Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road (12 page)
Read Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road Online
Authors: Willie Nelson,Kinky Friedman
Tags: #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Personal Memoirs, #Musicians, #Music, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography
LANA NELSON
It is an honor and a privilege to be the Flighty Attendant aboard the
Honeysuckle Rose
tour bus. I hate to call it a bus; it’s actually more of a member of the family than a bus. More time will be spent wrapped in these steel arms than anywhere else in the world. It’s a dear friend that’s also a home. Some days it’s just a handful of us onboard, leisurely traveling across America the beautiful, but other times we are packed so tight folks are sleeping on the floors. Every day is a different challenge. I will be serving, cooking, cleaning, and assisting with luggage and various secretarial chores. My duties may change daily, but my desire to be there doesn’t.
All I have ever wanted to be or do was to work with Dad and help him with his career, to be his head cheerleader. I would listen to his radio shows when he was a local DJ and I was a toddler. My favorite song was “Redheaded Stranger,” a song by Arthur Smith that he would play on his noon radio show. He would sing it to me at night to put me to sleep and he promised someday he would record it so I could listen to it whenever I wanted to.
I cried when he sold his song “Family Bible” because I thought no one would ever know how talented he was if his name wasn’t on the record. Dad was sweet and explained to me how we really needed the fifty dollars and everything would be okay. He made another promise: that someday he would buy us enough land to stretch as far as we can see and none of the events of today would even matter anymore. I was four years old.
When I was a kid, we moved a lot—every time the rent came due—and I was always trying to make new friends. I’d wind up having to explain how my daddy worked in the daytime
and
at night because he was a musician and that’s just what they do, and how making saddles or selling vacuum cleaners wasn’t his real talent but rather just a way for him to make money. He was actually a big star. I’d give them a quick rundown on some of the songs he had written and how someday they would be huge hits and they could say they knew him when.
I never went as far as my cousins Randy, Mike, and Freddie. They set up tours through Aunt Bobbie’s house and into the room where Dad was sleeping, granting the other kids in the neighborhood a quick glimpse of a rising star for twenty-five cents.
Dad nearly gave his life for me in a shoot-out with my abusive first husband, Steve, and then wrote the song “Shotgun Willie” about the whole ordeal. I have always liked the way he copes with disaster.
In 1975 Dad hired me away from the state of Texas and a job at the state capitol to be his secretary at a little office we had in Oak Hill west of Austin. I paid some of his bills and wrote the checks, including the ones to the band, which was then on a $225 weekly retainer to keep everyone from either starving or getting another job. We moved the offices to a house in Dripping Springs that Dad and Connie had just left empty after they moved to Colorado. It was out of this house that we promoted various other concerts and the Fourth of July picnic in Liberty Hill. You know that one. That’s the picnic where Paul whipped out his gun and shot holes in the sagging roof of the stage to relieve the intense water pressure from that afternoon’s torrential rains. It wasn’t the only time that day that Paul used his gun, but it was the most productive.
When Mark became Dad’s manager, we moved the main offices to Danbury, Connecticut. Soon afterward Dad bought the Pedernales Golf Club, plus seven hundred acres nearby. We turned the clubhouse into the Pedernales Cut-N-Putt recording studio (which I managed). At the time the golf course was private for his friends, family, and musicians who were recording at the Cut-N-Putt.
We built a western town on the seven hundred acres for a movie Dad produced, based on his No. 1 hit album
Red Headed Stranger.
I had never even been on a movie set when Dad and Bill Wittliff (the movie’s director) asked me to be the costume designer. I did, and surprisingly enough the costumes drew some good reviews. We were all flying by the seat of our panties on that one, but we pulled it off. We had our movie.
Somewhere during those years I directed his music videos for “Pancho and Lefty,” “Tougher Than Leather,” and “There You Are.” “Pancho and Lefty” won an American Video Award for best country video, and “Tougher Than Leather” was nominated a couple of years later. I can say that proudly; we lost to Ray Charles. Most recently David Anderson and I wrote and directed Dad’s next music video, “A Horse Called Music,” due out this fall.
CAROLYN MUGAR
W
e were filming the movie
Red Headed Stranger
in Austin, Texas. The studio offered to film it with an $18 million budget and Robert Redford as the lead, which was my part of the preacher. I decided to pass, not because I didn’t like Robert Redford—in fact we are friends to this day and I love the man. I passed because it was a part I really wanted to play. I asked my friend and director Bill Wittliff if we could do it for less. We settled on a $1.8 million budget and began to raise our own money. Don Tyson (of Tyson Foods) gave us the first $250,000 to get started and a few more friends here and there came up with $25,000 and $50,000 investments. It was far from enough to finish the film but enough for me to say, “Let’s go for it.” I had already built, and paid for, a huge film town on my property, so we just started filming. We invited Cheryl McCall, a writer for
Life
magazine and a dear friend, to embed herself and the magazine in our production set and gave them total access. She would often just hang out with me between takes. One day while we were filming on Bill’s ranch outside of Austin, my tour manager David Anderson, who helped coproduce the movie and kept the books, came to the set to talk money. After delivering the bad news that we were more than $150,000 overdrawn and hadn’t finished the first weeks of production, Cheryl interrupted and said that a friend she knew was having dinner with a woman from Boston, and she had money that she might be willing to invest. David was far from moved by the idea and was rude as usual—even though, in his defense, it did seem like quite a stretch.
The next morning, the mysterious woman from Boston showed up with $500,000, and that was how I met one of my closest confidants, Carolyn Mugar. It turns out we had a great deal in common, and she is still my friend to this day.
M
ARCH
2012
We just put Luke on a plane to Los Angeles. He has gigs to play up and down the coast, and then he goes to NYC to do the Letterman show, ho-hum. He has every right to be a spoiled little—I mean big—brat. But he is not. He has a really good heart and loves everyone; he gets that from his mom.
ANNIE NELSON
While raising our boys, I pretty much considered myself a married single parent. Don’t get me wrong, I have the best husband in the world, but he was gone a lot, and when we weren’t with him, I was on my own. People ask me, “How do you do it?” but the truth is we both love it. I think one of the secrets to our longevity is the fact that we are basically both gypsies in our souls, so traveling is in my bones, and I am okay on my own—in fact, I enjoy it. I am excited to see him when he comes home, and about the time he’s got to go and is ready to go . . . he’s really got to go! The trick, I think, is that he feels the same way. Willie is always happy to come home and to have time off, but if he’s off too long he starts to go through “picker’s withdrawal” and needs to play music somewhere—anywhere!
T
ODAY
IS
T
HURSDAY
, M
ARCH
24, 2012
These dates are more for me than for you. It’s good for me to know what month, year, date, and time of day it is, and oh yeah . . . where I am.
“Beautiful” is not a good enough word for Maui. It is breathtaking, healing, addictive, and a lot of other wonderful descriptions, and I still haven’t completely described Maui. I have lived here many years, and in some ways it reminds me of Abbott, Texas, my hometown. Paia, Maui, Hawaii, is a great place.
Annie is in the house cooking up a storm with Woody’s wife, Laura, and a bunch of our kids. It’s nice to have extended family here, or as we call it, the Tribe. We even have a room in the house called the Woody Wing. When he’s winning, he goes home; when he’s losing, the Woody Wing is occupied.
Now it’s poker time. Six twenty-two
P
.
M
.
, also known as “dark thirty.”
I
T
’
S
7:13
P
.
M
., S
ATURDAY
, A
PRIL
F
OOL
’
S
D
AY
Don’t believe a word I say from here on. Just kidding. Trying to get this day started; it ain’t easy. Maybe I’ll go back to sleep and try again later.
A
PRIL
2012
Annie and I head to Los Angeles tonight. It ain’t easy leaving heaven on earth, aka Maui, Hawaii. I start playing on the fifth in Texas. That will be good, because I’m ready for a great Texas crowd. Texas crowds get into it pretty good, and I love it when they do. The people put on as good a show as we do, and I feel the vibes. We send out good ones and they send them right back.
That means it all worked out right.
Lukas, Micah, Annie, and me
W
HEREVER
YOU
ARE
RIGHT
NOW
,
SEND
OUT
SOME
GOOD
VIBES
. Energy follows thought, and when you send it out, it keeps going. Every thought you have had is still spinning in the universe, so keep them positive. What goes around comes around, the law of karma—for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction, and I will keep saying this a lot, not for you, but for me. I need to hear it often. Earth is a school for dummies. We keep coming here to prove why we need to keep coming here. If we get it right just one time, I don’t think we come back unless we just want to. Knowing what we know, I don’t want to. It’s too hard. Living is hard enough, dying really sucks, and I don’t know, do the good times outweigh the bad? Fuck, I hope so.
GOOD TIMES
When I rolled rubber tires in the driveway
pulled a purse on a string across the highway
Classify these as good times good times
When I ran to the store with a penny
and when youth was abundant and plenty
Classify these as good times good times
Go to school fight a war working steady
Meet a girl fall in love before I’m ready
Classify these as good times good times
Here I sit with a drink and a memory
but I’m not cold I’m not wet and I’m not hungry
Classify these as good times good times
Good times are coming hum it um huh
Good times
F
OR
THOSE
OF
YOU
WHO
MIGHT
BE
OFFENDED
BY
MY
BAD
LANGUAGE
, I do apologize. There are so few words that I want to be able to use them all if I can, cuss words too. The most holy word of all, God, cannot be used in vain if it is the most holy word. There is no way to say it in vain. When you say the word God, you vibrate at eighty-two billion times per second. That’s why preachers say God and hold it a long time. It feels good to say it: GOOOOOOOOD. That’s cool. God, good, it all means the same. It’s the most powerful word in the English language—except for love. And God
is
love, so there you have it. Love is God, and God is love, end of story.
The first three letters in the universal language are “I am love,” or “I am God,” if you want to shake up the right a little. I am love, I am God, I am I, or if you think you feel bad, feel of me, or take your tongue out of my mouth, I’m kissing you good-bye, or I can’t get over you so you get up and answer the phone, or I hate every bone in your body but mine, or take your love and stick it up your heart.
It’s a nice plane ride. Nice plane, nice people taking care of you. That’s nice. Thanks, American.
“Life is a bitch and then you die.” Zeke really did say that.
There is a movie playing on the plane now, about people in a zoo of some kind. The star is very popular. I can’t think of his name, but he went down with the Titanic.
I met him once at a fund-raiser . . . hmm. Oh well. I had a friend who went down on an elevator and another one who blew a safe, but that’s another story. Was it Leonardo da Vinci? Maybe, I don’t know . . . DiCaprio! He’s a good actor, and I’m so proud of me for remembering his name. Oh yeah, that Da Vinci guy is a painter. Now I remember; I think he painted
The Last Supper.
