Willie (25 page)

I started working on the
Yesterday's Wine
album, though I wasn't ready to record it then.
Yesterday's Wine
was my first concept album, an album that tells a story. It's about a guy—imperfect man—watching his own funeral and reviewing his life.

Yesterday's Wine
starts off “Do you know why you're here?”

Yes, there's great confusion on earth, and the power that is has concluded the following:

Perfect man has visited earth already and his voice was heard;

The voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest

And I have been selected as the most likely candidate
.

YES, THE TIME IS APRIL, AND THEREFORE YOU
,

A TAURUS, MUST GO
.

TO BE BORN UNDER THE SAME SIGN TWICE

ADDS STRENGTH AND THIS STRENGTH, COMBINED WITH

WISDOM AND LOVE, IS THE KEY
.

After the
Yesterday's Wine
album came out a friend of mine got a call from a hippie fan in San Francisco who said, “I'm worried about Willie. He thinks he's Jesus.”

I got a kick out of that. Just last year one of those supermarket newspapers had a full-page story about the face of Jesus suddenly appearing on the outside wall of a grocery store in South America after a dramatic rainstorm. Hundreds of people came to pray to the image of Jesus, and some of the sick went away cured. A few days later, following another thunderstorm, a new figure appeared on the wall beside Jesus. It was Julio Iglesias.

What had happened, the rain had washed off the coat of whitewash that had covered a poster for “To All the Girls I've Loved Before.”

The supermarket headline said:

THAT
'
S NOT JESUS
—
IT
'
S JUST OLD WILLIE

Well, this imperfect man in
Yesterday's Wine
was just old Willie. In the song “Goin' Home,” it's just old Willie who observes his own funeral and sings:

The closer I get to my home, Lord, the more I want to be there
.

There'll be a gathering of loved ones and friends, and you know I want to be there
.

There'll be a mixture of teardrops and flowers
,

Crying and talking for hours

About how wild that I was

And if I'd listened to them, I wouldn't be there
.

Well there's old Charlie Tolk, they threw away the mold when they made him
.

And Jimmy McKline, looks like the wines finally laid him
.

And Billy McGray, I could beat any day in a card game
.

And Bessy McNeil, but her tears are real, I can see pain
.

There's a mixture of teardrops and flowers
,

Crying and talking for hours

About how wild that I was

And if I'd listened to them, I wouldn't be there
.

Lord, thanks for the ride, I got a feeling inside that I know you
,

And if you see your way, you're welcome to stay 'cause

I'm gonna need you
.

There's a mixture of teardrops and flowers
,

Crying and talking for hours

About how wild that I was

And if I'd listened to them, I wouldn't be there
.

I think it's one of my best albums, but
Yesterday's Wine
was regarded by RCA as way too spooky and far out to waste promotion money on.

The
Willie Nelson and Family
album came out in 1971 and went into the dumper, commercially.

I was in sort of the same situation I had been in ten years earlier. My band would fill a Texas dance hall. We were stars in Texas. But in Nashville, I was looked upon as a loser singer. They wouldn't let me record with my own band. They would cover me up with horns and strings. It was depressing. But as some athlete said, I hung my head high.

The Ridgetop house was rebuilt and we all traveled back to Tennessee.

For the Country Music Association Awards party week in 1971, Harlan Howard arranged a guitar pulling at his house. The rules were simple—just singer and guitar on a stool in front of a gas-log fire in a big room full of record executives, songwriters, and disc jockeys.

Naturally I had my favorite Martin guitar. I had already worn the hole in the body of the guitar because classical guitars like my Martin are not meant to be played with a pick. The hole looks soulful, but it's just a hole. I didn't have all the autographs on the guitar that night at Harlan's because Leon Russell started the autographing two years later.

I had been playing electric guitar early in the noisy beer joints. I
had a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Stratocaster. Those Fenders had much smaller necks than a classical guitar. Baldwin then gave me a guitar and an amp. I still use the amp, an aluminum job made in 1951, but I busted the Baldwin guitar at John T. Floore's one night. I sent the guitar to Shot Jackson in Nashville. Shot Jackson took out the guts, took out the pickup, and put them in a Martin classical guitar and set the whole bastard instrument up.

I've got such a terrific tone out of this guitar because it was a good guitar to begin with and then putting all that electronic equipment in it just happened to work exactly right, and there is just enough beer spilled in the amplifier to give it the perfect tone for me. I've never changed guitars or amps since Shot fixed up this Martin for me.

It came my turn to sing about two in the morning. The party had halfway thinned out. Most of the food was gone but there was plenty of booze. I climbed on the stool with my old Martin and sang all the songs I had written for a new album I called
Phases and Stages
. The concept is a look at marriage and divorce from the man's point of view on one side and the woman's point of view on the other. Considering the puzzlement with which Nashville had received
Yesterday's Wine
, I didn't know how this new concept album would go over. The song I started off with that night was “Bloody Mary Morning.”

When I finally finished, a stranger came up and said, “I'm Jerry Wexler. We're starting a country division at Atlantic, and I run it. I'd love to have the album you just sang.”

I said, “I have been looking for you for a long time.”

Jerry let me bring my own band in to play on my albums for the first time.
Shotgun Willie
came out first and sold more than any album I'd ever done.
Phases and Stages
followed and sold much better than
Shotgun Willie
. My third Atlantic album was
The Troublemaker
, mostly gospel songs, and by then the company had decided to drop country music and wouldn't do any promotion.

But I was long gone from Nashville by then. As soon as I signed with Atlantic, I moved back to Texas, looking for something like the Happy Valley Dude Ranch.

First we had to pick a town for headquarters. We considered Houston. I even put a deposit on an apartment in Houston. But then I went up to Austin and looked around. My sister Bobbie was playing a gig at a piano bar on the top floor of an apartment building near the capitol. She and her husband Jack were living in Austin with their kids, Freddy, Randy, and Mike.

The more I got to thinking, I liked the idea of living in Austin more than Houston. Who wouldn't? Houston was too hot and too crowded. Austin was a very pretty place. My friend Darrell Royal was the football coach at the University of Texas, and he told me I'd be crazy not to move to Austin. He said Austin had a lot of people like me, brothers under the skin, and I would find it out.

Austin had lakes and hills and plenty of golf courses, and it also had Big G's and the Broken Spoke and other good halls to work.

And Austin had a new redneck hippie rock and roll folk music country venue in an old National Guard Armory. They had painted the walls with portraits and scenes by Jim Franklin, Gilbert Shelton, Michael Priest, Jack Jaxon, and other Austin artists who were becoming well known in the hippie underground. My friends in Mad Dog Inc. had an office near the stage where they did “indefinable services for mankind.” The roof was hung with acoustic shields, and the crowd mostly sat on the floor like at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

There was a strong Austin to San Francisco axis in those days. The towns reminded me of each other. If San Francisco was the capital of the hippie world at that time, then Austin was the hippie Palm Springs.

This new Austin hall I'm talking about was sort of like San Francisco, but at the same time it was pure Austin.

It was called the Armadillo World Headquarters.

You need to understand what Austin was like when we moved there in late 1971 and rented an apartment on Riverside Drive.

If you stand downtown and look west across the river to the limestone cliffs that rise up abruptly on the other shore, you are looking at the place where the West literally begins.

The cliffs are a tall wall of rock that runs in an arc from Waco south to Del Rio. The old cotton economy of the South ended where it struck those limestone cliffs. Farther west beyond the cliffs is the Hill Country, which used to be the Comanche territory.

Built on seven hills in a river valley where pure artesian water flowed from the rocks and with a mild climate and deer and other wild animals roaming through the oaks and cedars, Austin was like Palm Springs for the Comanche nation long before the Anglo real estate developers turned it into a town in 1840. Houston had been the capital of Texas until then. The brazen act of building a new capital right in the middle of the Comanche's centuries' favorite resort started the bloodiest Indian war in Texas history.

You know the Indians lost, but it was hard to tell in Austin in the
early seventies. A hell of a lot of young people wore feathers and beads and necklaces and bells and doeskin pants and skirts with fringes and moccasins and long hair and headbands.

It was cheap living. Low taxes, no traffic to speak of. Billie Lee Brammer, who wrote
The Gay Place
, a novel about Austin, was legally blind without his glasses, but Billie Lee was forever taking a bunch of acid and losing his glasses and driving safely all over town in the middle of the night. Austin was a stable place that depended on the state government offices and five universities for much of its economy.

There was no way to get rich in Austin. Only half a dozen houses in town would be allowed in Beverly Hills. People who did have money didn't show it off. Car dealers and beer distributors were big socialites.

You couldn't legally walk around Austin smoking weed or eating acid or mescaline or peyote—dope was very much against the law in Texas—but it seemed like you couldn't walk around Austin for very long without at least being offered a joint.

Every few blocks in Austin you saw some new, unexpected vista—a Victorian house framed against the water and the purple hills, a pair of hawks circling above Mount Larsen, a Mexican family eating dinner on the front porch of a house painted pastel yellow with statues of Jesus and the Virgin in the front yard behind a little iron fence.

Barton Springs was the greatest outdoor swimming hole in the country. You could fish and swim in the river right beside your house. You could go out on Lake Travis in a houseboat and putter around hundreds of miles of shoreline for days before somebody found you.

For a population of about 250,000, Austin was a real piece of paradise, an oasis, the best-kept secret in America.

The most famous musician in Austin when I got there was Jerry Jeff Walker. Janis Joplin had sung for years at Kenneth Threadgill's place in Austin, but she'd gone to San Francisco to make her reputation. Jerry Jeff and I had some wild nights and days partying and picking in joints and people's homes around Austin. Everybody wanted Jerry Jeff to play his classic “Mr. Bojangles,” but he never did like to be told what to play or when to play it. If some host asked Jerry Jeff to play “Mr. Bojangles” or anything else at the wrong moment in the wrong tone of voice, he was liable to whip out his dick and piss in the potted ficus plant, and the fight would start.

There was more live music played in joints in Austin every night of the week than in Los Angeles.

Rock bands like Shiva's Head Band, the Conqueroo, and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators were going from Austin to San Francisco and back to the Armadillo World Headquarters. The Armadillo World Headquarters was a center for the arts. You could buy jewelry and leathergoods there as well as beer and good food cheap. They booked acts from the Austin Ballet to Ravi Shankar to Bette Midler. Eddie Wilson, who was the ramrod of the operation, would try anything. Rednecks and hippies who had thought they were natural enemies began mixing at the Armadillo without too much bloodshed. They discovered they both liked good music. Pretty soon you saw a longhair cowboy wearing hippie beads and a bronc rider's belt buckle, and you were seeing a new type of person.

Being a natural leader, I saw which direction this movement was going and threw myself in front of it.

My first show at the Armadillo World Headquarters was August 12, 1972.

In the spring some promoters had put together an outdoor concert called the Dripping Springs Reunion on a ranch west of Austin. They had bluegrass, Loretta Lynn, Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, Leon Russell, and me—with Coach Royal onstage. The promotion lost a bundle, but it had the seed of a sort of country Woodstock and got me wondering if I could do it better.

After my show at the Armadillo, I started getting bookings at college auditoriums. A new audience was opening up for me. I phoned Waylon in Nashville and told him he ought to come play the Armadillo. Waylon walked into that big hall and saw all those redneck hippies boogying to the opening act, Commander Cody, and he turned to me and said, “What the shit have you got me into, Willie?”