Willie Nelson (45 page)

“Do you want to engineer our record?” Willie asked them.

“Sure,” they said, nodding their heads in unison.

Although he didn’t know anything about engineering, Bobby figured between the two of them, they could make one half-decent engineer. “Larry knew how to work the equipment, and I kind of knew music, and we’d run around and learn how to do this stuff,” Bobby Arnold said. “It was country music—people bought cassettes. What do they care about fidelity? They want to hear Willie’s voice and guitar and Mickey Raphael.” They winged their way through the project.

The first album they engineered,
Tougher Than Leather,
went gold. Also known as
Stranger Jr.
for its western theme and concept, it tells the tale of an old gunfighter and the woman who was the wife of the man he shot, and their reincarnation as a modern cowboy and cowgirl. David Zettner, who remained part of the Family though he hadn’t toured with the band in years, designed the cover. After several years of nothing but duets, soundtracks and covers of old songs,
Tougher Than Leather
was a welcome collection of (almost) all-new Willie songs, including the jaunty two-stepper “Little Old Fashioned Karma” that fused the metaphysical with dance-hall fundamentals, and one very significant cover song, a straight-ahead rendering of “Beer Barrel Polka,” reaching back into the repertoire of songs he heard as a boy, and doing this one so authentically that he passed for Czech.

For the next eight years, Bobby Arnold and Larry Greenhill witnessed one of the most prolific runs in modern recording history in one of the strangest settings for making records. “We didn’t do much when Willie wasn’t there except play golf, go sailing, play pool, play chess, play music—everything was play,” Bobby related. “When Willie showed up, it was the usual Willie chaos. You were on call twenty-four hours a day. You know how recording is—it consumes your life, and then it leaves. Recording was on the ‘golf-thirty’ schedule [meaning after dark]. At the end of that, you’d play pool until the wee hours of the morning, and then you’d go to bed. Then you golfed, then you played music, then you played pool, played chess, then you went to bed.”

Golf and gambling were as much a part of the recording process as the actual studio work. The score wasn’t important. Willie and Coach Royal, who lived five minutes away, were speed players able to play thirty-six holes in half a day. “The cool thing was at the end of almost every day, we would always stop at the ninth hole and watch the sunset,” Bobby said. A lot of the time Willie would review studio tapes in his golf cart. “At the end of every night, two things would happen,” Bobby Arnold said. “I would always give him a cassette of what had been recorded, and Willie would always say, ‘Thank you for recording my record.’ Always.”

The core recording band was Willie’s road band, including recently added Nashville studio guitar pro Grady Martin and—if they were around the premises—close personal music friends such as fiddler Johnny Gimble, drummer Johnny Bush, pedal steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and bassist/pedal steel guitarist David Zettner, who lived at Willie World but was just as likely to be painting murals, the back of Willie’s bus, or designing album covers or posters. Watching Willie work with David Zettner and Jimmy Day brought it all into focus for Bobby Arnold.

“The basic idea of Willie recording was that it was just us,” Bobby said. “You would give him a cassette, and he’s golfing and listening to it, and he comes back and says ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ or ‘change this’ or ‘leave it like it is.’ He wasn’t specific about what he wanted—he just wanted it done.”

He was more motivated to record efficiently than perfectly. “We had to capture it on the first take,” Bobby said. “It might have had errors but it was still great. We were doing five and six albums a year when other people were doing an album every year or year and a half.”

“I run a session like I do a show,” Willie explained. “I know what I’m gonna do before I get there, we go in and do it, and we leave.” His attitude was informed by his Nashville experiences. “If you got three hours in a studio, you were real lucky,” he said. “During those three hours you’d better get three songs because there was another band getting set up to come in. It was just three-hour sessions, one right after the other, twenty-four hours a day in Nashville. If you went in there and spent too much time on one song, you lost that feel.”

Still, Willie was hardly set in his ways. His most successful album since
Stardust, Always on My Mind
was a Chips Moman production cut in Nashville and at Pedernales in 1981 before Chips left, combining Willie, Mickey, and Grady Martin with Chips’s favorite studio players—Reggie Young, Mike Leach, Bobby Wood, and Bobby Emmons. Chips gave Willie a clean, almost sterile sound as he covered a range of pop and soul standards while revisiting two of his own songs, “Permanently Lonely” and “The Party’s Over.” If the album was recorded using the same assembly-line formula that led him to leave Nashville, it didn’t bother Willie or his fans. The title track charted number 1 as a country single and number 2 on
Billboard
’s Hot 100 pop chart, while the album reached number 1 country and number 5 on the Top 200 albums chart, Willie’s best pop-chart action ever.

Johnny Christopher, one of the guitarists Chips brought into the sessions, wrote “Always on My Mind” ten years earlier with Nashville songwriters Mark James and Wayne Carson Thompson. Brenda Lee and Elvis Presley covered the song, but neither version came close to Willie’s.

Willie also sang a duet with Waylon on “Whiter Shade of Pale,” an organ-heavy dirge that was a 1960s hit for the British rock band Procol Harum, with both singers stretching their vocal range as they’d never done before, leaving George and Tammy and Kenny and Dolly eating their dust. They were still the best vocal duo in country music. Willie did a fine cover of the Chips Moman–Dan Penn composition “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” but sounded like he’d phoned in his reading of Simon & Garfunkel’s folk-pop smash “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Two other tracks were spun off as singles and reached number 2 on the country singles charts—“Let It Be Me,” a tune written by French songwriters that had been frequently covered since it debuted in the States in 1957, most prominently by the Everly Brothers, and “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning,” a leaving song cowritten by Gary P. Nunn of the Lost Gonzo Band.

Recording most of
Always on My Mind
marked the midpoint of the transition to use exclusively the studio that Chips Moman built west of Austin. Why record anywhere else? The condos, the golf course, and other amenities made Pedernales Studio headquarters for a string of musical reunions. In five years Willie made
San Antonio Rose
with Ray Price,
Old Friends
with Roger Miller,
Funny How Time Slips Away
and
In the Jailhouse Now
with Webb Pierce,
Brand on My Heart
with Hank Snow,
Take It to the Limit
with Waylon, and
Music from Songwriter
with Kris Kristofferson (another Booker T. Jones coproduction).

Paying back those who had helped him was a bigger priority than worrying about putting out too many albums. Besides, he loved singing duets. “I think I have the Guinness record for more duets than anybody,” Willie said. “I always sang with other people, enjoyed singing with other guys, and thought there was safety in numbers. Something out there with me and Waylon’s name on it would have twice the value as just the one of us. The same thing applied with Sammi Smith, Toby Keith, whoever. I’d seen it work before with Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Conway, and Loretta.”

His recording partnerships were not limited to stars. “Willie came out and was playing the same place I was in Reno,” said Freddy Powers, who’d met him in Fort Worth in 1955 with Paul Buskirk. “He was doing the big room. I was in the lounge. When he’d come over, the room would jam up. We started talking about Paul Buskirk, Johnny Gimble, players like that.”

“Hell, let’s get them all together and make a Django album,” Willie suggested.

A month later, they were in Gilley’s Recording Studio in Houston, a side benefit of the
Urban Cowboy
boom for club owner Sherwood Cryer, along with Bob Moore, who’d done several sessions with Willie in the 1960s, and Dean Reynolds, who played bass on Willie’s original recording of “Night Life” in Houston.

Somewhere over the Rainbow
was in the tradition of
Stardust
in referencing titles from the Great American Songbook, such as “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon?,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” But unlike the Booker T. sessions, the emphasis shifted to the other players and away from him, as he let Freddy sing lead on many tracks, and Buskirk and Gimble have the honors on the instrumental breaks. He was playing cool jazz with the cats who taught him how to play it. Sales were hardly comparable to
Stardust,
but it was personally satisfying and another way of repaying debts to all the musicians involved. Merle Haggard loved the recording so much he sought out Freddy Powers and hired him for his band. Powers moved into a houseboat on Lake Shasta and started writing songs with Merle, beginning a collaboration that lasted more than twenty years.

The same musicians got together for a Django Reinhardt tribute for a studio taping of
Austin City Limits.
Willie had starred at the Armadillo taping that led to the series pilot, starred in the pilot, headlined the first season, performed the whole
Red Headed Stranger
album the second season, and taped a show with one of his mentors, Floyd Tillman, and friends. Doing Django on
ACL
was hardly a stretch.

His jazz obsession dovetailed into another project with Jackie King, the swing guitarist who’d recently moved back to San Antonio from California to set up the Southwest Guitar Conservatory. They partnered on
Angel Eyes,
an album released only in Japan, that covered old cowboy songs (“Tumbling Tumbleweeds”), rhythmic swing (“Gypsy”), and Western Swing (“My Window Faces the South”). Willie knew Jackie from when Jackie played behind a variety of stylists, including blues shouter Big Joe Turner and honky-tonkers George Jones and Roger Miller, before joining the Billy Gray Band and relocating to San Francisco, where he backed up Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker and other jazz acts, formed the jazz-fusion band Shades of Joy, and did session work for Mercury Records.

The duet album with Merle Haggard,
Pancho and Lefty,
was special. Merle was a blue-collar brother and a fellow traveler from even before Willie met Waylon. Straight out of Bakersfield, Merle was salt of the earth like Willie was, had associated with more than his fair share of characters, and was one himself. He’d done time in prison, liked pot, and liked to talk about the paranormal; he was a big fan of Art Bell’s
Coast to Coast
radio show, broadcast in the wee hours of the morning. His people came from Newton County, Arkansas, the next county over from Searcy County, where the Nelsons and Greenhaws came from. Merle was also the first modern country star to honor Bob Wills by teaching himself fiddle and recording the album
A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World
long before Asleep at the Wheel and Alvin Crow came along.

Having Merle record at the Pedernales studio was both a treat and an honor. “We’re going to make lemonade out of horse shit,” Willie declared before getting down to business. Willie and producer Chips Moman augmented Mickey and Grady with Mike Leech, Reggie Young, Johnny Christopher, Gene Crisman, Bobbie Emmons, Bobby Wood, and Johnny Gimble. The production was considerably lighter and less hands-on than previous Chips projects.

Merle and Willie recorded at least twenty-three tracks that were album worthy. “But they didn’t have
the
song,” said Lana Nelson, a sharp cookie at twenty-nine who was managing the studio for her father. “Chips [who had returned to produce the album] was done. George [Fowler, Lana’s husband at the time] and I went home, went through our albums, and found Emmylou Harris’s cut of ‘Pancho and Lefty.’ We played it and said, ‘That’s it.’ We knew it.”

In the wee hours of the morning, Lana called Daddy and told him the album wasn’t finished yet. He had one more song to do. The writer of the song was Townes Van Zandt, the poet laureate of the down-and-outer school of Austin songwriters who lived for their craft and frequented songwriter joints like Spellman’s, emmajoes, Chicago House, the Cactus Café on the UT campus, and the Alamo Lounge.

Townes came from a well-heeled family in Fort Worth and lived in Clarksville, a small old west Austin neighborhood settled by freed slaves who worked for the rich folks in the mansions of the Pease-Enfield neighborhood nearby. Drink and drugs were his indulgences. Songs were the reason he lived. Having Willie cover one of his songs was the break of his life; “Pancho and Lefty” already was one of his biggest crowd pleasers on the folk circuit he traveled from L.A. to New York and Europe, but even more so around Texas and especially in Austin.

Merle was sleeping on his bus in the parking lot outside the studio when Willie knocked on the door. It was four in the morning. “Haggard, I’ve found this great song,” Willie said. “Come into the studio with me.” The band was already running through the instrumental. Merle suggested that Willie do the track and he’d come in sometime in the morning and finish it, but Willie was persistent. “You need to come in with me. Now.”

Merle shuffled into the studio, bleary-eyed and more than a little spaced out. Willie handed him the lyrics he’d scribbled on a brown paper bag. Merle ran through the vocals with Willie as they both got a feel for the song about a Mexican bandit and his inscrutable friend, both of them living outside the law. The tape rolled. Merle nailed his vocal in one take and went back to his bus to sleep.

The next morning, he found Willie on the golf course and asked if he could do another vocal of the song they’d recorded a few hours earlier.

Willie laughed and shook his head. “Hell, the tape’s already on the way to New York.”