Willie Nelson (16 page)

Martha had a tough hide, but she could no longer conceal her hurt. “You know how people are strong on the outside but really fragile? That was her,” Lana said. “She had an ‘I’ll knock you in the head’ personality, but she would cry at the drop of a hat.”

Martha tried to make the marriage work, but she was no match for a high-falutin’ lady singer. She finally threw in the towel. She took the kids and moved to Las Vegas to get a divorce. And Shirley stayed on the road with Willie.

When they came to Las Vegas to play a gig, Willie called to get together with the kids. “We were living in a tiny apartment and we hadn’t seen him in a long, long time,” Lana said. “But he didn’t come to get us. He sent Shirley to pick us up. Now, why anybody thought that was going to work, I don’t know. But it didn’t.”

Shirley knocked on the door of Martha’s apartment. When Martha opened it, Shirley told her sweetly, “I’ve come to pick up the kids.” Martha looked back at Lana and in a flat voice said, “Go get me a butcher knife.” Lana wouldn’t do it, but Susie did. Knife in hand, Martha chased Shirley off the porch, screaming, “Don’t ever come back, and you tell that fuckin’ Willie Nelson he’ll never see his kids again! If he wants his kids, he better be man enough to come and get them himself and don’t send his fuckin’ whore next time!”

Martha would soon marry Chuck Andrews, a man who worked construction for the company that was installing elevators in the new Caesar’s Palace. They moved to Los Angeles, then to Albuquerque, where Martha passed off Lana’s dark complexion as Italian blood. “I’m not going to have you treated like no damn Indian,” she informed her daughter. Being Cherokee in the Land of the Hopi was asking for trouble.

Martha’s marriage to Chuck was brief, and she took up with a man named Mickey whom she had dated in Waco before she met Willie. Mickey had gone into the army, and when he found out Martha had married Willie, he went AWOL. After he was caught, he spent two years in prison.

But family was the farthest thing from Willie Nelson’s mind. He was determined to be a country star. If that cost him his marriage and his family, that was the price he would pay. After a lifetime of preparation, the first Willie Nelson album,...
And Then I Wrote
, consisting of tracks Willie had recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles over the previous year, was released in 1962 in mono and stereo versions. Charlie Williams, a disc jockey on KFOX radio in Los Angeles, whom Willie had replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth eight years earlier, wrote the liner notes, comparing Willie’s songwriting-vocalist talents to pop songwriters Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.

The songs were all Willie’s, except for Hank Cochran’s “Undo the Right,” including his big three—“Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away”—as well as “Three Days,” which had already been covered by Faron Young as a follow-up to “Hello Walls,” reaching number 7 for Faron on the
Billboard
country singles chart. Despite the success of his songs as covered by others, the public was not responding the same way to the songwriter as performer. Still, being a Liberty Records artist got him road dates on his own.

W
ILLIE
convinced his old bandmate Johnny Bush to join him as drummer with the idea of grooming Johnny to be a solo act. The bass chair belonged to Shirley, who could yodel and sing as well as keep the rhythm. “[The other musicians] respected me,” the only woman in the band said. “I had been traveling for a long time, and they respected me and looked after me.” When Shirley didn’t travel, Pete Wade from the Cherokee Cowboys or Wade Ray filled in. Sometimes Wade and Willie worked as a duo with pickup bands when money was tight. When Willie could afford him, Jimmy Day came along.

Johnny Bush thought Willie was going to be bigger than Dean Martin someday, which was saying a lot, since Martin was cranking out number one pop hits like “Everybody Loves Somebody.” Johnny shared that opinion with Willie on a night after a not-so-good gig when a mic stand had been left behind.

“I want to let you know I’m doing the best job that I can and tonight I really fucked up,” Johnny told him. He tried to improvise a mic stand from a drum stand and duct tape, but the mic kept falling off. “I know I should have brought our mic stand, and if you don’t have a mic stand, you’re up the creek. If you want to eat my ass out, go ahead,” Johnny said.

“Are you through?” Willie asked. “Let’s have a drink. I ain’t gonna eat your ass out. You already did a pretty good job of that yourself.” Willie wasn’t going to give Johnny shit. He liked his voice and he liked his person too much for that. He wanted to help him, not fire him.

Paul English, the brother of Oliver English, who’d played with Willie on the radio in Fort Worth, and steel guitarist Charlie Owens were working in the house band at Ray Chaney’s place in Fort Worth a few nights later when Willie, Johnny, Jimmy Day, and Shirley Collie walked in to play. Paul rekindled his friendship with Willie and renewed his appreciation for Willie’s talent. “You realized he really could sing,” he said. “Shirley was a great bass player. She’d just smile. She had this charisma. She could really yodel too. We liked them all because they were musicians.”

Paul was clearly in awe of his friend, a real genuine Nashville recording artist. Paul took Willie’s Liberty album to a Fort Worth radio station to copy it onto a four-track tape cartridge. That way, Paul would have something to listen to on the new tape player he had installed in his car to keep him company on drives to Waco and to Houston, where Paul had call girls. He listened over and over, enough to figure out Willie was doing more than writing catchy country tunes. “I was amazed, because this guy could write,” Paul said. “I’d have people over to my house and ask them, ‘What do you think he’s writing about here?’ It was deep.”

Willie made other hires for his band whenever a tour was put together. For one run, he hired fiddler Ray Odem to complement Jimmy Day’s pedal steel and brought in his music mentor from Fort Worth and Houston, Paul Buskirk, to add his custom-designed double-neck half mandolin and half guitar to the sound, leaving Willie to strum and sing.

The group rehearsed in Roswell, New Mexico, then gigged in Albuquerque, where they picked up a second guitarist, Dave Kirby, a Brady, Texas, native who was Big Bill Lister’s nephew and a onetime Cherokee Cowboy. They worked their way to Las Vegas for an extended run at the Golden Nugget, one of the first Vegas spots to book country acts, doing six forty-minute shows between eight p.m. and two a.m. They managed to work the schedule with the help of pills, including Placidyls, aka “green meanies,” the kind of downers that inspired an abuser “to run yourself to pieces,” Shirley explained.

On January 12, 1963, at the end of the Vegas engagement, Willie and Shirley married at the Chapel of Love. Jimmy Day was best man. Johnny Bush was flower girl. Inside the wedding ring Willie placed on Shirley’s finger was the inscription “I promise you love forever and after forever, your Willie.”

His divorce from Martha Matthews wouldn’t become final for several months, but that was a mere technicality. “She couldn’t handle the way I was living,” Willie said about Martha with regret. Going down the highway, he explained, “is just the nature of what I do.”

Willie and Shirley worked the road, although they kept a mailing address in Fort Worth and stayed with his sister Bobbie and her husband, Paul Tracy, when they weren’t playing bars somewhere or recording.

Paul Buskirk had gone back to Houston and Ray Odem stayed in Fort Worth, so Johnny Bush recruited Charlie Harris, a guitar player from Corpus Christi; Eddie Sweatt briefly; then Pete Burke Jr. to play bass. Burke had road experience behind Hank Thompson. The new band picked up dates on touring package shows headlined by Slim Whitman, Little Jimmy Dickens, the Wilburn Brothers, Orville Couch, Frankie Miller, and Ray Price. Ray Price told Willie that Willie’s band was the worst he’d ever heard. But within a year, most of the same players were backing up Ray as the new Cherokee Cowboys. The back-handed compliment validated his determination to make it on his own.

Dallas gossip columnist Tony Zoppi noted Willie’s recording artist credentials when he touted Willie’s 1963 Valentine’s Day engagement at the Chalet. Four months later he was headlining the Big D Jamboree, appearing alongside Sonny James and Alex Houston. On September 2, he starred on a one-hour special live from the studios of Channel 11 in Fort Worth, along with Shirley Collie, Red Foley, Uncle Syp Brassfield, and Billy Gray. They were promoting a new barn dance in Fort Worth, the Cowtown Jamboree, staged at a recently opened venue in Fort Worth called Panther Hall.

Willie and Shirley gravitated from Fort Worth back to Los Angeles, where Willie hustled appearances with his guitar-picking pal Phil Baugh on car dealer Cal Worthington’s television show. He contemplated opening a West Coast office for Pamper Music and starting a booking agency with Tommy Allsup. With friends like Roger Miller, Gordon Terry, and Bob Wills living nearby, Southern California was almost like back home, only sunnier.

“We all ran around together and had a lot of fun,” Tommy said. “We had a lot going on.” Willie cobbled together a circuit working the Palomino in the San Fernando Valley, Phoenix, Fresno, and Northern California. Playing clubs provided plenty of opportunities to drink, smoke, and chase women, but the volatile combination could be dangerous. After a gig at J.D.’s in Phoenix one night, a jealous husband, pissed to see his wife flirting with Willie between sets, split Willie’s head open with a car jack in the parking lot after the show. “Put him in the hospital, almost killed him,” Tommy deadpanned. It was the price you paid when you worked the night life.

“Me and him had a booking agency, Willie Nelson Talent,” Tommy said. “Liberty gave him an office where the studio was. We put on some shows out in a ballroom in Pomona with Bob Wills, Roger Miller, Glen Campbell, and Ernest Tubb. Bob loved Willie’s style. Bob loved him because he was different. He’d let Willie sit in and he’d let Gordon Terry sit in. He’d hand his fiddle to Gordon and he didn’t do that for anyone.”

Tommy and Willie got along fine. “He’d let his hair down at times,” Tommy said. “We liked to go deep-sea fishing out of Santa Monica for bonito, yellowtail, and redfish. We’d take a sackful of brownies that Shirley baked with ‘that wacky ’baccy.’ We had a good time.”

The main reason Willie was hanging with Tommy Allsup was to record more sessions at United Studios on Sunset Boulevard. When Joe Allison left Liberty after failing to deliver hits for the label, Tommy took over as Willie’s producer.

The Oklahoma guitarist had played Western Swing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and rock and roll with Buddy Holly, giving up his airplane seat on the flight that killed Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in the winter of 1959. Liberty hired Allsup to produce and make records as leader of Tommy Allsup and the Raiders, who did an all-instrumental album
Twistin’ the Country Classics
for Liberty after being recruited by Snuff Garrett to play on a recording session for Buddy Knox, another West Texas rocker who had a number one hit, “Party Doll.”

“The previous album wasn’t that big of a hit,” Tommy said, so Willie and Tommy met at arranger Ernie Freeman’s house with Jimmy Day to strategize for the second go-round. “Willie sang Ernie some of the songs he recorded on the first session that had strings on the recording. We was trying to feel our way around. Disc jockeys loved him but he wasn’t selling any records.”

United was the hit factory where Bobby Vee and Johnny Burnette were cutting singles and where Tommy Allsup produced
Bob Wills Sings and Plays
. The studio players at United, paid a scale of $50 to $55 a session, were masters of the recording art. Drummer Earl Palmer knew rhythm. He was a jazz player raised in New Orleans with recording credentials including Fats Domino, Frank Sinatra, B. B. King, Barney Kessel, Professor Longhair, and Lou Rawls. Bassist Red Callender turned down offers from Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to pursue a free-lance career that earned him session work with Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Dexter Gordon, Oliver Nelson, Mel Tormé, Erroll Garner, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, Charles Mingus, and Charlie Parker, among others. Fiddler-violinist Bobby Bruce played with Henry Mancini and Lawrence Welk, as well as with Luke Wills, Bob’s brother, and with Leon McAuliffe, Bob’s steel man. Guitarists Glen Campbell, John Gray, and Bobby Gibbons and pianist Gene Garf augmented by Gentleman Jim Pierce and an uncredited Leon Russell were all known studio entities. Jimmy Day was Jimmy Day.

Tommy knew the best singers were the ones with distinctive voices who stuck out on any jukebox, like Hank, Sinatra, Dylan, Cash, Tubb, Odetta, Jimmie Rodgers, and Bob Wills. But “we had an agreement,” Tommy said. “Willie said, ‘If I don’t tell you how to produce this, you won’t tell me how to sing.’” Like Joe Allison, Tommy appreciated Willie’s unorthodox delivery. “He sang behind the beat, but he was always in meter,” he said. “That’s the way jazz singers sing. If you recorded with Willie, I don’t care if you knew the song backwards, you better write you out a chord chart, and read that sumbitch. He’s going to be away from the lead line. That’s what we’d do. If you start listening to him while he’s playing, you’re going to break time.”

Kenny Rivercomb, Liberty’s West Coast promo man, thought Willie was more of a jazz singer than a country singer and pushed Tommy to have him record the standard “Am I Blue?” Eddie Brackett, the engineer of Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” and sessions with Barbra Streisand and Sam Cooke, told Tommy that Willie had the most natural voice he’d heard in a studio. “I don’t have any EQ [equalization of the increase or decrease of signal strength for a portion of audio frequencies] on his voice and it just cuts through like a knife. He’s the easiest guy I’ve ever recorded. I don’t have to do nothing.”

When the newly wedded Shirley Nelson added her vocals, the sound took on a whole other texture. “They burned it up on ‘Columbus Stockade Blues,’” Allsup marveled of the fast-paced number allegedly written by Jimmie Davis in the 1920s. The February 20, 1963, sessions were Willie’s most fiery tracks yet, featuring Shirley and him speed-scatting like harmonizing jazz vocalists. “She could hang right in with him,” Tommy said with respect. Willie had recorded “Columbus Stockade Blues” earlier in Nashville, but it was nothing like the two versions he did at United. One version featured flashy Merle Travis–inspired finger picking by John Gray and Tommy Allsup. The second version was pure jazz, pushed by bassist Red Callender and drummer Earl Palmer, seasoned jazz musicians who earned their keep doing recording sessions. “We did two takes on it,” Tommy Allsup said. “First one, Earl played brushes. The second one he did with sticks. It was fast for a swing tune but they played their asses off on it. Red usually played bass in a business suit, and when he heard we were doing a second take, he said, ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ and removed his jacket.”