Willie at 65
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SATURDAY NIGHT IN LAS VEGAS: WILLIE gives the Orleans Hotel audience two and a half hours to remember. He goes from cheating songs and blues to gospel numbers like “Amazing Grace” to a Sinatra-like cover of “Stardust” to a deeply moving rendition of his current philosophical favorite, “Still Is Still Moving to Me.” By the end of the show fans have gone berserk, clapping, rocking, dancing in the aisles, calling his name. “We love you, Willie!” a female voice cries out. Willie has already tossed two headbands to his fans, and now he peels off his sweat-soaked black T-shirt and lobs it to a woman in the fourth row. The Orleans higher-ups are stunned by the reception. They had no idea how Willie would be received—they usually book acts like Phyllis Diller and Eddie Arnold—and immediately sign him for three dates in 1998, including another long Thanksgiving weekend. “It’s not the three straight sellouts that impressed them,” says Scooter Franks, Willie’s traveling concessions manager. “What they care about is the drop—the money that people gamble after the show. We told ’em, ‘Willie is like Sinatra: his people drink a lot of whiskey and they stay to gamble.’” Long after his roadies have cleared the stage and loaded the buses for the trip home to Austin, Willie is still signing autographs down front.
There is such a powerful presence about Willie that people sometimes believe he’s a mystic or even a messenger from God, a misinterpretation that he hasn’t always tried to correct. Billy Cooper almost convinced me that Willie has a magical ability to commune with snakes and birds and that he can, with a wave of the hand, convert negative energy to positive. Stage manager Poodie Locke tells of a ferocious gun battle in a parking garage in Birmingham, Alabama, after a concert, with cops squatting in doorjambs and civilians diving for cover. In the teeth of the chaos Willie calmly stepped down from the bus, wearing tennis shoes and cutoffs with two Colt .45 revolvers stuck in the waist, and inquired coolly: “Is there a problem?” In an instant, all guns were holstered and Willie was signing autographs. “He’s got the kind of aura to him that just cools everything out,” Poodie explains.
Willie believes that his life is a series of circles in which he is continually reincarnated, each version a little better than its predecessor. There is some theological support for this belief. Kimo Alo, one of the magician-priests, or Kahunas, who live on the island of Maui, where Willie has a vacation home, believes that Willie is “an Old King,” reincarnated to draw the native races together. When I ask Willie about the Old King theory, he dismisses it—though I suspect he secretly thinks it’s reasonable. In his autobiography he wrote, “Even as a child, I believed I was born for a purpose. I had never heard the words reincarnation or Karma, but I already believed them and I believed in the spirit world.”
Raised as a staunch Methodist, Willie was taught that if he drank or smoked or went dancing, he was doomed to hellfire. He never bought this doctrine: Willie’s God was always willing to give a guy another chance. An incident in the fifties, when he was teaching Sunday school at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Fort Worth, reinforced this conviction. His preacher gave him an ultimatum—stop playing in beer joints or stop teaching Sunday school—and Willie quit the church for good, disillusioned with a policy that summarily condemned people like him. He went to the Fort Worth library and started reading books on religion. “Soon as I read about reincarnation,” Willie wrote, “it struck me just the same as if God had sent me a lightning bolt—this was the truth, and I realized I had always known it.” Willie had the good sense to see that it would take many more reincarnations for him to triumph over his lustful urges, but at least he knew he was on the right track. Today, Willie and family worship at the one-room church on Willie World’s western film set, where Red Headed Stranger and a bunch of other movies were shot. Though the church is empty except for some benches and a portrait of Jesus hung by Lana and Bobbie, the music on a Sunday morning will stir the jaded soul.
Willie often jokes that he is “imperfect man,” sent here as an example of how not to live your life. This was the theme of Yesterday’s Wine, his most personal and spiritual album, and arguably his best. Written in the early seventies after a series of personal disasters, including a fire that burned his home in Nashville (Willie managed to save his marijuana stash from the ruins), the album follows a man from birth to death, ending with him watching his own funeral. “Maybe I was imperfect man, writing my own obituary,” Willie tells me during our conversation on the bus, breaking suddenly into song: “There’ll be a mixture of teardrops and flowers / Crying and talking for hours / And how wild that I was / And if I’d listened to them I wouldn’t be there.” The album also includes a passage in which God explains to imperfect man that there is no explanation for the apparent random cruelty of life: “After all, you’re just a man / And it’s not for you to understand.”
TWO WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS I drop by Bobbie Nelson’s home on the sixth fairway at Pedernales Country Club in Willie World and am surprised to find Willie sitting at the kitchen counter, rolling numbers and listening to a blues album he was recording recently with Riley Osbourn and some other blues players. Bobbie is cooking breakfast—-sausage, eggs, biscuits, and gravy. This was supposed to be a one-on-one interview with her, but it turns out to be something else. We sit for a while, sharing a smoke and listening to some great blues.
Pouring us more coffee, Bobbie asks Willie in her soft, sweet voice, “Remember where we first heard the blues?”
“Out in the cotton fields in Abbott,” Willie says. “Somebody would start singing ‘Swing low, sweet chariot’ and somebody else would pick it up.”
Bobbie has faintly romantic memories of the cotton fields, but not Willie. “By the time I was seven or eight,” he says, “I was working the rows for a couple of dollars a day. My desire to escape manual labor started back there in the cotton fields.”
A seven-foot grand and a smaller piano dominate the living room, and I remember reading that Bobbie’s first piano was a toy that she and Willie made out of a pasteboard box. The keyboard was drawn in crayons, and Bobbie sat under a peach tree in the back yard, practicing for hours. For years on long bus trips across the country, she propped a cardboard keyboard in her lap, shut out the world, and followed with her fingers as the works of Mozart or Bach played inside her head.
After a while, Lana stops by. She has brought Willie’s Christmas present. He’s leaving the following day for a couple of months in Maui with Annie and his boys. We all sit around the dining room table, passing heaping platters of biscuits. Bobbie and Lana are the two people closest and dearest to Willie, and they fuss over him like mama hens, tending to his slightest wish. Watching him in the nest of his true family, I realize that the private Willie is not much different from that little boy who grew up in Abbott. He knew that he was special, and so did everyone else.
“I married Bud Fletcher when I was sixteen,” Bobbie says as she refills the gravy bowl. “Bud formed a band called the Texans, with me on piano and Willie on guitar and vocals. Willie was making eight dollars a night, which was very good money for a thirteen-year-old.”
“The forty to fifty dollars a week we took home to Mama Nelson was a fortune back then,” Willie says. “I’d hock my guitar every Monday for twenty dollars, and Bud would get it back out of hock on Friday so the Texans could hit another lick.”
“Of course, Mama didn’t like us playing beer joints.”
Willie laughs, remembering. “She didn’t even want me going on the road. Shadowland was five miles away—in West. But that was the road to her.”
If Willie has learned anything in these 65 years, it’s that Mama Nelson was right. When your life’s the nightlife, all roads are pretty much the same.
