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  WILLIE

  Praise for Willie Nelson

  “Willie Nelson is a profound, original songwriter in a class with Stephen Foster who continues to enrich our lives with classics. He plays guitar like Django Reinhardt—it’s an extension of his body and soul, totally responsive to the power of his imagination. He is an artist of the very highest order, and beautifully—often hilariously—human.” —Kris Kristofferson

  “I have admired Willie’s songwriting and his personal style for many years. He is without a doubt one of the finest country song writers I know.” —George Jones

  “Willie’s one of my heroes. . . . He also shares with Sinatra a gift for incredible vocals.” —Jerry Wexler, from Rhythm and Blues: A Life in American Music

  “I have admired Willie Nelson as a songwriter and a recording artist for many years.” —Hank Snow

  “Willie and his music have touched the lives of so many people, and I personally have learned much from him.” —Julio Iglesias

  “Willie Nelson is all by himself—he’s an authentic American master. The genuine article.” —Sydney Pollack

  “With hair as long as the generosity and talent as big as the heart, there is also a compassion that appears to be endless. Willie is a giant among men.” —Leon Russell

  “Willie is a true gypsy. No matter what era he might have been born in, his music would have touched the hearts and souls of everyone, as it has in our times.” —Waylon Jennings

  WILLIE

  An Autobiography

  Willie Nelson

  With Bud Shrake

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2000

  Copyright © 1988 by Willie Nelson

  This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Willie is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1988. It is reprinted by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Helen L. Granger/Levavi & Levavi

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

  New York, New York 10011

  Distributed by National Book Network

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nelson, Willie, 1933–

  Willie : an autobiography / Willie Nelson ; with Bud Shrake.— 1st Cooper Square Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Simon and Schuster, cl988.

  Includes index.

  ISBN: 978-0-8154-1080-5

  1. Nelson, Willie, 1933– 2. Country musicians— United States— Biography. I. Shrake, Edwin. II. Title.

  ML420.N4 A3 2000

  782.421642'092—dc21

  [B]

  00-055475

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  This book is dedicated

  to my mother, Myrle,

  who went on the road

  long before I did.

  I could never have put

  all these memories together

  without the loving aid

  of my daughter, Lana.

  I wish to thank

  Cheryl McCall, Fred Burger,

  Townsend Miller, Bobby Arnold,

  Jody Fischer, and Jo Ellen Gent

  for their help in preparing

  this book.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Let Me Be A Man

  PART TWO

  Family Bible

  PART THREE

  Night Life

  PART FOUR

  Write Your Own Song

  PART FIVE

  I Gotta Get Drunk and

  I Sure Do Dread It

  PART SIX

  It’s Not Supposed to

  Be That Way

  PART SEVEN

  On the Road Again

  PART EIGHT

  The Healing Hands of Time

  INDEX

  WILLIE

  “I didn’t come here,

  and I ain’t leavin’.”

  —WILLIE NELSON

  PROLOGUE

  A long time ago when I walked onto a stage to do a show, I would search the room with my eyes. I was looking for somebody who was looking at me, who appeared interested in learning what I was doing in front of the microphone with a guitar in my hands. Once I found that friendly face, I would sing to that person all night long. I would zero in and make heavy contact with their spirit. And it would grow. The flash of energy between me and the one friendly face would reflect into others, and it would keep growing—these bolts of energy ping-ponging from one table to the next, or from one pair of dancers to the couple dancing nearby—and before long I would have the whole crowd caught up in my music and me.

  But it all had to start with one friendly face.

  It’s like now when I hug some girl in the front row. I’ll reach over and put my arm around her, and some other girl will give me a flower and I’ll kiss her, and the rushes of excitement will wash out through the crowd like the waves of the ocean, touching everyone. I don’t want any security guards between me and the front row, roughing up the crowd or preventing anyone from trying to touch me. I want to hug these people and let them feel how much I love them and are thrilled they are here with me.

  But it don’t always happen just like that nowadays. There are many nights when I walk onstage in some enormous dark venue and I can’t see a friendly face in the audience unless I took a Boy Scout flashlight and walked among them.

  I do a number of big concerts at night in arenas or at outdoor picnics—by big I mean crowds of 100,000—and I have to work those shows by feel. I can see nothing but a wide deep-purple canyon blinking with the fire of thousands of cigarettes.

  Even before I step onstage I can tell how hot the crowd is. If they’re hot they’re screaming or they’re rumbling with pent-up emotions. Sometimes there is so much noise from the crowd that I never hear a note I am playing or a word I am singing. My sound guys are the greatest at getting monitor music back to the band, but some nights it is impossible. I went to a couple of Beatles concerts in the sixties and I couldn’t hear their music for the screaming crowd.

  I can’t say I never dreamed such a thing would happen to me. I knew it would.

  The biggest crowd I ever played to—the biggest live and in-person crowd, as opposed to the worldwide audience that saw We Are the World on satellite TV—was at the US Festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. The Apple Computer guy—Steve Wozniak—had a lot of money he wanted to spend so he built a huge concert stadium around L.A. somewhere and hired a bunch of bands and paid us all way too much money. There was a constant stream of helicopters and limos arriving and departing backstage. Wozniak said there were a zillion people in the audience and how can I argue with a computer guy? The newspapers said there were more than 500,000.

  I walked out onstage and saw more people than I ever imagined seeing all at once, only they were speckled and flashed and hidden by the darkness and the theatrical lights. It was exciting, like standing in a spotlight at the fifty-yard line with five Rose Bowl crowds screaming and cheering from the darkness.

  I got a sense of people waving at me, and I waved back. Every now and then, thousands lit up like the exploding bridge scen
e from Apocalypse Now, sparking and booming like a fireworks display amid that immensity, that forest of people.

  They were hot. But I thought, well, if they’re this hot now, I better work a little harder and make them a little hotter.

  The way to do that if you can’t look them in the eye is to play music—one song after another, driving at them with the music—and that’s what we did. I felt electricity like my tennis shoes were wired to a generator. The screaming as we finished our set reached the pitch of jet engines. I was so high from the experience I wanted it never to end. There was so much noise and backstage confusion that I had to ask myself, “Self, did you arouse them tonight?” And self said, “Son, you lifted them up.”

  Really it’s the same thing I used to do on the road in the early days when I was looking for one friendly face. Many of those old shows the audience was hung over from the night before and not feeling that great to begin with, but you’ve got to get them to jump up on their feet and start dancing.

  What I do for a living is get people to feeling good.

  It’s not a power that I feel I have in and of myself. It is a power that is exchanged between me and my audience. By the fact that we musicians are out there with a bunch of big amplifiers and we know we can be heard by 100,000 people—or in high-tech terminology a zillion people—we know there is a tremendous lot of energy leaving the bandstand, and we can tell from the feeling coming back whether we’re having a big time or not.

  My band and stage crew and my sound and lighting guys have been with me so long now and know me so well that we communicate by instinct on the nights the crowd is so loud we can’t hear each other onstage. Paul English on drums and Bee Spears on bass can read me like a diary. By the gestures I make or the mood I’m in, Paul and Bee always know what I’m getting ready to do. To me it seems like I just go ahead from one song to another as they pop into mind. It’s a great help to have old friends onstage and at the control boards who anticipate what I’m about to do before I’ve even consciously decided.

  The whole experience is very electric. It’s the utmost high. Crowds come to see us and pay ten to twenty dollars apiece to stand up and scream for two hours. It’s probably very therapeutic. Psychiatrists encourage people to scream, holler, and laugh. Music raises their spirits, which is why they go to concerts. Music is a motivator. Music will make you leap up off your ass and move. It will make you dance, it will make you do jumping jacks. It’s no wonder music has been incorporated into exercise videocassettes that sell way up in the millions.

  Of course, our band is onstage to have a good time, too. If we don’t have a good time, chances are the audience won’t enjoy it so much either. Musicians who grow tired and cynical and begin playing just for the money instead of for the love of the music and for the crowds find their audiences start slipping away. You can’t fool a crowd for long, whether it’s a concert for 100,000 or a honky-tonk with 300 in it. People will pick up sour vibrations and take their business elsewhere. When you open your heart to an audience, you share your deepest feelings with them. They want to find love in your heart. They don’t want to see that it is nothing but a bank vault.

  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

  Let Me

  Be

  a Man

  Let Me Be a Man

  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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  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 s
o 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.