My Willie

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We crisscrossed the country two years ago.Willie sang, played chess, and smoked enough dope to make him so high that he had to call NASA to find his head. As for myself, I smoked cigars, drank a little Château de Catpiss, played chess with Willie, and wrote down many things at all hours of the day and night in my little private investigator’s notebook. Along the way, I went to many of Willie’s shows. Wandering around backstage at a Willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who’s running the Ferris wheel. It’s not the best seat in the house, but you see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody knows what the hell’s going on. “Fortunately,” said Willie, “we’re not in control.” If you’re sitting out in front, of course, it all rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring.

Backstage at any show has its similarities, whether it’s Broadway or the circus or the meanest little honky-tonk in Nacogdoches—the palpable sense of people out there somewhere in the darkness waiting for your performance, or being able to pull a curtain back slightly and experience the actual sight of the audience sitting there waiting to be entertained by someone who, in this case, happens to be you. It’s the reason Richard Burton vomited before almost every live performance of his life. It’s part of the reason George Jones took Early Times, Judy Garland took bluebirds, and many a shining star burned out too soon. Standing alone in the spotlight, up on the high wire without a net, is something Willie Nelson has had to deal with for most of his adult life.

One night at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, I was standing backstage in the near darkness when a voice right behind me almost caused me to drop my cigar into my Dr Pepper. It was Willie. “Let me show you something,” he said, and he pulled a curtain back, revealing a cranked-up crowd beginning to get drunk, beginning to grow restless, and packed in tighter than smoked oysters in Hong Kong. Viewed from our hidden angle, they were a strangely intimidating sight, yet Willie took them in almost like a walk in the trailer park.

“That’s where the real show is,” he said.

“If that’s where the real show is,” I said, “I want my money back.”

“Do you realize,” Willie continued in a soft, soothing, serious voice, “that ninety-nine percent of those people are not with their true first choice?”

“Do you realize,” I said, “that you and I aren’t with our true first choice either? I mean, a latent homosexual relationship is a nice thing to have going for us, but sooner or later …”

Willie wasn’t listening to my cocktail chatter. He looked out at the crowd for a moment or two longer and then let the curtain drop from his hand, sending us back into twilight. “That’s why they play the jukebox,” he said.

Willie’s character leapt off the stage and onto the page. I don’t know if you’d call it Jewish radar or cowboy intuition, but during my travels with Willie, a storyline began to evolve. He would be at the center of one of my most challenging cases (and I’d have to solve it before we all ended up in a bar singing Jimmy Buffett cover songs). There wasn’t a butler to do it, but Willie did have a valet named Ben Dorsey, who’d once been John Wayne’s valet. This provided some humorous commentary, since Willie wasn’t an enormous fan of the Duke’s. Willie preferred the old singing cowboys. Of John Wayne, he once said, “He couldn’t sing and his horse was never smart.” (That kind of talk never failed to irritate Dorsey and usually resulted in some sort of tension convention.) Other real characters who inhabit the Honeysuckle Rose and the pages of Roadkill are Bobbie Nelson, Willie’s sister; Lana Nelson, Willie’s daughter; Gates “Gator” Moore, his intrepid bus driver; L.G., his one-man security team; and a cast of thousands of friends, fans, and family, who, along with life itself, did everything they could to interrupt our chess games.

You can tell a lot about a man by his chess game, unless, of course, your opponent is smoking a joint the size of a kosher salami. Edgar Allan Poe once said of chess: “It is complex without being profound,” and it is because of that very complexity that a momentary loss of concentration or the entry of some foreign emotion, like a broken heart, can torpedo the game. When you take this into consideration, Willie plays with the evenness of the Mahatma, at a lightninglike pace, and rarely loses. (I, of course, rarely lose either.)

One of the things I admire most about the way Willie plays the game of chess, as well as the game of life, is his Zen-Texan approach to inevitable triumphs and defeats. The endgame doesn’t hold great interest for him because he’s already thinking about the next game. If he comes off less than his best in one game, one show, one interview, one album, his next effort is invariably brilliant. This is one of the reasons I’ve always looked up to both Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, even though they’re both shorter than everyone except Paul Simon.

I see Willie as a storybook gingerbread man: born into poverty, rich in the coin of the spirit, ephemeral and timeless, fragile and strong, beautiful beyond words and music, healing the broken hearts of other people and sometimes, just maybe, his own as well. Yesterday’s wine for Willie includes personal tragedies, Internal Revenue Service audits, and a somewhat geriatric band that could be dubbed the Shalom Retirement Village People yet to this very day undeniably takes no prisoners. The changing landscape of country music has made major-label support and generous radio airplay almost a thing of the past. For many legends of country music, this trendy tidal wave toward Nashville poster boys and modern, youthful “hat acts,” plus the inevitable pull of the old rocking chair, has meant the end of careers that were supposed to last forever.

In the midst of all this, like a diamond amongst the rhinestones, Willie Nelson stays on the road.