Music

Happy 82nd birthday, Willie Nelson!

(This was written for an earlier Willie birthday, but still applies.)

Photo by Theresa DiMenno at Farm Aid II Manor Downs.

Willie understood. When Frank Sinatra kept touring well into his 70s, reading the words of his classic songs off giant TelePrompTers, critics and fans wondered why he didn’t retire. How much money did he need? But Willie Nelson knew that concert receipts had nothing to do with his friend and idol’s busy schedule. “When you sing for people and they throw back all that love and energy,” Willie said before his 70th birthday, “it’s just the best medicine in the world.”

Twelve years later, Willie, who turns 82 today, tours and releases albums at the pace of a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Because it is.

The phases and stages of Willie’s career have found him evolving from the honkytonk sideman to the hit Nashville songwriter, from progressive country pioneer to crooner of standards. And now the iconoclast has become the icon, with Willie achieving American folk hero status.

This pot-smoking Zen redneck in pigtails, who sings Gershwin through his nose and plays a guitar that looks like he picked it up at a garage sale, transcends music and has come to personify the individual, the rectangular peg to the round hole of corporatization.

Willie’s the one producers called to sing “America the Beautiful” at the moving finale of the televised “A Tribute To Heroes” show after the Sept. 11 attacks. He’s played for worldwide audiences at former President Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize and he can have his bacon and eggs at any greasy spoon in the country and feel right at home.

Meanwhile, the journalists keep leading with the same questions about what keeps him going.

“I’ve been trying to take it easy for years, but this is what I love to do,” Willie said. “When I go home to rest, I get a little stir-crazy after a few days.” Here’s a man whose office in Luck, the Western town he built near his “Willie World” complex of golf courses, condos and recording studios on Lake Travis, carries a plaque that reads, “He who lives by the song, dies by the road.”

It’s no wonder that “On the Road Again” is the easiest song Willie’s ever written. The producers of the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose were looking for a theme song about vagabond musicians, and their star wrote the first words that popped into his mind:”The life I love is making music with my friends/ I can’t wait to get on the road again.”

It’s a simple existence made all the more comfortable because Willie is surrounded by people who’ve been with him for decades. Sister Bobbie, his 84-year-old piano player has been playing with Willie since 1937! Willie’s drummer Paul English, 83, has been the redhead’s running buddy since the 1950s. Harmonica player Mickey Raphael is a relative newcomer,  joining the ragtag caravan 42 years ago. Willie’s circle of fiercely loyal lifers include 90-year-old roadie Ben Dorcy, the former John Wayne valet, who’s been with Willie since the early ’60s. It’s an amazing family that has lost a few brothers in recent years: stage manager Randall “Poodie” Locke, bassist Bee Spears, guitarist Jody Payne. And the road goes on forever. “But if anything happens to Trigger,” Raphael said of the acoustic guitar that Willie’s picked a hole through, “that could be the show.”

The Martin classical guitar, which he bought sight-unseen for $750 in 1969, is Nelson’s most precious possession. That he lets friends, about 40 so far, carve their names into the guitar says as much about Willie Nelson, the unmaterialistic scamp, as the way he plays it with gypsy fingers and a jazzman’s curiosity.

Leon Russell and Willie Nelson have been friends since 1972.

Leon Russell and Willie Nelson have been friends since 1972.

With piercing brown eyes that seem to have the ability to make eye contact with thousands simultaneously, and a world class smile that’s both frisky and comforting, Nelson turns concerts into lovefests and makes fans feel like they grew up next door to him.

In the line waiting outside his shows are older couples dressed in tight, rounded jeans and multicolored western shirts, who look like they used to see a pre-bearded Willie at the old Big G’s dance hall in Round Rock or the Broken Spoke. But there are also tons of college kids in ballcaps and straw Resistol hats.

As with the Grateful Dead, Nelson’s spike in popularity so late in his career comes partly because he and the band promote a free-spirited, dope-smoking lifestyle. But where the Dead became synonymous with extended jams and mind-expanding drugs, the Willie way is built around short songs and long drives, with every cowboy having a little Indian in them. Above all, the band’s escapist bent is intensified with instinctive musicianship, a play-it-as-we-feel-it attitude that extends beyond the stage.

“Playing with Willie is tricky business,” bassist Spears told me in 2003. “If you try to follow him too close, he’ll lead you down to the river and drown you. You have to just play your part and trust that he’s going to come back and meet you at some point.” Willie says the musical kinship between him and sister Bobbie, who ride the bus together, is almost telepathic. “I’ve played music with my sister almost every night of my life,” he said, “and sometimes she knows what I’m going to play before I do.” williefamily25

“God bless ’em,” singer Marty Robbins once said of country music fans. “They’ll do anything for you but leave you alone.” But no country star has ever handled the demand from fans to touch, to talk to, to have a picture made better than Willie. He spent the first part of his career trying to become successful and the rest proving that success hasn’t changed him a whit.

He’s got a bunch of burly guys, including a former Hell’s Angel named L.G., working for him, but Willie doesn’t allow them to lead him through crowds, even when about 3,000 people stand between him and the stage, as they did at a Lone Star Park show in Grand Prairie I attended in 2003.

When the crowd let out a roar because they’ve seen Willie in their midst, Mickey Raphael walked up to the window of the band bus, peered out at his boss signing autographs in the sea of hats and said, “Looks like we’ve got about 45 minutes,” then went back to telling a reporter how he came to run away with this circus.

“My first exposure to the group was the cover of that (1971) Willie Nelson and Family record. They were the freakiest looking country band I’d ever seen. Paul looked like the devil and was wearing a cape; Bee had on some furry diapers. I said, ‘Now, what do these guys sound like?’ ” After sitting in with Willie and the Family at a firefighter’s benefit in Waxahachie, Raphael starting playing at all the band’s dates in the Dallas area.

“Willie asked me one night, ‘Hey, Paul, what are we paying that kid?’ ” said English, the infamous raconteur immortalized in Willie’s song “Me and Paul.” The pistol-toting English has handled band biz on the road since 1966, when Willie enticed him to leave his business supplying call girls to Houston businessmen. “I said we weren’t paying Mickey anything, and Willie said, ‘Then double his salary.’ ”

“Willie had us believing that it wouldn’t be ‘if’ we made it, but ‘when,'” Spears told me in 2003. “He knew that eventually someone was going to figure him out.”

Austin understood. In 1972, Willie Nelson fled Nashville for his home state and found a kindred musical attitude in this liberal outpost where the legendary football coach hosted pickin’ parties and hippies sang Merle Haggard songs. Even though he spends more of his time off the road these days in Maui, with his fourth and current wife, Annie, he remains Austin’s spiritual adviser and greatest musical ambassador.

Watch the movies he made here in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and you’ll see that so many old landmarks are gone, including the Armadillo World Headquarters, where Willie brought the necks and the heads together.

Something that has barely changed in the past 30 years, is Nelson’s set list. The day he opens with a song other than “Whiskey River” is the day rumors of Alzheimer’s Disease start.

There’s the four or five guitar strums and Mickey’s snaky harp lines and then the unmistabkable nasal twang: “Whiskey river, take my mind/ Don’t let her memory torture me.” It’s a holistic hoedown as “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)” follows, and then come patchwork versions of the early ’60s hits “Crazy,” “Hello Walls” and “Night Life.”

Ain’t it funny how much time hasn’t seemed to slip away?

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There’s a scene in Honeysuckle Rose when Amy Irving asks Willie if he ever gets tired of being everybody’s hero. His silence makes the question rhetorical, but after watching Willie hold court on his bus outside Gruene Hall one night, with person after person telling him how much his music has meant to them and their recently deceased mother, it’s a question worth re-asking. Does Willie ever get tired of being everybody’s hero?

“I think when that line came up in the movie, the reason I didn’t say anything was because I was probably thinking, ‘That’s about the dumbest question I’ve ever been asked,’ ” he said with a huge Willie laugh.

What a stupid question. Who wouldn’t want to be loved by millions simply by being themselves? Who wouldn’t want to be paid handsomely to do the thing they’d do for free? He’s on the road again and again, playing, in the words of Mickey Raphael, “Carnegie Hall one night and some dump in Odessa the next.”

On the road, he’s Willie Nelson, an American treasure and hero of the common folk. Now, who wouldn’t want to be that as often as possible?

Watch some great, rare access TV footage of Willie and Bobbie in the ’90s.