Willie (43 page)

We do things a lot different now. We're organized, calmer, saner, use tons more equipment, try to arrive at the gig with plenty of time to set up. But the spirit is the same. We're still a bunch of Texas yahoos.

People would get on our bus in the old days and change their lives. They'd come back speaking strange languages. We were crazy then. We're crazy now, but back then we had no regard for anything. We didn't hurt anybody, we were just wild. Our only rule was, we had no rules. And if there's no rules, there ain't no penalties. Now we do have rules and penalties—a sign of progress, I suppose. Country bands didn't have large road crews in the old days. We'd run in and play the show, check the money, and rumble. We can't really do that any more, because things have gotten too big. But if the time should come when we cut way back and start playing the beer joint circuit again, we're ready.

We're not like a lot of music people who get greedy because they've got a good living coming in. That's what's so fucked about the show-business industry. Greed just kills people. One of the things I regret about this whole business is meeting certain stars that I've looked up to and finding out most of them are just turds in a punchbowl. They'll try to screw you just to keep in practice. They'll quibble over $50 so hard they lose a $100,000 contract.

I was never in business on Wall Street, but the fucking entertainment
business is the nastiest I ever heard of. I think the movies are nastier than records. It's hard to say. But if anybody ever walked through a fucking war zone without a scratch, it's Willie. He cruises through it, smiling and unscathed. Paul walks a little in front in the jungle to keep the branches from snapping back and hitting Willie in the face, and the rest of us work our asses off to be sure when Willie reaches the stage he's as safe and comfortable as in his own living room.

If Willie could see all the shit that goes on behind him, he might get upset. But he has created the situation where he goes onstage and performs, and it's up to us to make sure he ain't bothered. We have to do the miraculous pretty often, but that's what Willie has come to expect and that's what he gets.

The first few years I worked for Willie, I hardly talked to him. Because when I was a kid in Waco, he was to me the greatest, an immortal, a guy that don't shit between his shoes. It was like working for John Wayne. I was scared to approach him. I had worked for some big acts before, and some of them were just total assholes. They'd blow their money on drugs and whores and let their crews rot. But Willie has always taken good care of his crew and expects the same in return. Our guys get their own rooms at hotels, where some stars put four to a room. We all play golf together on the road. So we draw the crème de la creme, the best engineers, the guys who do the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Beach Boys, they want to work for Willie.

It's like a big machine when we hit the road. You got to keep everything moving, don't throw the rhythm off. People who don't do it right don't last long. We have worn out a lot of people. The strong survive, and the weak fall by the way. We travel now with five buses and two trucks, plus a motor home for Bo and Scooter Franks who sell the T-shirts and caps and such as that. One bus is for Willie and Bobbie. The next is the business bus—that's the one with Paul English, who is the business head of the operation and either number one or number two in command of the whole caravan, depending on how you want to look at it. I ride on that bus with Paul and Paul's son Darrell Wayne, the tour coordinator, and Larry Gorham, who's in charge of security. Larry—we call him L.G.—is a Hell's Angel from San Jose. The stage crew rides on Paul's bus, where the important decisions are made about the tour.

The third bus is the band bus—Bee Spears, Jody Payne, Grady Martin, Mickey Raphael, and Billy English, Paul's brother, who plays percussion. Bee is third in command of our outfit. The fourth bus is
the Animal House. That's where Buddy Prewitt, our production manager, is in charge of the sound and lighting guys like Mike Garvey and David Selk and Tommy the Tuner (Tom Hawkins)—who tunes Bobbie's piano and the guitars—and others. The wild, rowdy shit that most people think happens on every bus mostly happens only in the Animal House. The fifth bus is for the Wrangler folks and their guests. The two forty-eight-foot semi-trucks are crammed with equipment. We all roll together, partly for safety's sake. Trucks rolling alone full of expensive equipment have been known to get hijacked. Waylon has lost a truck, Alabama has lost two trucks. It can get dangerous out there.

When the caravan pulls into town to do a gig, the first thing we have is the rigging call. A rigger is a guy who crawls up the beams to the stress points of the building and connects the cables to hang our sound system and lights over the stage. They can drop a chain down 90 feet from the ceiling—250 feet at the Superdome—and hit an X on the floor. Our big amps weigh 1,000 pounds each, so you don't want them crashing down. A rigger can kill you. Buddy likes to have the rigging call at 10
A.M
. Buddy and Mike Garvey oversee this part of it. Buddy is lights, Mike is sound. The lights go in an hour after the rigger because lights take longer to put up than sound. Two hours later they fly the amps and put the monitors onstage. They lay carpet on the stage and hang our big Texas and U.S.A. flags. By then it's about 3
P.M
. That's when me and the stage crew—Paul's bus—come in. We set the amp lines and the band gear. First up is Bobbie's grand piano, which Tommy proceeds to tune. We polish and tune the guitars, set up the drums. If all goes well, we're ready by 5:30
P.M
. We eat at six. The band gets there at seven for an eight o'clock show. And Willie comes in right as the show starts. Boom, boom, he's singing “Whiskey River.”

After the show if we're running to another town, we do it all in reverse, but we do it in a couple of hours. The two forty-eight-foot semi-trucks are loaded, the buses rendezvous—and we roll.

Before we got so big we'd travel in station wagons. I had a battery TV that I'd put in my lap and the guys would crowd around to watch the football game or whatever. I guess that's one way we really became like a family, as far as I'm concerned.

Mickey was real skinny then and didn't take much room. Mickey the kid. Mickey Meskowich, we called him. Half Mexican and half Jewish. A great harmonica player, but he'd drive you crazy asking questions constantly. One day we thought we figured out a way to shut him up for a while. Me and Bee and some others each threw
$100 on the table, maybe $500 in all. We told him, “Meskowich this jackpot belongs to the one who can go the longest without asking a question.”

Mickey said, “Hey, that's great. When do we start?”

We bought an old bus from Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner. Bee's daddy—he called him O.M., for Old Man Spears—and Baby Earl, who's a carpenter, remodeled the bus. They gutted the thing, tore out the front two bedrooms to make a lounge, ripped the bathroom out. Suddenly we had to run back on the road and had no bathroom. What we did was find a big red funnel and attached a coat hanger to it. You'd hook the coat hanger on your belt loop because it was so rough in the back of the bus you had to use both hands to hang on to the wall while you was pissing in the funnel. One night Bee sneaked into the room where the funnel was and nailed the door shut behind him and went to sleep. Willie got a knife and cut the door open, pissed in the funnel, and took the hammer and nailed the door shut again with a two-by-four. Bee never woke up.

O. M. got a good deal on a bunch of ugly-ass blue shag carpet. He covered the floor and padded the walls of the lounge with it, and that became our Blue Room. We had a driver named Maynard Lutz. We called him Homer Bounds—you know, homeward bound?

Paul designed a new bus for us. It was covered with quarter-inch steel, half-inch steel plate by the door, two drop safes, bulletproof glass, like a fucking armored car. Named it
Pauletta
. Paul ordered it to sleep seven, but before it was finished we had nine. We'd carry our gear in the back and strap the rest of it on top. It was red and black velvet inside, like a rolling whorehouse. By the time it was ready to roll, fucking
Pauletta
was too heavy to drive on most roads. We just parked it at the Austin Opera House and it sat there forever.

One of our old buses was called the
Tube
. It got bizarre on the
Tube
. We had as many as thirty-two people riding on the
Tube
at times—our guys, Waylon's guys, Tompall Glaser's guys, Hell's Angels, Hank Cochran, Bonnie Bramlett. You talk about a bunch of gypsies. When we did the Outlaw Tour, we expanded to two buses because Bobbie needed her own space to escape from all the shit on the
Tube
. You'd get on the
Tube
and there'd be ten people in the front lounge, people sleeping sideways in the aisles. Mickey and Bee and I would go scratch on the door of Bobbie's bus, and ask if she could find us a place to sleep. On the
Tube
, Bee made a rule that the last person still awake would get the best place to sleep—so Bee usually tried to stay up the longest.

We finally sold the old gold-and-black
Tube
to Beast, who Willie
hired as our traveling chef. Beast tricked up the
Tube
like a big kitchen. He was a good cook, but he was a Yankee and none of us is Yankees. I love veal parmigiana and I love pasta, but Beast baked everything. I swear to God, he even baked black-eyed peas in aluminum tins. Everybody knows you got to eat grease to make a turd. The whole band was plugged up from eating baked food. I almost went to blows with Beast over iced tea. I mean, how hard is it to make iced tea? Even after I showed him how, he couldn't do it. Beast was a good guy, but he never fit in.

In the beginning nobody's job had a title or an official salary that went with it. Nobody was hired, you just kind of came along at the proper time. The organization wasn't conceived, it happened. Willie would reach in his pocket and hand you a wad of walking-around cash. Willie has no respect for money, see. That's why his cash is always wadded up.

I guess you'd call me the stage manager. My job is like a combination of a foreman, a referee, a cutting horse, a body guard, and a psychiatrist.

We used to play a lot of dumps like the Palomino and the Troubadour in L.A., the Boarding House in San Francisco, Gilley's in Houston, the Rio Pall Mall in Longview, Big G's in Round Rock, Panther Hall in Fort Worth, the Longhorn Ballroom and the Sportatorium in Dallas. The only thing you could expect was the unexpected. We played Panther Hall one night in summer when it was hot as shit and the promoter wouldn't spend the money to turn on the air conditioning. It was so fucking hot the guitars warped. Everybody in the band—except Bobbie, of course—played stripped to the waist. At the Sportatorium the promoter, Gino McCoslin, used to oversell the place every time. To solve that problem Gino hung signs that said
MEN
'
S ROOM
over the exit doors. Guy would go in to take a piss, and
bam
, he's locked outside. He'd hammer on the door and yell, “Let me in, my wife's in there!” And Gino would say, “Fuck you, buddy, we're sold out.”

Gilley's was the all-time worst. I hate that fucking place. On the stage, your back is to the wall with no exit. You've got to go down the side and out the corner. The stage is only a few feet off the floor. We've played plenty of rough fucking beer joints, but we'd do a gig at Gilley's and come out with bruises and cuts and our shirts torn. People would be fist fighting in the crowd. Gilley's is a fucking skull orchard. You look out there at the crowd in that dim light and it's like a melon patch. People throwing shit. They could shoot each other without us even knowing.

One night in the midseventies at Gilley's this big-titted, cotton
candy blond with red shoes and a little waist and big arms with the sleeves rolled up on her cowboy shirt—I think she was a fucking offshore welder from Pasadena—grabbed the rail and came right onstage, eye to eye with me, just a few feet from Willie. I said, “Lady, you got to get down, you know. This place is crazy enough already.”

She says, “Eat my shit, you asshole.”

I poked her in the solar plexus. Boom. She kind of buckled. But she jumped right up, and I thought: Oh my God, this bitch is gonna whip my ass right here in front of everybody I know. I hit her another good shot, and she backed down.

Another night in San Diego, Willie invited the Jazzercise class to come up and dance onstage. It was 150 girls. Well, 150 girls onstage is dangerous enough, but get them dancing in step and you got an earthquake.

In Vegas the stage is about table high. People leap onstage and you got to deal with their shit. You can't be violent with them, because Willie don't like it, but sometimes it's hard to restrain a person without being physical. I looked around at one show, and here was some drunk bitch on the stage heading for Willie. I stepped in front of her and she said, “Get out of my fucking way. I'm gonna touch Willie.”

I said, “No, you ain't.”

She said, “Have you ever touched Willie?”

I said, “No ma'am, but I jacked him off once in Kansas City. Does that count?”

She looked startled, and it gave me a chance to ease her away as gently as possible.

Westbury, in New York, is a theater in the round that is a nightmare because the stage is so accessible. This goofy motherfucker jumped over somebody's shoulder at Westbury and landed onstage and walked right over and looked at Bee, then walked behind Willie and looked at Paul. They're still playing, right? So he goes over and sits down on Bobbie's piano seat and puts his arms around her and tries to kiss her. We got hold of that fellow and took him off in the darkness. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch, but you can't really do that.