Collage: Simone Tieber
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Full Nelson
By Robert Huber
The man they call The Last Outlaw lives by his own rules. Rule Number One: Be Willie Nelson
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The camera almost never works the first time, but Willie Nelson doesn't mind, even though it's past midnight in downtown Boston and the mercury's dipping toward 20. He's still smiling as Maggie, a sixtysomething grandmother, nestles close to him, and her husband, Tom, tries to get the flash to work.
"The little black button, Tom," she says.
"Let me try it again."
She nestles, and Nelson, who looks tiny and sweet in his big cowboy hat and fleece-lined jacket, smiles. His bus, the Honeysuckle Rose, is squeezed into the narrow alley leading to the front door of the Orpheum Theater, a double-decker venue he just played for two-and-a-half hours, a crowd nearly 3,000 strong rising right there on top of him—students and hillbillies and Boston Brahmins rolling and stomping through "On the Bayou" and "Always on My Mind" and "Funny How Time Slips Away." It's a rush he craves, he says—"to know that those people are thinking and feeling the same way I am."
And now, a line has formed along the bus and out the alley.
"It's not on the side, Tom," Maggie cries. "On top. In the corner."
This, too, Nelson needs, and it's something he does after each of his 200-plus gigs a year: He comes down out of Honeysuckle to hold court. "A lot of people come by to say hello after concerts," he explains, "and I enjoy sayin' hello." To everyone. As long as it takes, as long as the line lasts. Sign CDs, kiss the ladies, chat with everybody, and—
Flash! Tom found the button. Now Maggie takes one of Tom and Willie.
"Mr. Nelson," says the next in line, a serious-looking guy in his 20s. "I just want to say that it is an incredible honor to shake the hand of the man who plays Trigger," a guitar with an ever-widening hole in the box from picking. "I wonder if my friend could take a picture of ... "
"Sure."
Nelson's music, at its best, cuts right to the bone—especially classics like "Crazy," "Night Life," and "Funny How ..."—but even more it is Nelson himself whom his fans have come to see, and now get close to, to feel. And vice versa. Willie asks the Trigger fanatic if he plays guitar, tells him that Trigger's sound gets richer as the hole gets wider, that he's had to have the insides built up a few times as the wood got weak.
The line shivers. Doesn't matter—Willie is this way with everyone, locking in, making them feel like they're the only person who matters. "He has a very unusual degree of comfort inside his own skin," says Sydney Pollack, who directed Nelson in The Electric Horseman and produced two other movies he starred in. "I've visited with him before concerts, with several thousand people waiting, and we'll have a relaxed conversation. He'll be looking me right in the eye, not over my shoulder or looking at his watch. I don't think you get that way—you just are."
The line inches along.
"I just think he's so sexy," says a blonde not more than 25 who's already done the picture thing, gotten her CD signed, and now is just staring at Nelson.
"Why?" I ask. After all, Nelson, a 69-year-old great-grandfather, has got, oh, four decades on her.
"I don't know. It's just … him."
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