Willie (2 page)

When I say we have fun onstage, I don't mean we're not taking our music seriously and working as hard as we can. But we can still laugh at ourselves and get downright giddy up there. A few years ago we were playing to a packed house at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I started singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” The crowd started laughing. “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is one of the best songs I ever wrote, but there is nothing funny about it.

I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. I wondered if my jeans were unzipped or maybe I had my hat on backwards. Then I noticed the guys in the band were laughing, too. This was during my guitar chorus, and I didn't think it was all that great to have my whole band laughing behind my back.

So I turned around to check it out, and just then Bee Spears came flying right over my head wearing ballet tights and one of those puffy skirts.

Bee was flying back and forth across the stage, playing his guitar, and the room was rocking with laughter. What had happened was they had been performing the musical
Peter Pan
on that stage and had left the wires in place that made Peter Pan fly. Bee had found a costume and hooked himself to the wires, and he was having a terrific time swooping and sailing and doing his impression of an angel flying too close to the ground. It was the funniest thing I ever saw onstage, not counting certain heavy metal rockers who are funny but don't seem to know it.

We're not like a lot of bands who demand the promoters to cart them around in limos and stuff their dressing rooms with champagne and caviar and wall-to-wall blonds. Some of the guys in the band who smoke want cigarettes in the dressing room. But we don't even ask for beer backstage. The truth is, I don't want beer backstage. We used to have beer available all the time, and it got where there was such a mob of freeloaders around the beer cooler that I could hardly make my way to the exit. Then one day Paul English and I got a look at our beer bill for the past month. It was $85,000. We put an immediate stop to having beer or any stronger drink backstage, and you know what? There's hardly anybody backstage now who doesn't belong there.

When I walk off the stage after a hot show, I'm so wired on a natural high that for the next two or three hours my feet barely touch the floor. It used to be, when the regular show was over and everybody
was roaring, we'd go to a bar or somebody's house and the band would keep playing until we could see the sunlight through the windows and hear the birds singing outside. Now we get into our caravan of buses and leave town as soon as the show is over. There's plenty of time to come down when you're rolling all night on the highway, and you ain't someplace where you're liable to hurt somebody or get thrown in jail.

But there are times when so much energy has built up over a long road trip and the glands are pumping so much juice that even a 2,000-mile ride on my bus,
Honeysuckle Rose
, won't bring me back to earth.

When I feel this happening, I know I must go home—either to my cabin at my golf course in the hills west of Austin or else to my house in Abbott, the town where I was born.

For really allowing myself to rest and relax, there is no place quite like Abbott. That is where my dreams began, and I go back there to begin dreaming again, like a child . . .

PART ONE

Explain to me again, Lord, why I'm here;

I don't know, I don't know.

The setting for the stage is still not clear;

Where's the show? Where's the show?

Let it begin, let it begin.

I am born. Can you use me?

What would you have me do, Lord?

Shall I sing them a song?

I could tell them all about you, Lord;

I could sing of the loves I have known.

I'll work in their cotton and corn field;

I promise I'll do all I can;

I'll laugh and I'll cry, I'll live and I'll die.

Please, Lord, let me be a man,

And I'll give it all that I can.

If I'm needed in this distant land,

Please, Lord, let me hold to your hand.

Dear Lord, let me be a man

And I'll give it all that I can.

If I'm needed in this distant land,

Please, Lord, let me be a man.

A jab of pain in my back, above my right hipbone, meant morning had come for me, no matter that I could see stars in the plum summer sky through the window. I rolled over on my pallet on the floor of the upstairs room, trying to settle into a position for a few more minutes' sleep. I could hear the electric fan humming on the floor and felt a wash of cool air across my naked body. In hours it would be a typical Texas midsummer afternoon, 1987, my fifteenth Fourth of July Picnic—the sun so hot and the sky so bright that you couldn't stand to look at them—but for now there was a nice, wet breeze and I could gaze out the window and lie and bathe in starlight, the stuff that makes us all.

The pain hit again. I rolled over onto my knees, straightened up slowly, and walked to the window. Abbott, in the middle of Texas, is a smaller town than it was fifty-four years ago when I was born a hundred yards from where I was now standing. The sky is still clear in Abbott, and the stars look close to the earth, like they did when I was a kid.

With my arms raised at the window, I could smell grass and trees on the breeze, and the sharp odor of fresh paint. Old Bill Russell was painting the house for me and had worked late. I saw his ladder and buckets down in the yard below the second-floor window, throwing
shadows toward the barn. With both hands I combed back my hair and felt it fall free against the bare skin of my shoulders. Listening to the hypnotic vibrations of the electric fan, I inhaled deeply, swallowing air into my diaphragm like my grandmother had taught me. I held my breath until I was almost dizzy—as kids we'd hold our breath for fun until we passed out—and let it all out slowly and thoroughly, relaxing my neck and shoulders, letting my arms hang limp.

I did twenty-five deep breaths standing naked in the starlight. I felt strong and clean. Deep breathing at an open window is a wonderful thing unless you live in Los Angeles or down the block from an asbestos plant. Everybody knows that filling your lungs with oxygen is good, but not many people do it. It's like most of the choices you have in life. You know inside what is right. Whether you do it is up to you.

A lot of people think I sing nasal. It's not true. It may sound nasal to some ears, but actually it's the sound that comes from deep down in the diaphragm. That's where you get the most strength. It's the result of controlling your breathing, which is the secret to many things, including peace of mind. Indians, for example, concentrate on listening to themselves breathe. As they listen to their breath coming in and going out, they are hearing the sound of God. Breathing is a way for all of us to meditate and get close to the spirit. It's a key to mental and spiritual health. We've all heard the advice to take ten deep breaths when we're excited or agitated. Ten breaths will slow your mind, your metabolism, your heart rate, so you can get control and avoid making a dumb move or saying something stupid. Deep breathing gives you energy and makes you high.

You can bring divine energy into your lungs by breathing. Feel the beat of your heart. It is holy light. When you become conscious of the Master in your heart, your whole life changes. Your aura goes out and influences everything around you. You have free will to recognize it or to blind yourself to it. Be quiet and ask your heart. I mean, really shut up and listen to your inner voice. It will tell you this is the truth.

I looked at my watch. It was 4
A.M
. We had come back from pre-production meetings at the Picnic site at Carl's Corner about midnight on the
Honeysuckle Rose
. I must have slept three hours. Not bad. Three or four hours is a good night's sleep for me.

Stepping away from the window, I started my stretching exercises. Putting one foot on a chair and bending toward it to pull the hamstrings. Standing on one foot, grasping the other behind me with my
hand and lifting my head toward the roof. I took my time, not racing against time but forgetting about it, as I went through a stretching nonroutine—some of it yoga, some of it chiropractor, some of it Hawaiian Kahuna medicine, and the rest of it me.

The thought crossed my mind that my wife, Connie, wouldn't be at the Picnic today. In the fifteen years since I had begun these annual concerts, Connie had been backstage at nearly all of them. That first crazy but important Picnic in Dripping Springs in 1973, she was eight months pregnant with our youngest daughter, Amy. It made me sad to think of Connie not being around anymore. But we had recently separated again. Even though I've been married for what seems like my whole life—ten years to Martha, ten years to Shirley, and now eighteen years to Connie—I ain't really cut out to be a good husband and a perfect father. This time I had stomped out of the house Connie had bought in Westlake Hills on the shore of Lake Austin and said I wasn't coming back. It was after yet another argument about the same old subjects—I didn't spend enough time with Connie and our daughters, and I smoked too much weed. For me, the choice came down to staying in the Westlake Hills house with Connie all the time when I came off the road—which meant giving up all my pals who I hung around with on the golf course or in my recording studio in Texas—or never going back to the Westlake Hills house again.

Apparently, my third marriage was headed toward the divorce court, just like my first two, and for the same reason.

It's not easy to be married to somebody like me and be a wife and stay home and take care of the family while I'm out here traveling around and acting like a big star. I mean, it rubs. It's hard to find a woman who would put up with that. Now Connie put up with it for a long, long time and it's just too much strain. So whatever happens to my and her relationship, it has nothing to do with anything she did wrong. It was just one of those things. If I had to make a list of all the things that Connie did right, and all the things that she did wrong, there wouldn't be anything on the wrong side, zero. Because she did what she instinctively thought was the right thing to do and you can't blame a person for that.

I am as simple as I look, hard as that may be to understand. I am an itinerant singer and guitar picker. I am what they used to call a troubadour. I would love to be married, I love having a home, but my calling is not compatible with staying put. Sorry to say, I felt the time had come when I had to move on down the road again into the next phase of my life.

Whatever the next stage is, I don't believe it will include another wife.

Groping in a pile of clothes on the floor, I found a T-shirt and put it on. It read
WHEN IN DOUBT KNOCK EM OUT
. I pulled on a pair of shorts that looked like the Lone Star flag of Texas, stuffed my feet into running shoes, and crept down the stairs, trying not to wake my daughter Lana and her four kids who were sleeping on their pallets in what will be the living room when we finish restoring the house like it was when Dr. Sims owned it. Dr. Sims and his wife lived in this house in 1933, and on an April night of that year Doc was fetched by my cousin Mildred to tromp across the field to the little frame house where my mother, Myrle, was laboring to present the world with a new old soul—me.