Willie (44 page)

We played with the Grateful Dead in Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in 1977 to a crowd of 80,000. Us and Waylon. The Dead played three and a half hours while we watched clouds building up. This big fucking storm blew in and it was pouring rain when Waylon took the stage. Waylon freaked out. Lightning ain't the best thing to have happen when you got all this electrical equipment around you. Waylon hadn't been to sleep in about a year—he just ate Hershey's
Kisses and snorted cocaine. Waylon started hyperventilating. He froze. So Willie walked onstage, took Waylon's guitar, and kept on picking.

I says, “Willie, it's dangerous out here.”

Willie says, “If you got to go, you got to go.”

We changed bands in the rainstorm, moved Waylon's stuff off and ours on. Willie never missed a lick with rain pouring on him. I told the Grateful Dead guys, “You fuckers played so long you made it rain.” They said, “Yeah, so why don't your old man make it stop?”

Soon as we got our band set up, the rain stopped.

But one of the strangest happenings was in Birmingham, Alabama. We had done a show at the coliseum downtown. The Franks brothers had a Suburban then to carry their T-shirts, and we were loading our gear on the old
Tube
parked at a six-deck parking garage. We all carried two or three guns and plenty of ammo back then. Half the band was already on the
Tube
. Mickey was off chasing the monkey someplace.

All of a sudden we hear
Kaboom! Kaboom!

It's the sound of a .357 magnum going off in the parking garage.
Kaboom! Kaboom!
The echoes sound like howitzer shells exploding. It's kind of semi-dark, and this guy comes blowing through this parking deck and jumps in the Franks brothers' Suburban. Now here comes this bitch with a fucking pistol.
Kaboom!
She's chasing this motherfucker. It sounds like a fucking war.

People are piling out of the show and they start scattering. Here come cops from every direction. They're flying out of their cars, hitting that parking deck, spread-eagling the whole crowd—“On the deck, motherfuckers!”—because the cops don't know who is shooting at who.

We cut the lights, and slip around to the back of the bus. All you can see are police headlights in a big semi-circle and hundreds of people lying flat on the ground all stretched out. It looks like Guyana.

All these cops are squatted down in the doorjambs, turning people over, frisking them, aiming guns at everybody, just waiting for the next shot to be fired.

And here comes Willie. He walks off the bus wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes, and he's got two huge Colt .45 revolvers stuck in his waist. The barrels are so long they stick out the bottom of his cutoffs. Two shining motherfucking pistols in plain sight of a bunch of cops nervous as shit.

Wilie just walks right over and says, “What's the trouble?” Well, he's got some kind of aura to him that just cools everything out. The
cops put up their guns, the people climb off the concrete, and pretty soon Willie is signing autographs. He's got those eyes, that smile, it's magic. It he's singing to one girl or fifteen people in a hotel room or 200 people in a club or 50,000 people at a football stadium, these piercing eyes find the people, and he sings straight to each one of them. The men who don't like him are stuff-in-the-muds, bureaucratic assholes and chicken dicks. Women all love him. Everybody relates to him. Everybody has heartbreaks and problems with their families and their sweethearts. Willie plays to them. He's got this low wave of the hand that covers the first fifty rows and this high wave that covers the second deck, and everybody feels like he's waving at
them
. And he really is.

Our crowds have changed over the years. It used to be the hard core, then the older people started coming, and eventually the kids joined the crowd. Now everybody's there, from generation to generation. People are going to buy Willie Nelson records for the rest of their lives, and so will their children.

But if we ever do go back to playing nothing but honky-tonks, it's all right with me. At heart we'll always be a pile of wild Texas yahoos.

Most nights on the road, Willie sleeps on his bus instead of in a hotel. When he plays Atlantic City, for example, they provide a big suite. But he wants to sleep in his own bedroom on the bus—on the beach in Atlantic City. So I found a parking lot on the beach about ten miles out of town, and that's where we head when the show is over unless we're running to a new gig in another town.

There was a hurricane blowing in one night a couple of years ago as we drove to the beach. I kept checking the weather reports. They sounded grim. The cops told us we weren't safe in the parking lot—the hurricane was a big one and was coming straight at us. I suggested to Willie we might ought to move, but he said, “Don't worry about it, Gator. We'll get some fresh air tonight.”

Willie was tired and went to bed listening to the rain pounding on the roof. All night long I sat nervously in the driver's seat, ready to pull out. The waves started showering the bus, the sand piled up
over the wheels, the whole bus rocked back and forth, the wind howled. I thought: God, I guess we've had it this time.

But in the wee hours the hurricane split in half and the two forces veered away from us. In the morning I was outside looking at the sand banked up against the bus. I was still shaking. Willie opened the door and got out, yawning and stretching.

“I love the sound of rain,” he said.

I came by my love of traveling naturally, I guess, because I was born on a navy base in Maryland. My dad, a test pilot, was killed in a jet crash when I was little. My stepfather was also a navy test pilot. I grew up all over the country and drifted into driving station wagons and trucks for bands like the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks. In 1978 I got a job driving Willie's equipment truck. I moved to driving the crew bus and finally to driving Willie's bus—the one we call
Honeysuckle Rose
.

It's funny. This used to be a real young business. All the roadies for all the bands were in their early twenties. Now it seems the population bubble has just moved up. We all got older, and no young people are coming in as roadies. It's going to be real strange in a few years—a bunch of ragged, geriatric roadies.

You don't have to be a Teamster to drive a band bus. This is like a motor home. All you need is an operator's license. If we had to fill out Teamster logs—drive ten hours and take eight hours off—we couldn't get creative enough to do the paperwork. For us a twenty-six hour run is routine. You'd have to sit for three days to let your paperwork catch up.

My personal record is ninety-six hours straight. Four solid days and nights behind the wheel with no sleep. It's only my personal record, but I don't care ever to break it.

We used to pull into the parking lot of the big hotel near our gig, and the word would have gotten out that Willie was coming. There'd be thousands of people thronged around the place, waiting. We might turn off the motors, turn off the lights, get off the buses, and lock the doors—leaving Willie inside in the dark. Maybe the people would go away. But usually they'd stand there all night long and watch Willie's bus. Willie would be asleep inside. Not that he'd be avoiding his fans, but even Willie has to sleep now and then. Sometimes the crowd would pound on the bus until Willie woke up and came out.

Now we stay at hotels that aren't so obvious, maybe twenty-five to thirty miles from the gig. But people still manage to find us. Willie
won't let us escort him through the crowd. He'll stop and talk to every one of them. If they're too nervous to ask for his autograph or ask him for a picture, he'll say, “Hey, why don't you pose for a picture with me?” or “Hey, did you want an autograph?”

It's been kind of rough on Willie after the show. He's soaking wet from being on the stage. We have used 100 subterfuges to sneak Willie onto his bus to change his shirt, at least, before he goes back outside to sign his name a few thousand times.

Every kind of star and politician you can think of has been on Willie's bus. But maybe the most peculiar visitor was Richard Pryor.

It was Willie's birthday, about three or four years ago. We had a huge ornate birthday cake in the back room of the bus parked behind the Holiday Inn in Las Vegas. Richard Pryor showed up with his monster bodyguard. Pryor walks in and says, “Nice cake, Will. It's beautiful.”

Willie says, “Why, thank you.”

Pryor says, “Happy Birthday.'

And Pryor went
whap!
Hurled his whole face and chest headlong into the cake. Buried himself in it.

So Willie picks up a double armload of cake and mashes it all over Pryor's bodyguard.

“A happy birthday to all,” Willie says.

The wildest bus is the crew bus. They're still wanting to live the legend or enhance it in their own way. Paul cracks down on them the most.

But when the guys were drinking real heavy, the buses inside would look like a baseball stadium after a big game—ankle deep in bottles and rubbish. They used to play poker for maybe thirty straight hours until Bee Spears got mad and slammed his fist on the poker table so hard it exploded the thick glass top into a million pieces, glass flying all over the guys. I haven't seen a card game on a bus since then. Now it's dominoes or chess or computer golf. I've seen some terrible, red-faced, screaming arguments on the bus—never with Willie, mind you—but it's an unspoken rule that fist fighting is forbidden. Nobody ever swings on anybody. They might scream in each other's face all night long, but deep underneath they know they're going to be buddies again tomorrow.

It's my job to go grocery shopping and stock Willie's bus with food and drink. He wants raw vegetables and fruit—like carrots, apples, celery, radishes, oranges, bananas—on board all the time. I buy fifteen cases of Mountain Valley water for a trip, and plenty of Budweiser. And skim milk. Willie won't drink milk if it ain't skim. He
gets into diets, takes a lot of vitamins and bee pollen. Willie doesn't eat much, but he does like cans of Beanie Weenies and pork and beans—pops 'em in the microwave for a quick meal—and he loves potted-meat sandwiches. Potted meat is probably his favorite thing.

With the big four-cylinder diesel generator that runs the central air and stereos and TVs and VCRs, one of our buses gets about six miles a gallon. We'll run a bus about five years before we replace it or get a new motor—and five years is about as long as drivers last. I've seen seventeen changes of drivers since I came to work for Willie. It's a hard grind. You have a high burnout rate. I keep myself going by playing mental arithmetic games: How far to the next town? How fast are we going? What are we averaging? What is the fuel consumption? I don't know why I do it, but I can tell you within two minutes what time we'll arrive.

Willie likes looking out the window and seeing all our buses and trucks in convoy. If anybody screws with one us, suddenly they've got all of us to screw with. It's a real feeling of camaraderie, being on the road.

Willie is one of the first outsiders who has ever been worked on with our medicine. He has been coming to Maui for twenty years, and we have been watching him. We saw that he loves our islands and our people, so finally the old Kahunas—I am what you might call an apprentice, waiting and learning to take my place with the old Kahunas—agreed to use their powers to heal Willie's recurring back injury and his problems with his sinuses and his lungs.

I received permission to take Willie into a secret place in the mountains to see Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry has the knowledge of the
Kala
, the cleansing process that comes through the use of herbal medicines.

First Willie was given the seed of the candlenut tree. It is a round seed that you peel and find a nut inside. You crack open the nut and eat it. For a person Willie's size, four nuts are the perfect amount. In the beginning it made him very sick. The reason for this is the cleansing—bringing the poison out of him from his mouth and elsewhere. This is the basic level from where the healing can start. After he got over being sick from eating the nuts, he felt much better than
before he ate them but still not strong enough for us to do the healing of the bones in his back.

Kahunas can heal compound fractures in five days through prayer and special medicines. Licensed physicians may call us heathens and say we cannot heal, but they do not understand our ways. Our knowledge of the divine laws of nature is much older and deeper than theirs. The white man covers up this knowledge because he thinks of us as heathens. The missionaries were strongly against Kahuna magic, afraid of our power. They forced the Kahunas into seclusion. But the knowledge has passed down through generations of Kahunas who know the strength of sunlight and natural elements.

After we cleaned Willie out, we let him rest a couple of days. He had been drinking alcohol for many years and had much bile that had to be drained from his stomach and intestines. When he was rested we took him to a woman who does the Kahuna way of massage. She examined him and found everything out of proportion. His stomach was resting on his bladder, his intestines were turned improperly. She realigned his internal organs through massage and removed much of the pressure from his back. Soon Willie was riding his horse bareback through the high mountain valleys. You could see the joy in his face.

I was in the army during the war in Vietnam, was shot down in a helicopter and spent eighteen months in a prison camp in Laos. In my younger days maybe I didn't listen to the wisdom of my Kahuna ancestors, but in the camp I had plenty of time to think and evaluate. When I was freed, I went to my people in the mountains and became a “gatherer.” It is my job to gather people for the great coming-together of the native races, like the American Indians, the Eskimos, the Hawaiians.