Willie (35 page)

Billy, Martha, and me when Billy got married in 1983
.

The band gets ready to record another album. Jody Payne, Paul English, Mickey Raphael, Grady Martin, Bee Spears, and Larry Greenhill
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My home on the range. This is a picture of the main room at my cabin in Austin
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Shortly later, Willie fired me. “I don't think you fit in with us right now,” he said. “You want to do things your own way, and that's not how we're going to do them at this time.”

I was heartbroken. But it was only Willie saying, “Goodbye for a while. We don't need what you do, but we'll figure out something else.”

The next major project I worked on for him was the 1976 three-day Fourth of July Picnic at College Station, Bryan, Texas, where we had to confront one of the promoters with guns in our hands to collect the $10,000 he owed Leon Russell. I worked three months on the picnic, and at the end the promoter gave me fifty $1 bills and said, “I hope your Thunderbird car burns regular gas. Take this fifty dollars and get your ass out of Brazos County and never come back.” Since the promoter was also an elected official, I took him seriously and moved to Houston and worked as a bouncer at Liberty Hall.

I drifted back to Austin and was running a club when Willie signed a new recording deal with CBS records. One night CBS had a sound truck parked in front of my club, taping a live album. Three guys got into a beef on the sidewalk. One of them had pulled a knife. I went outside with my pistol to smooth them down. The guy with the knife was very belligerent and menacing. I thought I'd pop a cap over his head, maybe put a crease in his skull to remind him to show better manners.
Bam!
I shot at him, but the guy leaped aside.

The bullet went through the side of the sound truck and hit the CBS record representative in the leg.

It was a couple of weeks before I saw Willie. He said, “Well, Tim, you want to talk about it?”

I told Willie exactly what had happened.

He listened and grinned and said, “Tim, I want you to negotiate all my contracts with CBS from now on.”

Later that year I got a message: “Willie wants you to come to Austin and find a big warehouse that he and Leon Russell can turn into a club.” Willie got on the line and said, “I think we can get the Terrace Motor Inn, with the Opera House and convention hall.” We bought 14½ acres of ground, 218 apartments, the motel office (which I converted into the Backstage Bar), two swimming pools, three restaurants, and the Austin Opera House complex, a 54,000-square-foot building that had been a convention center. We paid $10,000 cash-with a note for $1,600,000.

We founded a company called Southern Commotion—we used to say we were just in it for the commotion—and I asked Willie how he wanted to structure the organization.

Willie tore off a piece of paper from a notepad and wrote “Southern Commotion . . . Tim O'Connor, President . . . Paul English, Vice . . . Willie Nelson, Secretary-Treasurer.”

Then he scratched out the line with his name on it and said, “We don't need one of them.”

I didn't feel I had the right to be a 50–50 partner. I wasn't bringing much to the table except desire and unproven worth, whereas Willie was already famous and making big money. But Willie graciously insisted we be full partners.

It was our understanding that I wouldn't use his name negotiating with the bank to buy the Terrace unless absolutely necessary. Everything Willie was getting into—like buying the country club—when the seller would hear the buyer was Willie Nelson, the price would go from $400 an acre to $3,000.

But the bank people got suspicious that I was just an imaginary character who just imagined Willie was a friend of his and just imagined Willie wanted to be involved.

The head guy at the loan office said, “I need tangible proof that you've ever dealt with Willie Nelson.”

So I threw that little piece of notepaper on his desk. My lawyer, Terry Bray, almost had a stroke. He kicked me under the table and tried to snatch the paper before the banker could see it.

But that piece of paper got us the $1,600,000 loan.

The paper is now in my safe in Montana, along with two wadded-up stock certificates.

In 1978 we sold half our Terrace property and paid off three-quarters of the note. Then Willie had a changing of the guard and his new management decided to restructure our deal. They offered me stock that made Willie and me 75–25 owners.

I took the stock certificates to Willie and said, “How do you want it to be?”

He picked up the stock certificates, wadded them, twisted them, tried to tear them in half. You ever tried to rip twisted stock certificates in half? It's like tearing the phone book.

Willie hurled the certificates on the floor and said, “I don't want to discuss this. We're fifty-fifty partners. I signed a piece of paper and that's all there is to it.”

In 1978 I was in the hospital with cancer, could hardly stand up after the operation, when Willie came and said, “Get out of here. I've got a new project for you out at the Pedernales.” It's been like that with one project or another, ever since.

Willie poured millions of dollars into restoring the clubhouse and golf course, building the finest recording studio, repairing the condos,
buying another 750 acres across the road where he built his cabin and his Western town. He'd say, “Well, this golf course is my
Stardust
album. The other 750 acres is my
Red Headed Stranger
album.” That's a nice way to look at it.

His cabin—I have to chuckle at that word, considering the artistic masterpiece it turned into—started as a one-room place with no electricity, no air conditioning, and no telephone. The phone company wanted $10,000 to run him a line, but he said, hell, he was hiding out up there, he didn't need a phone. But the builders kept adding things, like a fireplace, running water, bathroom—and finally a telephone. Now the cabin has 3,500 square feet of deck alone, plus electricity and a satellite dish and a stable for his horses. It's a monument to the builder's handcrafted art—a 5,400-square-foot cabin. The panoramic view across the Hill Country is the most beautiful I've seen anywhere in the Southwest, maybe even in the whole world. Willie has lived in some beautiful places—his house on Maui, his house in the Rockies in Colorado—but his cabin at the Pedernales might be the greatest of all. He's locked away from the world by fences, way up on top of the hill at a place even his close friends know not to phone him unless it's an emergency—and if he gets cabin fever he can be at his country club in five minutes or in downtown Austin in half an hour. We all respect his desire for privacy when he goes to his cabin.

Like Willie says, “If you need me, I'll call you.”

In the ten years we've been partners, Willie has never once given me a direct order. Never once has he told me, “Damn it, I want this done now.” He gave me the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes but to keep working on getting things right. So I constantly think: how would Willie want it? I observe his actions as my guidelines. I know, well, Willie wouldn't want me to do this or this because he doesn't treat people this way.

He's never lost his temper with me, and I've given him a lot of opportunities to do so. When he does get mad his eyes go steely cold black, his face tenses, his body tenses, his wording becomes short and direct—a slow burn, ready to explode and strike out. He doesn't like himself this way, doesn't like to be put in situations that inspire anger. He feels he should be more in control than to use anger to express his emotions. Willie is the deepest bunch of water I've ever known.

Quite honestly, he gives me chills constantly with his insight. He can be in a room with sixty of his best friends, and each one feels Willie is really with him above all. He's always introduced me to everybody wherever we went, even when I was in no condition to
be introduced. With Willie, friendship is for life and he trusts his friends completely. It can be a heavy weight to carry that much trust, but if you do it's very rewarding.

He's not just a songwriter, a singer, a musician. He's on the National Council of Theologians. He's read everything important by every important writer. He's a statesman of sorts. If he wanted to be an evangelist of the Jim Bakker approach, he could raise so much money you could cover Texas eight feet deep with it. But that is the opposite of Willie's kind of message. I love to hear him talk about Christ or the universe, the big things in life. I guess it's like listening to the pope, except the pope is boring.

You know how in the sixties we all wanted to go to the mountain-top to search for the meaning of existence? Willie is sitting on that mountain. I don't think his music is as important to him as it used to be. I know the road and the stage are not as big in his life now. He's in the act of finding himself, and we all may be very surprised what he does in the next few years.

Sometimes I wish his name wasn't Willie Nelson. It's probably selfish on my part, but it would really be neat to know him without him being a superstar. I wish his name was just Willie Jones.

Of course, then he'd probably be a blues singer.

When I first met Willie at the Grand Ole Opry in the early sixties, it was a very frustrating period in our business. I would see Willie passing backstage, or jamming with Buddy Emmons and Hank Cochran and the boys over at Tootsie's. Nearly everybody realized how good Willie was, but the people who ran the music industry in Nashville would just keep saying, “Well, I don't know if Willie is country or not. Is Willie country? Because if he ain't country, then this stuff he sings won't get played on the country music stations. If he don't get played on the country music stations, he won't make money for us. And if he don't make money for us, the hell with Willie Nelson. Who needs him?”

It was such a major concern—are you country enough for Nashville? If you didn't fit in, if you didn't do their idea of country material
whether it suited your sound or not, then you weren't worth a dime. That's how it was.

Willie finally took off and went back home to Texas for good. Waylon and I would fly down to Texas to catch a Willie show and just be amazed at the enthusiastic crowds he was drawing. But still the record company bosses couldn't make up their minds about him.

When I heard Atlantic Records was closing their Nashville office, I realized that since Willie had a contract with Nashville Atlantic, he would be out of a label. I thought that was the biggest mistake Atlantic could make, pulling out, because Atlantic had looked like the only door that was open to our kind of music. So I went to New York and got an appointment with the head of the label to talk to him about the Nashville office and mainly about Willie.

I'm sitting in this guy's office in New York, pleading our case. He pushes a button. A well-known producer sticks his head in the office. This guy says, “Tompall thinks we ought to keep Willie Nelson on our label. What do you think?”