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Full Nelson
By Robert Huber
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It was 1969. His oldest daughter, Lana, had married a boy near Nashville, where Willie lived at the time with his third wife, Connie, and his two other children. Willie found out that Steve had given Lana two black eyes, so he roared over to their place, slapped Steve around; Steve followed Willie home and took a shot at him with a .22. Willie grabbed his M-1 rifle and shot at Steve's car, then drove back to Lana's. Steve had returned, grabbed their son, and before leaving said he was going to "get rid of" Willie. Willie went home, hid his truck, and waited. When Steve drove by at dusk, Willie ran out of the garage and shot out his tire. Then he roughed Steve up enough to ensure that the boy wouldn't mistreat Lana again. His response now to the bad old days is equally wry: "It was nights like that, that's when I quit leavin' guns hanging around."
One thing's for sure, at least—the world Willie came out of was rough. "And being so broke in the beginning, that provoked a lot of things," says Bud Shrake, a friend who co-wrote Nelson's 1988 autobiography. Willie's parents essentially abandoned him and Bobbie when they were very young. Their paternal grandparents took them in, and Willie started writing sad cheatin' songs at age seven after his grandfather suddenly died. His only apparent option in Abbott was a life in the cotton fields. He washed out of the Air Force, got married young.
Willie sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door while he played in bars and wrote songs for peanuts to pay the rent. The classic "Night Life" got him $150, "Family Bible," $50.
As Shrake recalls, "In these little Texas joints you had to be armed. His drummer, Paul, collected money for the band, and he would walk into the owner's office with a gun to get paid. And it was really like that up until the middle '70s."
It's tempting to look for a big change in Willie, too. But the real reason he's playing 200 gigs a year to SRO crowds of every age, why feelings about him run so deep, has nothing to do with transformation. Willie Nelson is not a rough guy who turned sweet. He's a good guy who grew up with virtually nothing, struggled for a long time in a deadly business, and remained true to himself the whole way.
The toll of the road, though, was huge. Nelson's first wife, Martha, got so tired of his womanizing she tied him up as he slept off a drunk and beat him up. His second wife, Shirley, left when a bill from a Houston maternity ward arrived at their Nashville home—Willie had fathered a child with Connie, a blonde at one of his concerts whom he then married, never mind that he was still hitched to Shirley. He and Connie eventually parted as well. Willie's a tough guy to stay mad at, though; even disc jockey Bif Collie, whom Shirley left for Willie, forgave him. "If there's any man I'd like to have run off with my wife," he says, "it would be Willie Nelson."
Nelson got so frustrated in Nashville in the '60s—selling songs but not his odd, tremulous voice to record them—that he laid down in the middle of a street outside a bar one night, waiting for somebody to run him over. Nobody bothered. His house there burned down in 1969, and that was the trigger to head home to Texas.
There, in Austin, Nelson finally discovered a persona that felt natural, and it turned out to be the way to get hippies and rednecks interested in him simultaneously: the long-haired renegade. He was an overnight sensation after 20 years in the business, already a member of the Country Songwriting Hall of Fame, when his version of "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain" hit the charts in 1975. Suddenly he wasn't just a country outsider, but a singer and a slightly strange, and strangely appealing, entertainer.
Success didn't chase away all trouble. His oldest son, Billy, a struggling songwriter, hanged himself on Christmas Day, 1990. Willie felt he had to choose between canceling an upcoming tour to bury himself in grief, or carrying on. He chose the road.
On the matter of retiring from the road now, Willie sounds almost annoyed: "That's not even a possibility." As long as anybody is willing to listen, he'll keep on playing. He's got to. "I think that I'm supposed to be doing what I'm doing," he says. "I'm an itinerant singer and guitar picker. I am what they used to call a troubadour."
Now he's a troubadour who can do pretty much as he pleases. He trades Lone Star State tales with Dan Rather, harangues congressmen about the plight of the American farmer, and sometimes he still has the bus pull over at a honky-tonk in Texas, and if he's invited—who's he kidding?—gets up there and plays.
His time on the road, though, has mellowed him: "I read something somewhere that made a whole lot of sense to me—I forget who said it, it was one of those real smart guys, who said if you have a negative thought it releases a poison into your system, and then you start having another on top of it, and you start negative on negative, and then it snowballs. And I could see how that was really true, and how I needed to start with a positive thought and let those build."
What that means is letting his marriage to Annie unfold as it will; he still doesn't see her and the boys enough, he realizes, but all of them understand it's a concession to the life he has to live. And it also means zeroing in on the here and now: "I take it, not only a day at a time, but a moment at a time, and keep it at that pace. If you can be happy right now, then you'll always be happy, because it's always in the now."
That's how Nelson offers himself one-on-one, and it's also how he offers himself in concert. "When you open your heart to an audience, you share your deepest feelings with them," he wrote in his autobiography. "They want to find love in your heart. They don't want to see that it is nothing but a bank vault." Willie makes singing the truth about himself so tender and riveting, etched in his face and his voice and his words, that it comes off as not only for us but about us.
Says Farm Aid's Mugar, "That's why people feel safe, in his presence, to touch how we're feeling right along with him." That's Willie's gift to us. He's living proof that there are many ways to be true to yourself, but ultimately it boils down to something as simple as you can get: Dig deep. Feel what you feel. That's who you are, and it's just fine.
Robert Huber's writing has appeared in Esquire, GQ, and other magazines.
Now, read web-exclusive sidebars about Willie Nelson, including traveling tips from Willie himself and the author's personal story about being picked up by Willie Nelson while hitchhiking.
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