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Full Nelson
By Robert Huber
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It's the warmth, the ease, but also what he's been through. Screwing up his taxes, wrecking three marriages (wife number four, Annie, and his two teenage sons are safely tucked away in Maui; he had five children with his other wives), turning the back of his bus into party central. Nelson's got a well-documented bad-boy side. But he's come through all that. He made good with the IRS to the tune of $9 million (his sins, it turned out, were heeding bad financial advice and giving cash to anybody he thought needed some), nobody really cares how many times he's been married, and the road hijinks have calmed down.
It's true, Nelson has gotten a lot of mileage out of the outlaw persona—the bad-boy long-hair who climbed up on the roof of Jimmy Carter's White House to smoke pot and marvel how all roads led to the Capitol, the center of the world. But after practically half a century (and counting) on the road, Nelson has come to a different place. He's beyond playing the renegade or outlaw. It's not rebellion we're responding to now, but him.
The blonde and I watch as a tiny woman in her 70s with an almost scary, bug-eyed intensity puts a foot up on the bottom step of the bus—is she trying to go on in? No. Without a word, she pulls up her skirt and offers her thigh to Willie. He looks at her for a moment, pen poised. Then he smiles and signs.
The next night at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham, it's more of the same. There are some students, but the majority is an enthused mishmash of folks young and old making the trek down from the far reaches of upstate and Vermont and Maine to see their man, some 6,000 fans. "It's as if they're going to church, heading to a Willie concert," says Carolyn Mugar, executive director of Nelson's Farm Aid organization. (The once-a-year benefit concert Nelson started has now raised some $23 million for struggling family farms.) "He's touching something that people need to touch inside themselves, that they don't feel at other moments," Mugar adds. "People feel safe there wrestling with their deepest feelings."
And it's come to this: A year ago, Nelson was the star among stars picked to lead the singing of "America the Beautiful," the finale of a relief benefit for 9/11 families that was broadcast worldwide. It was a time, of course, of especially vulnerable, dangerous feelings. It required striking just the right notes of grief, strength, hope. Somehow, the little pigtailed guy from tiny Abbott, Texas, with a lot of life's road dirt under his nails, was the perfect man for the job.
The great man in question is primarily, it turns out, a goofball. It's later at night on his bus, Willie's relaxing at the tiny luncheonette-style booth where the table, flipped over, becomes a chess board (he's a very fast and very good player), listening to Poodie, one of his roadies, tell bad jokes.
It's a down-home world, Honeysuckle Rose, where Willie's older sister, Bobbie, his piano player for more than 30 years, lets the boys-being-boys fun roll right past her, ignoring a certain telltale herbal aroma. The bus is loaded: sleeping berths, bathrooms, state-of-the-art sound system, satellite TV and radio, and a backroom—Willie's—that's all king-size bed surrounded by photographs of his youngest sons, Lukas, 14, and Micah, 12, an American flag, a jump rope, some dumbbells, a speed bag, and Native American paintings, beaded necklaces, breastplates, and feathers that create a shrine-like curtain around three sides of the bed. (Willie's maternal grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee.) It's a room of reverence and use, for good reason: Willie is on the road more than half the year, and when he's back at his Austin compound—which includes a recording studio, golf course, and Western film set—he'll often live on the bus. Not even his place in Maui is really home. The bus is.
Willie warmly offers me a seat at the booth and sits across from me. And now, up close, his cowboy hat off, his hair in braids down his back, he looks much younger. His face is starkly white, and not nearly as lined as it appears from the audience. White beard scruffs his jaw. The eyes are coal-dark and active, moving. He takes a hit from a joint somebody has passed him and offers it to me. I laugh, and marvel aloud over his openness.
"It's important to me to be honest with you and everybody," he says. "Because I really don't feel like I should have any secrets. And I tell my boys the same thing, all my kids: No matter what you do, be truthful."
Do his sons get into big trouble if they lie?
"Oh yeah," he says. The black eyes are still. "They don't lie."
It's a hint, that edge—even though he now laughs at his own toughness, adding a bemused, "No, they don't lie." A hint of the old badass Willie. Even so, it's hard to reconcile the man before me, friendly and willing, with this one:
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