Willie Nelson's Letters to America by Willie Nelson

Author:Willie Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Horizon
Published: 2021-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

I’D HAVE TO BE CRAZY

It’s only natural for show-business careers to go up and down. It took me thirty years and fifteen studio albums to become an overnight success, and that was probably a good thing. Sometimes when a young act goes from drawing a hundred to a thousand to a hundred thousand, the temptations to go crazy can be hard to avoid.

We’d also been through years of touring, where you had to be tough not to get hustled or robbed or thrown in jail. Some of my favorite tour and event producers were basically thieves and criminals, but they worked for me, and as long as they didn’t steal too much and left enough for me and the band, that was okay because that made them my thieves and criminals.

Gino McCoslin was a piece of work who loved to oversell a show. I confronted him once when he sold twice as many tickets as people could fit into the Sportsman’s Coliseum in Dallas. Gino just shrugged and said, “Hell, the airlines do it all the time.”

One of Gino’s favorite tricks was to put a sign on the exit that said “Bathroom.” People would go out of the venue by mistake, then he’d charge ’em to get back in. Much of the business was done in cash, and as the band started drawing bigger crowds, the amount of cash got bigger too. My friends Scooter and Bo Franks have been selling my T-shirts since the beginning of time, and that started as an all-cash business.

When you carry lots of cash, you’re a target to get robbed. When the band is meeting lots of pretty girls, they prefer to not get accosted by a jealous boyfriend the next time we play the town. There was no shortage of guns on our tour. After a show at Birmingham Coliseum, I heard a gun battle going off right outside the bus. I didn’t know what was going on, but I decided to try to keep the peace. When the troublemakers saw me step off the bus wearing cutoffs and tennies, with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers, the problems seemed to melt away.

We were called Outlaws, a term that added considerably to the wild and crazy factor, but we also were playing the long game. We learned the hard way that if our buses stayed in town after the show, the band would party all night and pay the price the next day. So we took a different approach and left the show soon after it was over. By the time the crowd was looking for us to party, we were rolling down the highway.

It also helped that cocaine was banned from our tour. Coke will make you crazy and make you do crazy things, and my rule was, “If you’re wired, your fired.”

That doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun. As the crowds got bigger and bigger, we partied more on golf courses than we did in bars. And we partied onstage, pulling out all the stops for tens of thousands of wild and wonderful, dancing Willie Nelson fans.

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