Willie (15 page)

We stopped first in San Diego where Martha got a job as a waitress. I went to every club in San Diego trying to find work playing music. But none of the bars would even let me audition, because I wasn't a member of the union. To join the union, you had to pay $100 for initiation and dues. I didn't have $100 to pay the union and couldn't raise $100 unless I could work, which I couldn't. I was just shit out of luck in San Diego.

It hurt my ego for Martha to be supporting Lana and me. I got tired of it.

In the middle of the night without telling Martha I was leaving, I put $10 in my pocket and hitched up to Orange County and L.A. and started hitting the bars looking for work. But it was the same story as San Diego.

A couple of girls picked me up and took me to every club they knew, but there was no work for me. We went to the house where the girls lived. I was tired of lugging my fucking suitcase everywhere I went, so I left it with the girls and gave them my mother's name and address in Portland. The girls promised to send my suitcase to Portland, but I never saw it again.

I went out and tried to catch a ride north. About two o'clock in the morning I gave up and found me a culvert to sleep in. It was cold. I found newspapers and kindling and built a fire in the culvert to keep me warm while I slept. The smoke damn near asphyxiated me. I woke up coughing and stomped the fire out. In the morning I caught a ride to the railroad station and hopped a freight toward Portland.

Somehow I got off the train outside of Eugene. A guy picked me up and gave me a ride to the bus station. Just out of the goodness of his heart, he bought me a bus ticket to Portland. My stepdad, Ken, met me at the bus station and drove me home.

When I finally walked into my mother's house in Portland, there stood Martha waiting for me with Lana in her arms.

Soon as I'd turned up missing, Martha had called my mother. It wasn't hard for them to guess where I was heading. Mother sent Martha some money, and Martha and Lana caught the next plane to Portland. Beat me there by days.

Things started turning around for me. I got a respectable job as a disc jockey in Vancouver. My show was on from 10
A.M
. till 2
P.M
., all country music. I was head up against Arthur Godfrey in that time slot, but I started drawing good ratings. I was a very successful disc jockey in Vancouver. We had radio personalities like Shorty the Hired Hand and Cactus Ken. I was Wee Willie Nelson.

I played with a couple of bands around Portland and Vancouver. Martha was staying home taking care of Lana and becoming pregnant again.

On January 20, 1957, our second daughter, Susie, was born in a hospital in Vancouver in the middle of a snowstorm. Martha's parents, W. T. and Etta, came up from Waco to help with the babies.

In the fall of that year I made my first record. I cut it using the equipment at the radio station. The A side was “No Place for Me,” written by W. Nelson, sung by W. Nelson, produced by W. Nelson, performed by the W. Nelson Band for Willie Nelson Records. The lyric said, “Your love is as cold as the north wind that blows/and the river that runs to the sea . . . There's no place for me.” The flip side was “The Lumberjack,” written by my friend Leon Payne. I was twenty-four years old.

I hammered that record hard on the radio. For $1 you could get the record by mail with an autographed 8 × 10 photo of W. Nelson, star and recording tycoon. I sold out my first pressing of 500 records and eventually sold 3,000 of them.

Things were going unusually well in Vancouver. I guess I couldn't handle such good fortune. Elvis Presley had started bombarding the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” and “Love Me Tender”—it was like an atomic bomb falling on the music world. That same year the Russians put up
Sputnik
, the first satellite. I used to look up at the night sky, trying to spot the little machine that circled the earth every ninety minutes. It was exciting to think mankind had taken a step into space, where both the future and the past lie for us. I dreamed of going to the moon, but I didn't dream men would be walking on the moon in only ten years.

Mae Axton came to Portland and Vancouver. Besides being the mother of Hoyt Axton, Mae is a top songwriter. She wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” among others. I asked her for advice, and she told me to get the hell out of Dodge.

Working in Vancouver, Mae said, was not the way to become a star.

By now I was beating Arthur Godfrey in the ratings with my DJ show. I was a local celebrity. I walked into the station manager's
office at KVAN and demanded a $100 a week raise. “Pay me what I'm worth, or I'm taking a hike,” I said.

He told me not to let the doorknob hit me in the ass on my way out.

We stopped off in Springfield, Missouri, in my new red Cadillac and stayed with Billy Walker and his family for a few weeks. Billy was working on the Ozark Jubilee on the radio. Martha took a job as a waitress and I hired on as a dishwasher in a cafe. Billy and I talked about the Nashville music situation and depressed the shit out of each other. I got the feeling that if I went to Nashville right then I would have been like a chigger on the butt of the Abominable Snowman. The music at the top of the national charts was Pat Boone, another North Texas boy, singing “Love Letters in the Sand,” and Debbie Reynolds singing “Tammy.” I couldn't see any future for me in that direction, and Nashville thought my songs were not straight-ahead country enough to be recorded.

Martha was pregnant again. I already knew I couldn't support a wife and two babies—let alone three—on what I could earn as a musician. Two times in my life I decided to give up playing music for a living and get a regular job. This was the first time.

We moved in with Ira and Lorraine back in Fort Worth, and I took a job selling encyclopedias door to door.

I am a good salesman. The first thing you learn playing music on the stage is you have to sell yourself before you can sell the song to the audience. I figured it would be the same with encyclopedias.

The Encyclopedia Americana had a smart pitch that worked almost every time. We had an inside connection at the phone company to get the new listings of young people and newcomers who had just applied for phones. Several hundred people a month got new phones in Fort Worth. We would call them up and give them our pitch.

I would say, “Hello, this is Mr. Nelson. I'm with the Americana Corporation. I'm sure you're familiar with us. We own, publish, and sell the Encyclopedia Americana. However, I want to put your mind at ease. This call has nothing to do with the regular sale of the Americana. We're interested in people who would like to own the Americana without the expense normally involved in buying it. Is this something you'd love to have in your home without the normal cost involved in buying it? Oh yes? Well, what time does your husband come home?”

Each salesman would make six appointments for the day and then go call on them. Of the six, you ought to sell three.

My first day out I borrowed Hall Trace's old beat-up panel truck. I wouldn't park the truck in front of the house because I didn't want the customer to see what kind of car this big executive was driving. I'd park a block away and walk to the house and knock on the door.

I didn't memorize the pitch that first day, but it was written on a piece of paper in my pocket.

My first customer met me at the door and said, “I can't afford it.”

I said, “Let me see what the company says about that.”

I pulled out the piece of paper and said, “I'm supposed to tell you that you can't afford not to have it. An educational system like this can be yours for the price of a package of cigarettes a day. It's not a question of can you afford it, it's something you should have. Think of your children's future.” If the guy had another objection, I had another answer.

The first time out I sold three sets.

I sold a set of books to two newlywed kids who didn't have a stick of furniture. Just a mattress on the floor. They signed up for $400 worth of encyclopedias and had nothing in their icebox but a quart of ice cream.

My conscience started bothering me about selling books to people who couldn't afford them. Since then, that sales pitch has been outlawed by the Better Business Bureau, but back then it was perfectly legal. It was called the negative approach. You started out saying, “I'm not a salesman and I can't sell you anything. So don't try to buy these books. I can't sell them no matter how much you need them.”

I got fed up with myself for taking unfair advantage of people. Looking around their houses I had noticed something people in Fort Worth needed more urgently than encyclopedias. They needed vacuum cleaners.

I went to work selling Kirby vacuum cleaners. Now this was really a great product and immediately useful to any family. Kirby's were powerful vacuum cleaners but they were very expensive. I had to have a good story to convince people the Kirby was a better deal for them than a cheaper vacuum cleaner.

I'd go in somebody's house with my Kirby and dig dirt out of their mattress that they had no idea was there. When I got through cleaning their mattress, they thought they were the filthiest people in town. I'd get all kind of shit and corruption out of their mattress and spread it all over the floor. Anybody's mattress has got it, you know, unless you clean it every day. It just accumulates. But you spread all that dead skin and stuff on the floor, it just looks horrible. People think they can't sleep in their bed another night. I'd show them how unhealthy they'd been living. “Do you believe some people actually let their babies crawl on dirty mattresses?” I would say. I sold a lot of Kirbys without it hurting my conscience because I was telling the truth.

But I couldn't stay out of the clubs for long. The nightlife was calling me. Martha would hit the joints with me when we could hire a babysitter or find one among our relatives. She loved the nightlife as much as I did.

I started attending the Metropolitan Baptist Church, where Ira and Lorraine were members. I felt like I made contact with the people at the Metropolitan Baptist, with the Holy Spirit in their presence.

I joined the church and was baptized. Being submerged just happened to be part of their deal, like sprinkling was with the Methodists. I had no objection to it. I figured I could do this just as well without being dunked or showered, but it mattered a lot to the people in the church. And it did give me a kind of wonderful, purified feeling every time I did it.

I began teaching Sunday school. I thought I was a good teacher. I knew my lessons. On Sunday mornings my class would go over our lessons and read the Bible verses for the day. Everybody would kick it around and say what they thought it meant. To me that's what a Sunday school teacher was supposed to do.

Then came one of those unexpected encounters that changes your life.

The preacher at Metropolitan Baptist said he had to talk to me in his office after the service on Sunday. He said, “Willie, either you quit playing in beer joints or else you quit teaching Sunday school.”

“You must be nuts,” I said.

Some members had told the preacher they heard I was playing in beer joints again.

“It couldn't have been too hard for them to hear it,” I said. “I've seen them right there in the audience at those beer joints.”

The preacher didn't back down. He had been put into the position of choosing between satisfying the congregation—including the hypocrites—who put money in the collection plates on Sunday to pay his salary, or siding with some redheaded musician who drank and smoked and cussed and picked his guitar and sang in dance halls. We all knew that on Sunday mornings when I would be teaching my class, the swampers at the dance halls would be sweeping up the broken teeth and blood off the floor. It was clear in the preacher's mind. He elected to stick with his money supporters. That made it easy for me, too. I decided to stay with the beer joints that paid me money to help support my family. The preacher sounded so wrong to me that I quit the Baptist Church.

I had never really been regarded as a good Methodist since I was a child cedarbark smoker and Bohemian beer-drinking guitar picker. Now I was no longer a Baptist, either. And I was disillusioned with religions that condemned people like me.

But deep inside I had a powerful spiritual urge. You wouldn't call it religious, exactly, because religious meant the Church and following the rules a bunch of people in authority had dreamed up to keep their subjects in line. These religious Church rules frequently had nothing to do with anything Jesus taught. I mean, you see a church hitting on its members for more and more money so the church can buy real estate and tear down grocery stores to make parking lots and erect carnival rides on top of good farmland and pay big salaries to the preachers and their staffs who go to church conventions to pass more rules and think up new ways to make money—and you say, “I ask you, Jesus, is this how You want it done?”

If you really seriously in all faith get quiet and pray and ask Jesus, He will answer you. This is the truth. He won't necessarily set fire to a bush or send a bolt of lightning. Instead the answer will come through your inner voice, your conscience, your divine spirit.

My inner voice told me the Methodists and the Baptists didn't have a hammerlock on God. My inner voice said there were millions of people in the world who felt the same as I did. I went to the Fort
Worth Public Library and began reading every book on religion I could find. I discovered the world was full of people who believed in reincarnation. Soon as I read about reincarnation it struck me just the same as if God had sent me a lightning bolt—this was the truth, and I realized I had always known it.

The world was full of people that believed one time through life ain't it. Sure, by the beliefs of the Church, a guy could go maybe eighteen years and be the wildest kid on the street and get hit by a train and get sent to hell and that was it, no more Jimmy Blue. I just didn't think that could be right. I believed the guy should have had another chance before he got sent to hell, he was only eighteen, and who were these people to say that what he was doing was wrong, and how did they know what caused him to do it, you know? I was asking a lot of questions myself as a kid and I just couldn't believe the answers the Church gave me. What made sense to me was reincarnation, which says no matter how many times you fuck up, it's up to you, you're still going to have to come back, again and again, until you get it right, until you get a passing grade. That started making sense to me, a lot more sense. And then I started finding other people who believed that way and I felt, well, I'm not in this alone. I started listening to people who knew a lot more about it than I did and I found out that it has progressed leaps and bounds in the last hundred years. Probably right now, more than half the people in the country believe in reincarnation. Fifty years ago, it was less than ten or fifteen percent.