High, but Not Lonesome

During the late ’60s, a crack developed between long-haired country and the slicked-down variety. By a miracle of timing and talent, Willie Nelson slipped through it. Nelson was raised in the hardscrabble honky-tonks of central Texas and wrote hit songs for Music Row before reinventing himself as an outlaw megastar. In Willie Nelson, music writer Joe Nick Patoski captures the breadth of a career that long ago passed into legend.

Patoski writes extensively about the Texas music scene and has covered Willie since 1973. His book, compiled from oral histories, interviews and previously published work, is biblical in both length and tone. For Patoski, Willie is a super-Texan with Christ-like powers of reconciliation.

Growing up in tiny Abbott, Texas, Willie was raised on the music of the church and the dancehall. According to Patoski, Abbott’s segregated practices were lost on the Nelson siblings, who were equally enamored of black sacred music, Mexican conjuntos, Czech polkas and Texas swing. “The young [Willie Nelson] didn’t think the Czechs or the Mexicans or the Negroes were any different from his people,” he writes.

When Austin became a hippie enclave during the ’70s, Willie embraced the movement’s peaceful aesthetic while maintaining ties to the old school thugs and “entrepreneurs” for which central Texas is famous—usually with longtime drummer (and enforcer) Paul English watching his back. With a determined attitude but no particular plan, says Patoski, Willie “left the distinct impression that he hovered above the fray, laughing and singing, articulating a simple message: Whatever Happens Happens.”

But this characteristic sense of detachment hadn’t been much use earlier, especially not during Willie’s Music Row stint in the ’60s. In a section of particular interest to Nashville music fans, Patoski documents Willie’s alliances with like-minded souls such as famed songwriters Hank Cochran and Roger Miller. Despite writing such hit songs as Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” however, Willie’s laissez faire methodology was no match for the hands-on production techniques of studio heads Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins. Willie’s great gift was songwriting, but his true love was partying and making music with the “Family” (as his band, crew and hangers-on are known). And in 1972, there was no better place for that than Austin, Texas.

“The new [Austin] culture welded the hedonistic attitudes of the hippie lifestyle (drugs and sex, especially) onto the body of a Texas redneck,” Patoski writes. Willie fit right in with Austin screw-ups such as Jerry Jeff Walker and Doug Sahm, whose scattershot careers were benefiting from the new Texas hip. Audiences were tired of the cleaned-up country coming out of Nashville and Los Angeles—and Willie, Waylon and the boys were the perfect antidote.

This outlaw image translated to the big screen. With records like Stardust and Waylon and Willie topping the country and pop charts, Patoski documents Willie’s appearances in The Electric Horseman and Honeysuckle Rose. True to form, Willie hooked up with Amy Irving, his co-star in the latter movie, despite her engagement to movie mogul Steven Spielberg.

Throughout the book, Patoski describes a man who’s relentlessly positive. Even during his well-publicized troubles with the IRS, Willie spun crap into gold, releasing IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories, a stripped-down, sad record that many consider to be a masterwork. In debt, Willie still paid the record’s participants first. The smiling singer was featured on its cover, sporting a shirt that read, “Shit Happens.”

Despite these saint-like descriptions, Patoski doesn’t shy away from Nelson’s darker side. Willie married four women but didn’t remain faithful for long. When he drank too much (before discovering marijuana), his domestic disputes sometimes got physical—with the singer usually on the losing end. His struggle with stardom is well documented, also. As his growing crowd of friends, family and business associates make increasingly unreasonable demands, Willie can’t say no, remaining passive-aggressive at best.

The book’s language is off-the-cuff, which at times gets Patoski into trouble: “What the bean counters couldn’t see was a very small number of younger fans more attuned to rock than country who were getting hip to Willie’s trip,” for example, sounds hopelessly arcane. Despite the book’s length (or perhaps because of it), Patoski glosses over Willie’s career in the late ’90s and early ’00s. He allows 1998’s Teatro two mere sentences, even though the esoteric record, produced by Daniel Lanois, is one of Nelson’s most courageous projects. Still, for those more interested in struggle than payoff, Patoski’s detailed account of Willie’s unorthodox rise will be more than satisfying.

Willie Nelson depicts its subject in all his complexity—as a philanderer, devoted husband, farmer, rambler, entrepreneur, philanthropist, stoner Christian and cowboy Buddhist. An outsider’s insider who determinedly rows his own boat, Patoski’s Willie is a working-class hero as comfortable with the Hollywood elite as he is with the thousands waiting for autographs after his shows. Says Patoski, Willie is “one of the few people on earth to resolve the eternal contradiction of embracing the sacred and the profane with equal joy….”