JJ Live, with Stoke

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JJ Live 03:
with Stokely C. Green, on the Willie Nelson Thing

JJ: Today's conversational guest is my good friend Stoke, who is briefly here on his way to somewhere else. Welcome. I guess you heard about the Willie Nelson bust.

Stoke: Pound and a half of grass, little handful of 'shrooms.

JJ: The way I heard it, all five people on the bus claimed the dope was theirs, so no one person would be holding enough for a felony.

Stoke: Ain't no felony nohow, up to sixty pounds. Not to possess. Now if you possess with intent to distribute, that's a felony.

JJ: You amaze me.

Stoke: Some folks all bitter and sayin if he'd of been a regular person, specially if he'd of been a brother, they would have laid more than a lil ol possession rap on his ass.

JJ: And some commentators have mentioned the coincidence factor. All along, Willie has been supporting Kinky Friedman for governor of Texas, but apparently he hasn't said much in public, so far, about the decriminalization plank of his platform. But this incident occurred just after Willie Nelson talked about legalizing marijuana, in public and to the press.

Stoke: Ain't no big thing, like a surprise or nothin. You talkin bout a man on the cover of High Times magazine in livin color, havin a golf tournament for NORML, on they advisory board and all.

JJ: One thing I've always wondered - during the Carter administration, did Willie Nelson really smoke a joint on the roof of the White House?

Stoke: Don't know about that, but he surely did give that Chip Carter some grief about paraquat spray, told him pull his daddy's coat. Now, this little incident with Willie and his homies down in Louisiana, you know they ain't no such thing as bad publicity. Specially for a band got a new record out, with a big ol reefer leaf right on the front.

JJ: You're talking about the Countryman album - reggae, gospel and country.

Stoke: I love me some country music, if it got heart.

JJ: Heart is heart, no matter where you find it.

Stoke: Can't fake it, can't mistake it. You know, Johnny Rodriguez ast him "Hey Willie, how you write them songs?" Willie say, "Be honest, and make it rhyme."

JJ: I've heard that Johnny Rodriguez owes Willie a lot, in terms of getting his career started.

Stoke: He ain't the only one. Look at Charley Pride. Willie and his band playin this hall in Dallas, nothin but white faces ever been under them lights before, and here come Charley Pride up on stage for a jam. Them people sittin there lookin like, "What the fuck?" and ol Willie go up to Charley Pride and kiss him right on the mouth. Whoa! Wish I'da been there that day.

JJ: He was telling them it's okay to listen to a black country singer.

Stoke: Listen, hell. He sayin to Bubba it's all right to BE a black country singer. Black is beautiful, man.

JJ: You know what Ken Kesey said about Willie's music - he said, "You feel him court those redneck minds, and then his acid consciousness reaches right inside that redneck mind and adjusts a little thing that's out of whack and fixes it."

Stoke: Don't be talkin bout no redneck. Redneck is like the N word.

JJ: Not quite exactly, I don't think. I mean, it's okay to say Willie was the founder of Redneck Rock. It's legit to say he brought about the reconciliation of the rednecks and the hippies, and created the Cosmic Cowboy archetype.

Stoke: You know the big message? The one in capital letters? Every live gig where he ever do this one song, say, "he cried like a baby, and he screamed like a panther in the middle of the night" - and the crowd go apeshit. They cheerin, they whistlin, stompin on the floor with them pointy-toe boots, and you know what for? Here go a badass outlaw hero, tellin these Southern boys a man can cry. Don't mean he got to do it every day. Don't mean he got to do it all out in front of God and everbody. But he can do it. Might be the first and only time them macho gringos ever hear that concept.

JJ: With a live audience, another insane moment comes on the first note of "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." Not on the first word, or the first musical phrase. No, the very first note and they freak out. I was at a show Willie did back in the Seventies, in a little place called Floore's Country Store in Helotes, Texas. The stage wasn't much higher than the ground. There was this - the only thing you could call it would be a ritual. Somebody in the crowd would hand Willie his Stetson or his gimme cap, and Willie would wear it for a couple of minutes and then swap it for another person's hat and wear that for a while. Somebody would pass Willie a longneck and he'd take a swig and hand it on to one of the other musicians, and then it would go back out in the audience. I mean he had that physical bonding thing down. A whole lot of people went home that day with something Willie touched.

Stoke: I used to have me one of them "Honk if you love Willie Nelson" bumper stickers on my guitar case. They had a movement in Texas to name a state highway after him, and the state senate re-named the Fourth of July, called it Willie Nelson Day. People in Texas believe when they die, they go to Willie's house.

JJ: The thing is, we don't have to die to go to Willie's house. The Fourth of July picnics are Willie's house. In that space, Willie's family creates a home, in a way that only the Dead and a few other bands have managed to do. And there might be other country stars, or other bands, that have played more benefits, but not many. He's always into something. Farm Aid is probably the best known, but this biodiesel thing is very promising.

Stoke: You got that shit right. Land of the free be jonesin for that A-rab oil. Man got a program to put fuel in the tanks and employ the farmers, that man is the genuine American Hero same as any grunt over there in the land of the sand.

JJ: We're always hearing about these miscellaneous good deeds, like an emergency airlift of food to a reservation in trouble.

Stoke: His first old lady a Cherokee. Willie come home all drunk one night and fell on the bed, she sewed up the sheets around him tight and then whomped on him with a broomstick.

JJ: Which may be why he said, "Anyone who underestimates a woman now is making a mistake. I don't underestimate a woman one bit." It seems to me that not only would a feminist have a hard time finding something to dislike about Willie Nelson, but almost anyone would. Why do people relate to him so easily?

Stoke: He done fucked up, and he been fucked over. Willie trimmed trees and raised hogs and sold door-to-door. How many songs he sell for a hundred, two hundred dollars, and then everbody and they cousin come along and record it and make a million? He was in the studio backin up some singer, makin a record called "What Can You Do To Me Now?" when his house burnt up. He made it home just in time to pull out the guitar case full of primo Colombian weed.

JJ: Unfortunately, the tapes of hundreds of unrecorded songs went up in smoke. That's the kind of tragedy some people never recover from.

Stoke: Willie come a long way from pickin cotton. He be out there with the cullud field hands, and them people sing when they work just like in slavery days. He tune in to that race music and that Tex-Mex sound. Played the blues with the brothers in the dives in Fort Worth and Houston. Musicians say he work like a jazz man. Rolling Stone reporter say he the closest thing to Ray Charles the white race ever produce. Just not too long ago Willie made a record with some young kid call hisself L'il Black. It sound lame, but both they heart in the right place. "On the Road Again" in rap. You believe that shit? Website say, "permanently out of stock - do not order."

JJ: I'd rather have Milk Cow Blues anyway. That's a collaboration with B.B. King, Dr. John, Keb' Mo', Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and a bunch of others I can't recall at the moment. It was a great day for music when Willie went back to Texas. They say he could have been the king of Nashville, but he didn't have the stomach for it.

Stoke: Willie got a attitude all his own. One time he got a birthday card from fifteen hundred inmates at the state penitentiary in Missouri. Went there and played a show for free. They made him a honorary convict.

JJ: Do you suppose that's where the "outlaw" label came from?

Stoke: Naw. Willie born a outlaw. It come with the cream. It don't mean breakin the law, necessarily. More like a all-round life philosophy. One time the band was booked for a fair in California. Found out the bureaucrats had bought up all the reserved seats before anybody else had a chance at them tickets. Willie say, happy trails to you, and have y'all fair without the Willie Nelson Family.

JJ: In one interview, he said a so-called outlaw is just someone who "knows what he wants and isn't always going to go along with everybody else's program."

Stoke: Course that don't mean they ain't no law-breaking at all. They say before he joined up with Willie, the drummer used to make ten times as much at his sideline than he did onstage in the clubs.

JJ: The band does have a reputation for rolling up the most potent buds on the planet. A photographer I know talks about the "burn 'em down" tradition. When somebody with a camera or a notebook comes around, the band considers it a duty to get them so loaded they forget all about whatever it was they came to do.

Stoke: Ol Willie used to teach Sunday School at the Baptist church, but the preacher shut him down, said he wouldn't have no honky tonk man teachin Sunday School, not even to grownups.

JJ: But the people in his class were the same ones he'd been playing music to the night before. They call him "Saint Willie" and "The Guru with a Will of Iron." Mickey Raphael has been traveling and performing with him for years, and he says Willie never even had a bad thought. Kris Kristofferson said it's like being around Buddha, that Willie radiates such a positive attitude, you get a contact high and find yourself being a better person somehow.

Stoke: When somethin go wrong, Nora Jones mama say "What would Willie do?" just like other folk say "What would Jesus do?" One thing I been told, he do a lot more listenin than talkin.

JJ: That seems kind of strange for somebody who's supposed to be a wise man.

Stoke: A closed mouth gathers no feet.

JJ: You hear about physical healings, and marriages saved, all kinds of amazing tales about miracles attributed to Willie. There's a story Kinky Friedman tells, he was on the edge of some kind of meltdown, he went to Willie and said "Am I crazy?" Willie told him, "Take it from me, if you ain't crazy, there's something wrong with you." You hear about him after a show, when everybody else has gone somewhere else to party, he's hanging around the stage door still talking to a midget or a lady on crutches.

Stoke: They say he got a lawyer friend used his lyrics for evidence in a trial. Some construction worker got hurt real bad. Lawyer tells them the words to a song Willie wrote called "Half a Man." "If I only had one arm to hold you….." Jury get out they handkerchiefs.

JJ: There's a great quote from his ex-wife Connie. "I've seen Will so tired he can't go any further. Then someone will ask one more thing from him and he'll do it. He doesn't ever want anybody to think that success has changed him."

Stoke: Another thing you hear about Willie is, he pay his band and his support crew better'n any other star in country music. But them guys stuck with him through the thin days, when there wasn't no paycheck in it. And he lets his appreciation show. When somebody else on stage doin his solo, Willie just stand there drinkin it in, soakin it up, lookin like a mooney-eyed groupie.

JJ: This bust in Louisiana, supposedly one of the troopers said they didn't take the musicians in because the jail was full.

Stoke: Word up! Every incarcerational institution in America got three, four mofos crammed into what supposed to be a place for one.

JJ: Somebody else said, "Maybe the state trooper grew a heart."

Stoke: Uh-huh. And maybe pigs fly.

JJ: Maybe the state trooper is - and I have to interject here, this is my least favorite cliché' - but maybe this officer is sending a message. Quite a few law enforcement professionals, and especially a lot of retired law enforcement professionals, perhaps because they don't have so much to lose….

Stoke: You want to wake me up when you come to the point?

JJ: A lot of those people are saying the War on Some Drugs is bullshit.

Stoke: Thanks, man.

JJ: Some people say celebrities are singled out and picked on, and made an example of. Others complain that celebrities are sacred cows who never have to pay for their misdeeds. And probably both views are correct, depending on the circumstances. But I can't see the point of objecting because it looks like Willie and his friends got off easy. Give the guy a break, he's 73 years old, that's way past the age of consent. And if he did get off easy, so what? He's already been through plenty of adversity. The IRS took everything he had. His friends went to the auction and bought as much of his stuff as they could and gave it back to him.

Stoke: However much the government think he owe them, it's chump change stacked up against what the corporations and politicians rip off, every day the Lord sends. But the point ain't "they shouldn't ought to hassle Willie Nelson" because he famous or rich or old. In front of the law, everybody equal. Move on, people, let's get to the root of the issue. Point is, if a man can smoke dope fifty years and still do what Willie Nelson do, what exactly is the fuckin problem?

JJ: Thanks, man. I hope you'll come back again.

Stokely C. Green is a Professor of Ethnomusicology and a MacArthur Fellow

Stoke drawing: Dr. Agon