Willie Nelson Read online

  Zeke Varnon: He had more moxie [guts] in those days than anybody I ever saw. One night we were sitting in Scotty’s Tavern, playing dominoes and watching the Monday night fights on TV. A guy at the bar is making comments like he is some kind of expert. Willie says, ‘I’ll bet you ten bucks on the fighter in the white shorts.’ We didn’t have a dollar between us. If Willie had lost that bet they’d have beat pure hell out of us.2

  There are many examples of these kinds of tests. It was a macho thing, most certainly, a little bit of the set-’em-up-and-shoot-’em-down cowboy mentality held over from his Abbott schooldays, but it was more than mere bravado. Plain mischief-making accounts for much of it, but there was something more. It was as if he was challenging the world and he didn’t care too much if he lost. A very attractive quality in a young man, but also a pretty desperate one.

  Having suffered a painful fall from a tree whilst working, and tired of being broke and having to scrabble for every cent, Nelson enlisted in the US Air Force in late 1950. The Korean War had begun in the summer of that year, and when he turned eighteen in less than six months’ time he would be required to report to the draft board and await military deployment. He preferred to have some choice in the matter and signed up voluntarily. In December he was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio to undertake basic training. Straight away he was marched into the barbershop to have his proud pompadour shaved to the skull. There were no barracks, only tents. He was unceremoniously roused for a gruelling run at 4 a.m. every day, and on top of all that it rained constantly. Almost the first thing anyone had said to him when he arrived was: ‘You fucked up.’ He was inclined to agree.

  He wasn’t academically cut out to be pilot material. He was always a sharp, bright boy – and an exceptionally switched-on adult – but it was not a sophisticated intelligence. It wasn’t measured in certificates or book learning; it was raw and instinctive, and not suited to much beyond manual work, which is all most of the males from Abbott were expected to undertake. Further military training in Wichita Falls led to another relocation to a base near Belleville, just east of St Louis, Illinois, but it could as well have been anywhere. He sloshed around while they worked out what to do with him, drinking, playing poker. He was finally given the choice between being a radar mechanic or a medic. He chose radar but failed to grasp the technical side of it and so was moved to the medics. It sounded grand, but in practical terms it meant a job lifting boxes in Biloxi, Missouri.

  His back – already a little out of shape from pulling corn in his schooldays – had been further damaged in the fall from the tree, and the heavy manual work in Missouri exacerbated it. He sensed an opportunity to leave. Although Biloxi had been something of an improvement on Illinois, in that it had given him the chance to play guitar at the Airmen’s club and thus also the opportunity to meet and bed some local girls, he was sick of the discipline of the military life and wanted out. Eventually, after nine months in which he felt he had achieved nothing, the state of his back earned him a medical discharge, and by late 1951 he was back living at Mama Nelson’s house in Abbott, perhaps a little chastened, playing again with Bud Fletcher and the Texans and anyone else who would have him.

  He fell for Martha Jewel Matthews from the stage of the 31 Club on Corsicana Road just east of Waco. She was a regular. Even at sixteen, she loved to go out and dance her way between all the honky-tonks lined up from her home in Waco out to West. She may even have seen Nelson before at the Nite Owl or one of the other regular spots he played. He had certainly seen her: hair so black it was almost blue, eyes like coal, olive-skinned, five feet seven inches tall and every inch of it ready to grab life by the throat. She was the original good-time girl, a teenager before the term had even been coined: loud, fun, a little aggressive, the life and soul of the party and used to getting her own way no matter what.

  ‘Martha did love a good time,’ Nelson later recalled. ‘She had a lot of friends and she danced a lot.’3 She was a familiar breed – he could as well be describing Myrle. Their courtship consisted of little more than Martha coming to see him at the 31 Club whenever he was there, or him visiting her at the Lone-Oak Drive Inn on the New Dallas Highway in Waco where she worked as a waitress. Martha’s parents were much like Nelson’s grandparents: hard-working, fundamentally religious people who frowned upon too much frivolity or carousing. Their daughter defied them frequently to visit the clubs, just like she defied them over her choice of boyfriend. They disapproved of her penniless, rough-around-the-edges guitar player, which may be one of the reasons they wed so quickly. They ‘ran away’ to Cleburne, a town only a few miles north of Hillsboro, and got married in the basement of the courthouse in February 1952, without either the presence or knowledge of their respective families.

  The groom was eighteen. By his own family’s standards, at least, Nelson had left it late, but he had known Martha for only a few months, perhaps even weeks, and in hindsight they should both have spent some time taking the temperature of their relationship before running up the aisle. As it was, they were utterly consumed by young love, and not a little lust, and they jumped right in. In time the relationship would fuel some of his most despairing songs and come to confirm his worst suspicions – about himself, and women, and life – but on his wedding day he couldn’t believe he had managed to a snare such a sexy, desirable young bride.

  Johnny Bush: She was the most beautiful thing. Three-quarters, I guess, Cherokee, raven-haired, brown-eyed, tall. Beautiful. She was the sweetest thing in the world until she got mad or drunk – or both.

  Initially ostracised by the Matthews family, they moved in with Mama Nelson in Abbott – always there, always happy to help – and set about fathoming the mysterious art of being man and wife. It was an absolute shock to the system for Martha, whose middle name of Jewel apparently denoted that she was a princess in the eyes of her parents. An only child, she had never even washed a dish before she moved to Abbott and was entirely spoiled rotten. Nobody stood to attention in the Nelson homestead and Martha had little choice but to learn to earn her keep, but life quite quickly became strained.

  They had their good times, of course. They both knew how to have fun and made little effort to change their habits. Martha still worked as a waitress and frequented the clubs whenever she could; her husband was still playing around the towns, although he was struggling to get by – what money he made, he quickly spent, a recurring theme from now until far into the future. It would be perfectly normal for him to stand playing guitar on stage with Bud Fletcher and watch Martha dancing on the floor, or even working behind the bar, in the same club. It sounds cosy but they were so young they struggled to cope with the reality of it.

  Willie Nelson: Anybody she would look at, I’d be pissed off. Anybody I’d look at, she’d be pissed off. We were extremely jealous of each other, seeing just how much we could do to each other and get away with it.4

  Both of them, particularly Martha, thrived on the tension, but it was exhausting. Nelson effectively began testing the strength of Martha’s love. He liked women and they liked him, and he felt a certain security in having his wife shouting accusations of infidelity – or at least inappropriate flirtations – at him. He was also a product of his time and place: he never would be first in line for any awards for his contribution to the feminist cause, and he felt that as long as he was earning a little money and providing some kind of home for them both he could pretty much do what he wanted. On the other hand, Martha was so striking and attracted so much attention he could hardly believe that she could be faithful. After all, his role models had not been promising. He was well versed in the mechanics of abandonment and deep down had very few expectations that someone as beautiful and flighty as his wife would stick around for the long run. He loved her, but he was already preparing for the worst. He needed options.

  They were mere teenagers, and singularly ill-equipped to iron out their differences in a sensible manner. They left Abbott and headed for Eugene, Oregon
in late 1952 to stay with Myrle and her husband for a while, seeking pastures new and trying to earn a little more money. They financed the trip by taking a job delivering a car from Texas to Eugene. It was not a happy journey. The marriage had settled into a routine of rows, accusations, periods of intense fun, sex and even romance, then more rows again. Martha was not impressed by her husband’s inability to keep even the most menial of jobs. ‘He lost more damn jobs in a month than most people have in a lifetime,’ she later said. ‘All he wanted to do was pick that damn guitar.’5 His musical career had effectively gone nowhere in the three years since he had left school – indeed, he was earning less now than he had been when he was thirteen and working beer halls with Bud Fletcher. In Eugene, Nelson worked as a plumber for a while and played briefly with a band on the Hayloft Jamboree programme on the local radio station, KUGN. Martha continued to wait tables; it soon became apparent there was little reason to stay long.

  Martha fell pregnant and the couple returned to the open arms of Mama Nelson in Abbott to await the baby. She was born on 11 November 1953, in hospital in Hillsboro, and christened De Lana Nelson. The birth of his first child caused Nelson to be physically ill in the hospital. Whether he was scared of the implications or simply squeamish is hard to say. But it caused him to think a little harder about the future, that’s for sure.

  Since its creation in 1845, Baylor University has made its home in the series of distinctive, austere red-brick buildings which sit amidst 750 acres in the centre of Waco. It houses the premier collection of the poet Robert Browning’s life works in the domed, somewhat ostentatious surroundings of the Armstrong Browning Library, and attracts some of the most prestigious academics and writers in the world through its doors on visiting lectures. As you might expect from the largest Baptist university in the world, it is a conservative campus, broadly Christian in thought and deed. This was even more emphatically the case in 1954. Waco itself was in a state of mild shock. Its population of 85,000 was in the process of dusting itself down following the deadly tornado of 11 May 1953, which killed 114 people and virtually destroyed the city centre. Even today as you drive around there are huge gaping holes in the city’s fabric where a building was destroyed by the tornado and never rebuilt. A visitor can’t help wondering whether the storm knocked much of the personality out of the place as well.

  There may have been no dancing, no sororities or fraternities, no smoking inside the student centre and very few ethnic minorities at Baylor, but one obvious incongruity was the high proportion of military ex-servicemen among its 6,000 students, perhaps as high as twenty per cent. This would be a remarkable statistic today, but was fairly ordinary back in the 50s. Following World War II, the American GI Bill programme paid a weekly wage to ex-servicemen if they wanted to pursue further education. The men on the GI Bill brought a little bit of the real world into the Baptist propriety of the campus. Many of them were in their twenties, had families, would drink, smoke and swear. Nelson became one of their number on 9 March 1954, when he cashed in his GI Bill chips and signed up for the full fifteen-hours-per-week course for the spring quarter of the academic year.

  What was he thinking? Clearly a 22-year-old guitar player with no house, no money, no steady job, a wife and a newborn baby would – to a greater or lesser extent – be aware that he needed to stop messing around with his life. Even if self-improvement was not his basic motivation, it would have got Martha, back waitressing in West, off his case for a while. Equally, he might simply have been running out of ideas and taken an easy option. The campus was only a few miles down the road from Abbott and he had his weekly $26 of GI money to support him. He later claimed he had some vague idea of becoming a lawyer, but in reality all his short stint at Baylor succeeded in doing was cementing, once and for all, his determination to work in music.

  Willie Nelson: I was there long enough to realise that I really wanted to play music more than I wanted to be a lawyer. But I had a good time while I was going there. I had some good teachers, and in class I made some new friends.6

  One of these new friends was Jack Loftis, who originally hailed from Hillsboro and went on to become a respected journalist and editor of the Houston Chronicle. Loftis recalls a polite young gentleman, reserved and clean-cut with his short hair, jeans or khakis, never once, to his knowledge, associated with trouble. He was a bit of a loner, playing dominoes and drinking with ‘whomever was available’ at the Rendezvous on Fifth Street when he should have been studying. Someone who was amiable and popular but a little unknowable. Nelson often joined a carpool with Loftis and others who lived back north up the I-35, and the one thing they quickly found out about him was that he was hooked on music. Waco was a thriving hub at the time: the likes of Slim Whitman, Faron Young, the Maddox Brothers and Hank Thompson had all been recent visitors to the city’s clubs, which attracted students and general citizens alike from all over central Texas. Nelson was a little further down the ladder, still playing long nights in honky-tonks throughout his time at Baylor, still hooking up with Bud Fletcher’s band and even taking the Interurban railroad up to Hillsboro to pick his guitar on street corners.

  Jack Loftis: There was never a doubt that music was his main interest. I never thought he would be ambitious enough to leave central Texas, but that was about par for the course for all of us back then. He was playing pure country honky-tonk songs of that era. I remember he liked Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, as did just about everyone else. His [voice] was quite ordinary. Most of us thought Willie was great, but few ever dreamed he would become an icon.

  His classic wisecrack about his time at university was that ‘he majored in dominoes’,7 and it’s true that he was largely absent from his classes the whole time between his enrolment until his premature departure on 10 July 1954, halfway through the summer quarter. But among the six courses he took – which ranged from business and plane trigonometry to history – was one which held some genuine significance: Speech and Radio 105, an introductory study of radio and TV. He had definite ambitions to become a disc jockey, whether as an end in itself or as a means to getting his songs heard. Many singers in those days served an apprenticeship working in radio, and taking a course on speech and radio was a conscious move. Nelson has been – and can be – a sight more calculating than he is often portrayed. ‘I do recall his talking about his plans to drop out of Baylor and seek work as a disc jockey or musician,’ says Loftis. He was, in fact, about to do both.

  His presence was barely missed, and is hardly celebrated even now. He is not a student that the university remembers with any pride, and indeed a Willie Nelson concert scheduled to be held on campus in 1988 was cancelled by the university president: ‘It is our hope that he will use his influence in the future to strengthen the moral fibre of our nation,’ he announced, unamused by his public endorsement of marijuana. ‘Our concern for the health and well-being of the American people is an overriding one.’ It was one of the rare instances where Nelson vented his fury in public. ‘Maybe the guy felt sanctimonious, like his hallowed hall was too good for me,’ he responded. ‘It makes me mad. Waco is my home town.’8

  He and Martha and little Lana headed south for San Antonio, where Johnny Bush, the Mission City Playboys and the delights of Al’s Country Club were waiting. He found a city like no other. Home of the Alamo, it is a bustling, colourful, cramped place, filled with noise and music and wearing its history on its sleeve. Built on the banks of the San Antonio river in south-west Texas, it is defined by its geography. Mexico is a mere two hours away, and many Texans drive down to Laredo or another of the grey border towns to regularly stock up on cheap cigarettes and alcohol. It is, perhaps surprisingly, America’s ninth largest city, with a population nearing 2,000,000, well over 50 per cent of which are of Hispanic origin.

  Nelson came here in 1954. He has previously stated that he arrived in San Antonio in 1953, but Johnny Bush recalls that baby Lana was already several months old when they first met and that Nelson mentioned he ha
d recently attended university – it’s likely the date has simply become confused in the mists of time. The city already had a distinctive flavour, with a heavy Mexican presence as well as many native Americans. San Antonio was undergoing a growth spurt, in the process of virtually doubling its population every ten years, and it was home to about 500,000 residents. It was by far the biggest place Nelson and Martha had ever lived, and its temptations and trials weren’t perhaps the best influence on their marriage. Martha was always suspicious of her husband’s activities, and though she was wrong in the beginning, she ‘wasn’t wrong for very long’,9 according to Nelson.

  There was simply little that could be done. Nelson was discovering quite quickly that he wasn’t really cut out for marriage. Without the support network of family and old friends, Martha was left literally holding the baby most of the time, and she resented the late nights he spent playing in clubs, getting up to God knows what. She wanted to be out there too, and not necessarily with him. They would fight almost constantly upon his return. The family were living in a large house in Florida Street in the south side of the city, shared with other members of the Mission City Playboys: steel player Carl Walder and his wife Dottie had a couple of rooms at the front, the Nelsons were holed up in the back, and Cosett Holland hung some curtains to screen off the dining room and set up his bed in there. It was not a particularly serene environment for the fiddle player. Walder and his wife fought almost as frequently as Nelson and Martha, while he was stuck in the middle, hiding behind his curtain.

  Johnny Bush: Usually, Willie prompted it. She took it out on him, and I think toe to toe she could have probably whipped him. I’ve seen the battle scars several times. He’d come to work with scratches and Band-aids. She thrived on it, [but] I don’t think he liked it so much – maybe he did, or he wouldn’t have stayed with her as long as he did. They [could be] great together, but it was World War III about two or three times a week. I drove up one day and got out of the car, and I looked up [to see] Willie running out of the back door full throttle, and a pot was following him. He was outrunning the pot. When he saw me he turned, and when he turned the pot went straight into the garage. He looked at me and said, ‘She loves me. Gimme a cigarette.’ It didn’t seem to bother him at all that she was mad enough to throw a pot which could have really hurt him. That went on all the time. But there were a lot of laughs, too, it wasn’t all like that.