Willie (42 page)

I put a can of chili into the microwave and ate it with soda crackers and skim milk for breakfast. From my table I could see the broken land that led off toward the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Consistency is the main requirement for a performer on the road to keep in mind. I have always been dependable. If I am supposed to be there, I show up. In my own mind, I'm still playing for the gate.

It's kind of like everywhere I go on
Honeysuckle Rose
, whatever town I wake up in, I'm in my old hometown. I go out and walk the streets, drop in for coffee at some cafe. People say hi to me. It's very flattering to be recognized.

I personally think the more security you have, the more problems you are going to have. Larry Gorham's job is to watch out for me on the road—always from a discreet distance—but if I'm not on tour, there's no entourage marching around me to clear a path. People have asked, “Aren't you worried about being kidnapped?” Who the hell would want to kidnap a guy like me? Of course, it might happen tonight. But the point is, if anybody has a mind to kidnap you or blow you away, you could be surrounded by security guards and they'd still get you. If somebody drove up with a car full of machine guns and started shooting, the security guards next to me would keel over at the same time I did. I ain't learned how to stop bullets in midair yet.

A few years ago in Dallas, a girl climbed halfway up on stage to kiss me. So I leaned over to kiss her, and her husband took a swing at me. He was boozed up and probably pissed at her for something else, anyway. That didn't make me mad. It was some guy in Phoenix who reminded me I was still an animal with a long way to progress up the spiritual ladder.

I was in the dressing room in Phoenix and this guy came back and said he was looking for Willie Nelson. He said he wanted some autographs for folks who were waiting in a car behind the club.

I walked out the back door with him into the parking lot. It was dark and I was looking for the folks in the car when—
wham!
The guy slugged me in the head with a crescent wrench. My head poured blood.

I picked up a two-by-four about four feet long. Every time the guy swung at me with the crescent wrench, I dodged and whaled him with the board. We fought for twenty minutes, breathing hard and drenched with blood and sweat. I kept whacking the poor bastard with the board, and he kept coming after me with the crescent wrench. We hardly said a word except for cussing. It was like
Bad Day at Black Rock
.

Finally somebody broke up the fight. It turned out that the last time I'd played Phoenix a few months earlier, the band had been out with this guy's wife. She went home and told him she'd been with me.

Barroom brawls are something I try to avoid. I know my temper has always been a problem, whether I inherited it or developed it. Having a hot temper is like being an alcoholic, you always know it's there. I don't like to get mad. It makes me feel terrible. I am not pleasant to be around when I get mad. People actually get up and leave the room. Anger and anguish are basic emotions everybody feels. I'm sure I'll always feel them, but I hope it's for more important reasons than just to get pissed off. I guess life is a continual process of trying to wise up.

Honeysuckle Rose
and our caravan rolled into the outskirts of Salt Lake City early in the afternoon. The buses parked in the alley and around the corner. The Holiday Inn had a swimming pool indoors, so the lobby and the bar were kind of warm and humid.

Darrell Wayne English, Paul's son and our tour coordinator, had already checked me and Bobbie in under an alias. She went to her room. The guys in the band drifted to the bar beside the swimming pool inside the hotel. We had the night off. The pleasures of Salt Lake City beckoned to the band and the crew—fellows with imagination.

In my room, I switched on CNN on the TV and ordered a cheeseburger and a glass of tea from room service. I checked through a dozen phone messages. All of them were from people who knew enough to find me, and most of them I should call back.

The room service kid took the lid off my cheeseburger and unpeeled the plastic wrapper off my glass of tea. He acted pretty suave.

Day after tomorrow the band would be at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I would be in a suite as big as a house. I knew the Caesar's Palace suite well—I like washing my jeans in the bathtub there and hanging them out the window to dry in the desert wind.

The toughest spot to work up a frenzied exchange of energy with the crowd is Las Vegas. Most of the people who come to the big dinner shows when I work on the Strip are just glad to be sitting down. They've been standing at the slot machines all night, or losing at the tables. What they want is a couple of hours of rest and relaxation. If they get to eat something and hear some music, so much the better. Mainly, though, they're trying to get off their damn feet.

A Las Vegas dinner-show crowd is not a rock and roll crowd, that's for sure. In his heyday, when he was really hot, there was an explosion
of energy between Elvis and his audience. I wasn't a wild fan of Elvis's, but put the man onstage doing his music, and you got something more powerful than the sum of its parts. You got magnetism in action. Maybe it was sexual, I don't know, but if ever a performer could get up onstage and turn a crowd into crashing waves of energy, it was Elvis.

Yet Elvis couldn't really whip up a Las Vegas dinner-show crowd on a regular basis. I went to see Elvis one night on the Strip and I slipped in at the back of the room and listened a minute and thought: what is going on here? There was Elvis up there working his ass off, and the crowd was just kind of politely exhausted. They clapped and whistled, but you couldn't feel them giving anything back. I felt like jumping on top of a table and yelling, “Hey, everybody, that's Elvis Presley up there! You should be jumping up screaming.”

But the crowds in Las Vegas are normally not screaming crowds. Las Vegas is the place where you make more money than you do anywhere else, but it's not the place where a performer is the most appreciated.

When I finished my cheeseburger and tea and made a few of my phone calls in the room at the Holiday Inn, I sneaked back out to
Honeysuckle Rose
and put some ballads on the tape machine and drank a couple of beers to make me sleepy and burned one down and crawled into Bobbie's bunk and shut the curtains. It was cold, so I pulled the blankets around me and snuggled up. I felt like a kid camping out, real cozy and nice. Maybe my back wouldn't start hurting.

For all you fellow pilgrims, here is my list of statements to watch out for on your journey:

1. The booking is definite.

2. Your check is in the mail.

3. I promise not to come in your mouth.

4. We can fix it in the mix.

5. This is the best dope you've ever had.

6. The show starts at eight.

7. My agent will take care of it.

8. I'm sure it will work.

9. Your tickets are at the door.

10. It sounds in tune to me.

11. Sure, it sounds fine at the back of the hall.

12. I know your mike is on.

13. I checked it myself.

14. The roadie took care of it.

15. She'll be backstage after the show.

16. Yes, the spotlights will be on you during your solos.

17. The stage mix sounds just like the program mix.

18. It's the hottest pickup I could get.

19. The club will provide the P.A. and the lights.

20. I really love the band.

21. We'll have lunch sometime.

22. We'll have it ready before tonight.

23. If it breaks, we'll fix it free.

34. We'll let you know.

25. I had nothing to do with your marriage breaking up. Your marriage was on the rocks long before I ever met you.

26. The place was packed.

27. We'll have you back next week.

28. Don't worry, you'll be the headliner.

29. It's on the truck.

30. This coke hasn't been cut.

31. My last band had a record deal, but we broke up before recording the album.

32. Someone will be there early to let you in.

33. I've only been playing for a year.

34. I've been playing for twenty years.

35. We'll have the flyers made tomorrow.

36. I'm with the band.

37. The band gets free drinks.

38. You'll get your cut tonight, no problem.

39. He'll work the door tonight for us.

40. You'll have no problem fitting that speaker cabinet in your trunk.

41. There will be lots of roadies when you get there.

42. I know we'll get some applause after the next tune.

43. We'll have more than enough time for a sound check.

44. This is one of Jimi's old Strats.

45. We'll definitely come see you play tonight.

46. You can depend on me.

47. You won't have to play any requests.

48. We have this great gig in Vegas next month.

49. The other band will be glad to let you use their P.A.

50. I am singing on key, the P.A.'s screwing up.

51. Sounds good to me.

52. You won't have any trouble finding the place.

53. I've played there before.

54. We can turn the volume down if it's too loud.

55. I just use this little amp for small gigs. I've got a Marshall stack at home.

56. This tour itinerary you can count on being correct.

57. You only have to do two sets.

58. The laundromat is just around the corner.

59. Best party club in town. Go check it out.

60. The guy with the dope will be here in twenty minutes.

When I first went on Willie's payroll, the production crew rode in a station wagon. Now we have our own bus.

My job is to do all the advance work and scheduling of the trucks and my crew. I negotiate the sound and light packages. By that I mean I communicate with Mark Rothbaum's office in Connecticut and find out what the dates are in advance so I can get a fair deal for the sound and light equipment we need to rent. I'll design a lighting plot, for example, and Fed-X it to four different lighting companies and then take bids on the telephone to get the best price. I keep in touch with Paul about it, but he pretty much leaves it up to me.

That is before the tour starts. The real fun part of the job is doing the lights during the shows.

I use seven or eight colors and there are seven or eight people onstage I have to cover with lights. I can do general washes and throw special colors on one person, change to different looks. I call it accenting the mood.

Take a simple number like “Georgia.” It starts with Jody Payne doing a little guitar intro, and I highlight him with a flesh pink which comes up when the rest of the stage is dark. It's very quick and
subtle. Then, boom, spotlights hit Willie as he sings. Then I change the color scheme again, directing the attention, helping create the mood. We may have lavender lights on stage right and stage left, maybe light blue on the sides, and a different color—an amber spot—on Willie to make him stand out.

Willie sings along and I add subtle bumps and looks, then Willie fades out. Boom, hit Mickey for his harmonica solo. I go to a straight red on Mickey, but his next solo I don't use red on him again. Don't want to identify Mickey with nothing but red. At the end of Mickey's solo, Mike Garvey hits the echo on his sound board. I bounce a different color, bop it, pop it to white, and then I add Willie in there, and Mickey gets his applause and slowly fades out. Then it's back to Willie. And you give a soft highlight to Mickey as the song ends.

That's a simple one, four cues. We use fourteen cues on some numbers. A couple of songs are just one cue—the opening cue on Willie and let him do it. But there we are, maybe 200 feet from the stage directing the attention of the crowd to the musicians. The average person who goes to the show wouldn't have any idea from a distance which one was playing the guitar unless he's accented by the lights.

Every night Willie comes out onstage, he's going to have the exact same sound, the exact same microphone, the exact same monitors, the exact same lights. We put a carpet down, and it's just like a living room. The only thing that might change from night to night is the way Willie enters the stage.

He comes off his bus and he may have to go up the center back, center of the stage, or right side of the stage. We got a place called the “Grady Gap,” which is between Bobbie on the piano and where Grady Martin stands with his guitar. Willie comes through the Grady Gap, or maybe around the side of Mickey Raphael. Once Willie hits the stage, he could be like Ray Charles. He could be blind and still know he's got eight feet between the end of his microphone and his amps. He can keep his eyes on the crowd, take two steps and hit a knob on his amp and never miss it. Unless Jody Payne sees him coming and hits it for him first. It pays off in satisfied audiences. At a Willie show the band is not irritated by a bad sound system that makes them lose their timing or their feeling. It makes everybody real comfortable to know what to expect.

We were a beer joint band in the beginning, and we're still a beer joint band—because in a heartbeat we'd go back to the beer joints and be just as happy.

We were doing a tour of the South fifteen years ago, alternating opening the show with Poco. We'd play our gig and drink all night and chase women and shit and get up at noon and roll six hours and show up at the next gig at eight. Poco would have done two sound checks and lifted their three split-level risers into place and be wondering where we were—and here would come thirteen Texas yahoos piling out of buses and trucks at the last minute. Willie and the band would walk onstage and just blow Poco away. It killed those Poco guys. After Atlanta, they quit the tour. Their road manager told us, “Hey, we like you guys, but we can't work with you because you ain't professional. You guys are never gonna make it in this business.”