www.stillisstillmoving.com

Thanks, Phil Weisman, for sharing this poster.

Texas Monthly

One by WIllie,
by John Spong

Read transcript here.

On this week’s One By Willie, Mickey talks about that song, marveling at the way Charlie McCoy, the Nashville A-Teamer who plays harmonica on it, seems to be inventing notes that don’t exist in real life. But just as “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture” provided the impetus for Mickey hooking up with Willie, it’s also a great jumping-off point for Mickey’s discussion of life in the Family band. His memories are wide-ranging and often surreal, touching on the weird way he was first invited to join, mysterious stowaways who lingered on the bus for days, his and Willie’s onstage telepathy, and the way his half century of friendship with Willie changed his life.

We’ve created an Apple Music playlist for this series that we’ll add to with each episode we publish. And if you like the show, please subscribe and drop us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

One by Willie is produced and engineered by Brian Standefer, with production by Patrick Michels. The show is produced by Megan Creydt. Graphic design is by Emily Kimbro and Victoria Millner.

Transcript

John Spong (voice-over): Hey there, I’m John Spong with Texas Monthly magazine, and this is One By Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love. This show is brought to you by White Claw Hard Seltzer.

This week, we talk with Willie’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, a musician whose playing is as vital to Willie’s sound as Trigger and Willie’s own voice. He’s here to discuss a fairly forgotten cut from Willie’s last days in Nashville, “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture,” which is a song that predates Mickey even meeting Willie, but it’s also the song that made him first hope there was a place for him in Willie’s band. From there, he touches on the truly freaky photo of Willie that’s on that album’s cover—man, talk about words not fitting pictures; check that one out—before giving an eyewitness look at life inside Willie World, describing things like the unlikely way he was invited to join the Family, concerts in which the band decided to just keep playing until dawn, stowaways on Willie’s bus, and so on. Oh, and he also talks about how much his fifty-year friendship with Willie means to him. Let’s do it.

[Willie Nelson singing “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture”]

John Spong: What’s so cool about the song “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture”?

Mickey Raphael: Well, I’ve got to say that just, first off, the first thing that caught me was the harmonica. Charlie McCoy is playing harmonica on it, and the harp part is just so . . . it’s not overplayed—Charlie is one of these guys that doesn’t play any notes that don’t absolutely have to be there. And he’s actually playing notes that don’t exist on the harmonica; he’s bending notes, which is a technique that you do on the harmonica to get notes that don’t really exist. But it’s just such a simple, kind of a haunting sound that he gets, and that’s what first piqued my interest on this tune.

It’s like, “Oh, this incredible harmonica part.” So maybe what registered was, maybe there’s a part for me in Willie World. But then, listening to this song, I mean just musically, it’s different. It has such jazz voicings, and the changes are just not your typical country song. And it deals with a basic story line—“the words don’t fit the picture.” I mean, you say something, and it’s not really what’s happening in real time. And it just hits me on so many levels—but the first thing that caught my ear was the harmonica, and it just drew me in.

John Spong: Well, and if folks don’t know who Charlie McCoy is, he was one of the Nashville A-Team session players, one of the first-call guys, whenever Chet or Owen Bradley—Chet Atkins, who produced Willie’s stuff back then, and Felton Jarvis, who produced this, I think, because this was 1971—Charlie McCoy was the harmonica player you’d bring in. And if I remember, the story is that Charlie . . . he came to Nashville, he wanted to make it, maybe playing guitar, as a singer, songwriter, whatever, and he realized, “Oh, well, there’s a lot of those here, and that’s not going to work.” So he decided, “Yeah, but there’s not a lot of harmonica players. If I can just play the harmonica well, I’ll always have a place when they call people to come record.”

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, right. Well, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no harmonica players, other than Charlie, and he set the bar. It’s just, there’s never been anyone to play like him, or to make an impact on music. And saying so much with so little notes—which is hard for a harmonica player, because, first off, you don’t have anything to hide behind; you’re pretty naked up there with this little piece of tin in your mouth. And most players, me included, tend to play way too much. So I think with age, or with experience, you kind of back off, and Charlie’s just one of those guys that has definitely achieved saying a lot with a minimal amount of notes.

[Willie Nelson singing “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture”]

John Spong: Wow.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, those lyrics—it’s like he’s been reading my mail. 

John Spong: And it’s interesting—so at that period, in the early seventies, he’s going through a breakup with his second wife, Shirley, who—presumably that’s written about, or it’s during that, and it’s funny, because it’s one of those Willie things where he’s, in a sense, letting her know that everything’s going to be okay. He is leaving her. You know? And he’s already with Connie.

Mickey Raphael: Right. Everything’s going to be okay . . . for him.

John Spong: Yeah, precisely. There’s kind of that element. But then, the other thing is, you know, the album before this is Yesterday’s Wine, which is one my very favorite records I’ve ever heard by anybody. It was so weird—it didn’t do anything, and then this album—because this was the title cut to the album, Words Don’t Fit the Picture—comes out in ’72, and it doesn’t even chart. This song was released as a single, and it was on the charts for two weeks. I think it got to seventy-three or something. It’s not quite working, and that’s after years of frustration at RCA, who he knows is fixing to drop him—to let him go. So in a very real sense, he’s going through two nasty divorces in this moment that he’s singing about here. There’s a lot in there.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, a lot of information to write about, a lot of inspiration. Yeah, it was a hard time for him, emotionally, and this is what came out of it. This is something good that came out of those, you know, those hard times.

John Spong: And I cut you off a little while ago when you started to talk about how nuts that album cover is. But yeah, it’s very difficult times for Willie, and anybody listening to this should really just hit pause and Google the album cover art, because, I mean . . .

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, Willie’s standing in front of the Rolls with Connie. I can’t remember if she’s wearing fur, or she might be wearing a fur hat, and then Felton Jarvis, the producer, is the chauffeur . . .

John Spong: It’s his big Rolls.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, Willie’s wearing bell-bottoms, which he did anyway, I think, in those times. But that’s actually a great picture of Willie. And Connie looks fabulous.

John Spong: The suggestion that in the middle of all of this difficulty, especially with RCA, he might be a rock star with a Rolls and a chauffeur—that’s a nice inside joke between Willie and Chet, and maybe a handful of others, I guess.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah. And his covers back then were fabulous. The one, it’s called Willie and Family. One of my favorite songs on that is “I’m a Memory”—we have to go back and talk about that cover, too, eventually. That’s one where the whole family’s around the bonfire.

John Spong: At Willie’s place in Ridgetop, right?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, and I asked him one time. I mean, I see Paul, Willie, Bee—who is wearing a fuzzy pair of, it looks like boxer shorts. And it’s obviously winter, they’re around a bonfire, and I said, “Who is this?” And they go, “Well, this is the whole family.” Bobbie’s there with her husband, I think, and kids, and they’re really young, and Lana, Willie’s daughter, was there with her babies. And then there’s one guy I didn’t recognize. I said, “Well, who is this guy?” And they go, “Oh, we don’t know, he just walked up out of the woods and was standing by the fire.” Which kind of sums up everything. I mean, we’ll be doing a recording session with Willie, and there’ll be a couple of people, or one guy, in the studio, and it’s like, “Is this guy with you?” “No, I thought he was with you.” Somebody just walked in. That’s kind of been our MO in the early years. I mean, there was a guy—we were on tour, and there was a guy riding on our bus for several days, and we were up in the East, and I said, “Bee, who’s your friend?” He goes, “My friend? I thought that was your friend.” And this guy had just been traveling with us, and we find out that nobody knew who he was. He’d just gotten on the bus. So it didn’t surprise me at all when they said, “Oh, that guy just walked out of the woods.”

John Spong: And it’s weird, too, because that record—like, when people bellyache, when Willie fans talk about how Nashville mistreated Willie—I mean, I love so many of those records from the sixties, and to me, they don’t sound like you guys later, but it sounds like great sixties-era country music.

Mickey Raphael: It’s my favorite; it’s my personal favorite.

John Spong: Really?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah. . . . And Then I Wrote, Willie and Family, Words Don’t Fit the Picture, Laying My Burdens Down—all the RCA stuff back then is just brilliant.

John Spong: It is. So back to “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture” specifically, you talked about it having jazz chords in it—I’m not going to be able to identify that. But . . .

Mickey Raphael: Nor me, but it sounds very intellectual.

John Spong: Yeah, sho’ nuff.

Mickey Raphael: But no, that wasn’t your basic, you know, three-chord country song. Even though it was pretty simple, it wasn’t too complicated a song to play—it just was, you know, it’s kind of timeless. It just didn’t fit, definitely didn’t fit with what was going on in Nashville at that time.

John Spong: Well, when I get to overthinking it, one thing that did strike me as cool about it—the verses, at the least the first one or two, it sounds almost like it doesn’t resolve itself at the end. And so, when he sings, “Where are the words I say to you / The words don’t fit the picture anymore,” it kind of ends without resolution, and it’s almost like the end of the verse is a cliff-hanger. And then he goes into, “If we’ve been acting all along / We both act right; we both act wrong,” and he leaves it there again. But then at the very end, you keep thinking, “Oh wait, it’s a cliff-hanger—maybe this is going to work out. What’s going to happen next?” And then he says, “Nope, it’s a one-act play that comes to an end.” And it’s like, “Oh, wow. Yeah.”

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah. He keeps pushing you towards the edge, and you don’t actually go over till the end—you know, figure it out till the end. So yeah, Willie’s really brilliant.

John Spong: It’s awfully sophisticated.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, in a very simple way, too, which is fabulous.

[Willie Nelson singing “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture”]

John Spong: So, had you listened to a bunch . . . you grew up in Dallas, right? And you’re—

Mickey Raphael: I grew up in Dallas, but I had no country background whatsoever. I think the only country song I was exposed to was, as a teen, was “Blood on the Saddle”—Tex Ritter. And I thought, “Oh, this is country music? I’ll pass.” But I grew up in Dallas, and I was kind of into the sixties folk scene and the British invasion. I loved the Stones and the Animals and . . . you know, I had no country background. And then, when I met Willie, he was so unique, he didn’t strike me as your typical country and western singer, and I was just so enamored by his guitar playing and his writing, you know, I just really latched on to his music and started doing a crash course in his music, and found those RCA records.

Well, at the time, I was playing with B.?W. Stevenson, who had some local success in Dallas, and we were on RCA. And when we would go to the RCA offices, they had a vault with all the records that they were releasing—B.W., the Guess Who, you know, I can’t remember who else was on RCA at the time—and there was this Willie record, and that’s the first record I picked, was the Willie and Family, was the one with everybody standing around the firepit at Willie’s farm in Ridgetop, and I just picked it because it was such a weird album cover, and I thought, “Wow, this is crazy. Who is this guy?” But that was my first introduction to Willie, was the and Family record, and it was the album cover that drew me in. And then I end up meeting Willie in ’72 through Coach Royal and kind of put it all together, and I got interested in—was definitely interested in Willie, but then got interested in the rest of the world of country music.

John Spong: Tell me about that first meeting, because it’s kind of legendary. And I don’t want to blow too much smoke, but, in fact, I really think that you meeting Willie—when you think of how important he is as an artist, as a figure in American history, and how important your harmonica is to his sound—for me personally, that’s on par with Lennon running into McCartney in high school, or whatever they called it in Liverpool, or Jagger meeting Richards. And I know that’s a pretty dramatic thing to say, but you and Willie hooking up really changed history.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, well, it changed my life, anyway. And thanks to Darrell Royal and Edith Royal. Darrell was a real patron of the arts and a close friend of Willie’s and a serious music fan, and I guess they’d heard me play with B.W. or heard me playing around Austin. And I guess they knew I was in Dallas, and the coach was at a ball game. I think Texas was playing Arkansas that weekend, and he got word to me and said, “Hey, we’re having a little picking session in my hotel after the ball game. Why don’t you grab your harmonicas and come over, and I’d like to meet you, and you can meet some of my friends.”

John Spong: Oh, wow.

Mickey Raphael: And I wasn’t a big football fan at all. I mean, of course I knew who Coach Royal was, but I was not an athlete, and the reason I was a musician was because I couldn’t play sports. So I go over there, and Willie’s there; Charley Pride was there—I had met him because my dad designed and built custom furniture, and Charley was one of his clients, so I had met Charley when I was a teenager. And I think I was twenty at this time. And they just passed the guitar around, and I had my harmonicas, and I just tried to play along with them. Willie did “Night Life” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “Crazy,” and I thought, “Oh, this is the guy that wrote those songs?”

John Spong: Wow.

Mickey Raphael: After that little party, Willie says, “Hey, if you ever hear we’re playing anywhere, come sit in.” And a couple of months go by, and I read that Willie is playing in a junior high gymnasium, a benefit for a volunteer fire department in Waxahachie. So I drive down there, show up, and sit in with them. And play with the band. And they’re set up on the floor, you know, on the court in a gym. And I think we played “Fraulein” four or five times that night, because people like to dance; they like to two-step. So it gave me a chance to learn the song. I mean, they weren’t hard songs, but I really didn’t know any of these songs, and he was just playing standards. And afterwards, we went to the truck stop right on 35 and had breakfast, which is what you do at one in the morning. And I was getting ready to leave, and I thought, “Well, I’ll have one more cup of coffee.” And that last cup of coffee, Willie says, “Hey, we’re going to New York in a couple of months to play Max’s Kansas City; why don’t you go with us?”

So the rest is my history, anyway. So that was a couple of months previous to the Max’s gig, and then I would see—I’d just look and find; I don’t know how I . . . oh, I think I would call Connie or something and say, “Is Willie there?” “No, I haven’t seen him in several days.” Or I would find out where they were—they’d be playing around Texas, and I’d just drive my car down there and show up and play. So that’s kind of how I learned. We didn’t practice, but that’s how I learned to play with him, by showing up four or five times on the weekends—he would just be playing weekends. And then, one day, Willie asked Paul English, our drummer and bandleader, he says, “What are we paying Mickey?” And Paul goes, “Nothing; he’s just coming to sit in.” And Willie’s famous line is, Willie says, “Well, double his salary.”

John Spong: One of the things that was so different about the band after you joined—really is different from pretty much every country band there had been prior to that, is that there’s no steel guitar and there’s no fiddle. In fact, your harmonica replaces the steel guitar with a lot of what it does, right?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah. I mean, well, he had Jimmy Day playing, who was an iconic pedal steel player, and when Jimmy left the band, Willie wasn’t going to replace him with another steel player. So I happened to be playing. I had just started playing. And so I just kind of segued from the steel, as a voice in the band, to the harmonica. Because he wasn’t going to hire another player, because you couldn’t replace Jimmy Day. So the timing was perfect.

John Spong: When I talked to Steve Earle, it was an offhand comment; he was making a joke—kinda—but he said, in talking about the way the band sounded and how unique and different it was from country bands that preceded it, he said that there were two great achievements of the Armadillo World Headquarters, and one is the one everybody thinks of, which is the hippies and the rednecks communing. But the other was that he said that those hippies being there, and the Grateful Dead being there and bands like that, gave Willie permission to form a jam band, as opposed to a traditional country band. And that was an interesting way to think about it, because it really does sound very different from Ray Price’s band ten years ago, or the way Ernest Tubb and those guys, his players—

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, we’re not as structured as that. I don’t think we’re as accomplished musicians as those guys, really, but, I mean, we are a great jam band. At that time, we were playing four-hour sets.

John Spong: What?

Mickey Raphael: We would just play. And songs would last forever. I mean, whatever we were fueled on at the time was working. I remember we played an outdoor festival in Baton Rouge, and it was raining, and it looked like The Walking Dead out in the audience, and Willie thought, Let’s see if we can outlast this audience. And we played till the sun came up. And it looked like a zombie apocalypse.

John Spong: [Laughs] When you talk about it being loose, who keeps time? Who do you follow in—

Mickey Raphael: I’ve been asking myself that question for forty-eight years. We all keep time, and I think we’re all listening to a different drummer. It doesn’t matter. Willie starts the song, and as long as we end close together and nobody gets hurt, it’s fine.

[Willie Nelson singing “Whiskey River”]https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/mickey-raphael-on-willie-nelson/#acm-ad-tag-div-gpt-inline-1

John Spong: And then, the other guys in the band, the other people in the band, just in a nutshell, what are they like, and what do they bring? Like, every time Bee Spears’s name comes up, whoever brings it up starts laughing.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Spong: I mean, it’s—

Mickey Raphael: Besides being a great bass player with Willie, yeah, he was a real joker. And sometimes the jokes were at great expense, but as long as he could get a laugh . . . We were in Vegas— and there’s a YouTube video of this—we were in Vegas hanging out; we’d play these two-week runs at Caesar’s Palace, and we’re hanging at the bar after one of the shows, and he meets these guys that are the riggers for Peter Pan. You know, they fly her; they do all the rigging. And they were between shows, so Bee says, “Could you fly me?” And they go, “Well, yeah. We’ve got the harness and everything.” So Bee talked them into coming to a show, and it was Saturday night at Caesar’s Palace, sold-out show. And they hooked Bee up in this harness that’s connected at the hips with these eye hooks, and it’s kind of an old style that they were doing, and to fly, they hoist you up, and then you have to arch your back and get your body in a particular position where you’re balanced, so when you’re moving you’re horizontal.

Well, Bee could never get that position right. So Saturday night, Bee walks offstage. We had another bass player; we had Chris Ethridge with us. So Willie’s doing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”; Bee slides offstage, gets in the harness, they hoist him over our heads, and they’re pulling him back and forth across the stage, but Bee is doing somersaults because he can’t keep his body in the right position to be horizontal. And the crowd is going nuts during Willie’s solo, and of course Willie’s nodding, “Thank you very much; thank you very much.” He has no idea, at this point, that Bee is upside down, hovering ten feet over our heads.

John Spong: That sounds like the person I’ve heard described.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, I remember he was having a cookout at his house one time, and to his wife’s dismay, he took the box spring—I think Leon was out there, too—and he was going to cook a goat. So he dug a big pit, ripped the box spring up off of his bed, and put the box spring over the pit, and built a fire under it, and then laid the goat on the box spring, because he didn’t have a grill big enough.

John Spong: Oh, wow. I mean, that actually suddenly sounds like everybody I know from Bandera.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah; I think that’s exactly where it was.

John Spong: Was Paul English intimidating the first time you met him? What was Paul like?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, Paul was pretty intimidating, even though he was just a sweetheart and a pussycat and really kind of the enforcer. I mean, we were playing places that I couldn’t really go in by myself, these redneck joints. Big G’s was one in Round Rock, Texas, and I had really long hair, and this was right at the end of the Vietnam War, and, you know, the air was politically charged. And I would wait in my car, and Paul would get there, and I’d walk in with he and the rest of the guys, and anybody who’d say anything—I mean, Paul was a pretty serious character and always packing—always had a pistol or several guns on him, and rightfully so, because a lot of times he had to collect money; you know, a promoter didn’t want to pay us. And Paul would go in there and convince the guy that it was in the best interests of his health to pay us.

John Spong: And then Jody. He’s the one guy that I’ve never really heard much about.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah. Jody was married to Sammi Smith, who had the big hit, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” And then, he played with Merle, he toured with Merle’s band. And he’s from Kentucky, and he has a great bluegrass background. I think he was playing in bands when he was probably twelve years old. But he played lead guitar and sang harmony with Willie.

John Spong: And so it’s varying degrees of musicianship, but everybody getting along and bonding and working this thing together.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah—because, you know, it wasn’t a democracy. I mean, it was a band, but we had a boss, and that was Willie. And it was like, “Anything goes,” but . . . there were no rules other than show up for the gig and be able to play.

John Spong: And if you’re doing that two hundred nights a year for forty years, eventually there is some telepathy involved.

Mickey Raphael: Oh, yeah. Total communication without speaking.

John Spong: One thing I was curious about, that I asked ahead of time about, was the way you and Willie’s playing interacts, and the other song you’ve been talking about through this has been “I’m a Memory,” which is on Willie and Family, but then it’s also on the live album that came out seven years later, Willie Nelson and Family Live that was recorded at Harrah’s Casino. Lake Tahoe?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, uh-huh.

John: Okay. Let me play that real quick, because I want to hear the two of you guys together.

[Willie Nelson singing “I’m a Memory”]

Mickey Raphael: Man, that must’ve taken a lot of coffee.

John Spong: [Laughs] Coffee, you say. Well, that’s actually—it’s one of the famous things, and I first heard it from you when I interviewed you a long time ago. There was Willie’s famous edict about what happens when you’re wired.

Mickey Raphael: Oh, “If you’re wired, you’re fired”?

John Spong: Yeah.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the time, we were starting to make a little money, and drugs were around, and cocaine was there. I knew some people that did it. And that was—you know, Willie didn’t care if we drank or smoked, but he said, “I don’t want to see my guys spending good money on bad drugs.” And cocaine was not a very creative drug at all, especially musically. It just made you play really fast.

John Spong: Yeah. Well, and it’s funny, because at that time, when cocaine first started showing up in the seventies, people thought, “It’s not addictive; it’s expensive, but it’s really not that bad.” But weed was still looked at as this terrible thing. It seemed like it was probably the effect that it had on musicians that was one of the things that helped people realize, “Oh yeah, cocaine’s actually bad.”

Mickey Raphael: Yeah. It’s just a bad drug to listen on. Where marijuana will kind of mellow you out, you know, and relax you, and you can really groove and listen to music, when you’re high on coke, you’re talking all the time, and you’re not listening to the other person. And one thing about playing music is you’ve got to listen to the other players. And you can hear some records—I’m not sure who in our band was using, but when everybody’s playing on top of each other, I mean, there’s something there that you wouldn’t normally be doing. It’s just like talking a lot without listening. 

John Spong: Huh. Well, it’s an interesting song to summon cocaine talk. And I don’t think this is necessarily what happened, but Joe Nick Patoski once—who wrote the biography on Willie, the big one—once told me, he said that this song, “I’m a Memory,” he feels confident is Willie’s first-ever public championing of marijuana. And I said, “What?” And he said, “No, listen to the lyrics. It’s a good-riddance song. It’s a ‘you’re gonna miss me’ type song,” and he’s mentioning moments in this lover’s life when after he’s gone, she’s going to be missing him, and he says, “I’m the love that you bought for a song / I’m a voice on a green telephone.” Joe Nick said, “That’s weed, man.”

Mickey Raphael: No, no, no, no. They had green telephones. I mean, there was . . .

John Spong: Yeah.

Mickey Raphael: I never thought about that, though. Wow.

John Spong: Thank you. I needed that.

Mickey Raphael: Yeah, I’m going to have to go back, and I’m going to have to call Willie up and say, “Hey, can I have a bag of green telephone, please.” That’s what they oughta name some of that stuff.

John Spong: Absolutely. It’s going to connect you to somebody.

Mickey Raphael: “Green telephone.” That’s right.

[Willie Nelson singing “I’m a Memory”]

John Spong: And when you are playing with him, like when we listened to “I’m a Memory” just now, what is your harmonica supposed to do in relation to his guitar . . . or do y’all just do your thing? Is there—

Mickey Raphael: We never discussed it, but I know the original one, and there was strings on it. There’s kind of a string part. And I also echoed the signature line that Bee, the bass player, was doing. And I know kind of what licks Willie’s going to play on it, because there’s a certain signature melody there, or lick there, that Willie’s going to do, and sometimes I would double it, or answer him. So again, it’s a conversation. And Willie may play something, and I may answer. In fact, in the great words of Leon Russell’s percussionist, this wonderful African medicine man named Ambrose Campbell, he told me one time, he goes, “Music is but a language. Speak to me, and I will answer.”

John Spong: Okay, wow. It’s not relevant at all, but my kids are named Willie and Leon. It just made sense. It just made sense. But the friendship with Willie, what’s it akin to? Are y’all like brothers? Is it akin to a father-son thing or uncle-nephew? Or . . .

Mickey Raphael: All of that. It’s brothers. He can be a father figure at times. So he maintains several roles there, but it’s always—I always lean on him for inspiration. And again, sometimes it’s not discussed, but I’ll listen to how he approaches something musically, and I know what to do, because [of] just seeing how he approaches a problem or approaches the music.

John Spong: Can you think of an example? Has there been a moment where you needed counsel? Or where putting a Willie record on was what you needed? Or are you tired of hearing all that?

Mickey Raphael: Yeah. Well, I’ve told him if I was going through a crisis in a relationship, I said, “Man, this song, or this record, has really consoled me.” You know, I always told Willie that I would go to his songs, to his lyrics, before I would go to my shrink. I mean, especially this era, the late sixties, early, early seventies. But it really was—there’s something just very therapeutic about seeing somebody else going through something that you may have experienced, and that’s what’s great about Willie. He has such great appeal because he speaks to people’s everyday experiences, and everybody can identify with what he’s saying.

[Willie Nelson singing “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture”]

John Spong (voice-over): All right, Willie fans, that was the great Mickey Raphael telling us about “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture.” A huge thanks to him for coming on the show, a big thanks to our sponsor, White Claw Hard Seltzer, and a big thanks to you for tuning in. If you dig the show, please subscribe, maybe tell a couple friends, and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and give us some stars. And please also check out our One By Willie playlist over at Apple Music. And be sure to tune back in next week to hear singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff talk about biker funerals, Leon Russell, and the Leon Russell song that closes out Willie’s album Shotgun Willie, “A Song for You.” . . . We will see y’all next week.

You get this and other really cool Willie Nelson merchandise on his website here.

photos:  Joe Songer

TOM HILLGETTY IMAGES

www.thepioneerwoman.com

See all photos here.

http://www.gq.com
by:  Dan Hyman

Willie Nelson doesn’t schedule interviews. Nowadays, his publicist rings him up, and when the country legend happens to pick up—which, judging by our multiple failed attempts to get him on the line, is a rare occurrence—he’s informed there’s a reporter on the other line. Would he like to chat, perhaps? He almost never says no. So on the first call that Nelson answers—our fourth attempt overall—we’re on the line with the man known as the Red Headed Stranger.

At seventy-eight, Willie Nelson is a relic. But he doesn’t see it that way, because the country star has managed to stay as busy as ever. He’s usually touring. When he’s not, Nelson is either at his Austin, Texas ranch or at his home in Maui. Time away, however, doesn’t often suit Willie well. He likes to work. And after all, how fun could resting on your laurels be when you’ve has sold upwards of 50 million albums?

Nelson is most excited about his latest endeavor, Heroes (due May 15), a full-length album he recorded last year with family and close friends, including Snoop Dogg, Kris Kristofferson, and Jamey Johnson. Heroes is not your average Willie Nelson post-millennial release—the man, in addition to a trio of new originals, covers Coldplay and Pearl Jam. Nelson was in Mississippi when he hopped on the line with GQ, and talked about his new album, enjoying Amsterdam with his pal Snoop Dogg, and how he’s smoking as much pot as ever. 

GQ: Thanks for hopping on the phone, Willie!
Willie Nelson: Sure!

GQ: Heroes was a family affair. Your sons, Lukas and Micah, share writing credits on the album.

Willie Nelson: It was, and is always nice to work with the kids. But I also had a lot (of others): Kris (Kristofferson) and Jamey (Johnson) and Snoop and Sheryl Crow and a bunch of other great talent in there. (Billie) Joe Shaver. Ray Price. So a lot of my friends were in there.

GQ: Speaking of Snoop, I hear you shared some time together in Amsterdam.

Willie Nelson: Yah. I was in Amsterdam and I got a call from Snoop and he was, I think, in New York or somewhere and didn’t have anything to do. So he just flew over and we hung out for a few days.

GQ: I assume you two frequented a few of Amsterdam’s famous coffee shops?

Willie Nelson: We had a cup of coffee or two [laughs]. We got to be good buddies.

GQ: I know you are also longtime buddies with fellow country icon Billy Joe Shaver, who also appears on the album.

Willie Nelson: Heck, yah! In fact the song, “Heroes”, I wrote that song about Billy Joe, really. We stay in touch. We text back and forth all the time.

GQ: And Kris Kristofferson, another longtime friend of yours, also makes an appearance.

Willie Nelson: We’re big friends. I saw him a little while ago. I was in Maui and he lives over there also sometimes. He’d come by. We hung out a little bit. Another time before, that he brought Muhammad Ali by.

GQ: Kristofferson and Ali. Quite the combination.

Willie Nelson: [Ali]’s an incredible guy. One time I think we were playing in Kentucky or something and he’d come by and say hello. And I brought him on the bus and we hung out a little bit. And I’ve got a punching bag in the back so I got him back there punching the bag.

GQ: You have some surprising covers on Heroes—your cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” in particular.

Willie Nelson: It was for a [Chipotle] commercial first and it was pretty well received, so we decided to put it out on the new album.

GQ: And Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe”? Can’t say I saw that coming.

Willie Nelson: My son Lukas knew that song and he brought it to the studio. And that’s really how that happened. He brought about half the songs to the studio.

GQ: Is that a different process than normal? Do you usually come up with the track list yourself?

Willie Nelson: [It happens] all kind of different ways. On this particular one, Luke came up with the song and naturally I liked the song. But I wasn’t familiar with it until we recorded it.

GQ: It’s interesting because “Just Breathe” sounds like it could have been one of your originals.
Willie Nelson: Aw, thanks!

GQ: I know you have a home in Hawaii. Have you been spending a good deal of time down there lately?

Willie Nelson: I just spent a couple weeks over there and we’re back traveling now. I’m in Mississippi tonight and then Illinois. I just enjoy both working and not working. And fortunately I work enough where I get that out of my system and then we take a few days off, take a rest. It’s working pretty good. We work a couple weeks and then we take a couple off.

GQ: What does Willie Nelson do in his downtime? Are his off-duty activities a bit different than in, say, 1975?

Willie Nelson: Oh, it’s the same stuff I was doing in ’75! I don’t notice any changes. I went for a bike ride a while ago, a little run. The weather’s nice here so I can get out. So I’m just doing whatever I can do. And when I’m off I’m either playing some golf or some poker or whatever comes up.

GQ: What motivates you to get up each morning and keep playing and writing music?

Willie Nelson: New music keeps coming along and every now and then I write some new things—there’s “Hero,” “Roll Me Up,” and “Come On Back Jesus” on the new album. Then I go back and do something in the show that we hadn’t done in maybe a long, long time. Like last night I did “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes”. And I recorded that twenty, thirty years ago. [Editor’s Note: Nelson recorded this track in 1996] Every now and then I’ll think of something to put back in the show. I just kind of play it off the top of my head. If I do it that way it keeps it kinda fresh.

GQ: People love to mythologize your marijuana intake. Is your current pot consumption level exaggerated?

Willie Nelson: No, I still probably smoke as much as I ever did! I use a few different methods now. I don’t smoke as many joints as I used to. I use vaporizers a lot. It cuts down on the heat and the smoke. And for a singer that’s not a bad idea.

GQ: I must ask. How’s your famous acoustic guitar, Trigger? She still receiving the finest of care?

Willie Nelson: Trigger’s doing great! Trigger’s probably in better shape than I am.

This entry was post