stillisstillmoving.com

Whoot Weekly
January 24, 2002
by Steve Angelucci

Once a daytime door-to-door Bible salesman and a night-time honky-tonk entertainer, Willie Nelson just wanted to be a Texas country singer.

Through a Nashville stint in which e established himself as a major songwriter, super-stardom as an outlaw country-rock singer, and several movie roles, he has  done that and more. 

“I was always dumb enough to think I could do anything,” Nelson once siad, “and got lucky and did it sometimes.”

Born on April 30, 1933, in Abbott, Texas, Nelson and his sister Bobbie Lee Nelson were raised by their paternal grandparents, who tutored them using mail order music courses.   A quick learner, Nelson received a Stella guitar at age six and played his first job at a dance at age 10 with John Raycjeck’s Bohemian Folks Band.  Weaned on the music of such fellow Texans as Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb, he was also fascinated by big bands, and particularly the music of Frank Sinatra.  Nelson began playing at dances and later, honky-tonk bars.  While in high school, he worked for a local radio station and had his own show.

After a stint in the Air Force, Nelson self-produced and promoted his first song, “No Place for Me.”  By 1959, he was a full-time disk jockey, writing songs in his spare time.  Struggling to make a living, he was divorced and the father of two children.

“Well, I was raised in a Christian atmosphere and church and raised in a Methodist Church,” Nelson said in an online interview. “I remember one time I was a disc jockey down in Pleasanton, Texas, and every Sunday morning there would be about four or five different denominations come through there and do the radio show and they were all looking right at me.  So, I got preached to by every denomination imaginable, and I’ve been around gospel music all my life.”

In 1960, Nelson began making money from songwriting.  He sold “Night Life,” which became a hit for Ray Price, and other songs.  He arrived in Nashville and found his songs were in demand.  Pasty Cline recorded “Crazy,” Faron Young had a big hit with “Hello Walls,” and Roy Orbison hit pay dirt with “Pretty Paper.”  However, Nelson and the heavily orchestrated Nashville sound of the Early ’60s never gelled; his own music was strongly influenced by earlier country music and the blues.

In December of 1970, Nelson found his Nashville home ablaze.  He raced into the burning building and returned slightly scared with a battered guitar case in hand.  While most spectators assumed it housed a highly prized instrument, it actually contained high quality marijuana.  Nelson decided it was a sign to go home to Texas, where his iconoclastic attitude and “outlaw” music made him a hero.

There, he began performing his own work and gaining fame as a singer-songwriter.  In Nelson’s first year back in Texas, he recorded two albums, Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages.  In 1975, Nelson achieved popular stardom with the Red Headed Stranger album.  Containing the hit “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” it helped establish him as one of the top artists in country music.  The simple instrumentation and spare production of this concept album challenged Nashville’s musical attitudes.  Wanted:  The Outlaws, his album with Waylon Jennings, Jessie Colter and TOmpass Glaser, soon followed and firmly established Nelson nationally.  It sold over one million copies, became the top-selling country music album in history, and sparked an outlaw country revolution.

One of Nelson’s biggest hits was the Stardust album of 1977 in which he sang standards such as the title song and “Georgia on My Mine.”  It spent more than a decade on the country charts.  Other albums have included tributes to Lefty Frizzell and Kris Kristofferson, gospel music, and popular duets with Waylon Jennings.  Nelson, a prolific writer and musician, has recorded over 200 albums.

All the while, Nelson has continued to produce new hits.  In the early ’80s, he performed duets with such diverse artists as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Julio Iglesias, Ray Charles, and Leon Russell.  Yet, he did not neglect song swith country peers like Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, and George Jones, nor influences like Ray Price, Webb Pierce, faron Young, and Hank Snow.  In 1993, Nelson’s 1983 song “On the Road Again” was used in the soundtrack to Forest Gump.  Throughout the ’90s, he released albums such as Across the Borderline (his last record for Columbia, produced by Don Was), Moonlight Becomes You (a collection of standards), and Just One Love (a return to straight ahead Texas-style country).

Spirit, Nelson’s stunning first album for Island Records, included an intimate acoustic combination of friends and family performing at Pedernales Studios out side of Austin.  It featured Texas legend Johnny Gimble on fiddle, sister Bobbie Nelson on piano, and veteran Family member Jody Payne on rhythm guitar.

Nelson’s single “You Were Always on My Mind” won a Grammy Award, one of five such awards in his career.  Other donors include eight Country Music Awards, four American Country Music Awards, a 1973 induction into the Songwriters received 18 RIAA Certifications, including seven gold, five platinum, three double platinum, one triple platinum and two quadruple platinum records.

Nelson is the president and co-founder (along with Neil Young and John Mellencamp) of Farm Aid and has been instrumental in raising funds to help American farmers since 1985.  Nelson launched Farm Aid in 1985 after a comment by Bob Dylan at the Live aid concert.  Dylan mentioned that the farmers in America needed their own benefit concert and Nelson decided to take action.

In recent years, Nelson has found success as an actor, performing in several films, including Red Headed tranger, Thief, Honeysuckle Rose, Barbarossa, Pair of Aces, Songwriter, Electric Horseman, Stagecoach and Wag the Dog.  Nelson’s television work included a guest appearance on Nash Bridges and a recurring role on Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.

In this age of commercial country music, many country icons such as Nelson, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams Jr., and Waylon Jennings receive little airplay.  However, Nelson doesn’t let this bother him.  “I haven’t ever been a regular guy with country radio,” he said.  “My relationship with the music industry has always been tenuous.  It’s been like, ‘Well, we’ll play this, but he’d better shape up.’”

This month, Lost Highway/ The Island Def Jam Music Group released his new album, The Great Divide.  It features duets such as “The Last Stand in Open Country” with Kid Rock, “You Remain” with Bonnie Raitt, “Maria” with Lee Ann Womack, and “Don’t Fade Away” with Brian McKnight.

Willie Nelson’s performance is a rare Atlantic City appearance for this musical legend.  He often sings a few songs from each of his hit albums and is renowned for his live performances.

Mother Earth News
May/June 1987
Farm Aid’s Founder:  Willie Nelson
Patrick Carr

It’s midwinter in Tampa, Florida, and as usual the weather is warm going on stifling. Willie Nelson really needs the air conditioner humming peacefully in his mobile home away from home, the Silver Eagle Honeysuckle Rose.

In his own, quiet, careful way, Willie’s all business today. Waiting in the cool, dark comfort of the bus for the horde of people his presence will draw to town tonight, he’s working hard: poring over snapshots of himself and his sister Bobbie outside the Abbott, Texas, church in which they learned to sing, for the cover of a genuine hard-core Christian mail-order gospel album; making little decisions about the set he and his band of honky-tonk gypsies will play tonight; ordering up a carefully nutritious chicken dinner from the kitchen bus that travels with his five-vehicle caravan, then forgetting to eat it; talking business with little haste or waste of words or energy, on the radio telephone at his elbow.

The business concerns the usual megastar matters — movie promotion, investment opportunities, the touring schedule, a $1.5 million book contract — but also something seemingly out of place in this context: the Farm Aid cause, Mr. Nelson’s foray into public service. Cocooned amid Tampa’s concrete consumerism, the former Bible salesman, and latter-day multimillionaire is taking time to help the family farmers of his country fight back against government policy, big business and the economics of scale.

There is something rather special about Willie Nelson. It was he, after all, who united the rednecks and the hippies and the surburbanites of the 1970s in appreciation of a style of country music considered both archaic and impossibly uncommercial by the Nashville powers-that-were. Likewise his image — a lovely blend of longhair, cowboy, rebel, hardcore party legend and wise old man — is suggestive.

It’s no wonder he’s such an institution. You can look up to some entertainers (Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Paul McCartney), but Willie invites involvement, not distance. The dominant element of his stare — a thoroughly savvy serenity — is mighty trustworthy.

That invitation to trust must have been part of his image all along. Certainly it was during his late teenage years, when he was already trying to get ahead in the world by promoting dance concerts throughout east Texas, earning his percentage from acts like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Milton Brown and the Brownies, Spade Cooley, and the legendary Ernest Tubb while he watched from the wings and learned the ropes. It also impressed the folks in the Nashville big leagues after Willie had decided to forgo his studies for the Baptist ministery in favor of a full-time career in the hillbilly highway nightlife; you need a lot more than even the kind of devasting song-writing talent Willie possessses to become a primary source for the Music Row hit machine the way he did in pretty short order. And when eventually his ambitions outstripped what Nashville was willing to offer and he made his legendary end-run around Music Row, his aura so impressed the college hippioes of Austin, texas, that not too long after he’d been among them they began to buy posters proclaiming, “Matthew, Mark, Luke and Willie,” and to enshrine them in their places of fun and meditation.

A Nashville executive describes his experience: “It was amazing, just wonderful,” says the Nashville executive. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Neil Reshen (Willie’s manager) was so bad — I mean, you really wanted to have the man arrested; the secretaries used to run for the bathroom when he showed up. But when you talked to Willie, it was like negotiating with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and you were so relieved you didn’t have to deal with Neil that you gave Willie whatever he wanted. But, of course, what Neil wanted and what Willie wanted were the same things. They were working the good cop, bad cop routine, the oldest con in the world, but they did it so well you didn’t realize what was going on till it was all over.  And by then you’d done a deal you’d never have even dreamed of otherwise.   Willie just outplayed me, and he ended up getting what he really deserved. And all that means is he’s smarter than I am. He just has to turn that smile on you, and you’re hooked.  But now I take him seriously. He may be beautiful, but he’s not dumb.”

Such a man — with his hard-earned combination of country compassion, common sense and carefully honed business skills – would have been the perfect choice if American farmers had gone looking for a leader in their hour of need.  That’s not how it happened, though.  It was Willie who went unbidden to the farmers.

September 1985 was when it began, in Champaine, Illinois, as a notion kicked around between Willie and his crew in the wake of Bob Geldof’s Life Aid marathon.  As Willie recalls, in the low-to-vanishing key for which he is renowned, “I have no idea how it got started.  I was just sitting in the bus….”

Like a large proportion of the projects Willie judges worthy, the 14-hour Farm Aid benefit moved from the idea to action with little further ado.  It was set up with minimum fuss and executed with slightly less toll and craziness than usually attends a mammoth outdoor music festival featuring multiple major entertainers.  (Which figures.  After more than a decade of organizing and hosting his legendary Fourth of July picnics, Willie is perhaps the world’s premier mastermind of such events.) When it was all over — when Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Alabama, Billy Joel, Kris Kristofferosn, Bon Jovi, Joni Mitchell, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, John Cougar Mellencamp and some 45 other acts had done their thing and the TV viewers who watched them had sent in their donations — Willie and his crew suddenly found themselves in temporary possession of a great deal of donated money.

That came as something of a shock. “I figured people would respond,” says Willie, “but not nearly as well as they did, and as all that money started rollin’ in, I had to rethink my position.  I realized I had to do a lot more than make some calls and go out and sing.  My name was attached to that money, so by necessity I had to take responsibility and decide that I would be the one who writes the checks.  So that’s what happens, nothing goes out without my signature on it.  And so far, I know that every quarter of that money has gone to benefit the family farmer in some way.”

After Farm Aid One in Illinois and Farm Aid Two, held in Austin on the Fourth of July, 1986, the approximate total for which Willie has taken responsibility is $14 million.

And Willie doesn’t just sign the checks, he approves them.

“He makes the final decision,” says Caroline Mugar, the director of Farm Aid (Willie is Chairman of the Board). “We just do the research on what’s going on, who’s doing what where, what they hope to do and how they’ve used the money they’ve already gotten, and we make recommendations.   Then Willie decides.”

Texas’ most famous troubadour certainly seemed pleased with our Spring 2008 issue, which saluted his 75th birthday.  That was actually his 3rd time on our cover — he’s the only artist to date with that honor.

Thanks to Kelly from Texas for sending this from the current issue of Texas Music.