Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic
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In fact, the medical people did report some difficulty with the crowd, especially on the first two days. Rory Harper, one of the supervisors of the medical staff, said, “Occasionally people even pushed the stretcher crews back and wouldn’t let them through. Or we would be trying to treat someone who had passed out and somebody would yell, ‘Give her a couple of Quaaludes and she’ll be all right.’ They were either stoned or just didn’t give a damn.”
To climax the confusion, operations manager Tim O’Connor took the microphone to announce that a peculiar Texas law governing mass gatherings required that the show end promptly at eleven o’clock. Not only would the last four scheduled acts be canceled, but Jerry Jeff would not be allowed to come back for an encore. As the young folk began yelling about rip-offs and suggesting that the law and its agents occupy themselves in acts of sexual self-gratification, I feared there might be some unpleasantness. But this was not a violent crowd and the height of the objection came when a young man stood on a beer chest and screamed frustratedly at O’Connor: “You’re a fart!” It is possible to be irritated with a person so designated but one does not lynch him. Defeated, perhaps at some level relieved to have the ordeal ended without having to admit they were ready to quit, the crowd filed out peaceably.
It may be that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, but as I eased my ravaged body into the soft bucket sets of my little red station wagon, I reckoned that the folks who schedule three-hour concerts in air-conditioned auditoriums have a basically sound idea. And as I drove past the tired, dirty kids bedding down in the Willie Nelson Approved Campsites next to the Speedway, I was pleased that because I have this good job teaching school and writing stories, I could afford to stay at the Ramada Inn. I caught the last part of No Time for Sergeants on the motel TV. I could have seen all of China Gate if I had wanted to.
On Friday, July 5th, I awoke at noon and enjoyed a delightful breakfast of pizza and icedtea, which I preferred to the Alice B. Toklas brownies and Kool-Aid I imagined the kids were eating out at the Speedway. I didn’t go back to the picnic until about four o’clock,but that was early enough. I still managed to get in a full day’s entertainment.
Despite what was probably greater heat—reports of 103 may have been exaggerated but indicated what folk thought of the weather—most people seemed to be suffering less than on the Fourth. Hundreds of umbrellas and makeshift sunshelters had been erected, creating the appearance of vacationers who had headed for the beach but missed. Apparently because most people took salt tablets and upped their liquid intake, the medical staff had far fewer cases of heat prostration. But in its place, they treated thousands of cuts that resulted when the threshing action of a grounds-cleaning machine left millions of small chunks and shards of glass lying in wait for romantically bare feet.
I roamed a good bit on the Fifth and found the much smaller crowd friendly and relaxed, even though the young folk kept confirming my sense of strangerhood by asking, “Are you having a good time, Sir?” and “What’s happening, Daddy?” I wanted to point out to them that most of the performers they liked best were a lot closer to my age than theirs, and that having never heard of the Lost Gonzo Band or the Neon Angels did not mean I had ridden into town on a head of cabbage. I wanted to tell them about the time I had breakfast at Cisco’s Bakery in Austin with Willie Nelson and Tom T. Hall and Coach Darrell Royal, or about hearing Bill Monroe when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were part of his Blue Grass Boys. I even considered telling them about the time I heard Gene Krupa and Charlie Parker on the same night, but I didn’t want to have to explain who they were. Mostly, I just smiled and said, “Fine.” But when the third person of the day asked me if I was a sheriff, I asked him whatever had made him think I might be. He said, “Well, it’s your shirt.” I asked him what was wrong with my shirt. It’s a good shirt. My wife gave it to me for Christmas. “That’s just it,” he said. “It’s too good. You need an old shirt.” I don’t go along with that. It seems to me that pretending I’m poor isn’t taking poverty seriously. Besides, I don’t have any old shirts. I give them to the Goodwill and take it off my income tax.
While wandering around, I ran into several fine folk of maturity comparable to my own, but none delighted me more than Mr. and Mrs. Weldon Wilson from Wharton. Mr. Wilson, who had on grey trousers and a peach-colored shirt with the short sleeves rolled up a couple of turns and who wears his thin grey hair in a close trim, fixes TVs for Sears over at Bay City. He and Mrs. Wilson, who wore a navy blue shorts outfit with white socks and sneakers and had a chain fastened to her grey half-rim glasses so she wouldn’t have to put them down when she took them off, were enjoying themselves. “The main reason I am here,” he said, “is because I like country music. And I haven’t seen any of the kids that I don’t like. They are going to be running this world in the future and from what I have seen here I think I’ll enjoy living with them. I really do. A little girl asked me a while ago why I was here. I asked her why she asked me that question and she said, ‘Well, usually only kids come to these things. Do you enjoy it?’ I said, ‘Definitely!’ She said, ’You don’t think we’re wrong?’ I said, ‘Definitely not! When I was your age I did things the older people thought I was wrong in doing.’ And, you know, she just loved my neck. Anyone that would say that all these kids are out here for is to get doped up, there’s something wrong with them. There might be some of it I don’t agree with, but they’ve got their own lives to live and they are going to live them, one way or another. They’ll have to pay for their mistakes, the same as you and I did, but I haven’t seen them doing that much wrong yet.”
Mrs. Wilson said, “Neither one of us has ever smoked marijuana or taken dope and we probably never will, but there is something that is funny to me. Out of all them I know that are smoking it, there is not but one I know that wasn’t a cigarette smoker first. So smoking can lead to marijuana just like marijuana can lead to heroin. And, you know, if this had been the thing to have done when I was this age, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have tried it.” Mr. Wilson wasn’t sure about that. “I’ve got enough adrenaline in my body that I don’t need anything to slow it down or speed it up. Anything they can use their smoking or their dope to do I can do the same things naturally. Say, would you like a beer? We’ve got Coors.”
Late Friday afternoon, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band galvanized the audience into the form it would hold until well after midnight as hundreds, maybe thousands, of young people wedged themselves into a sweating, writhing, ecstatic mass of back-to-front bodies that stretched outward from the side stage in a 50-yard-wide semicircle. As the Dirt Band raised the speed and volume of its excellent music, the crowd raised the intensity of its response. Five attractive chicks persuaded their dudes to lift them onto their shoulders that they might better see and perchance be seen. I thought about how much it would make my neck hurt to have a girl sit up on my shoulders like that and how I would resent not being able to put my hands in my pockets because I would have to hold her by the thighs to keep her from falling off, but the dudes seemed to bear up under their burdens rather well.
