Paul English, Willie Nelson's longtime drummer, has died. I had the pleasure of traveling with him for a few weeks in 2005, and here's an essay I wrote about the experience.
Riding With Willie (April, 2005)
Last night I slept on a bus parked in a gravel lot outside a large music venue in Ireland. I’m on a three-bus tour, in the UK and Ireland, opening shows for Willie Nelson. This tour includes a smoking bus, a non-smoking bus, and Willie’s bus, carrying Willie, his sister Bobbie, daughter Lana, and personal assistant David Anderson.
I’m on the non-smoking bus with my guitar player Thomm Jutz, Willie’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael, his bass player Bee Spears, and some of Willie’s non-smoking crew. The busses park diagonally side by side in the lot, two or three feet apart.
When we boarded after the show late last night, Willie’s guitar Trigger was lying on the couch in the front lounge. Thomm and I stared at it in silent awe. The most famous guitar on Earth was laying there unguarded, no case. Tunin’ Tom Hawkins, Willie’s guitar tech, walked up from the back of the bus smiling. “Trigger’s riding with us tonight. I gotta change the strings.” Tom picked up Trigger and handed it to me, “Wanna hold it?” I reached for it, held it in my hands for a moment, got scared, and put it down. Terrifying.
No way I was going to strum that instrument. I went back to staring at it.
Trigger’s neck is deeply sunken in in between each fret, (especially the first five). Waves of wood rise and fall where Willie’s fingers had gripped it for the last fifty+ years. The wear wasn't just directly under the strings, where most guitarists create little dugouts from constant play. Trigger’s frets were worn down all the way across the neck; a sign of how far Willie bends those La Bella black nylon strings.
I looked closely at the famous fist sized hole in the body below the high E string, and then peered inside the sound hole. A network of small internal wooden braces held the body together. Dozens of signatures were scratched into the front and back of the instrument: Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, members of Willie’s band, Kris Kristofferson, and several others, all fading into the old wood, the majority spreading into unreadable blurs.
Thomm Jutz, my guitar player, asked Tunin’ Tom if he could play it and got a yes. Thomm picked it up and strummed it. The cord sounded dissonant. He plucked a few riffs, same thing. The tones were off. Deep waves in the neck had made it impossible to play it in tune. Willie Nelson is probably the only person on Earth who can make Trigger sing. When Willie dies, Trigger is most likely headed to the Smithsonian. Future generations will see this iconic instrument in perpetuity - the maker of timeless American music loved by millions the world over.
The next day, I sat down next to Paul English in the catering area as he read the newspaper. Paul is Willie’s drummer of 39 years. The only drummer who has been with a band longer than Paul English is Charlie Watts, with The Rolling Stones. I sat down at his table on purpose, but Paul barely looked up a from under his tinted glasses and black cowboy hat. I could tell he just wanted to read the paper, but I somehow found the courage to talk to him. I managed to get a few stories out of him, and listened in amazement.
Paul told me that when they bought Trigger, they had to pay for it over time, $25 a month, for years. The purchase was a calculated risk, they had no idea if they'd ever be able to fully pay it off.
Then he talked about some shows they’d played in the ‘60’s, on a package show with 11 other acts, including Charley Pride and Kitty Wells. Paul said Charley Pride was the headliner, a HUGE country star at the time and could single handedly sell out the Houston Astrodome. But in Louisiana, they wouldn’t rent him a room at The Holiday Inn. Paul said he and Willie snuck Charley in through the back door of that hotel with a jacket over his head, and he shared a hotel room with Willie.
Like fellow musical giants Nat King Cole, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday and so many others, Charley Pride was subject to discrimination out on the road when segregation was the law of the land.
“Willie loved Charley, was one of his early champions. He had Charley’s back.” Paul said that tour was the backstory behind Willie’s song about him, Me and Paul.
"On a package show in Buffalo
With us and Kitty Wells and Charlie Pride
The show was long and we're just sitting there
And we'd come to play and not just for the ride
Well, we drank a lot of whiskey
So I don't know if we went on that night at all
But I don't think they even missed us
I guess Buffalo ain't geared for me and Paul"
******
The tour busses pulled out of the parking lot before sunrise, headed for the ferry to cross the Irish Sea to Liverpool. I woke up after three hours sleep when my bunk shook from highway motion. Sleeping on a moving bus is a skill I do not have. I opened my curtain and looked out the window. It was dark.
The show last night was like the two before, seven thousand reverently quiet, devoted Willie Nelson fans listening to every word as I played my 45-minute opening set. Thomm Jutz and a few members of Willie’s band, Billy English, Bee Spears, and Mickey Raphael joined me on stage. It felt like a dream, surreal, yet somehow weirdly destined, a déjà vu, familiar, but otherworldly.
I stood on the side of the stage listening to Willie's set, night after night. I knew every word of Willie's songs, every note. I’d listened to his records since I was a child. His music is literally a part of my being.
The bus turned off the highway, entered the ferry line, and the tour bus rolled into the belly of the boat and parked. Due to safety concerns, everyone is required to get up and out. The band and crew were waking up and putting on their jeans when I saw Willie leave his bus and head for the early morning breakfast line, alone. His daughter Lana soon followed behind him, with Bobbie Nelson on her arm. My eyes were burning as I got off the bus and onto the ferry, but I was in a good mood, on a natural high from playing in front of the three biggest audiences of my career.
I felt like I was living in a movie. I got into the breakfast line behind Willie. He ordered the Full English. So did I. He motioned to me to sit next to him to eat. He had me laughing and feeling comfortable, straight away. He sang me a couple verses of a song he’d just cut for iTunes -
”Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other”
“And I believe to my soul that inside every man there's the feminine
And inside every lady there's a deep manly voice loud and clear
Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he's done with his women
But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer”
The last verse was killer, something about “don’t fuck with the lady living inside the cowboys head.” There was a very drunk Irish guy staggering around the dining room while we were waiting in line. His clothes were rumpled, dirty, shirt un-tucked, shoes un-tied. His belt was loose and hanging. I heard someone in the kitchen say he’d been riding the ferry back and forth from Dublin to Liverpool all night, unable to find the exit when the boat docked. The crew found it funny and let him stumble around from deck to deck, trapped on the ferry as it went back and forth from Ireland to England.
As Willie talked, the drunk tottered towards us, rubbing his eyes like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, that the man sitting at the table in the dining area was actually Willie Nelson. He approached us with a wobble, and as he got closer, he burst into tears. He said, “Fucking bloody hell, its Willie Fucking Nelson, is it? Is it?” Willie looked up at him from his chair. Through his tears, the drunk asked Willie to go home with him, so his wife would believe that he’d really met him. I looked back at Mickey sitting at the next table behind us as if to ask should we do something to help? Mickey shook his head no. “Willie can hand handle this shit.”
Willie dug through his pockets for something to write on, pulled out a matchbook from his jacket, signed it, handed it to the drunk, and pleasantly dismissed him. The guy shoved the signed matchbook into his pocket in a crumpled mess, and walked away. Ended up in the corner of the dining room, on the floor, asleep. When he wakes up, at some point, he probably won’t have any idea how Willie Nelson’s autograph landed in his pocket.
.
Willie finished his breakfast. As he got up from the table he said, “Mary, I sure do like your songs. I’m glad to have you with us.” He paused. “You know, an artist’s first taste of success is a bitter thing, and you’ll want to spit it out on everyone”. He smiled, “Probably best not to.”
I thought of all the nights I'd played to more or less empty rooms. The nights I spent asking for a place to sleep from the stage at the end of the show. The myriad of rejections, humiliations and slights I’d experienced from the music business and people didn’t see any money in me.
I nodded. “Yea, yea. I hear you. Probably best not to.”
*****
At the party in the hotel bar in London after the last show of the tour,
I asked Willie, “Why do people love sad songs so much?”
I knew I may never have the chance to ask him that again, and his answer was important to me.
He said, “Well, I think they understand that if heartache, sorrows and troubles can happen to old Willie, they can happen to anyone. Everyone goes thru pain in this life, no matter who they are. Sad songs provide confirmation. It makes folks feel less alone knowing that I go thru the same struggles that they do.”
“Yea, yea.” I said. “That’s exactly it.
Sad songs make us feel less alone.
