Jimmy Carter 
Willie at 65
What do the years do to a rebel? Sometimes they make him even wilder. The Red Headed Stranger long ago went gray, but His passion–for music, the road, and adventure–– hasn’t gone cold.
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Willie was just 26 and in the middle of an incredibly hungry and productive period in his life when he wrote “Funny How Time Slips Away.” He wrote it and two other equally memorable classics—“Crazy” and “Night Life”—in the same week, driving in the early morning hours from the Esquire Club on the east side of Houston, where he was playing six nights a week, to the apartment in Pasadena where he lived with his first wife, Martha Jewel Mathews, and their three kids, Lana, Susie, and Billy.
These were his pre-Nashville days, and he was as poor as a Sudanese cat. Living in Houston, Fort Worth, San Diego, California, and a lot of other places, Willie worked by day selling vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias door-to-door and played by night in honky-tonks. He worked as a deejay where he could. Whatever it took to survive, Willie did. He sold all the rights to “Night Life” (including claim of authorship) for a measly $150. “Night Life” is one of the greatest blues numbers of all time and has been recorded by everyone from B. B. King to Aretha Franklin, but Willie gave it away for the equivalent of a month’s rent. He had to use the alias Hugh Nelson the first time he recorded it. He sold “Family Bible” for $50 and tried to sell “Mr. Record Man” for $10. Writers were like painters, Willie believed: An artist sells a creation as soon as it is finished so that he will have enough money to create again.
From his earliest years Willie knew that he was born to play music. Daddy and Mama Nelson, the grandparents who raised Bobbie and Willie after their parents divorced, taught singing and piano, filling their home in Abbott with music. Bobbie had the patience and the discipline to study music—her mastery of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach is such that friends say she can play concert piano at any hall in the world—but with Willie it was all instinct. He started writing poetry when he was five and got his first guitar at age six, a Stella ordered by his grandparents from a Sears catalog. Within a few weeks he had learned the three chords necessary to play country music—D, A, and G—and begun compiling his own songbook, called Songs by Willie Nelson. Daddy Nelson’s death the following year had a profound effect on Willie. In his autobiography he wrote, “After Daddy Nelson died, I started writing cheating songs.” Heartbreak and betrayal animated all of his early writings.
Influenced by the voices and styles he heard on the radio—the songs of Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb and the voice of Frank Sinatra—Willie charted his destiny. Who could have predicted his amazing success or that he one day would be regarded by many, including me, as the greatest songwriter who ever lived?
“A lot of times when I’m driving alone,” Willie tells me, “and my mind is open and receptive, it will pick up radio waves from somewhere in the universe and a song will start. A line, a phrase. You don’t call up creativity; it’s just there. Like the Bible says, ‘Be still and know that I am.’”
“Do you pull over to the curb and make notes or what?”
“I never write it down until the whole thing is in my mind. If I forget a song, it wasn’t worth remembering.”
“But you must think about it.”
“I don’t like to think too much. It’s better coming off the top of your head. Leon Russell had this idea of going into the studio with no songs, just turn on the machine and start writing and singing. You remember winging ‘Main Squeeze Blues’?”
He’s referring to my wedding night in 1976. Phyllis and I had been married earlier that evening in the back room of the Texas Chili Parlor and eventually found ourselves at Soap Creek Saloon, where Willie was playing. On an impulse, I hopped onstage with Willie and began improvising a song that I called “Main Squeeze Blues.” I don’t remember any of it except the title, but the audience seemed to think it was pretty good.
“I see what you mean,” I admit. “When you’re sailing high or when you’re in a hard place worrying about the rent or food for the kids, something kicks in and words start gushing. But where do the melodies come from?”
Willie gives me the look you give a child who asks ridiculous questions. “I snatch them out of the air,” he says patiently. “The air is full of melodies.”
Willie’s God-given ability to produce under pressure has delivered some of his best work. “Shotgun Willie,” which turned out to be the title song of his first successful album, was written in a couple of desperate minutes in the bathroom of a New York hotel room, on the back of a sanitary napkin wrapper. The night before he was due in the studio to record Yesterday’s Wine, he popped some pills and wrote the final seven tunes, including “Me and Paul,” celebrating his friendship with his longtime drummer Paul English.
Even in very personal moments, Willie can’t help working on his music. Some years ago, when he was trying to find the words for a father-daughter talk with Susie, Willie asked her to drive him from Austin to Evergreen, Colorado, and along the way he delivered his lecture by writing “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” Willie says, “She was young, trying to grow up, and it occurred to me that it was easier to sing it than say it. She’s driving and I’m writing, singing, and picking, and finally it comes to me: ‘Hey, I’ve got another f—ing song half finished; all I need is a bridge and a steel turnaround!’” When the old well ran dry one time, Willie wrote a throwaway called, “I Can’t Write Any More,” immediately followed by a beautiful ballad, “Be My Valentine,” which celebrated the birth of his son Lukas, on Christmas Day, 1988.
The music stopped exactly two years later, when Willie’s eldest son, Billy, hanged himself. Of all the traumas in Willie’s life—the screwings by record and movie producers, an early career crisis so desperate that he lay down on a snow-covered street in Nashville and waited for a car to run him over, his famous battle with the Internal Revenue Service—the only one that really rocked him was Billy’s death. Willie has never talked about it or even acknowledged that it wasn’t accidental. He knows that I also lost a son, so when I ask him how he dealt with Billy’s tragedy, he thinks about the question for a long time, then says in a faraway voice, “You know, Gary, I just kept on. As it happened, we had a six-month gig in Branson, starting New Year’s Eve. I had a legitimate reason to cancel all my dates and go bury myself from reality, which is what I felt like doing. But that old survival instinct cut in. So I went to Branson, cussed the place, and threw myself into my work.”
As a young man, Willie made being broke and desperate into a profitable lifestyle, but he hasn’t written much in recent years. Now that he is rich and famous, he tells me, “I don’t have the leisure to write much anymore.” Maybe that’s true, I think. But it seems equally possible that at this stage of his life, Willie has said it all.
ALL OF WILLIE’S MARRIAGES HAVE been wild and tempestuous, but none quite as crazy as his marriage to Martha. Both of them loved the nightlife and its vicious cycle of drinking, cheating, fighting, and making up. Once, when Martha caught Willie fooling around, she tied him up with the children’s jump rope and beat the hell out of him. Another time she broke a whiskey bottle over his head. “Yeah, marriage to Martha was a running battle,” Willie confesses, recalling that in those days he always carried a gun—it was “part of my uniform.”
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