Willile Nelson, Mark Seliger
www.texasmonthly.com
by: John Spong
Amarillo-born Mark Seliger was a lonely college freshman at what was then called East Texas State University when he first fell for Willie Nelson’s music. A new girlfriend was visiting Dallas, and he wanted to go see her, so he borrowed his dorm RA’s car for the drive over from Commerce. He found a cassette-tape copy of Stardust sitting on the dashboard and put it into the stereo. When icy roads turned the seventy-mile drive into a slow-rolling, two-hour ordeal, he just kept flipping the tape over, playing it nonstop the whole way—a pattern he repeated on the even longer drive home. He was hooked.