Collage: Simone Tieber
|
Where You Headed?
By Robert Huber
A soon-to-be-famous Willie Nelson's decision to pick up the hitchhiking author tells a lot about the kind of guy that Willie would become
|
My wife used to kid me that this is a story I tell within 15 minutes of meeting anybody, but I've gotten over that. Now I wait at least a half-hour. It's the sort of story all of us have, a calling card of who we once were. Or, in my case, who I wanted to be.
It happened in nowhere Texas, almost three decades ago. I'd dropped out of college during the middle of my junior year in 1974 to take a big tour of America with a fellow dropout, the appropriately named Steve Love. We headed south in his old Le Mans, but the clutch blew, so we started hitchhiking, which instantly made the trip both harder and much better. We'd be standing on some forlorn stretch of freezing highway, aghast at the cruelty of a world that screams past at 60 miles an hour. Then, Yes!, an old VW microbus on the horizon! And within two minutes we'd be stretched out on a warm shag rug in the back of the van—rock 'n roll blaring, a certain mood-mellowing substance in the air, whisked along by fellow counter-culture travelers who would no doubt offer their living room floor for the night.
There were also, though, lonely guys in pickups with a bottle of whiskey between their legs—and no way for you to be sure they really were going to drop you off in the next town until you were out of that truck.
And sometimes there were no passing cars at all, like New Year's Eve in 1974. Steve Love and I were trying to get to Austin from San Antonio to see the Marshall Tucker Band that night. But Highway 281 was pretty lonely, almost no cars, a terrible dead stretch of hitchhiking, where not only was nothing happening but very possibly nothing ever would happen and we would die, at this spot, waiting. Steve Love was babbling about his favorite movies of all time, such as The Last Picture Show. I was silent.
Then a black Mercedes Benz appeared, slowed, and pulled over. This in itself was strange—somebody rich enough to drive a Benz willing to pick up raggedy guys like us. Pleasant-looking fellow with swept-back hair, alone, maybe 40 years old. Steve got in back, I in front.
"My name is Bob," I told him as he eased back onto the road, "and this is Steve. What's yours?"
"Willie Nelson." He smiled.
Slightly odd, like an athlete referring to himself in the third person, to give us both names. We had never heard of him. "Well, thanks for picking us up, Willie."
He nodded, still smiling.
A mile or two later, I wondered, "What do you do for a living, Willie?"
"I play music."
Huh. He plays music. We're in a Mercedes. I asked the next thing that popped into my head: "Ever cut an album, Willie?"
"I've made 19."
I looked back at Steve: We're in a Mercedes. He's made 19 albums. Maybe we're on to somebody…
"There I am," Willie Nelson said, turning up the radio, tuned to some local station, "singing a duet with Tracy Nelson."
Her, we had heard of. The song was "After the Fire Is Gone." Steve Love and I exchanged a silent Who is this guy? Willie Nelson nodded, still smiling, amused.
Soon, he dropped us off—Willie had to veer off in another direction. And that night in Austin, we happened to mention, oh, 20 or 30 times to girls we met at the concert that somebody named Willie Nelson picked us up hitchhiking. Very popular guy in Texas, this Willie.
Of course, he did get famous, big-time famous, starting just a few months later—with the release of "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and the album "Red Headed Stranger." Willie crossed over, and his sweet country persona got discovered by a mass audience after 20 years in the business. Over the years, his fame helped my story, of course—especially the part about us having no clue who he was.
I saw him again, about five years ago in Philadelphia.
"You haven't changed a bit," he said to me when I climbed onto his bus. He remembered! All the way back to '74, picking me up! Willie burst out laughing.
Of course, he didn't remember—Willie can't remember whole years, let alone 20 minutes with two kids long, long ago. But he had been prepped; Willie was in town to do some charity boxing against his buddy Tex Cobb, the ex-heavyweight contender and film actor, and I know Tex slightly, and got him to set up this meeting.
And when Willie invited me to sit down for a chat, I told him the details: Highway 281 between San Antone and Austin. At the time, he was clean-shaven, with his hair pretty short. "Yeah, I used to go that way, up into hill country to visit friends," he recalled. "And I had just cut my hair and shaved—not intentionally." He laughed. "I went to a guy for a trim who really messed it up, so I thought it was better to start all over."
He certainly looks very different now, his face worked on by time and life on the road, though the broad triangles of hair on either side of his head that funnel into braids like Geronimo's are still a lovely chestnut brown. I asked Willie if the broader point is true too—did he feel that he had to start over, remake himself into someone else to kick-start his career?
"Nope," he said pleasantly. "Same guy. I haven't changed much."
Like a lot of people, I grew up from hippiedom to join conventional society with a wife, children, profession, mortgage. But Willie, he's still the same guy, the kind of guy who would pick up two forlorn kids by the side of the road down in Texas and not give a hoot that they had no idea who he was (already a member, back then, of the country songwriters Hall of Fame for hits like "Crazy" and "Funny How Time Slips Away"). A guy with an easy warmth that's a big part of his appeal now.
I asked him if it's annoying, sometimes, being famous.
"I like to look at it as if, no matter where I'm at," Willie said, "I can walk outside and find somebody that knows me and that I'm not a stranger, and I can walk into a place, and, if I really need to talk to somebody, there will be somebody there who will say, yeah, that's Willie. If I'm out there, and I'm workin', I just did a concert, a lot of people come by to say hello—I enjoy sayin' hello."
Then Willie Nelson poured me another cup of coffee.
|
