Willie Read online

  I climbed onto Honeysuckle Rose and rode a long way out of town to a series of shows, which I had learned was the best place for me to be while the Picnic was being put together. I had, after all, fifteen years experience with Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnics. They usually ended with me slipping into a plane in the middle of the night and flying off to Hawaii to hide for a week while the damages were assessed. Over the years I realized it could be an advantage to be unfindable before the Picnic, as well. The Picnic grows beyond control, and I try never to worry about what is out of my control—just to give it my strongest positive thoughts and trust for it to turn out well.

  Now I loped back to Dr. Simms’s old house in the early Abbott morning—daydreaming, several voices inside me talking all at once, as they usually do, telling me tales, offering advice; they are my guardian angels mixed in with some malicious spirits. I listen to the voices argue all the time but my inner Mediator makes the decisions unless my ego jumps in front and screws it all up.

  Honeysuckle Rose’s generators were humming in the yard as Gator Moore, my driver, got the bus ready to roll. Gator is a tall, well-built guy with long hair and a beard and healthy biceps. He’s a good companion on the road and a conscientious driver who always gets me to the show on time, or the movie set or the recording studio or the motel. I depend on Gator.

  I stopped in the kitchen to eat two plums and a bowl of plain yogurt with walnuts and sliced bananas and strawberries on top. I washed down a couple of painkillers with a slug of grapefruit juice, hugged Lana, and talked to my grandkids.

  I climbed onto Honeysuckle Rose with a random group of friends. Gator drove us along the streets I ran that morning and headed up the highway until we came upon an enormous Texas flag—I mean it looked like it was ten stories high—and turned down a side road into the backstage area. I climbed out and walked up onto the stage to gaze at what we had brought forth.

  Beyond the stage the ground fanned out in a field that could hold the 80,000 capacity crowd Carl and Zeke had been predicting in the papers. It was already getting hot. I found myself sweating on stage, and not only because of the heat. I had begun to realize that a crowd of 80,000 was a crazy prediction for a blazing 100-plus-degree day out here on this shadeless prairie at Carl’s Corner. You would have to be a lunatic to fight the traffic of the predicted mob to Carl’s Corner on such a blistering day, no matter that we had loaded the show with Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller, Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, Billy Joe Shaver, Don Cherry, Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Rattlesnake Annie, Bruce Hornsby, Jackie King, Joe Ely, Joe Walsh, Eric Johnson, and had a hell of a show scheduled.

  I heard a mellow, husky voice crooning behind me. The voice was singing gibberish—“the old church . . . the bells . . . the yellow house on the corner . . . oh I am fucked . . .”

  Don Cherry was pacing back and forth at the rear of the stage, rubbing his hands together. Besides being a good, stylish singer, Don is a scratch golfer who used to play on the pro tour—two qualities that I admire above most others.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  Don stared at me with blue eyes that showed intense concern, like maybe a contact lens had gone crooked.

  “Oh, shit, Will,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you know the lyrics to ‘Green Green Grass of Home’?”

  I thought about it for a moment. I could hear the melody in my head, but the words didn’t come.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ve been driving up and down the highway for two hours trying to remember that fucking song. I must have sung it five thousand times in nightclubs. I could walk on stage in Vegas right now, and ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ would burst out of my throat, I couldn’t stop it. But now it’s gone. I can’t remember the fucking words.”

  “Sing something else,” I said.

  “Are you crazy? That’s what I open with.”

  I left Don huddling onstage with Bee Spears, Mickey Raphael, Grady Martin, and Poodie Locke—stalwarts of my band and crew—all of them singing at the same time, working on the words to “Green Green Grass of Home.”

  At 10 A.M. my band and I kicked off the show to a couple of hundred folks camped below the stage with folding chairs, umbrellas, and coolers. I recognized many of them, people I had seen at my outdoor shows in Texas for twenty years, aging hippies like me with earrings and tattoos and hair under the women’s armpits. They danced and waved their hands. A big Viking woman in a green undershirt pulled out two breasts the size of volleyballs and bounced them in her palms while her biker old man screamed with toothless joy.

  I introduced Don Cherry at 10:30 in the morning. Looking cool, loaded with big-time nightclub aplomb, Don snapped his fingers and swung into “Green Green Grass of Home.” He sang that song as good as anybody could sing it, like he was headlining the song to a sellout crowd at a star hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas.

  The aging hippies listened with a sort of bemused curiosity. When Don gave it his show-biz finish, they sat and looked at him like he was a Hottentot. The crowd—if you could call it that—clapped politely and began to yell “Let’s boogie!”

  Instead Don sang them a patriotic song about what this country means to him and every true American within hearing. This time the people cheered and whistled when he finished with his arms outlifted and his head held high. Pro that he is, Don bowed and fled the stage while they were still whistling—we call it getting out of Dodge.

  “Fuck it,” he said as he passed me on the steps. “Which way is the airport?”

  By the middle of the afternoon the temperature was 103. The wind had started blowing hard enough to flap the banners on the stage so they sounded like horsewhips cracking—it was some relief from the heat. The crowd had grown to about 4,000. It was clear the prediction of 80,000 had been nuts.

  Darkness fell. My old pals Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller showed up. Kris was, as usual, in an uproar. In the newspaper that morning had been a story that accused Kris of throwing away a plaque some Vietnam vets had given him after he played a benefit for them up East the night before.

  “How could they say such shit?” Kris yelled. “In all the confusion backstage, I didn’t know the plaque got left behind. For God’s sake, I’m on these guys’ side, I’m busting ass for these guys, I’m not gonna do anything stupid and humiliating like throw away their plaque!”

  Kris would be happy if this was coffeehouse time again, like the fifties and early sixties, where he could sit on a stool with his guitar and sing his songs to a packed house of beatniks. Kris is, of course, one of the best songwriters of all time. He shows more soul when he blows his nose than the ordinary person does at his honeymoon dance. But commercial is a word Kris refuses to hear. He has written a lot of hits and some standards, but he writes what he wants and sings what he wants—even if the record labels drop him—and for my Picnic he was going to do his new songs about the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and about Jesse Jackson. By now the night wind had dropped the temperature into the 80s, and the crowd had grown to an estimated 8,000.

  My manager, lawyer, and accountant arrived, counted the house, looked at the bills, and slunk around with subdued and mournful expressions. The Picnic stood to take a $600,000 bath.

  Zeke was a pardner for profits but not for losses. That was understood from the start. I would never put Zeke in a loser. The money to pay the losses would have to come from Tim, Carl, and me.

  Carl got drunk as soon as he saw the size of the afternoon crowd, had slept it off and was back aboard Honeysuckle Rose telling me with all the certainty a forty-seven-year-old guy born in Kleburg County in South Texas, father of seven children including a two-year-old, could muster that in another hour we’d have a crowd of 50,000. He hit the tequila again.

  “Want to play some dominoes?” Carl asked.

  “Mix ’em up,” I said.

  “What’ll we play for?” Carl said.

  “Your town.”r />
  “Shit, you own it already. Let’s play for cash,” Carl said.

  I went onstage with my band to play the last set at 2 A.M. I couldn’t tell how many people were listening down there in the dark. I knew I was going into the tank financially on this Picnic. We had made some major miscalculations. But none of that mattered when we struck up “Whiskey River” to open the final set. That was only money—this was music. The excitement I felt at that moment was too powerful to carry a price tag.

  Standing in the spotlights, with the old stars above me in the Abbott sky, I saw the satellite TV truck sending our picture and our music all over the cosmos. And from that stage at Carl’s Corner I could see, too, the dark blanket of the fields where little Booger Red had picked cotton and busted his back baling hay so many, many years ago.

  Regardless of what this 1987 Picnic may have cost me, in the end we wound up with a good permanent concert site not ten miles from the barbershop where I used to give a shoe shine and a song for fifty cents. How’s that for using the creative imagination?

  The Chorus

  MILDRED WILCOX

  It was about sundown when Myrle’s waters broke. I remember the period of day because Mama Nelson and I were doing the evening milking of our cow, and Myrle had wandered out to watch and talk with us. She was too pregnant to work, but maybe she could sense it was near and wanted company. Anyhow, Myrle’s waters broke while Mama Nelson was milking the cow. Mama Nelson sent me running to fetch Dr. Simms, who lived only three houses away. But there was a lot of land between houses in Abbott in 1933.

  I ran as fast as I could. A couple of years earlier, when I was thirteen, Myrle had given birth to Bobbie Lee, and it had scared me to death. Bobbie Lee was born on the first hour of the first week of the first month of the first year—1 A.M., January 1, 1931. They had made me go upstairs and told me to go to sleep. Myrle was only sixteen herself, and I was frightened and curious what was happening to her.

  Myrle used to iron for Dr. Simms. She ironed his white shirts. Mrs. Simms wouldn’t let her iron anything but the collar and the sleeves, because that’s all that showed when he put on his vest. Myrle would starch and iron his collars and cuffs one day a week. I don’t know what she got paid, but it was a little bit of money.

  Dr. Simms came to the house to handle the birth. Mama and Daddy Nelson were there. Myrle’s husband, Ira, must have been at work. He could have been off playing music someplace—Ira was always playing music—but he wasn’t at the house.

  Because I had enjoyed Bobbie Lee so much, had babysat with her all the time instead of working, Myrle had told me, “You’ve loved my first baby dearly, so when my next one is born, whatever it is, you can name it.”

  I gave the new baby my daddy’s name, Hugh. Then to go with Hugh I chose the name Willie. It sounded kind of musical—Willie Hugh Nelson. I wasn’t old enough to realize that Willie wouldn’t be a mature, grown-up man’s name someday, that he might be more proud to have a name like Granddaddy Nelson’s—William—stuck on a marriage license. But he was never William. He was always Willie.

  Willie’s granddaddy and grandmother—our grandparents—used to teach singing in Arkansas before the family moved to Abbott, Texas, in 1929. They would take over some country schoolhouse for ten days or so and teach music to the families—men, women, children, everybody loved singing. My goodness, up in the Arkansas mountains no shows came through. When you weren’t working, you were either in church singing or you were at a party singing or a schoolhouse singing. I was only eight or ten years old, but I was the pump organ player. Granddaddy Nelson would have me learning new songs constantly. He was the song leader. Whatever he wanted to sing, that’s what I learned to play. I would help chalk music on the blackboard at the singing schools. Everybody would learn to read music, read the lines and spaces. And they would sing by notes. DO, RE, ME. I played by shape notes, and that’s why it was so hard, because DO remains the same shape but it changes lines every time you change keys.

  We would ride horseback to the schoolhouse for the singing schools and spend nights with the people who came to study. Everybody brought food and gathered to study music for maybe two weeks at a stretch. We mostly sang gospel hymns. We would sing all six verses of every hymn.

  Granddaddy sang bass. At night he would hold little Willie on his lap and sing him to sleep with his beautiful bass voice—songs like “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and “Where Have You Gone Billy Boy.”

  Willie’s father, Ira, was always wanting to go off and play in a band somewhere, and Myrle would go with him, so I would take little Willie, just a few months old, to our house and he would sleep in the curve of my arm. Bobbie would sleep with Mama Nelson.

  When Willie was about two, some of us bought him a little Christmas gift. It was a mandolin made out of tin with real strings on it, so he could strum the chords. That was his first musical instrument. Willie kept it a long time. He and Bobbie weren’t destructive, they kept their toys. Of course, they didn’t get a lot of toys like kids do now. They had to take care of their things because they weren’t going to get something new every time somebody went to town. People didn’t go to town every day, either.

  Myrle and Ira got divorced and went their separate ways, leaving Bobbie and Willie with Ira’s folks, Dad and Mom Nelson. Times were hard in the Great Depression. Our granddaddy was a blacksmith. Sometimes people would have work done and then not pay him. Some were well-to-do farmers around Abbott, but they wouldn’t pay and never did pay even after Granddaddy Nelson died and left Mama Nelson with Bobbie Lee and Willie to take care of. Bobbie Lee and Willie had to wear clothes somebody handed down to them, or gave them, but they didn’t mind. If Bobbie and Willie only had one good dress and suit to wear to church, it was always nice and clean.

  It was such a blow to us all when Dad Nelson, our grandfather, suddenly died at age fifty-six. He was a powerful man, not tall but real strong, but he had a bad heart. He caught pneumonia and tried to take some kind of sulfa drug that went against his heart. He took sick one day and died two weeks later.

  I spent all the time I could with Bobbie Lee and Willie. We played games—hide-and-seek, Annie Over, follow the leader, little games that groups could join in and play. Sometimes we’d play paper dolls with the girls and little Willie would help us cut dolls out of the mailorder catalogues.

  Before I got married and left home, I helped look after Bobbie Lee and Willie. Mama Nelson would never let me spank them. I used to tell her, “If you just let me take a broom weed, just a broom weed, and spank their little old naked legs when they get out of line . . .” But Mama Nelson said no.

  After I moved a mile down the road with my husband and couldn’t see Bobbie Lee and Willie so much anymore, Mama Nelson had to stake little Willie in the yard, like a cow. She used a twenty-five-foot rope, which gave him plenty of grazing room. I would walk over to the Nelson house to visit the children. When I had to leave, Bobbie Lee and Willie would follow me as far as they were allowed to go away from the house, up to the next street. Then they would lay down in the grass and cry until I was out of sight.

  I couldn’t stand that. Finally one day I stopped and went back and said, “Let me have a little talk with y’all. If you keep doing this, I can’t come back. I’ll just stay home and not come see you. So you promise not to follow me up the road and cry.”

  They cried some more and promised.

  There was never anything said about the children being raised by their grandparents and not having a momma and daddy all the time like other children did. Bobbie Lee and Willie never seemed to mind the fact that they didn’t have something other children had. Of course, it was depression time, when nobody had a whole lot. But Bobbie Lee and Willie were happy, well-adjusted kids.

  They made good grades in school. Bobbie always played the piano for the school, and Willie would play the guitar and entertain the kids. Every fall the Abbott school
would hold a carnival to raise money, and each class would pick a boy and a girl to be the king and queen of the class. Whatever grade they were in, Bobbie Lee and Willie were nearly always chosen.

  Myrle and I used to try to write songs together when Bobbie Lee and Willie were babies. After school we would sit and try to put words together so they would rhyme. I’d say, “Did you think of anything that rhymes real good today?” We’d sit down and work some more. We weren’t worrying with music, just trying to put words together to make a song. We never did get anything written. What made us want to make a song, I don’t know. But we worked frantically at it.

  BOBBIE LEE NELSON

  Our grandmother would wake Willie and me up in the morning by throwing ice water on us. Mama might call our names once or twice, but if our feet didn’t immediately hit the floor, here would come this flood of ice water. Usually I would jump out of bed before the water struck—because I knew it was on its way and I didn’t like it—but some mornings she needed a whole pitcher of water to get Willie up. Willie says he would have grown up to be a pretty even-tempered guy if it hadn’t been for the way he was woke up as a kid.

  Mama Nelson just didn’t have time to fool with coaxing us out of bed. There were chores to be done. The cows had to be brought to the barn and milked, the hog had to be fed, and the chickens. Willie would go out and ride the milk cow into the barn—his first experience as a real cowboy.

  Mama would fix breakfast for our granddaddy and Willie and me before we went off to work—Daddy Nelson to his blacksmith shop and the rest of us in the cotton- or cornfields. Later Mama got a job as a cook in the school lunch room, but still we had to be up and moving while the stars were in the sky.

  My earliest memory, I was three years old playing outside our little house in Abbott, under the cottonwood and cedar trees, and our mother Myrle and our daddy Ira—not our grandparents but our real parents—were standing by the car having a loud disagreement. Oh, it was so unpleasant, such an awful thing to hear. I started crying and ran to our bedroom at the back of the house and hid. Willie was just a little baby in his crib. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew somebody was leaving.