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’s second marriage, to singer Shirley Collie, was more placid, at least for a while. They were living in Nashville, though Music City wasn’t nearly ready for him. By universal agreement, a hillbilly song had just three chords; Willie’s songs had four or five. The formula for a country lyric involved one catchy line, followed by shallow sentiments of heartbreak and betrayal, rhymed predictably. Nothing in Willie’s songs was predictable. His style was deceptively simple, relaxed, and conversational: “Hello, walls. How’d things go for you today?” If the country music industry was threatened by such originality, country singers weren’t. Faron Young’s cut of “Hello Walls” sold more than two million records. Patsy Cline’s version of “Crazy” eventually won an award as the most played song on jukeboxes ever. Ray Price made “Night Life” his theme song. By the mid-sixties everyone was recording Willie’s songs, but no one was buying his records. Disillusioned, Willie bought a small farm outside Nashville and determined to be a gentleman farmer-songwriter. He smoked a pipe, wore overalls, raised weaner pigs with fellow musician Johnny Bush, and gained thirty pounds on Shirley’s good country cooking. By 1968, however, he was on the road again and life was becoming a living hell. “Shirley was boozing as bad as I was,” Willie says in his book, “and we were all swallowing enough pills to choke Johnny Cash . . .”
The marriage ended when Shirley opened a bill from the maternity ward of a Houston hospital—itemizing the cost of a baby daughter born to Willie Nelson and one Connie Koepke. A year before, the knockout blonde in the fourth row at a club in Cut ’n’ Shoot happened to be that same Connie Koepke. She became wife number three, even before his divorce from wife number two was finalized.
Willie’s marriage to Connie lasted seventeen years, far and away his personal best, but the strain of the road again took its toll. This time, actually, it was a road movie—Honeysuckle Rose—whose theme song, “On the Road Again,” Willie had written in flight on the back of an airline barf bag shortly after signing to do the movie. In the flick, Willie’s character, a musician, has an affair with Amy Irving’s character. At the same time, Willie had a highly publicized romance with the actress. Marriage to Connie flamed out during the filming. “Anything you want to tell me about Amy Irving?” I ask him on the bus. “She was something else,” Willie replies, then after a long pause, adds, “and I’d do it again.”
Willie met his current wife, Annie, on the set of the movie Stagecoach, where she was working as a makeup artist. “They say we marry what we need,” he says. “Kris [Kristofferson] married a lawyer, and I married a makeup girl.” They have been married for nearly ten years, a term that roughly corresponds to Willie’s average time with one wife.
“Marriage gets easier as you get older,” Willie admits. “There are still a lot of temptations out there. Mother Nature has a way of checking our appetites, but the girls still look good. If I stayed around [in a hotel or bar], the same thing would probably happen again.”
THE ADVENT OF THE ARMADILLO WORLD HEADQUARTERS in 1972 was a revelation for all of us—especially Willie, who had just moved back to Texas from Nashville and was more or less retired from the national music scene. “We had been trying to travel all over the world with a seven-piece band and compete with the others,” he remembers, “but it just wasn’t working. I knew I could make a living playing honky-tonks in Texas.” Serendipity, in the form of a hippie hitchhiker, led Willie and the band to the soon-to-be-legendary Armadillo, a onetime National Guard armory that entrepreneur Eddie Wilson had transformed into a dance hall. This was the start of a wonderfully weird convergence of hippies and rednecks that would change music history.
I first met Willie on August 12, 1972, a few hours before his first gig at the Armadillo. Both of us were in our late thirties and relatively new to psychedelics and long hair. A couple of friends and I were in the small office that the Armadillo had set aside for Mad Dog, Inc., a shadowy organization that Bud Shrake and I had founded at roughly that same time. Artist Jim Franklin was decorating a wall of the Mad Dog office with a portrait of a crazed Abe Lincoln when we spotted Willie and the band across the hall. I didn’t recognize him at first. I had been a fan since 1966, when Don Meredith handed me a copy of Willie’s album that was recorded live at Panther Hall: Listening to it over and over that night was one of the most profound experiences of my life. The album cover pictured a straight-looking country singer with short hair and a bad suit. He clutched a guitar, but from his looks it could have easily been a pipe wrench.
Willie was different now. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, and though he was still clean-shaven and passably middle class, he was obviously undergoing a metamorphosis. “I saw a lot of people with long hair that day,” Willie recalls. “People in jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, basically what I grew up wearing. I remember thinking: ‘F— coats and ties! Let’s get comfortable!’” The real eye-opener for me came that night. Who in his right mind could have predicted that the same audience that got turned on by B. B. King and Jerry Garcia would also go nuts for Willie Nelson? This Abbott cotton picker had merged blues, rock, and country into something altogether original and evocative.
Success came rapidly after that. His Shotgun Willie album sold more copies in Austin than most of his other albums had sold nationwide. The next album, Phases and Stages, sold even better. Willie decided to hold an annual picnic in the style of Woodstock. He appeared onstage at the first one, in 1973, in cutoffs, sandals, long hair, and a beard. Two years later he had a huge hit with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” By 1978 his image and reputation were so established he convinced executives at CBS Records that his next album ought to be a collection of standards like “Stardust” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” At first they thought he was crazy, but Willie pointed out that “my audience now is young, college age, and mid-twenties. They’ll think these are new songs.” He was right. Stardust was a pivotal album for country music, opening up a whole new audience. “Willie has always been a prophet, slightly on the edge,” Rick Blackburn, the president of CBS Records Nashville, said later.
The early seventies were also the formative years for Willie’s other “family”—a motley and colorful crew of itinerant musicians, promoters, and roustabouts that Willie has collected along the way. Billy “B. C.” Cooper chauffeured Willie around in a six-cylinder Mercedes before the first bus was purchased and doubled as his bodyguard; he’s one of the last of the original family. “I was just a old used-car salesman,” B.C. told me recently at Willie World, where he now resides in peaceful retirement, “but Willie took a liking to me and told me to follow him, and I been following him ever since.” Larry Gorham was a Hell’s Angel in San Jose before Willie appointed him chief of security. Paul English was a Fort Worth pimp and burglar when Willie asked him to play drums in 1966. Mickey Raphael was a teenage nobody when he cornered Willie outside a Dallas recording studio and applied for a job as the band’s harmonica player. “Follow us, kid,” Willie instructed. Willie’s judgment for new talent is instinctively good, and once discovered, they stay for life.
Backstage at the Orleans, I meet another of Willie’s longtime mates, Phil Grimes, now a Las Vegas developer and real estate executive. In the early seventies he was a freelance reporter for the Associated Press in Austin. “I went out to do a story on Willie,” Phil tells me. “I got on the bus and it was three and a half weeks before I could find my way off.” Looking around, it occurs to me that Willie probably has the last group of geriatric roadies in the business.
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