On a winding stretch of road 30 miles west of Austin, a couple of miles down from a hamburger shack and an auto-repair shop, there's an iron gate with the image of a cowboy silhouette. Type in a key code and ride up a steep, muddy incline surrounded by oaks, cedars and patchy grass. After a left turn at a barn, you will enter a ghost town: a
Willie Nelson built Luck, Texas, on a corner of his 700-acre Hill Country property for his
1986 cowboy film
Red Headed Stranger. Nelson wanted the movie to come out a decade earlier, at the same time as his classic album of the same name, but then Robert Redford, who was supposed to star in it, dropped out and Hollywood lost interest. Nelson, who had dreamed of owning an Old West town since he was a young Roy Rogers fan, pushed forward, despite the fact that he owed the government millions in taxes. He raised money with the help of investor friends. He cast his family and band in the movie, and enlisted University of Texas architecture students to build Luck. The movie originally called for the town to burn down, but Nelson had the ending changed.
"Oh, we never were going to tear it down," Nelson says in a low, husky twang as he drives a '94 Chevy through Luck on a clear, blue winter morning, before letting out a heavy cough. "We wanted to get all the movie money we could and then get them out of town!"
Today, Luck is one of the last standing Western film sets in the country, though "standing" may be an overstatement: The planking has fallen off a barn that houses a John Deere tractor, the imitation rock has almost completely peeled off the bank, and the post office has almost collapsed entirely. When the town's architect returned recently, he thought it needed to be bulldozed.
The ranch and surrounding area are known to locals as Willie World. Nelson also owns Pedernales Cut-N-Putt, a nine-hole course you can see from his house. Next to that is a recording studio, and condos for friends, family and longtime crew members. Poodie's Hilltop Roadhouse, a burger joint full of old Nelson posters and stage props, opened by his late stage manager Poodie Locke, is down the road on Highway 71; Nelson has been known to drop by for a surprise set. Drive to downtown Austin, and you'll find the new Willie Nelson statue on Willie Nelson Boulevard.
With his youngest kids, Lukas and Micah, grown up and out of the house, Nelson spends his rare nontouring days driving around, listening to his Sirius XM station, Willie's Roadhouse, sometimes going off-roading and carving out paths. "I've thought I was going to die a few times with him in the truck," says his daughter Paula. "He's like a kid, doing the whole cowboys-and-Indians thing. It's his playground."
Today, Nelson is wearing a black hoodie, sunglasses and dirty New Balance sneakers, his semibraided hair tumbling out of a black baseball cap that says ZEKE'S SOCIAL CLUB. He steers his Chevy through the property with sharp, jagged turns, occasionally lighting up a burned-out joint in a cup holder. At one point, he stops the truck and singles out a stable: "I have a sick horse in there – we tried to isolate him from the herd a little bit," he says. "This is just old, rough country. A lot of room to drive around, a lot of privacy. I like Texas."
We pull up next to a rickety building in the center of town with a sign reading WORLD HEADQUARTERS LUCK, TEXAS. The musty wooden interior is packed with dominoes and poker and pool tables; Nelson frequently hosts Texas Hold 'Em games with a group of local musicians and businessmen. The walls are covered with novelty signs (OLD MUSICIANS NEVER DIE – THEY JUST DECOMPOSE; FOR A GOOD TIME CALL MATILDA: SHE GIVES DISCOUNTS). There's a WILLIE NELSON FOR PRESIDENT 2008 sign, posters advertising his famous Fourth of July picnics, which he's mostly hosted in Texas every year since 1973. Behind the bar are fan paintings and photos of Nelson with old friends – the late moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, Doug Sahm, singer-author Kinky Friedman – and a live shot of Johnny Cash. "He used to call me for jokes in the middle of the night – 'What's the latest?'" Nelson says.
He fires up his coffee maker, then reaches into a 1950s-style Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox packed with loose green pot and pulls out a tightly wrapped, torpedoshaped joint. He takes a slow hit, holding it in as he looks at a mounted cow's skull near the fireplace. Next, he produces a vaporizer pen. "Do you ever smoke these?" he asks. "It's just pot – no smoke, no heat. You can smoke 'em on the plane!"
Nelson has been arrested at least four times on marijuana offenses. In Waco, Texas, in 1994, police found him asleep in his Mercedes on the side of the road, a joint on him, after a late poker game. In Louisiana in 2006, en route to Texas Gov. Ann Richards' funeral, Nelson's bus was pulled over and police seized 1.5 pounds of weed and two ounces of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Four years later, he was driving back from Thanksgiving in California when the border patrol arrested him in Sierra Blanca, Texas. ("He feels great – he said he lost six ounces!" joked his harmonica player Mickey Raphael at the time.) "They mostly want autographs now," Nelson says of the law.
"They don't really bother me anymore for the weed, because you can bust me now and I'll pay my fine or go to jail, get out and burn one on the way home. They know they're not stopping me.
"Weed is good for you," he says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel – there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Abruptly, he changes the subject. "Wanna ride around a bit?"
Nelson turned 81 in April. He can be forgetful – in concert, he sometimes needs to look over at Raphael, a veteran of his band for more than 30 years, to see if they've played "Georgia on My Mind" or some other song yet ("But I think that's the dope more than anything," says Raphael). His hearing is shot, and he no longer signs as many autographs as he used to. But he still practices tae kwon do and sleeps on the Honeysuckle Rose, his 40-foot-long biodiesel-fueled tour bus, while the rest of the band check into hotels. At one point on the ranch, when he stops to show off his favorite paint horse, Billy Boy, he easily hoists himself up to the secondhighest fence rung, balancing about four feet off the ground.
Willie spends about 150 days a year on the road – two weeks on, two weeks off – playing many of his 20 Number One country hits, plus the church and gospel songs of his youth and favorites by heroes like Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell. Nelson is one of the last living links to the days when country pioneers like Hank Williams played barn dances and ruled the radio. He's an innovator who brought different strains of music, from gypsy jazz to hippie concept albums, to Nashville. He has sold more than 40 million albums and has put out 16 in the past decade alone, projects ranging from the Western swing of his youth to reggae and pop standards. His new album, Band of Brothers, which contains some of his most reflective songs in decades, is his first Number One album on the country charts in 28 years. It often sounds like a tour diary: "I've Got a Lot of Traveling to Do" is about turning to weed and the road to escape turmoil at home, and the soulful "I Thought I Left You" is about scanning a guest list for a former lover's name ("Why, in heaven's name, can't you just get lost?" he sings). "There's a little truth in all of them," he says.
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He's an uncanny vocal phraser: "The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson," said the late producer Jerry Wexler. "The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they're going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It's some kind of musical miracle."
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. "The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers," says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, "Oh, why does a guy write? I don't know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it." Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, "a bit of a mystery." "He's really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you're talking about," says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. "You're like, 'Fuck, Willie, answer the question!' There's a lot of exterior there. That's why you'll never quite fully get that picture."
"You never get to know him like you should, but you know there's more there than what you're seeing," says Loretta Lynn. "I know there's more there because of how he writes. He can't fool me!"
"He's a hard man to know," Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. "He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn't talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him."
'Say hi, Will," says his wife, Annie, turning her iPhone toward him. Inside their home, she's FaceTiming with some relatives in Italy. "How ya doin'?" Nelson says with a wave. They ask how his shoulder is feeling after a recent surgery. "Much better, thank you!"
Nelson has been recovering from a torn rotator cuff. "I couldn't play golf, and I could barely play guitar," he says. His friend George Clooney recommended a German treatment called Regenokine. "The doctor took some blood out and recharged it and made it with, like, 150 percent more healing power, then he stuck it back in there," he says. "It really works. I'm in great shape."
Nelson met Annie, 54, when she was working as a makeup artist on the set of his 1986 made-for-TV movie Stagecoach; she would become his fourth wife and longest marriage by far. "She's been with me through thick and thin – you can't ask for anything more than that!" he says.
Friends credit her with keeping Nelson healthy (they bike and swim at their second home in Maui, and he's cutting back on bacon). She also helped reduce his payroll. "There were a lot of people sponging off him, even though he didn't look at it that way," says Johnny Bush, Nelson's close friend and the writer of "Whiskey River." "They lived in the condos and at the world headquarters; there were trailers all over the place. And, of course, Willie wasn't going to tell them to leave."
Located up the hill, past a second gate, is Willie and Annie's Texas home, a modest, rustic log cabin modeled after turn-of-the-century smokehouses. The kitchen overlooks a giant barnlike living room, with tall ceilings and cedar beams. On a grand piano next to several guitars, there's a family portrait from the Nineties of the couple with Lukas and Micah, who frequently play music on tour with their dad. ("I've been hearing my licks come back better than they went out," says Nelson.) Next to a Hank Williams bobblehead is a minireplica of Nelson's Austin statue, a figure with a big grin, pigtails and hefty arms, clutching Trigger, his trademark acoustic. "What can you say?" Nelson says. "The sculptor may have exaggerated some points, but I'd say it's how I'd like to look."
He offers to show me his seconddegree tae kwon do belt, and takes me into his bedroom, which has a plastic dresser full of socks and colorful Hawaiian shirts that he wears in Maui. "He's working on a third black belt, but he's kind of cheating," Annie says. He laughs. "I cheated on these!" he says. "If you want my honest opinion, I think it's kind of political. Every [martial arts] school wants theirs to be the best. I'd do the same thing if I could get someone with a name to come in."
We walk across the driveway to what Nelson calls Django's, a small log cabin where he spends most of his time. A baseball bat sits by the door; Al-Jazeera plays with the volume off on the flatscreen, while a liberal talk-radio show blares in the back of the room. There are shelves of books – books about the history of the Middle East, a book of sketches by Julian Schnabel and a Django Reinhardt songbook. Reinhardt has long been Nelson's favorite guitarist; he has been taking lessons lately, learning some of the jazz great's techniques from a teacher in Maui.
"Wanna see the arsenal?" Nelson says with a grin, using a loose piece of wood to pry open a wooden cabinet. "I couldn't get in here if I needed to," he says. He picks up a knife engraved with his face, an old sawed-off shotgun and a double-barreled rifle inscribed with the lyrics to "Red Headed Stranger" (a gift from Connie, his third wife), then takes out a .22-caliber rifle with a scope. "This one's pretty cool," he says, curiously peering down the barrel for several seconds. He has trouble fitting it back in the cabinet, so he forces it in, repeatedly banging it against the wood, with the barrel nearly touching his face, as I look on uneasily.
He settles into the couch, which is cluttered with free weights, some old black-and-white promo photos waiting to be signed and a Bible ("It puts some positive thoughts in your head when you might be thinking negative," he says). On the coffee table, there is a chessboard obscured under a CIA baseball cap, rolling papers, a grinder and an ashtray full of joints. "Might as well do some puffin'," he says.
As a kid growing up in Abbott, Texas, a hundred miles from here, Nelson would go down to the town's general store and play dominoes, the only kid in a group of fully grown farmers. "The older guys loved him," says his sister Bobbie, 83, who has toured with Nelson full time for the past four decades. "He'd hang out with the old guys and the young ones. People always just migrated toward him, the same way they do now."
But at home, he didn't have it easy. His parents, Ira and Myrle Nelson, got married when they were 16 and 15, respectively; Bobbie came a year after that, followed two years later by Willie. Six months after his birth, his parents split and his mother left for the West Coast, eventually settling in Washington. "Myrle was smart, flashy, full of energy . . . a dancer and a card dealer," Willie once wrote. "My mother could never have stuck it out as the wife of a Fort Worth mechanic on weekends." ("Willie is very much like our mother," says Bobbie.)
Ira left the kids with his parents, Will, a blacksmith, and Nancy, who picked cotton and gave singing and music-theory lessons at their house in exchange for food and secondhand clothes. By the time they were each six, Bobbie was playing piano and Willie was learning chords to spirituals like "The Great Speckled Bird" from his grandfather. Willie was already showing signs of talent; his first-grade teacher made a visit to their house after he aced a poetry assignment. "She said, 'You know, this is really unusual, his ability to write poems,'" says Bobbie.
That same year, the family was shaken again when Willie's grandfather died of pneumonia after suffering an allergic reaction to a medication. There was talk of splitting up the kids between their parents, or putting them up for adoption until their grandmother gained custody. In his 1988 autobiography, Nelson wrote, "I hadn't even had time to grieve for the loss of a mother and daddy, much less my grandfather. Our separation from Mother and Daddy seemed worse than a death because they were still out there in the world."
Willie spent his nights listening to his family's Philco radio – especially Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, discovering the fiddle-steeped country of Hank Snow, Roy Acuff's quavering heartbreak ballads and the wild, electric, jazz-flavored honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours. Willie also sat with his sister as she learned the complex pop songs of the time. "I'd be trying to figure out what the hell was going on in 'Stardust' and 'Moonlight in Vermont,'" he says. "All those great songs have fantastic chord changes in them."
By the time he was nine, Willie and Bobbie were performing at open-air summer church revivals. At one revival, Bobbie met an older guy named Bud Fletcher, who put together a Bob Wills-style band. They married when she was 16, and she and her brother joined the group. Willie ended up becoming the de facto bandleader, singing and playing lead guitar. He was 14 years old. "The girls loved him," says Bobbie. "They were like a fan club of his that just was always there."
After turning 18, Nelson spent nine months in the Air Force during the Korean War before being honorably discharged for a bad back. He considered a career in business, briefly attending Waco's Baylor University ("I majored in dominoes"), before returning to the Texas honky-tonk circuit. At one gig, he met Martha Matthews, a pretty 16-year-old Cherokee brunette. They eloped three months later. The relationship produced three kids and "enough heartbreak to inspire most of the songs that got him elected to the Songwriter's Hall of Fame," their daughter Susie Nelson wrote in her book, Heart Worn Memories.
The family spent the Fifties traveling the country, looking for work. In Eugene, Oregon, Nelson was a plumber's assistant; in Fort Worth, Texas, he sold vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias door to door. He could be loose with the facts; he says he used the "negative approach" (opening line: "I'm not a salesman, and I can't sell you anything, so don't try to buy these books. . . . "). "You got your little story you tell, and you get your feet in the door and try to sell a set of books that costs more than their furniture," Nelson says. "I took a little pride in the challenge of knocking on the door and being able to talk my way into the house."
In San Antonio, he talked his way into a $40-a-week morning-disc-jockey job by saying he knew how to run the control board. That led to a position at Fort Worth's KCNC in 1954, where he capitalized on his position by bringing his guitar to work and playing his music between records by Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells and other stars. "I was promoting my shows on the radio," he says, and then breaks into character: "'I'll be playing Gray's Bar tonight in Fort Worth – y'all come over!' It helped both areas, you know?"
(At that point, Nelson had not yet developed a taste for weed. Johnny Bush remembers: "We were all passing it around before a gig. Willie drove up, and I said, 'Hey, you want some of this?' And he said, 'No. That shit gives me a headache.' Can you believe that?")
Nelson spent two years on the Houston nightclub circuit, where he managed to score a Top 10 country hit when the honkytonk singer Claude Gray covered Nelson's gospel song "Family Bible." (Nelson famously sold it to Gray for $100.) Then in 1960, he drove his Buick to Nashville, home of the Opry and several newly opened record labels. "I thought I had some good songs," he says, "and I knew Nashville was the store you went to sell them." The 27-year-old Nelson moved his family into a trailer park and used his Texas-nightclub connections to get in the door at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, a hangout for the city's top musicians. He became a regular at the back room's exclusive guitar jams, showing off songs like "Night Life," "Crazy" and "Funny How Time Slips Away" for pro songwriters including Harlan Howard, Roger Miller and Hank Cochran, who quickly helped him get hired at his publishing company, Pamper Music. At Pamper, Nelson would clock in weekday mornings and write songs like the offbeat ballad "Hello Walls," which became a Number One country hit for Faron Young in the spring of 1961. Ray Price, who was one of the biggest stars in Nashville at the time and a co-owner of Pamper, recorded "Night Life" – Nelson's diary of seedy bars and heartbreak – which became the title track of Price's Number One country album. "I thought it was more of a blues song, but it turned out great," Price said. Nelson also played bass in Price's band the Cherokee Cowboys. The two stayed close; when I spoke to Price two weeks before his death from pancreatic cancer, he said he and Nelson had spoken eight times that week. "We're sort of like brothers," Price said. "I lived with Hank Williams the last year of his life, and he was just like Willie. His secret was he could walk out onstage and just be himself, and that's what it's all about.
