May 9, 1997 - Art Bell
02:12:39
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| From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may be, across all these many, many time zones, stretching from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains with visions of dancing exotic ladies all the way across this great nation to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands. | ||
| Very similar visions there, south into South America, north all the way to Santa Country, actually to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet. | ||
| That's a lot, huh? | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast A.M. I'm Art Bell, and this morning, Willie Nelson is here. | ||
| So that's what's coming up. | ||
| All right, well, this should be interesting. | ||
| He lives, I think, more in his bus than he does in a big house that he's got somewhere, if I remember the 60 Minutes piece right. | ||
| And right now, I think he's in Atlantic City, New Jersey. | ||
| And he's Willie Nelson. | ||
| And Willie, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thanks, Art. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm doing real well. | ||
| My wife, just a few minutes ago, I do the show from home, Willie. | ||
| And before we went on the air, she said, well, the way you two guys feel about women, you ought to hit it off just fine. | ||
| Anyway, it's great to have you. | ||
| And I guess what I would like to know, Willie, is about you. | ||
| You know, I've achieved some success. | ||
| I'm 51 years old now. | ||
| Later in life, and people always think, you know, that it comes right away. | ||
| When did it come to you? | ||
| Honestly, when I first made a little money playing music, I felt like that I was successful. | ||
| I'd been doing a lot of hard work, like picking cotton and corn and baile and hay for a little money. | ||
| When I first went out and made $8 playing with this bohemian polka band when I was like nine years old, I figured that I'd hit the big time. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I've been a star ever since. | |
| So in other words, whenever you were working, as far as you're concerned, you were a star. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I felt like it. | ||
| People were coming up wanting my autograph. | ||
| And so even though it might have been just two people in six years. | ||
| Maybe I might ask it a different way. | ||
| When did the IRS figure out you were a star? | ||
| Well, let me see. | ||
| It took 14 years. | ||
| When they first decided that maybe they would check in and see how Willie was doing, it took 14 years from that date before they finally decided, well, let's go in and take what we can get. | ||
| But at that point, they said I owed them $32 million. | ||
| Yeah, $32 million. | ||
| $32 million. | ||
| I have to say it real fast. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| $32 million. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah, I saw the piece on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was good, by the way. | ||
| Did you enjoy doing that? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I really did. | ||
| Ed Bradley is a really nice guy, and all the guys who worked on, we did about three different sessions. | ||
| They came to FarmAid, and they came to a place down in Texas at Holotis, Texas, a place called John T. Flores' Country Store, and they came down and shopped the concert. | ||
| Yeah, I enjoyed it. | ||
| I'm going to tell you the truth, Willie. | ||
| I was never, my early years in radio, and I've been in it like 30 years, you know, spinning records early on, that kind of thing. | ||
| And I was into rock, and I was never a fan of country. | ||
| And one time, in a little California town in Santa Barbara, there was no other job available. | ||
| So I went and took a job as a country jock. | ||
| And I was like a fish out of water. | ||
| You know, I didn't know the music. | ||
| I didn't know anything. | ||
| And when I first got there, I hated it. | ||
| I hated it because I just didn't know the music. | ||
| But then a funny thing began to happen. | ||
| You know, as the months went by, I slowly and slowly and slowly began to say, you know, this is pretty good. | ||
| And then pretty soon I was really liking some of it. | ||
| And then I was really enjoying it. | ||
| And I thought, oh, God, what's happened to me? | ||
| I've completely changed. | ||
| And so it's just, it's like a matter of exposure. | ||
| After a while, I think it happens with nearly any good music. | ||
| It's like a fine wine, you know, once you acquire the taste. | ||
| Yeah, if you're exposed to it over a period of time. | ||
| That's what happened to me. | ||
| Every day I was exposed to it. | ||
| It finally got to where I was loving country, and there was all kinds of songs that I was enjoying. | ||
| And I'm kind of curious. | ||
| How did you even find out about me? | ||
| Well, we travel all the time, and most of our travels are after the show at night. | ||
| We normally will get on the bus and drive to the next town, which might be 400, 500, 600 miles away. | ||
| And Gator, the driver, listens to you all the time. | ||
| Thank you, Gator. | ||
| He's got you on, you know, and he's even got all your schedules, and he looks up where you are, I mean, on what frequency in this town, in that town. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so he got us all to listen to you. | ||
|
unidentified
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And now we're all big fans. | |
| I've got an email here I'd like to read you. | ||
| It says, Art, it's early Friday morning. | ||
| Sitting in my office listening to highwaymen, The Road Goes On Forever, and deep in reflection. | ||
| Asked Willie about playing at the Ferguson Unit, Texas Department of Corrections in 1974. | ||
| Due to a bout with juvenile insanity, I remember that myself. | ||
| I found myself there at Christmas time that particular year. | ||
| Willie and his sister Bobby played a concert there that made my situation tolerable. | ||
| Many years later, I got the opportunity to thank Bobby, but never did get a chance to thank Willie because he got off the stage quick in Mexia, Texas. | ||
| Art Willie has given a lot of his time and money just to brighten up those whose lives are, at least for the moment, somewhat less than positive. | ||
| Thanks, Willie, from Tim. | ||
| Do you remember doing that? | ||
| Yeah, I sure do. | ||
| We went down there. | ||
| It was a friend of ours that was serving some time down there, a guy named Sam Coleman. | ||
| We went down there to do a show for him and the other inmates down there. | ||
| There's might as well talk about it. | ||
| There's been a lot of women in your life, Willie. | ||
| There's been a few in mine. | ||
| What's your attitude after all this time about women in general? | ||
| You know, as you get older, you start to change your attitudes a little bit. | ||
| How do you feel about it? | ||
| No, no, I don't haven't changed my attitude at all. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No, that would never happen. | ||
| Then how would you describe it? | ||
| One of admiration. | ||
| Admiration, I feel exactly the same way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The first country person that I really met who I had a great deal of admiration for was Crystal Gale. | ||
| And I got to meet Crystal in Las Vegas a few months ago. | ||
| Got some pictures with her and stuff, and I'm so proud of that. | ||
| I've got it on the wall here. | ||
| She's a great, beautiful gal. | ||
| Oh, she certainly is. | ||
| And so I guess that's the right word. | ||
| I've got a lot of admiration for women, too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You're doing a lot of work for the American farmers. | ||
| What really is the situation now with a small family farmer? | ||
| I mean, things are really changing, aren't they? | ||
| Well, yeah, let me give you an example of what they once were. | ||
| We used to have over 8 million small family farmers, and this was like 40 years ago. | ||
| Now we're down to less than 2 million small family farmers, and we're losing 500 a week. | ||
| We had a couple of thousand black minority landowners and farmers left. | ||
| In a couple of years, there won't be any of those left. | ||
| Native Americans are losing land. | ||
| Everybody's losing land. | ||
| There's a big land grab going on. | ||
| That was what it was all about from the beginning, is to get the land. | ||
| A lot of the farmers were talked into, a lot of the young farmers just getting into it, were talked into at one point a few years ago when things were looking great overseas to plant from fence post to fence post, and they were encouraged to come in to the banker, the friendly banker who was going to loan them the money. | ||
| They needed maybe $5,000. | ||
| The banker would give them $20,000, right? | ||
| So then when it come due and they didn't have the money to pay for it, it wasn't the same friendly banker. | ||
| The land now belongs to the bank. | ||
| It's not the way it used to be where they'll give you more time. | ||
| Now they want the land. | ||
| The old friendly banker is gone. | ||
| Yeah, you think that was a large orchestrated movement? | ||
| Yeah, and it's still going on. | ||
| That's why we're still losing $500 a week. | ||
| That's why the farmer is not making enough money to make his payments. | ||
| That's how you take something away from somebody is to cut their income where they can't make their payments. | ||
| All right, we're a big country, and our country seems like it feeds a lot of the rest of the world. | ||
| These big corporate farms achieve some of that. | ||
| There are some people out there who always might say, if the small American farm, you know, family farm goes away, it won't affect them. | ||
| They'll continue to eat. | ||
| Why should the American people care? | ||
| First of all, you need someone on the land who loves the land. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| If you have someone there who feeds his family from the land, who drinks the water from the well, there's a good chance he will take better care of that soil than some big corporate conglomeration whose owners are somewhere in Spain on a boat or something. | ||
| They could give a damn less about what's happening to that soil. | ||
| Every civilization that's gone under in the past has gone under, for the inability to feed its people, soil erosion. | ||
| Now, the state of Iowa, in the last hundred years, has lost 50% of its topsoil. | ||
| So it doesn't take a great mathematician to figure it all out. | ||
| You know, you're right about that. | ||
| And I don't know how much you get a chance to hear, but there's some pretty horrible things going on in a lot of our waterways right now because of mass use of pesticides and other things that appeared to be activating organisms that are eventually not going to be real friendly to people at all. | ||
| Most farmers who had to use chemicals and pesticides have done it because their loaning institutes made them do it so that they would be sure to get enough yield per acre to make their loan payment back. | ||
| They didn't care that they were running the soil. | ||
| They didn't care anything about that. | ||
| No, they care about the bottom line. | ||
| The bottom line. | ||
| So what's happening is all the pesticides and all the chemicals that we've been putting on our lawns, golf courses, and farms, now a lot of it we saw going down the rivers, you know, headed toward the ocean. | ||
| Full of chemicals and pesticides going right back into the ocean, into our food chain again. | ||
| Yeah, there's some scary things beginning to happen, Willie. | ||
| there's this new organism that's about half plant half animal and it lies dormant apparently at the bottom of waterways and then when enough pesticides a lawyer Yeah, both bottom feeders. | ||
| Anyway, when enough of something awful gets to it, it activates, and it begins first killing the fish and the plankton, and then it has shown a definite desire for human blood as well. | ||
| So it's like we're doing it to ourselves, and I'm kind of worried That at some point we're going to go past the point of no return. | ||
| Yeah, we may have already. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| We may have already. | ||
| I don't like to seem real negative about things, and you always want to try and do what's right, but we may have gone too far already. | ||
| And I don't know how you turn it around. | ||
| I mean, industrial farming is increasing. | ||
| The small farmer is going away. | ||
| It's happening more and more and more. | ||
| How do you turn that around? | ||
| Now we have what they call factory farms, where you'll have 100,000 hogs in a small farm community. | ||
| Then you'll have 100,000 chickens laying a million eggs, and then you've got 10,000 cows. | ||
| It's not the way nature intended it, where a farm, you have a 200, 300-acre farm, and you have a little this, you have chickens, cows, hogs. | ||
| That's the way it's supposed to be, because that way the environment can handle it. | ||
| But when you put that much hog manure running off of small areas into land and water and supplies around small communities, it's a horrible situation. | ||
| I've gone to two, three maybe now, different places in the country where farmers and people who live next to these factories have called me and told me how horrible it was. | ||
| We go in there and we try to call attention to it. | ||
| In a lot of instances, in a couple of instances, we have got those factory farms closed, and in some instances we have them being sued or moved. | ||
| So it can be done, but it's a horrible way to treat the people, first of all, and then the land itself. | ||
| And then the animals themselves, that's an inhumane way to raise chickens, hogs, or cattle. | ||
| Well, that's a problem they're having down in North Carolina right now. | ||
| Very severe problem in North Carolina. | ||
| And Missouri and Nebraska. | ||
| I mean, it's everywhere it's happening, but in South Carolina, it's the limelight now. | ||
| The people down there are fighting it, and there's some great guys down there really working hard to keep it from happening, you know. | ||
| I got to presume, since you did this song that I love so much, The High One, God, I love that song. | ||
| Jimmy Webb wrote that song. | ||
| Jimmy Webb? | ||
| Jimmy Webb wrote that song. | ||
| And what got all of you, I mean, that's quite a collection of the big names, Whalen Jennings, you, Johnny Cash, Chris Christoffson. | ||
| What got you all together? | ||
| Well, it started out that John was doing a Christmas show in Switzerland. | ||
| And he had asked Whalen and me and Chris to come over and be on the show. | ||
| And, in fact, we were having our pictures made, a photo session, and the photographer asked Whalen, said, what are y'all going to Switzerland for to do a Christmas show? | ||
| And Whalen said, because that's where Jesus was born. | ||
| And the guy said, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And went on, you know, he never thought it. | ||
| But anyway, we went over there to do this Christmas show with John and June, and we had a lot of fun, and we decided maybe when John came back, he was going to do an album. | ||
| So he wanted me to go in and sing some songs with him. | ||
| So then we got in there, and Wayland and Chris showed up, Johnny Rodriguez, and we started recording. | ||
| The Highwayman, the lead song, that's about reincarnation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| I mean, how do you feel about that? | ||
| Well, I believe in that 100%. | ||
| I think that's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| You know, we're all going to school out here. | ||
| This is a university, and we're in a rather low grade at the moment. | ||
| Hopefully we'll graduate to higher grades. | ||
| But right now, everyone is going through, and everyone is in a different grade. | ||
| So as you progress and as you learn your lessons, I think you progress and you go on to other and do other things and become a better person or a better spirit wherever. | ||
| But I do believe in reincarnation. | ||
| I thought you might. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I'm real concerned about the grade level, as you pointed out, that we're at right now. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of seems like there's not much reverence for life out there anymore, and it's getting to be less, not more. | ||
| A lot of blank-eyed kids out there committing crimes. | ||
| You know, one of my favorite examples is when somebody used to go in to rob a 7-Eleven or something, they'd go in with a gun, say, give me your money, and the guy would give them the money and put it in a bag. | ||
| He'd go run, get in a car, and take off. | ||
| Now, they go in with a gun to rob 7-Eleven, say, give me your money, and they get the money and shoot the guy in the head as an afterthought and get in a car and drive away. | ||
| It's like nobody cares about life, or there are so many, there are fewer people now that care at all about life, theirs or anybody else's. | ||
| What is that from? | ||
| Why is our society changing like this? | ||
| Our values have changed. | ||
| You know, the do unto others, the golden rule, has sort of been forgotten. | ||
| So I think that's what's happened. | ||
| It's more like do unto others for they do unto you. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So how, you know, like, how do you fit working with farmers, doing that kind of work into the kind of schedule that you keep? | ||
| And I guess what is your schedule like anyway? | ||
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You're doing a show about every day or every other day or what? | |
| Well, we do a couple hundred shows a year, so we're out here a whole lot. | ||
| We listen to you a lot. | ||
| Well, what I'm asking is, how do you fit good work into 200 shows a year? | ||
| Well, I try to do a better show tonight than I did last year. | ||
| And tomorrow night, I'll try to do a better one than I did tonight. | ||
| In each town, it's different. | ||
| Each show is different. | ||
| You've got a different crowd. | ||
| You're in a different mood. | ||
| Everyone on the stage is a different person or 24 hours older. | ||
| So everybody's different. | ||
| So in order to get back to exactly where you were, close to where you were the night before, it requires, you know, it's a challenge. | ||
| So every day is a challenge to do as good as you can do. | ||
| I hear that. | ||
| Actually, I want to talk to you about that a little bit. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour, so just relax. | ||
|
unidentified
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You've got several minutes, and we'll be right back to you. | |
| Back down to Willie Nelson. | ||
| Willie. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Let's talk about performing a little bit because that's something at least I know about in a sense. | ||
| You know, I come on here and do this for five hours every night. | ||
| And what I found is, because I love what I do, 98 or 9% of the time, I come on and I do a show, and it's just like falling off a log. | ||
| I mean, all I do is come on there and have fun, and it comes naturally. | ||
| And then maybe about 1 or 2% of the time, it's hard. | ||
| And, you know, maybe I'm having a bad day or my biorhythm is not just right or something or another. | ||
| And you've got to push, you know, you've got to push to make it happen. | ||
| And then if I don't feel right after a program that I didn't do what I wanted to do, I beat myself up real hard mentally. | ||
| Is it like that for you? | ||
| Well, I really get a lot of energy from the show itself. | ||
| I feel like there's a huge energy exchange between the band, us, and the audience. | ||
| And I get charged up, they get charged up, and that stays with me. | ||
| I don't ever, ever go back to where I was because I'm going back to another spot tomorrow night. | ||
| But tonight I got in a place where I'd never been before. | ||
| I mean, it was a lot of energy there going back and forth, and I'm still charged up over it. | ||
| I had a great time. | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| But once in a while, once in a while, with 200 times every year, there's got to be a day when you had to push to do it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Some days it's work. | ||
| Some days it's work. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you never know when those days are coming. | ||
| That's the bad part. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They sneak up on you. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| Listen, in your interview on 60 Minutes, you revealed that you smoke pot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For years, I've said I thought pot ought to be decriminalized, legalized. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this fits right in with a small farmer because there's a lot of farmers right now down through, well, actually all over America, but in the mountains in the east, especially, that have grown pot. | ||
| I think it's the number one cash crop in California. | ||
| You know, I think it was the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago ran an article and said that if we were to legalize pot in all its forms, hemp, for use commercially in pot, the government would derive about $500 billion a year just from allowing that to occur. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| We could balance the budget in 20 minutes if you just passed the law where everyone could grow and every business that was hemp related could go ahead. | ||
| At one time, the American government encouraged our farmers to grow hemp even after they made it illegal back in 1937 by throwing it in with a lot of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. | ||
| When they did that, they made it illegal and then nobody could use it. | ||
| And the doctors who had been using it had been calling it cannabis. | ||
| So they were upset when they heard that marijuana and cannabis was the same thing. | ||
| When they made marijuana illegal, they also made cannabis illegal. | ||
| So the doctors who had been prescribing various medicines using cannabis now had to quit. | ||
| And then, what did our government do? | ||
| I'm in, what, seventh or eighth grade and I've been in school and the war is breaking out. | ||
| And all of a sudden we're out in the gymnasium making rope out of hemp. | ||
| They made it legal again and they encouraged our farmers to grow hemp for the war. | ||
| And so we do have rather a double standard on the issue. | ||
| It's all politics. | ||
| If there wasn't so much competition, if hemp didn't replace so many things that I think are bad for the country or for the land itself, the petrochemicals that we have, you know, when petrochemicals came along, when plastics came along, they replaced everything that was being made by hemp. | ||
| From cellophane to dynamite, the first Levis in this country was made out of hemp. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, the paper that the Declaration of Independence was written on was made out of hemp paper. | ||
| Yep, that one I knew about. | ||
| The sails on the ships that sailed around the world were made out of canvas. | ||
| That's where the word canvas comes from. | ||
| Our covered wagons were made out of canvas. | ||
| This is a great product. | ||
| It's a very strong, durable product, but it's also competition to other textiles. | ||
| So the paper industry didn't want marijuana made legal because hemp is a big competitor to the tree, the wood industry. | ||
| The William Randolph Hearst people who own millions of acres of trees all over the world wanted to make marijuana illegal because one acre of hemp is equivalent to four acres of trees. | ||
| You can take the biomass from hemp and you can build houses with it. | ||
| You can do everything, make paper out of it. | ||
| Everything you were doing out of our trees and the rainforest could be done and used to be done with hemp. | ||
| Well, so then why are we so far out of our minds that we're allowing these industrial interests and politicians with their agenda to stop this? | ||
| I mean, we're really out of our minds. | ||
| Of course we are. | ||
| And I think that there's a few positive things that have been happening. | ||
| California and Arizona came with some initiatives that passed, and the people there are beginning to really snap to what's going on in the big conspiracy over the last 50 years, the wool that they pulled over everyone's eyes, just to Protect the petrochemical industry. | ||
| Everything that was made out of hemp is now being made out of plastic. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I guess that's a lot of money. | ||
| You know, I sort of figured years ago, I remember they sort of toyed with the idea of legalizing marijuana, and then we had several Republican administrations, and marijuana got lumped right back in there with all the other hard drugs. | ||
| And I always thought, Willie, that was the most dangerous thing in the world because some little kid somewhere, 12, 13 years old, smokes a joint. | ||
| He finds out he doesn't go out on a rampage. | ||
| He finds out his brain is not fried eggs. | ||
| He finds out he was lied to. | ||
| And so then, this little guy, lied to once, finds it pretty easy to try the next thing up the ladder. | ||
| And then he's in trouble. | ||
| I'm sure that's happened just because he was lied to and he couldn't believe what he'd been told anymore. | ||
| Yeah, so somebody lines out some Coke for him and away he goes, you know, and that's that. | ||
| Yeah, and I really believe it's wrong for a parent to stand there with a cigarette in your hand and a drink of whiskey in your hand and tell kids to put that joint down. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's something, I mean, there's people dying all over the world from cigarettes and alcohol, and nobody yet has ever died from smoking pot. | ||
| I believe that actually is accurate. | ||
| That really is accurate. | ||
| Nobody's died. | ||
| No, unless a bale of it fell on them or something. | ||
| If it were legalized, wouldn't that do an awful lot for the small farmer? | ||
| It absolutely would. | ||
| It would open up so many new ways for this guy to make it. | ||
| I mean, they've done nothing but take ways away from him now. | ||
| Kentucky used to be the greatest hemp-growing state that we had. | ||
| And when you took that away from the farmers, now they started growing tobacco, but if they were allowed to grow hemp, they could make so much more money. | ||
| Well, as I said, there were a number of Republican administrations, and I kind of figured, and I think a lot of other people figured, first time we got a Democrat in office, probably he would legalize or decriminalize pot. | ||
| But then we've got this President Clinton who, I think, puffed, but didn't inhale or whatever it is, and it seems like he got himself stuck in a position where he can't make any moves politically. | ||
| I'd give anything if he didn't inhale. | ||
| You think it'd be a different country right now? | ||
| I think it'd be. | ||
| Oh, well. | ||
| So maybe it'll happen eventually. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What it takes, I think, is people speaking the truth about it and combating the image that they put on TV and everywhere else, and at least telling the truth. | ||
| That's all I ask, is tell the truth. | ||
| Well, you know, it's such a politically suicidal issue. | ||
| Politicians believe that they don't want to take a stand on it. | ||
| That's the reason that I'm sure our president didn't admit that he might have inhaled, because at the time he felt like it might have cost him an election. | ||
| And there's a lot of other politicians out there who would not come out of the closet for the same reason. | ||
| They don't want to lose voters. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And it's being really dishonest, but so what's new? | ||
| Yeah, in fact, that's almost worth asking about, too. | ||
| I used to talk about politics, you know, a lot. | ||
| And I was very involved and very much an activist. | ||
| And it seems like in the last several years, maybe two or three years, all of a sudden, everything they're talking about in Washington, or most of what they're talking about in Washington, isn't, or arguing about in Washington, isn't even relevant to our lives. | ||
| I mean, they're academic, I'm right, you're right, left-right arguments that just aren't relevant to our immediate lives anymore. | ||
| And so I kind of stopped talking about politics as much as I used to. | ||
| It just is not important. | ||
| I mean, it is important if they ever really did anything important. | ||
| Yeah, if the government acted and worked the way that we all thought it was doing, well, then it would be a good thing. | ||
| But the way it is working is that it's working for its own selfish interests and doesn't have the people's interests at heart, and it doesn't take a real smart guy to figure that one out. | ||
| Tell me something. | ||
| This place you live in, this bus, what's it like? | ||
| I mean, it's home. | ||
| It's home most of the year, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's got everything I need. | ||
| We're parked outside the motel now, but I'm not going inside. | ||
| I stay here. | ||
| I live on the bus. | ||
| I'll go in maybe. | ||
| So your crew goes into the motel? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you stay on the bus? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you in your private life different than you are in your public life? | ||
| I mean, you know, more private? | ||
| I've heard about private life before, but I've never really experienced it. | ||
| Because in the beginning, I didn't really want it. | ||
| And, you know, you start out wanting, you know, to be known and liked by everybody when you're an entertainer. | ||
| And then once you get that, you start trying to figure out how to hide and get away from the people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, I dearly love my fans, but it's like most of my life is radio. | ||
| Like, most of your life is music. | ||
| And so it begins to take over your life. | ||
| And whatever private moments you have are really few and far between. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's a decision that we make when we get into the business that we're in. | ||
| We give up our private life. | ||
| That's whether we wanted to or not or whether we say we were going to or not is immaterial because you do. | ||
| No, I made that deal with myself. | ||
| I mean, I knew what I was getting into. | ||
| And I figure you did too. | ||
| Yeah, I did, too. | ||
| And I didn't start out trying to kid myself into thinking that I could do this different than anybody else has ever done it. | ||
| I mean, it's when you're trying to balance a job on the road and a home a thousand miles away, you're going to have some problems. | ||
| Are you married now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You are? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| I mean, 200 days. | ||
| Well, I've been married four times now. | ||
| Well, I mean, how does it work this time? | ||
| It's working fine now. | ||
| This has been a good one. | ||
| It's working fine, but it does require a certain kind of person who can live with the things that they have to live with. | ||
| Not only me living away from home, and then when I'm home, you have mixed emotions. | ||
| When you're here, you want to be home. | ||
| When you're home, you want to be here. | ||
| So you're a little bit unhappy everywhere. | ||
| And you have to have a woman who understands that. | ||
| You love the road? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Where is your wife? | ||
| What part of the world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Texas. | |
| Texas. | ||
| Figure she's listening to you? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| She runs a Montessori school there in Texas, and she's probably in bed sleeping. | ||
| In bed sleeping, yeah. | ||
| My wife is, you know, I believe in this soulmate thing. | ||
| So I do too. | ||
| And boy, is she my soulmate. | ||
| But she understands the way I feel about women. | ||
| And when there's a pretty woman around, she points her out to me. | ||
| That's an understanding woman. | ||
| Most women would say, don't look there. | ||
| Don't look there. | ||
| Well, you know, there are some understanding women out there. | ||
| God bless them. | ||
| Yeah, indeed, God bless them. | ||
| Listen, country music in general. | ||
| What's happening is country music becoming more popular? | ||
| Is it waning? | ||
| What do you sense is happening, not just with you, I mean the whole industry? | ||
| Oh, it's growing. | ||
| I have never yet met anybody who became a country music fan and then left it. | ||
| So anybody who was one 50 years ago is still one today. | ||
| He may not be able to turn on the radio and hear his kind of country music, but he's still a fan. | ||
| And then there's the new fans who have picked up their heroes along the way, you know, from Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, all these guys. | ||
| There's millions and millions of new fans out there. | ||
| So I see the country music as healthy as it's ever been, healthier. | ||
| So that means there's a lot of new blood coming in. | ||
| In other words, there's another Willie Nelson out there somewhere. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| But somewhere out there, there's a whole lot of guys headed toward Nashville with a pickup truck full of songs. | ||
| Some of them will be great. | ||
| What do you say to those people? | ||
| I encounter people wanting to be in my business all the time, and I'm always kind of at a loss to tell them or to advise them. | ||
| And I'm sure you get a million people ask you that question, so maybe you can answer a million questions at once now. | ||
| Somebody who wants to be a Willie Nelson someday, at least from a career point of view, what do you tell them? | ||
| Well, I tell them if they really want to be something, they can be that. | ||
| And if they really have the talent, then there's nothing that can keep them from being that. | ||
| And regardless of the advice I give them, if they really want to do something, they're going to do it on their own. | ||
| I believe, you know, the old, you know, if you build a house of quality in the woods, the world would be the path to your door. | ||
| I really believe in that one. | ||
| Well, to me, I had a passion for what I wanted to do, and I loved doing it, and I never really expected anything to come of it, and I didn't care. | ||
| If you want to know the truth, you know, money-wise, I never figured to make much money. | ||
| Most people in radio don't. | ||
| Probably most people sing in music, you know, and little places every night. | ||
| They don't make a lot of money either. | ||
| And the key is not to care. | ||
| And then somehow or another, when you don't care, it all works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's weird, huh? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Basically, the same thing happened to my career when I left Nashville and sort of gave up and decided that maybe, you know, a singing career of traveling around the world wasn't for me. | ||
| So I moved back to Texas and said, well, you know, I'm just going to play where I want to play and do what I want to do and not really care what happens. | ||
| Then all of a sudden, everything started happening. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand that. | ||
| It's like when you relax and you don't give a damn, then it all just flows and it all happens. | ||
| Yeah, do you play golf? | ||
| I do not, but I imagine that rule applies with golf. | ||
| It really applies with golf. | ||
| If you get up over the ball and stand there and worry about all the things that could happen wrong, they do. | ||
| They happen. | ||
| Jan, if you just relax, take a little advice, and go at it, why, the ball goes pretty much where you want it to go, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, if you just shut everything out and swing, well, then let your natural instincts take over, and you'll be fine. | ||
| Listen, how are you doing on time? | ||
| I'm coming slowly here toward the top of the hour, and there's about a million phones ringing here, and a lot of people, I'm sure, would love to ask you questions. | ||
| Well, I'm here. | ||
| You're there, huh? | ||
| Yeah, whenever. | ||
| When you're in the bus, are you pretty much, you know, everybody else has gone to the motel? | ||
| I mean, you're in there alone? | ||
| Well, right now, my sister, who plays piano in the band, is here, and she has some earphones on, and she's listening to us talk. | ||
| And David Anderson, who I think emailed to your address some information, he's here listening. | ||
| And Gator has got his earphones on listening. | ||
| I see. | ||
| How is it work in such close quarters all the time? | ||
| I mean, you've got to be almost, well, actually, some of the people are your family. | ||
| But aside from that, it's got to be almost like a family, doesn't it? | ||
| It has to be, yeah. | ||
| When you live this close, it's like living in a submarine. | ||
| You really got to have people who know how to live close together. | ||
| Does it always work? | ||
| Or like all families, do you guys sometimes get in fights? | ||
| Well, fortunately, we don't get in the kind of fights that we used to get into. | ||
| Now it's mostly drive-by shoutings. | ||
| Drive-by shoutings? | ||
| All right, excellent. | ||
| What I'm going to do then is ask you to sit tight. | ||
| You've got plenty of time. | ||
| Just relax. | ||
| Do whatever you want to do. | ||
| And we'll come back to you and we'll get phones open after the top of the hour because I know a lot of people want to ask you a question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, sure. | |
| All right, stay right there. | ||
| Willie Nelson. | ||
| Morning, everybody. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My guest is Willie Nelson. | |
| And you know me. | ||
| I can't resist. | ||
| Willie's here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
and here's will it I was a highwayman. | |
| Along the coast roads I did ride. | ||
| With sword and pistol by my side. | ||
| Many a young maid lost her marbles by trade. | ||
| Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade. | ||
| The masters hung me in the spring up pointed by. | ||
| But I am still alive. | ||
| I was a sailor. | ||
| I was born upon the tide. | ||
| With the sea I did a bite. | ||
| I sailed a schooner around the Horn of Mexico. | ||
| I went along the world and made so little clothes. | ||
| And when the yards broke off, they slipped it, I got killed. | ||
| But I'm living still. | ||
| I was a damn builder across the river deep and wide. | ||
| We're stealing water dips alive. | ||
| A place called Boulder Home Go, I'll call the Bow I swept and held to the wet concrete below They buried me in that range of no sound But I'm still around I'll always be around I'll | ||
| I'll fly a starship across the universe divine. | ||
| And when I reach the other side, I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can. | ||
| Perhaps I may become a highwayman again. | ||
| Or I may simply be a single drop of rain, but I will remain. | ||
| And I'll be back again and again and again and again and again and again. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| I love this song. | ||
| I love this song. | ||
| Willie, welcome back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| I've got a couple of commercials, but I wanted to ask you right out of that. | ||
| How did you guys decide where you were going to sing, what part you were going to sing, and how did that song even happen? | ||
| Well, the producer of the album, the first highwayman album, the highwayman, was a guy named Chip Smallwood, a great producer, a good musician, a great writer himself. | ||
| So we left a lot of those decisions up to him rather than us sit around because we knew what he was really trying to get. | ||
| So we let him make most of those choices. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I've got to ask you to stay good and close to that cellular of yours. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It's one of those songs, Willie, that, you know, sometimes what I do here is real stressful. | ||
| And toward the end of the program, I'll play that, and it calms me. | ||
| Music does that to you. | ||
| If it's really meaningful, like that song is really meaningful to me, and it calms me. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's absolutely why the jukebox plays in the beer joints and lounges and clubs around the world because music has a calming effect on us human animals. | ||
| It brings you back to your center, kind of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Willie, hold on. | ||
| We're going to go to the phones in a moment. | ||
| Back down to Willie Nelson. | ||
| Willie, I've got a couple of faxes. | ||
| I want to read your questions, then we're going to go to the phones. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This fax says, I hate people who do this, but I'm reading it anyway. | ||
| It says, Art Bell's staff hasn't got one cojone if you don't ask Willie this question. | ||
| Willie, I've been from Orange to El Paso, from McGowan to Denton, and I still ain't figured out how to beat the IRS. | ||
| I ain't saying you beat a damn thing. | ||
| I know that's a sore point, but it's the thing everybody wants to hear about. | ||
| I don't know what they want to hear about, Willie, but that's the question. | ||
| How did I beat the IRS? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| You pretty much paid them, didn't you? | ||
| I paid them, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's your answer, wherever you are out there. | ||
| Now, ask Willie, what is the brand and model of guitar he plays, and when and how did he get the extra hole in the top, and can he give a recommendation for someone who wants to graduate from a cheap guitar to a good one? | ||
| That guitar is a Martin classical guitar, and I've had it for about 35 years. | ||
| And those guitars normally you're supposed to use, a pick guard, almost classical guitars. | ||
| But this one, if you're going to use a pick, you use a pick guard. | ||
| pig guard so my my uh fingers uh just wouldn't play it and uh play I guess Whiskey River too many times wore a hole in that guitar, and it's just gotten bigger and bigger every year. | ||
| I've had to go in there and reinforce it on the inside a couple of times, but I don't think it affects the tone. | ||
| No. | ||
| Is it one of those things that, I mean, like if all of a sudden you didn't have it, would that be real bad? | ||
| Yeah, it would be real bad because it's the sound that I really have grown to love. | ||
| It's the best guitar sound for me that I've ever found. | ||
| So you're real careful with it, then? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| All right, one more. | ||
| Please ask Willie to say a few words about Patsy Klein. | ||
| Well, first of all, Patsy Klein was one of the greatest of our time. | ||
| Recorded Crazy a song that I wrote, which went on. | ||
| Her recording of it became the best all-time jukebox song. | ||
| It played more than any other song in the world ever. | ||
| I love Pat Jukebot. | ||
| One last, I guess. | ||
| This is for my audience. | ||
| We talk about a lot of weird things on this program, Willie. | ||
| It's somebody's understanding here that you're pretty close friends with Jimmy Carter. | ||
| You know him pretty well? | ||
| Yeah, I sure do. | ||
| When Jimmy Carter ran for office, Willie, he said to the American people as a campaign promise that when he got in office, he'd tell them everything there was to know about UFOs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he sort of never got around to really discussing that. | ||
| And this person is wondering if he ever talked to you about that. | ||
| No, we never talked about it. | ||
| And I really do believe that no matter, it's like a lot of other things that you think you might do when you get to Washington if you're elected. | ||
| But when you get there, by the time you get there, you've had to make so many deals along the way, compromises along the way, that anything, any promise that you made, you're liable not to be able to keep it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like, you know, it's such a great country, and we really do have a lot of freedom, but there are some basic things that are really wrong, and that's one of them. | ||
| And it applies not just to the president, but it applies to all of our government. | ||
| And I just don't know what we're going to do about that, because it seems like it's getting worse, not better. | ||
| It's Big Brother looking after us, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever wonder what it's going to be like, you know, for your children, for the next generation after that, what this country, what the world is going to be like? | ||
| Well, I think I know how some people would like for it to be. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| But I don't think that everybody's going to lay down and roll over and let that happen. | ||
| Fortunately. | ||
| But it seems like some things are headed to this one world type deal, no matter what we do. | ||
| I mean, it's headed in that direction. | ||
| Well, it may be. | ||
| And if that is the best way to run a planet, maybe somewhere along the way in the future, they may come up with the idea that that is the best way to do it. | ||
| Right now, I personally think the best way to do it is to let Art handle his business, Willie handle his, you know, Whelan handle his, and not let one guy somewhere handle all our business. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, I think that's why we're only around here for so long, because we wouldn't be able to stand it past a certain point. | ||
| Or they wouldn't be able to stand up. | ||
| One of the two. | ||
| All right, let's see who we got. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Roseburg, Oregon. | |
| Oregon. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Willie. | |
| Hey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, my wife and I saw you in Eugene back in 1986. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You played at MacArthur Court. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You haven't been back since? | |
| No. | ||
| I used to live in Eugene. | ||
| My mother lived there, and I went to visit her there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I think your mother died about a year later up in Olympia, Washington or something. | ||
| At Gleed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pardon? | |
| In Gleed, right across from Portland up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Somewhere up north there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you haven't been back since, and we really miss you. | |
| Up close to Yakima. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, well, I haven't been there, and I don't know why not. | ||
| You know, maybe somebody will, some promoter will bring us in there. | ||
| Maybe we're headed that way. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We played Portland and Seattle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think you were planned one time here in Roseburg, but then they canceled. | |
| Roseburg's not too adapt to really getting into big-time operating music, you know. | ||
| But anyway, we had really enjoyed the concert. | ||
| And Joni, say hi to Willie. | ||
| Hi, Willie. | ||
| Hi, Joni. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| How are you? | ||
| We talked to you, Willie, behind the concert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were so shook up, you know, all we could say is we love you, Willie. | ||
| And I took your photograph. | ||
| I wanted to say something. | ||
| All right, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to know when you have your next Farmade. | |
| Farmade will be October the 4th in Irving Stadium right outside of Dallas, between Dallas and Fort Worth, where the Dallas Cowboys play. | ||
| We had one farmade there before, and it went well, and they invited us back. | ||
| So we'll be back in there on October 4th. | ||
| And by the way, I really appreciate, Willie, the invitation to be part of that. | ||
| But as I told you, October 1st, I'm taking off for Egypt and Greece and all those kinds of places. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| And you said something to me on the phone. | ||
| You said, well, I'm going to Egypt, too. | ||
| Metaphorically, you meant it. | ||
| You've got a break coming up at some point where you just sort of like disappear for a while? | ||
| Well, I've got a few days off, and I'm planning on heading to my hideout. | ||
| Yeah, that's good. | ||
| Everybody's got to have a hideout. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello? | ||
| Hello? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Willie? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Willie, this is Gary Unger, the real writer of Born in USA, almost titled God Bless You Esau. | |
| A very important question for you, and we love you here in Clinton, Iowa. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, how do you audition for Farm Aid if you've been sending you like 25 years? | |
| Well, if you want to send a tape of what you do to FarmAid, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in care of Carolyn Mugar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, Cambridge, Massachusetts. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Do you have a zip code? | ||
| Probably, but I don't know what it is. | ||
| It'll get there. | ||
| What you do is you go to the post office and they've got a book and you look up a town. | ||
| They'll give you the zip code. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Farm Aid, right? | |
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, thank you very much, Willie. | |
| It's really nice talking to you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson, who's in New Jersey. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Mr. Bell. | |
| This is Robert. | ||
| Where are you, Robert? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in the San Joaquin Valley listening on KFRE, sir. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Willie. | |
| Hey. | ||
| Hey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| What a thrill. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I got two important questions to ask you for me. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But first of all, let me just say this to you. | |
| If we lived back in the days of horses, I would have been proud to ride with you. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| Thanks to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My first question, out here in California, Fresno, you know, we had Garth Brooks here. | |
| We would sure love to see you here again. | ||
| Well, I'd like to come through there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I hope you do, sir. | |
| My second question, for your millions of fans, please consider being up on the big screen again. | ||
| We'd love to see you on the screen. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a movie now since you brought it up. | ||
| There's a movie coming out at the end of this month called Gone Fishing with me and Joe Peschke and Danny Glover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's great, Willie. | |
| Oh, no kidding. | ||
| Willie, do you like, how do you feel about motion pictures, television, that kind of thing? | ||
| Oh, I enjoy doing it. | ||
| It's a lot of fun, especially, you know, if it's something that I think I can do. | ||
| And if I can't do it, then I'd rather not even try it. | ||
| What's going fishing about? | ||
| Gone fishing is a comedy. | ||
| Joe Pesci and Danny Glover grew up together in Connecticut, and they were always getting in trouble, and they grew up fishing, became big fishing fans, and they came to Florida. | ||
| They won a fishing contest, and they came to Florida, and it's a story of what all the trouble they get into in the Everglades. | ||
| You know, I've done a little bit of television, and what I want to ask you is this. | ||
| It's like when I went and did some TV, I did my part, and I had no idea what the overall picture was until I got to see it on TV myself. | ||
| You know, it's like I had my little isolated part, compartmentalized part, and I did that, and I didn't even know what the program was about until I got to see it. | ||
| I guess it's a little different with a full motion picture. | ||
| But do you get the feel of what you've done before it's done, you know, before you get to see it on the screen yourself? | ||
| Well, it happens both ways. | ||
| You know, if I get a chance to really work with the actors and the script and everything, well, then that's one thing. | ||
| And you're all shooting it there together and working together every day for weeks. | ||
| But then when I did this King of the Hill show a few weeks ago, we met somewhere in some hotel or something, some building somewhere, me and this guy, and I read my lines and he faked everybody else's lines, and then they went somewhere else and put it all together. | ||
| So I had no idea what that was going to look like until it came out. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a surprise. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm Dave, and I'm in Long Beach, California. | |
| Hi, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I got a little story to relate to Willie, plus a question I'd like to ask him when I'm done. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went to see you one time when you played in Laughlin, Nevada. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And my mother and I went over to see you, and we really enjoyed the show. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But before we went in to see the show, you had like a life-size cut-out poster of you standing in the lobby. | |
| And so I was taking a picture of my mother standing beside your poster. | ||
| And some other lady came by and decided that I was you. | ||
| And she wanted a picture of me with her. | ||
| So my mother gladly took the camera and took a picture of me and her for her. | ||
| Did you autograph it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, but I autographed it David Mead, but I don't think she read it. | |
| She just closed the book and ran off with a happy smile on her face. | ||
| And I guess she was happy that she got home and read the autograph. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And my other question for you was, how do I get a job driving your tour bus? | |
| Now, there's a threatening little remark for a guy who listens to my program. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, the driver of this bus is a guy named Gator. | ||
| And first of all, you'd have to whip him. | ||
| i'd have to wait he wasn't hungry but Willie, the other people who work with you, like Gator, who listens to this program, thank you, Gator. | ||
| They really, they've got to be living the same kind of life you live, right? | ||
| And they've got to enjoy it like you do. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very gypsy-like lifestyle. | ||
| And you have to love that. | ||
| Listen, country music. | ||
| The guy who called from Oregon, are there places, Willie, that you go back to a whole lot and then places you don't get to too frequently? | ||
| Is that the way it works, or are you like all over the place? | ||
| Well, there are certain places that I really enjoy playing. | ||
| Some of them that I've been playing since I really first started playing. | ||
| Places like John T. Floors and Hellotis. | ||
| And well, there's maybe a few of those around the country. | ||
| There's the Dewey Group Longhorn Club in Dallas. | ||
| There was a big beer. | ||
| Now there's new big beer joints opening up all over the country. | ||
| But I like to go back to those old places that I used to play because the atmosphere is still there. | ||
| So you're comfortable. | ||
| Makes you comfortable. | ||
| Feel at home there in those places. | ||
| What about these really big things, like where you've got concerts with a gazillion people out there? | ||
| Is that harder? | ||
| Well, it's different in a way. | ||
| Not as personal. | ||
| It's not as personal as being close up with 200 or 300 people in a club. | ||
| It's a different atmosphere, and there's a different energy exchange there, and you have to, I guess, approach it a little different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hear you. | |
| All right, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Willie Nelson is my guest. | ||
| This is CBC to Atlantic City, where Willie's in his bus. | ||
| Do you call it a bus or do you call it your home? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bus. | |
| Bus. | ||
| It is my home, but it's a bus. | ||
| Here's a question for you, Buffax. | ||
| Please ask Willie, what drew him to the part in the film made about the American skydiving champion, stranded in Russia? | ||
| Did you do a movie about that, something called Coming Out of the Ice? | ||
| Yeah, with John Savage. | ||
| It was a movie for, I think, CBS television. | ||
| And it was several years ago. | ||
| We did that up in Finland. | ||
| Finland? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was in Finland about a year ago. | ||
| That's a really interesting part. | ||
| What's your impression of that part of the world? | ||
| Oh, I love it. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| I like all of that area up there. | ||
| I was in Helsinki, and it's an amazing part of the world. | ||
| It really isn't amazing. | ||
| I mean, it's old, but it's clean. | ||
| And somehow, Willie, in our cities in America, when they get old, they're not clean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I really do like the places that I've been up in there, Norway. | ||
| I love Norway. | ||
| Have you ever been there? | ||
| I have. | ||
| Same kind of impression. | ||
| Copenhagen, even. | ||
| All of those cities, somehow they're old, but they've aged gracefully. | ||
| And I can't figure out how they've done that. | ||
| You know, to be so old, so much stonework everywhere is a different kind of atmosphere. | ||
| And yet they stay clean while our cities have kind of gone... | ||
| I'm sort of partial to Amsterdam myself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| You like Amsterdam? | ||
| Yes, beautiful. | ||
| Absolutely beautiful. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Willie. | |
| My name's Daryl. | ||
| I'm calling from Seattle, Washington, about as far across the coast, across the United States as we can get apart from each other right now. | ||
| But I feel so close to you. | ||
| I feel like you are a father figure to me. | ||
| You've got a pioneer spirit, man. | ||
| You are what freedom is all about. | ||
| And I really want to thank you for your stance on hemp because I'm a stone-cold hempster. | ||
| I call talk radio shows every day of my life telling people that marijuana should be legal and that the farmers need this product and we need to save our forest. | ||
| And I was wondering, have you ever met with Woody Harrelson? | ||
| Yeah, I know Woody. | ||
| He's a good friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man, he is such a great guy, too. | |
| You know, Woody Harrelson, you, I put you guys right up there with Mark Twain, man. | ||
| I am so proud of you. | ||
| And I will, I mean, when I see an Eagle, I'm thinking about Willie Nelson. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, oh, man, we put on a little festival over here in Seattle. | |
| It gathers about 60,000 people a year. | ||
| It's called the Seattle Hemp Fest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you get a chance, I'd like you to take a look at those pictures on the internet. | ||
| They're easy to find. | ||
| Just type in Seattle Hemp Fest on any search engine. | ||
| You'll find them. | ||
| And we would really, really love to just have your support in spirit. | ||
| Or if you could send an email or a message to us around the Seattle Hemp Fest, we're going to have it in August. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Be a lot of help. | ||
| Well, I tell you, for sure, you've got my best wishes with you all the way, and my spirit is there. | ||
| You know, no matter whether I get a message to you on the email or not, I mean, you know how I feel about the issue, and I'm with you all the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| And Art Bell, please, please get him on again and again and again. | ||
| And more hempers, please, too. | ||
| Winnie Harrelson, all the rest. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah, I'll be glad to. | ||
| How about you, Willie? | ||
| What kind of thinking did you do about Pot before you decided to be public about it? | ||
| Well, it's one of those things that once you realize that you have been lied to about something, you have to decide whether you want to do anything about it or whether you just want to lay down and roll over and say, well, those son of a guns lied to me. | ||
| And it really upset me to think that they would insult my intelligence like that. | ||
| Have you changed a lot over the years? | ||
| I mean, if you had to describe how you've changed, from like when you were in your 20s to now, you're a different person? | ||
| You say? | ||
| Just in my habits. | ||
| I think I've dropped a few bad habits, hopefully, along the way. | ||
| But my attitude about everything, I don't think it's changed to a degree, hardly. | ||
| I don't know whether that's just because I'm a stubborn Taurus or what. | ||
| You spent any time in jail? | ||
| Today, no. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We're talking ever. | ||
| Ever? | ||
| Have I spent any time in jail? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you do a lot of work, you know, for people who are in the joint. | ||
| And I've got to tell you, I get a lot of letters. | ||
| Man, I have so many listeners who are in jail, federal institutions, local institutions, you name it. | ||
| And you go and you sing for them sometimes, don't you? | ||
| Sure, I do. | ||
| Well, you know, a lot of my friends and relatives are in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where are you? | |
| It's a pleasure to talk to both of you guys. | ||
| Yeah, Okay, where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm fantastic. | |
| I'm from St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Art, I've got your book. | |
| I haven't had a chance to finish it yet, but it's fantastic. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Willie, we have a mutual friend. | |
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm from St. Paul, Minnesota. | |
| I'll give you his initials, JP. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know who I'm talking about? | |
| I'm pretty sure I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your movie Red-Headed Stranger when you shot the man off the back of the horse that the man stole. | |
| That's my friend. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know who I'm talking about? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Would you give him a message for me? | ||
| You get a hold of Brian in St. Paul. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| If I run across him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I first was introduced to you. | ||
| I'm the youngest of eight. | ||
| And my sister had the Red-Headed Stranger album. | ||
| And I just recently got that again on CD. | ||
| And I'd love for you to come to St. Paul for a concert so you could sign that for me. | ||
| And if you happen to come out here and bring Jeff with you, I throw a hell of a barb at you, and you're more than welcome to come on over. | ||
| Well, see, now you're just going to use his initial. | ||
| Now you used his name already. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't use his last name, did I? | |
| We know who you're talking about, don't we? | ||
| Yeah, we do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| Hey, you know, it's like you're an American institution now. | ||
| How does it feel to be an American institution? | ||
| Oh, I don't really know what that means. | ||
| Well, it means... | ||
| Uh... | ||
| It means like everybody knows Willie Nelson. | ||
| Commode is a household word. | ||
| Well, yeah, I'm. | ||
| Oh, Willie. | ||
| But everything is relative. | ||
| You know, I used to have this saying, of all the people who don't like me, just think of the millions who've never heard of me. | ||
| How do you handle it mentally? | ||
| Once you got to the point where, I mean, there was a breakout in your career, all of a sudden, you know, you were known nationally. | ||
| I mean, everybody began to know you. | ||
| And it's a pressure, isn't it? | ||
| Well, I guess it is. | ||
| You know, I don't think about it. | ||
| I really don't think about it. | ||
| I know there's a responsibility to keep the music going. | ||
| I know I have a responsibility to Farron Young and to Lil Jimmy Dickens and to Hank Williams. | ||
| And I take that very seriously. | ||
| You're going to ever stop? | ||
| You're going to ever go fishing or are you going to keep singing until you drop? | ||
| All those things. | ||
| I went fishing last Sunday. | ||
| My birthday took my boys down to Gallison fishing. | ||
| I'm not a big fisherman. | ||
| I don't do that a lot, but it's. | ||
| Oh, I meant that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I meant that metaphorically. | ||
| I mean, is the day going to come you're going to hang your guitar up and you're going to just, you know, live a different life? | ||
| Or are you going to probably keep singing forever? | ||
| Well, I hopefully will sing forever. | ||
| I don't really want to think about quitting singing or quitting playing or quitting doing what I'm doing because I'm really having a good time. | ||
| And as long as I'm healthy and as long as people show up, to me, that's the perfect world. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hear me okay. | |
| I hear you fine, sir. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Bradenton, Florida. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, as one who is obsessed with talk radio, I'd like to ask Mr. Nelson something regarding pot. | |
| I'm not personally a pot smoker, but could we try having an experimental state where they allow pot legally and before we go total U.S.? | ||
| Well, I think that's happened now. | ||
| California and Arizona now have passed a law where medicinal marijuana is legal there, and the doctors can prescribe it. | ||
| So that is happening, and I think it's good that it's happening in a small scale, one or two states, where everybody else can look at it and see, you know, just how affected is the population going to be one way or another. | ||
| Well, so far it looks to me like California is no crazier than it normally is. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to see the change. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Willie? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Willie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't think the bottom would fall right out of the market for pot if they allowed it nationwide, do you? | |
| The bottom fall out? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I think the bottom would fall out of the black market end of it once they legalized it. | ||
| I mean, those guys would have to figure out something else to sell. | ||
| What about the liquor industry? | ||
| You were a drinker once, weren't you? | ||
| Pretty heavy drinker? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I was. | ||
| So marijuana takes the place of booze? | ||
| For me, it has. | ||
| And maybe it was a natural progression for me because whenever I used to get too drunk to know what I was doing, well, Paul English, my good friend and drummer, would bring me a big fat joint and say, here, smoke this. | ||
| Next thing, you know, I'm laying on the floor. | ||
| So at least I'm controllable. | ||
| So that's the way I sort of switched over. | ||
| And I sort of liked the way Paul was handling it and the way I was handling it. | ||
| I really wasn't handling alcohol that well. | ||
| Yeah, what kind of drinker were you? | ||
| Some people get happy, some people get belligerent. | ||
| Well, I think it depends on what you have on your mind when you start drinking, you know, and I had a lot of negative things on my mind, bad marriages and all that kind of stuff, and not making any headway in my career. | ||
| So if a guy ever needed a reason to drink and to feel sorry for himself, I never had one. | ||
| A lot of people say bad marriages make good country music. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I mean, is it tragedy, you know, living through a bunch of really hard stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we all do. | ||
| Not just people at the top. | ||
| People at every level live through hard stuff. | ||
| Does that harden you, make you better at what you do? | ||
| Sure, it does. | ||
| It makes you a little more wary of what you do or beware of what you do. | ||
| you don't really learn a lot, I guess. | ||
| So I find myself making the same mistakes over and over again in some instances, you know. | ||
| You know, you we were talking about reincarnation. | ||
| Um your place uh your your place in this uh constantly reincarnating world. | ||
| You figure you've been around a lot before or you're pretty new at this. | ||
| I think I've been around a few times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with the guy who's been around a few times. | ||
| Willie. | ||
| Willie Nelson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, this is Tony in Palm Desert. | ||
| Hi, Tony. | ||
| Hey, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I called Willie because my wife wanted me to call and have you say hi to Bobby because she loves your sister. | |
| Hey, Bobby's sitting over here listening. | ||
| I'll tell her that someone says hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we've seen you every time you come out here to the desert because we've been a longtime fans of yours. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And my 86-year-old mother has picked out two songs that we're to play at her funeral that you've done very well. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Which songs are those? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wind Beneath My Wings. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Angels Flying Too Close to the Ground. | |
| All right. | ||
| See, there you are, Willie. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| When I said it's like you're an institution, that's what I meant. | ||
| People like that. | ||
| People who are going to play your music at their funeral, that kind of thing. | ||
| If you stop and think about it, which I think it's better not to do, because it'll get to you after a while. | ||
| But it's like a lot of responsibility, huh? | ||
| Well, I agree with you. | ||
| I don't think you're supposed to think about it. | ||
| We've got a saying that we like to use out here. | ||
| Fortunately, we're not in control. | ||
| And I hang on to that one with both hands. | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| Your sister, you're pretty close to your sister? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we're probably as close as blood relatives can get. | ||
| We've played music together all our lives. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Top of the morning to you. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Rob in Springfield. | |
| Springfield, Ohio, there's quite a few Springfields, aren't there? | ||
| There are, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Nelson. | |
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a pleasure to speak to you in honor. | |
| I am interested in the songwriting, and I was wondering if there's anything you could tell me about a place where I could send any songs or anything about how much it would cost to get copyrights done and all that stuff. | ||
| I honestly don't have any information on where to send songs. | ||
| I don't have a publishing company, so I really couldn't help you there. | ||
| There are some good publishing companies around, but I really couldn't give you a name. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Would there be any? | |
| I know there is no way this is possible, but if I could send you something, a little poem that I write. | ||
| Yeah, send it to me at Spicewood, Texas. | ||
| Spicewood, Texas. | ||
| Yeah, 78669. | ||
| 669. | ||
| Willie, I take it anything that shows up in Spicewood with your name on it gets to you. | ||
| It'll get there. | ||
| I don't know how the Postal Department does it, but they've come to know me too, Willie. | ||
| I bet they have. | ||
| And people can address things to, I've seen actually, No zip code, in the desert, and somehow it gets to me. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And I'm sure the same with you. | ||
| How big is Spicewood? | ||
| It's just a few disturbed people. | ||
| All right, first few disturbed people. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Well, you would have been, but you're a dialtone. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Willie, I think it's great on your farm aid you do for the farmers and everything. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really do. | |
| That's really a wonderful thing there. | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in San Francisco. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Any call art? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I said the 28th of this month? | |
| It's 28 of next month. | ||
| For what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
June. | |
| Huh? | ||
| The Sacramento deal, you know, against the MTBE. | ||
| Oh, yes, yes, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, the stuff that's been getting into the groundwater, poisoning the water and stuff. | |
| Yeah, this caller, Willie, is talking about some stuff in California. | ||
| It's getting into the groundwater. | ||
| They're getting wells closed down. | ||
| You know, Willie, I was pretty much political conservative. | ||
| In a lot of ways, I'm economically still very conservative. | ||
| But, boy, I'm telling you, Willie, I'm becoming really conscious of our ecology. | ||
| You travel around a lot. | ||
| It seems to me like our weather's getting worse. | ||
| Oh, yeah, and I'm sure you've read books that predicted it. | ||
| It's, you know, supposedly that time when the Earth is going through some changes, so it's important that everybody know that this is a natural progression. | ||
| Well. | ||
| Don't you think so? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean. | ||
| Have you ever read a book called Mother Mary's Message? | ||
| Mary's. | ||
| Mary's Message to the World. | ||
| I've interviewed the author. | ||
| It's a very interesting book because it talks about the weather changes and why and when. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| Well, here's what I think. | ||
| We agree the change is going on, but I don't know if it's natural. | ||
| I think, you know, whether it's like a creator, God, or nature, and they may be like one and the same, that this earth is beginning to react to what we're doing. | ||
| I would agree with that 100%. | ||
| But I think what we were doing is a natural reaction. | ||
| So the world, the earth itself is taking a natural reaction to us. | ||
| I think every few million years the world has to get rid of the folks and start all over again because we don't know how to handle it. | ||
| We haven't figured out how to treat the earth as a living entity. | ||
| And we keep treating it like it was a piece of dead meat that you can do whatever you want to do to. | ||
| And the earth is a big living thing, and all it has to do is belch a couple of times. | ||
| Yeah, there's 8 million people gone. | ||
| Yeah, and we're gone. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| And I'm afraid some of it might come from organized religion, you know, because some people interpret the Bible to mean that we can do whatever we want, that we have dominion over everything, and if we feel like concreting over everything around, no problem, go ahead and concrete and do whatever you want to do. | ||
| And that's our right, somehow or another. | ||
| And I think that's just sort of a misinterpretation. | ||
| So I think you're right. | ||
| I think we've probably been around a few times before and booted away. | ||
| Look, we're coming to the top of the hour, Willie. | ||
| i have a five-hour show but it's four o'clock in the morning back there uh... | ||
|
unidentified
|
so i have you know i Oh, I'm not getting sleepy. | |
| No. | ||
| You want to stick around? | ||
| Well, I'll stay with you a while if you don't care. | ||
| No, I don't care. | ||
| I'd love to have you. | ||
| All right, cool. | ||
| Then take a break. | ||
| You've got about 10 minutes, and we'll be back. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Willie Nelson is my guest. | ||
| And he is an American institution, whether he likes it or not. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| Somewhere along the way, we decided it's better that we leave town that night. | ||
| Because everybody's knocking on your door, that kind of thing. | ||
| So in other words, get out of town, get to the next town. | ||
| Well, we just like we were talking about earlier. | ||
| You and I are a lot alike in some respects. | ||
| It's better that I get out of town or I'd have had more than four marriages. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| There are, as you said, your watch probably sleep right now. | ||
| There's a lot of temptation out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A whole lot of it. | ||
| And don't get me, I don't want it to go away. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Yeah, I feel exactly, exactly the same way about it. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning, Art. | |
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, my name's Cindy, and I just can't believe I've got my two favorite men on the radio at the same time. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Well, good morning to you, Temptation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thanks so much. | |
| Listen, I wanted to ask you something. | ||
| I have got a dream that I've told my family about for the last probably 15 years, and what that is, is to sing Amazing Grace with Willie Nelson in my living room. | ||
| Well, the thing is, I'm standing in my listing room right now, and I was wondering if you'd like to sing it with me, or at least a couple bars. | ||
| We'll kick it off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Amazing Grace. | ||
| How sweet the sound of rest like me was lost now was mine. | ||
| But now I think Ha, ha, ha, ha. | ||
| You did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He made a dream come true. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I got to tell you, I believe that music can help heal the planet. | ||
| Well, that's a fact. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I believe in that one. | |
| How much gospel have you done, Willie? | ||
| Honestly, and I'm not saying this just to be smart, to make a smart crack, but I think all music is gospel. | ||
| And I started out singing the traditional gospel, and since then I've just been adding different kinds of what I really believe gospel music. | ||
| Blues is gospel. | ||
| Bluegrass is gospel. | ||
| It's all true music of the Spirit. | ||
| It seems like a lot of people who came from a background like that, pretty simple background, Crystal Gale's one, the Poynter sisters, they were raised by a preacher. | ||
| And look where they went. | ||
| And that seems to happen to people who come from real strict or religious backgrounds. | ||
| For some reason, they just... | ||
| And it's a natural progression from gospel. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| i believe that i think uh... | ||
| you know if you start out singing gospel music uh... | ||
| you've got By knowing that kind of music, you already know the blues, you know country, you know a lot of different kind of music without even knowing that you do. | ||
| Do you ever sing any other kind of music? | ||
| I mean, when you're just jamming, do you ever get into anything else? | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Jazz or pop or blues or, you know, do you ever just... | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On Island Records. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, how in the world do you get from where you are to reggae? | |
| Don Waz, a great producer, who did the Borderline album that I did on Columbia, and also did the last Highwayman album that we did. | ||
| He said, why don't we do a reggae album? | ||
| And I said, well, you know, I like reggae, but I don't know anything about it, and I'm afraid I don't know what kind of reggae. | ||
| And he said, why don't we take some of your songs and put reggae beats to them? | ||
| And so we went to the studio and did one, a song called Undo the Riot. | ||
| And it turned out so good that we flew down to Jamaica and talked to Chris Blackwell at Island Records. | ||
| And he liked the idea. | ||
| So now we have a reggae album with you. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How do you like it? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| We do a song, Jimmy Cliff's song on the show every night called Sitting in Limbo. | ||
| Sitting in Limbo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Have you ever heard that one? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a great song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Willie. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I wanted to say how much I enjoyed Your appearance on the cartoon show King of the Hill. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was there and saw you at the very first farmade in Champaign, Illinois, all those years ago. | |
| I believe it was 1981. | ||
| The first farm aid, I believe, was 80, what, David, 84? | ||
| First farm aid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
85? | |
| The first farm aid was what? | ||
| 85. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Well, sounds like my short-term memory is gone. | ||
| Well, I wanted you to talk a little bit about, I assume there is probably another farm aid coming up. | ||
| Yeah, we mentioned the date earlier, but I'm glad to mention it again. | ||
| It's October the 4th in Irving Stadium just outside of Dallas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And who all is appearing with you there? | |
| Well, there'll be the regulars, me and John Mellenkemp and Neil Young and John Connolly and whoever else we can get to come there. | ||
| And we usually have 30, 40, 50 acts that are glad to come because everybody knows the problems and the situation and everybody's eager to help. | ||
| We've never had any problem getting people to play for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Well, good luck to you. | ||
| And I was going to ask you, what was it like doing that show, King of the Hill? | ||
| And I'll hang up and let somebody else talk to you, too, if you want to comment on that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| A lot of people want to ask about King of the Hill. | ||
| Well, that was a great show. | ||
| First of all, I didn't know that there was such a show until I was on it, you know. | ||
| So the first show that I saw was the one that I was on. | ||
| Those guys are hilarious. | ||
| Have you seen the show, Art? | ||
| I have, yes. | ||
| It is a funny show. | ||
| Well, a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people seem absolutely interested. | ||
| All right, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Don't hang up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| Willie Nelson is my guest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Booty River more deadly. | |
| Land of Venus Night. | ||
| Paul's and I must be the number one Willie fan. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just thought I'd let you know that, and I can't believe I'm actually talking to you. | |
| Well, that's great. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, record this and play it back in your loghouse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm going to. | |
| I am recording it. | ||
| But I wanted to ask you one little question. | ||
| How come is it that all of what I think is your very best music never became big hits? | ||
| Well, that's a subjective question, but it's a fair question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like The Sound in Your Mind is my favorite one. | |
| Well, you know, there was a lot of records that I made back in those years that sort of got lost in the shuffle. | ||
| The Sound in Your Mind was one. | ||
| Yesterday's Wine was one. | ||
| It came out many years ago, and now it's been reissued. | ||
| But a lot of those records that a dozen or more that I felt like had, well, you get a dozen albums, ten songs, an album, and there's a hundred songs there that just got lost. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, they're good. | |
| And those, to me, are the best ones. | ||
| Are there what's your favorite? | ||
| Do you have a favorite favorite favorite? | ||
| Well, I have, I do in my show every night 40 to 50 songs, and those are my favorites. | ||
| And usually the last stuff that I've written is my favorite. | ||
| I just wrote an album called Spirit, and those songs are my favorites now. | ||
| Spirit. | ||
| What inspired that? | ||
| Why call it Spirit? | ||
| It's an evolution of the spirit. | ||
| This album was written over a 17-year period, and it starts out with the way I felt 17 years ago and the way I feel now. | ||
| It's a concept album that I really waited a long time to write because I really didn't have it all together. | ||
| I wrote maybe six or seven songs in the Spirit album last year. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Art. | |
| This is Marcus. | ||
| You're pistolback and pagan in Portland. | ||
| How are you gentlemen doing? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Heidi. | |
| Well, I have the opportunity, Willie and Art. | ||
| I just wanted to say may the God and Goddess bless you both for the work that you've done in the cause of human freedom. | ||
| There are a few things in my canon that are as important. | ||
| No, I'll amend that. | ||
| The cause of freedom is the most holy thing that I can conceive of in the realm of human experience. | ||
| And I think you both have done yeoman service in that cause, and everybody knows it, and long may your flags fly. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That being said, Willie, I also wanted to thank you again for a piece of work you did in a movie called The Electric Horseman. | |
| Oh, yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a brilliant piece of down-to-earth leavening that that movie needed to make it more than just a feel-good picture. | |
| That elevates it to the canon of a keeper. | ||
| For no other reason than it tells a good story about an important subject, freedom, and how it applies at all times and all places to all people and all things. | ||
| And it's a good lesson that we need to keep in mind and never forget. | ||
| Sort of tangentially, which goes into my question for you, Willie, you have a unique opportunity that I think some politicians would give their eye teeth for. | ||
| You travel all over the country. | ||
| You meet millions of people. | ||
| You have your finger on the pulse of the nation the way that very few people are gifted to have. | ||
| And I've admired and respected you, although I'm not a country music fan. | ||
| I admire you as a person because you have demonstrated this kind of openness and receptivity and honesty that makes it possible for people to tell the truth to you and for you to know the truth about them. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is your sense of the pulse of America? | |
| Where do you think we are as a people? | ||
| Where do you get the feeling that we're going? | ||
| Oh, that's a good question. | ||
| Well, I'm a positive thinker, so naturally, I'm thinking that the fact that you and I and the people who have called in tonight have the ability to be here tonight and say what we're thinking and to have it being heard by millions of people all over the world. | ||
| To me, that's a positive sign. | ||
| Because if enough of us get out there thinking and talking positive, then, you know, the Berlin Wall fell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what's next? | |
| What I find Is that the older I get, the easier it seems like it is for me to say what I really feel without caring. | ||
| In other words, just to say what I feel. | ||
| And that's kind of recent for me, like in the last decade or something. | ||
| I sort of began to change and not care. | ||
| And so I just started saying exactly what I felt without regard for the consequences. | ||
| And I'm sure you've become a little... | ||
| Sure, I'm a big Barry Goldwater fan. | ||
| Yeah, so am I. And he says so much of exactly what's on his mind that I think the press is getting afraid to go to him anymore. | ||
| Well, you know, we've had a few guys around. | ||
| All politicians haven't been bad. | ||
| I think I like, well, I like Barry Goldwater, and I liked Jimmy Carter, and I liked Harry Truman. | ||
| I mean, these were some, and Lyndon Johnson, I like these guys who would stand up and say, wait a minute, you know, this is the way it is. | ||
| That's exactly what Barry Goldwater did. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello there. | ||
| Oh, whoops, I didn't push the button, so that's not going to work. | ||
| First time caller line, now you're on the air, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was calling earlier about the idea I had to run by you. | |
| Well, you're on the air with Willie Nelson, so there's no point in running an idea just by me. | ||
| Do you have a question for Willie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I have a question for both of you. | |
| All right. | ||
| Fire away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, I was thinking about all the prophecies in the Bible and several other prophecies that talk about natural disasters towards the end. | |
| Prophecy. | ||
| I interview a lot of people who are into prophecy, and there's biblical prophecy. | ||
| You do anything about that, Willie? | ||
| Prophecy, where things are going in the longer run? | ||
| Well, I do believe in prophecies. | ||
| I think a lot of prophecies are interpreted in different ways. | ||
| The book of Revelation, for one thing, is all book of prophecies, but it's interpreted in a thousand different ways. | ||
| Some of those are right. | ||
| I just don't know which ones it is. | ||
| You ever wonder, with regard to Revelation, since you mentioned it, it's hard to tell where you are in a process. | ||
| You think we're in that now? | ||
| I do believe that we're in that time period when there are changes being made. | ||
| And there are rapid changes. | ||
| They're happening fast. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of information being fed to us now through all the channels that's coming into us so fast that a lot of us are reeling from it a little bit. | ||
| But I think it's just important to know that that's what it is. | ||
| We're just receiving a whole lot of information real fast. | ||
| And it's probably for a good reason we maybe are going to need this knowledge. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| I've been observing this for 13 years doing a talk show, and I started to realize that things are coming at a faster and faster pace. | ||
| And I tried to ask myself if it was just because of the media delivering this information to us. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, things really are beginning to speed up. | ||
| Yeah, and actually the media is way behind in giving it to us. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on there with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm from Lake County. | ||
| My name's Marsha. | ||
| And hi, Willie. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| I'm glad to hear that you did a reggae album. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really different from what you've done before. | ||
| But recently, my husband and I and my whole family have changed over from Country Western to reggae because it is really a family-oriented love and full of brotherhood. | ||
| And as you know, right now, all we've got now is our family and our friends. | ||
| Well, you know, let me tell you a story about where reggae music came from. | ||
| And this is a story that the reggae musicians that I recorded this album with told me that many years ago, when they first listened to music over the radio out of Jamaica, they would listen to these different stations and they would hear this country music. | ||
| And they couldn't hear the rhythms because there weren't any drums back in those days anyway. | ||
| So they put their own rhythms to the country music. | ||
| And that's where the original Jamaica songs came from, the original reggae songs come from. | ||
| They were getting the messages, the spiritual messages of the country music songs that are not there today. | ||
| What you've been looking for in country music today, the reason you went to reggae, is because you're looking for that one thing that you don't hear in country music anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and you're totally right on that aspect, Willie. | |
| I think it's funny that country music and reggae sort of make the big circle. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour again, choice point. | ||
| You got a choice. | ||
| I've got the hours. | ||
| I don't want to hog all the programs. | ||
| You've got other folks coming or something, but I'm here. | ||
| How much longer we got? | ||
| An hour? | ||
| An hour? | ||
| I've got two hours left, Willie, and I've got nothing but time on my hands. | ||
| that's a luxury radio, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not like... | |
| If you're having fun, then let's keep going. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Willie Nelson is my guest, and we'll just keep going. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| This is CBC. | ||
| Don't hang up, Willie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
From that time, a few, including you, and I was wondering if you have any that you're willing to tell on the air. | |
| Well, of course, I remember Barbara Newt. | ||
| Still, you know, I run into him occasionally. | ||
| He and Chris Christophson and some more guys hung out together in New York. | ||
| And I run into him back in the 70s, I guess it was. | ||
| And he's a good songwriter, good picker. | ||
| I think he's in California now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what was your first question? | |
| What was your first question, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
About the super suckers. | |
| He's been doing some recordings of... | ||
| They did a lot of my songs and they put their own spin on them. | ||
| Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground was done with an electric sewing machine playing the rhythm. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Hey, I'm going to switch topics on you real quick and ask you a real serious question. | ||
| We've had some things happen in this country that are not so good, Willie, down in Waco, in Idaho. | ||
| And lately, we've been getting these people arrested. | ||
| We've got the trial going on in Denver now. | ||
| We've got militias. | ||
| We've got people who are taking matters into their own hands. | ||
| And it scares the hell out of me. | ||
| I've got this feeling that if we get the wrong spark at the wrong place at the wrong time, there's going to begin a cycle of violence in this country. | ||
| It's going to turn us into another Belfast. | ||
| And I thought I would ask you about this militia stuff and what's going on currently and what you feel about that. | ||
| Well, personally, I feel like that if everybody gets out and votes against the people they don't like, then there won't be any need to get any guns and go shoot nobody. | ||
| To me, that's the way to do it. | ||
| Once it gets to the point where you feel like you have to arm yourself and fight, then it's too late anyway, because look at China. | ||
| You can't beat a tank. | ||
| I don't care how mad you are or how big your shotgun is. | ||
| You can't outshoot that tank. | ||
| So once it gets to the point where our government is more well armed than we are, we're screwed anyway. | ||
| So you better figure out a way to vote them out because you can't whip them. | ||
| Yeah, and more and more people are getting apathetic. | ||
| They're getting the feeling that they can't change anything, and they're getting cynical. | ||
| Willie, even I'm getting a little cynical sometimes about politics, and that turns them away from voting, and it just seems like some kind of vicious cycle, and it's beginning to spawn these people with guns. | ||
| I know it, and like catch 22, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. | ||
| But I still believe that there is a peaceful solution. | ||
| There's got to be because. | ||
| The alternative is not so hot. | ||
| No, the alternative is an impossible situation. | ||
| You can't win. | ||
| Look at Waco. | ||
| Look at all these other places. | ||
| You can't beat them that way. | ||
| You've got to do it at the voting polls. | ||
| You really can't beat them in court. | ||
| You have to vote them out. | ||
| That's the only way. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| Eastern the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, this is Jeff from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, WTMJ 620. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Willie, I didn't even realize that your recordings went all the way back to 1962. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was your first album? | ||
| It was called And Then I Wrote. | ||
| It was on Liberty Records. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, okay. | |
| Yeah, it was just, I have a little book here. | ||
| I was just looking at it. | ||
| Hey, I didn't get a chance to check out any of the Farmade. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But my hometown, you guys played there, Farm Aid 4, Indianapolis. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I got lucky. | |
| I happened to get the whole thing on videotape. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was just fantastic. | |
| It was a fantastic show from beginning to end. | ||
| I'm not a big country fan, but I like some of the bands, some of the country and western bands that happened to play there. | ||
| It was pretty cool. | ||
| I have a strange Willie Nelson story to tell you real quick. | ||
| When I first got here to Milwaukee back in 85, and I had already moved here by the time you guys came to Indianapolis, I didn't have a place to live, went to a mission. | ||
| I was wearing a Willie Nelson t-shirt. | ||
| And it just was a black t-shirt. | ||
| It's got just a drawing of your face on the front of it. | ||
| And I need a place to stay. | ||
| And the pastors as well, you know, you've got to blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You've got to stay, you know, listen to the sermon and all this, you know, and all, you know, and you've got to be up by 6 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| And he looks at my shirt and he says, but you've got to do this. | ||
| You've got to change your shirt because Willie Nelson doesn't do the work of the Lord. | ||
| And it just struck me kind of strange. | ||
| Because Willie Nelson doesn't do the work of the Lord. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what the guy told me. | |
| That's what the pastor told me. | ||
| And he wouldn't let me stay there overnight. | ||
| Now, where do you suppose a pastor might have got an idea like that, Willie? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, I'm serious. | |
| I was in 85 when I first moved to town. | ||
| Well, I can understand why anybody out there who's a really fanatical, religious person could look at Willie Nelson and say, well, my goodness, you know, keep your kids away from this guy. | ||
| Don't let your kids grow up to be like Willie. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| You think that... | ||
| You think that you've been around long enough so that you were in the Old West one day, Willie? | ||
| It seems like you were there. | ||
| Oh, I probably was. | ||
| Because I really still think that way a lot. | ||
| Well, when I see you in those kind of parts, it seems like it's really natural for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Feels that way to you when you're doing it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's really not a lot of acting involved in those kind of parts, really. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I thought. | ||
| First time caller align, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is Gary from Richland, Washington. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Mr. Nelson, I think you're one of the coolest guys that ever walked the face of the earth, and I mean it sincerely. | |
| Even if you don't like Willie Nelson, you know dang well you're the coolest guy. | ||
| I was just wondering to know, what are some of the newer singer songwriters today that you respect or listen to? | ||
| And also I want to know, one of my guys I like a lot who has a lot of respect for you is Steve Earl, and if you could say a few words about him. | ||
| Well, first of all, yeah, Steve Earle is a great writer, and he's one of those younger guys that I would, you know, say him and Rodney Crowell, and of course, to me, Chris Doffson is still a young guy. | ||
| But the real young guys, I really don't know who they are. | ||
| I don't know who's writing these songs these days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I saw you guys do that on Austin City Limits with Billy Joe Shaver and Kimmy Rhodes. | |
| She was kind of new to me, and I really liked her a lot. | ||
| Well, yes, she's a great writer, and she's there in Austin. | ||
| She's an old friend. | ||
| She'll be playing the picnic again this year, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man, I'd love to go down that picnic. | |
| And Billy Joe Shaver, I mean, to me, he's still a young writer. | ||
| You know, back when all this stuff about country music was going on, I knew I was in trouble when I heard those people say, well, I wish they'd play some of them old guys again like George Strait and Randy Travis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Well, thank you, Willie. | ||
| It's been a great pleasure. | ||
| Same here. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm so glad I got through. | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in eastern Indiana. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, two things first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One is a request, and the other is a comment. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This Sunday's Mother's Day, and my mother is a tremendous fan of Mr. Nelson. | |
| And I was wondering if he would be willing to give her an audio autograph. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What's your mother's name? | ||
| Jean. | ||
| Willie. | ||
| What's her name? | ||
| Jean. | ||
| Jean? | ||
| Jean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Well, happy Mother's Day, Jean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is wonderful. | |
| Her, and she and my wife make me believe in God. | ||
| They are wonderful women. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, thank you very much. | |
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| You're not a strictly religious person, are you? | ||
| I mean, you're not like in a church every Sunday or something, are you? | ||
| Or are you? | ||
| Well, no, well, I couldn't be in a church every Sunday. | ||
| I hadn't gone to church in a long time, but I still, I believe we walk around in our church every day, you know. | ||
| So wherever we are, that's it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's fair enough. | ||
| When I come back, I want to ask you a really tough question. | ||
| So stand by and don't go to sleep and don't hang up. | ||
| And we'll be right back. | ||
| From the high desert, near Area 51, so-called Dreamland. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this is CBC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
RCA going to release one of their essential series on your sides from back then. | |
| All right. | ||
| Last question first. | ||
| There is an album called Yesterday's Wine that came out on RCA several years ago. | ||
| It's just been released on Justice Records. | ||
| And, you know, that was good news to me because I didn't think that album really had a good shot back in those years. | ||
| The content was a little bit early, I think. | ||
| And Justice Records liked it enough to get it and put it out again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was ahead of your time. | |
| All right, what about this fairness in music licensing? | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| Do you, Willie? | ||
| Well, I wrote this letter to some folks trying to get that, keep that from being passed. | ||
| As I understand it, what it is, it's if this law is passed, and there's a lot of songs that I sing that would be restricted. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is this the law you're talking about? | ||
| It is, I guess. | ||
| I mean, what does the law or the proposed law say, or what effect would it have, Willie? | ||
| Well, first of all, let me see if this is the one this gentleman is talking about. | ||
| Well, he's already gone. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, in case it's a law that, as I understand it, it's a law that prohibits certain lyrics and ideas. | ||
| It's a horrible form of censorship. | ||
| So naturally, I think anybody, any writer, anybody, any citizen ought to be against it. | ||
| How in the world can they, on what basis can they limit? | ||
| I don't understand that at all. | ||
| There's a lot of things that are done in the name of morality, and it's for our own good. | ||
| Oh, is that what it's about? | ||
| In other words, certain words or phrases you can't say or you can't write about in a song? | ||
| I'm sure that's the origin of it. | ||
| That's the origin of the law that I'm talking about, and I'm not sure about this other topic. | ||
| Oh, well, all right then. | ||
| What about all this crazy music that's out there right now, the rap stuff? | ||
| That's the ones they're after. | ||
| Yeah, I know that. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| But so kind of like Larry Flint stood and stood behind the First Amendment with the flag behind all that stuff, it really applies here as well. | ||
| The rap stuff is bad, but sometimes in the name of what we call freedom, if we really mean what we say about the First Amendment, even the stuff you don't like, got to let it go. | ||
| Yeah, you can't tell people what to hear and what not to listen to. | ||
| That's not what we do. | ||
| Everyone should be able to listen to what they want to listen to, like what they like. | ||
| That's why they put knobs on the radio so you can turn the dial. | ||
| You've got that right. | ||
| And yet, let me tell you something. | ||
| There are a lot of people out there who hate my guts, at least some. | ||
| You know, if you're not hated by some, you're probably not doing anything at all. | ||
| And yet they're glued to listen to remind themselves how much they hate me. | ||
| Well, they feed on that. | ||
| It's a strange psychology, isn't it? | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art, and hi, Willie. | |
| How you both doing? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| This is for Willie and for Art, sort of. | ||
| Willie, there's a guest who you've done farm aid, and there's a guest who Art has on a show weekly called Linda Howe. | ||
| She studies cattle mutilations and crop circles. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was wondering if you would consider, she's also former Miss Idaho, but would you consider doing a crop circle cattle mutilation aid? | |
| And this is Martin and Oceanside. | ||
| Are you in Oceanside? | ||
| I'd like to know more about it. | ||
| I'm not sure what you're talking about. | ||
| Well, you know, in a lot of parts of the country, in fact, all over the world, there have been these really strange incidents of cattle mutilations that make absolutely no sense at all. | ||
| And crop circles, well, those are these Strange designs, Willie, that show up in the middle of farmers' fields, wheat fields, those kinds of things that appear to be nothing that a human being could do, you know, as though it came from somewhere else or something else, or whether it's a message, or nobody really knows what the hell it is. | ||
| But they're beautiful, they're intricate, and nobody knows what they are. | ||
| I've heard of those and I've seen them, but I'm not sure what the benefit is for. | ||
| Well, he was kidding about that. | ||
| Oh, he was kidding about that. | ||
| But I mean, you know, the question about the crop circles really is interesting. | ||
| It's like somebody's trying to tell us something, unfortunately, somewhat cryptically. | ||
| And there have been some amazing examples, like Stone Enge in England, with 191 circles joined together, some looking like DNA strands, and all these strange things going on that we simply don't understand. | ||
| But right in the middle of farmers' fields. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, maybe you're right. | ||
| They're trying to communicate in some way. | ||
| Yeah, maybe they are. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| It would figure that you would have on your program a dope-smoking, tax-dodging, government-hating hippie. | ||
| That would figure for you one who has murdered not 39, but now 43 people who you sit to their dooms by watching a comet. | ||
| Willie, this is a fellow named J.C. Features himself to be a preacher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you give it a bad name. | |
| How about someone like Hank Williams, who sings good songs about the heartland? | ||
| This is J.C. Features himself to be a preacher, Willie. | ||
| He's doing great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You administered the new revelation from the Lord, and you are against the Lord's work, just like the gentleman who told the gentleman with the t-shirt that he has to take that off, that he was causing disruption among those who were there to follow the true faith, and that Art Bell, you're, you know. | |
| Willie, he thinks I'm the Antichrist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you've murdered your body counts piling up. | |
| You can't say that you're this morality. | ||
| He's talking about the heaven's gate suicides. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you're trying to dodge that. | |
| You're blaming that on me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're trying to dodge that. | |
| I didn't know whether you did it or not. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| JC, be calm. | ||
| They say you left your motor running. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| Be calm, J.C. Yeah, I'm... | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| You're never calm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yes, I am. | |
| Are you trying to say that I have a problem? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I have a problem with the fact that you bring on subversives onto your program. | ||
| We're trying to say that the government, JC, enough for now. | ||
| Are you holding your nose while you're talking? | ||
| I've often wondered about that myself, Willie. | ||
| Mercifully, he seems to be gone. | ||
| But he'd just go on and on if I let him. | ||
| So, are you a proud subversive, Willie? | ||
| Am I a proud subversive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's the way I feel about it, too. | ||
| First time call a clock in your air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where are you? | |
| I'm Sacramento. | ||
| Sacramento. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's hear how you follow that last act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was really pretty funny. | |
| I mean, that guy should never be on the air. | ||
| Well, if he hadn't been, though, we wouldn't have got that laugh. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And, hey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Art. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to ask you, have you ever heard of a man named Erwin Schiff? | |
| Yes, I have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have? | |
| And I bet Willie has, too. | ||
| I'm afraid I haven't. | ||
| Oh, you haven't. | ||
| Oh, it's all about the IRS, right, Caller? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, this is somebody who I think. | ||
| Has Irwin been behind bars over the IRS thing? | ||
| I think he has, hasn't he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, he has. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was a mistake. | ||
| Well, I don't know about that, but there's been a lot of people who've been behind bars. | ||
| You know, Willie, since, let me ask you this about the IRS. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there who say that the 16th Amendment was never ratified. | ||
| I'm not a citizen of this country. | ||
| I'm this or that, and I don't, and I won't pay taxes. | ||
| And a lot of them end up going to jail. | ||
| How do you feel about those people? | ||
| Well, I don't know about those people. | ||
| The way I feel about it personally is that I've always felt like that if I made enough money, I didn't mind paying taxes. | ||
| I think we're being overtaxed a lot now. | ||
| But as long as I'm making enough money to pay my taxes, then I didn't bitch about it too much, you know. | ||
| It hurts a little bit when you look at what they take because it is a lot. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| If you look at it like, well, it's a pretty good price to pay to live in America. | ||
| And if you look at it that way, it is. | ||
| And I do look at it that way. | ||
| Listen, I got one more hour. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| You do, too. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
| Don't hang up. | ||
| No, don't hang up. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I see trees of green. | |
| Red roses too. | ||
| I see them blue for me and you. | ||
| And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Because it seems like no matter how good a person or bad a person you are, if you're public enough, there's somebody who doesn't like you enough to probably try to do you harm. | ||
| And do you think about that? | ||
| No, I can't afford to think about that. | ||
| You know, the thoughts do come by, and you have to say, well, am I going to worry about this or am I going to go ahead with my life? | ||
| So no, I don't. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| I go back to what we talked about before. | ||
| Fortunately, we're not in control. | ||
| So I go about my life and I figure that other people are taking care of me. | ||
| I better have some guardian angels or I'm in trouble anyway. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And you just can't let it bother you. | ||
| I finally came to the same conclusion. | ||
| Just keep doing what you're doing and having fun. | ||
| And if the plan is that you exit early, then that's the plan, and you can't do anything about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
| That was Don in Denver. | ||
| Yeah, hi, Don. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got a couple of questions for Willie. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| If you're not a legend in your own time, how come they named a highway after you down there in Texas? | ||
| Which one was it? | ||
| It's the highway that runs through Abbott, Texas, really. | ||
| The highway is closed now. | ||
| They moved that highway, and now there's an interstate out the edge of town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, there is? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They named a highway after you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, if he's not a legend, it's what is, you know. | |
| And it's the road. | ||
| What's great about it is the road that I used to run up and down is when I was a kid, and I still go back there now and hang out on the road and just have a big time just knowing that, hey, this ain't bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Willie Nelson Highway. | |
| Okay, and the other question was, I don't know if it was a rumor or not, but I heard something about you at the White House or something taking a little break to go up and have a smoke on the roof or something. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| I've heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, that's the rumor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it a rumor or was it true? | |
| You know, I can't remember for sure. | ||
| He claimed short-term memory loss on the subject. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, and one more question. | |
| Is there any chance you could squeeze art into your next movie there? | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He needs more exposure. | |
| No, don't. | ||
| I'll tell you, Willie, I've been fighting with this. | ||
| I'm a radio guy. | ||
| And now, you know, all the TV people, I mean, CNN's coming out here next week, film a whole show and everything. | ||
| And it just, it gives me the heebie-jeebies, the camera. | ||
| I don't know how to get over that. | ||
| Yeah, I know the feeling. | ||
| There's more mystery to radio, you know. | ||
| There absolutely is. | ||
| And I just, every time I look at these other talk show hosts who go on television, I say, boy, are they making a mistake? | ||
| And, you know, they've got a good face for radio, and they should stick with it. | ||
| Well, yeah, but there's always temptations, especially when you get as popular as you are. | ||
| They're going to be firing at you, you know, to have your own daily TV commentary show. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| They're talking to me about all that kind of stuff, and I have been resisting, and I have said no more times. | ||
| And these television people and these movie people, they are very persistent people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's like they don't take no. | ||
| They just keep coming back and, well, how about if we do this? | ||
| Or how about if we do that? | ||
| Or we can make it easy on you. | ||
| And, oh, man, they just keep coming. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Art and Willie. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in central Texas. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is, I know golf is one of Willie Nelson's favorite pastimes. | |
| And my question is, who was the most fun person he ever played with, and who was the best golfer he ever played with? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Lee Trevino, I guess, is one of the best golfers that I ever played with. | ||
| And one of the most fun guys that I ever played with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He seems to have a good sense of humor. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that a big part of your life's sense of humor? | ||
| It has to be, Argy. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You've got to laugh a lot or you're in really trouble. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It holds you off from going crazy thinking about the more serious stuff. | ||
| Listen, we happen to have Perump is a little big small town, but we actually have a really good golf course here, Willie. | ||
| I've played that golf course. | ||
| You have? | ||
| I played that golf course. | ||
| In fact, the last time I played that golf course, Benny Binion rode around with me. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, the next time you get near this golf course, I hope you'll call me up. | ||
| We'll get together. | ||
| Can we do it? | ||
| Yes, and moreover, I would even be willing to try and play golf. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| I'd love to do that. | ||
| All right, good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask about is Johnny Gimbal. | |
| And I have never heard a person that can make a violin swing in a Western band like he can when he's played with you. | ||
| Johnny Gimbal is on my latest album, Spirit Album. | ||
| Johnny plays some really great stuff on there. | ||
| Oh, no kidding. | ||
| When's that going to be out? | ||
| Oh, it's out now. | ||
| It's been out about six months. | ||
| So, any record store, probably, huh? | ||
| Right, it's called Spirit. | ||
| All right, Easel on Island Records. | ||
| Island Records. | ||
| Whoops, would have been West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning, Trey. | ||
| Good morning, Willie, and hello there. | ||
| And Happy Mother's Day to Ma Bell out in Long Island. | ||
| That's my mom in Long Island. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A big hug to both of you and a warm smile. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Willie, I couldn't name a song that you've done. | ||
| I'm not a fan of your music, but I am a fan of your soul. | ||
| I started liking you when Johnny Carson, who I used to idolize, started having you on his show a lot, and I was really glad to know you from that. | ||
| Yeah, you know, this caller is saying something really important. | ||
| And they don't necessarily have to be a fan of your music to be a fan of your soul. | ||
| And there is something about you, Willian. | ||
| And I don't know what it is, but it's like people can feel your soul. | ||
| People can feel your realness. | ||
| And that's a big part of it. | ||
| It's not just music. | ||
| Well, I think people can feel what you feel if you feel it deeply enough. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| Hold on, Willie. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be right back. | |
| The devil went down to Georgia. | ||
| He was looking for a film deal. | ||
| He was in a bag. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We came across this young man going on the fiddle and playing a pot. | |
| And the devil jumped up on the paper jump. | ||
| I'm a fiddle player, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you care to take a pair, I'll make a bet with you. | |
| Now, you play pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the devil a view. | ||
| I've got a fiddle of gold against your soul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was playing Timeshare there at the time, and I saw these buses, and I said, surely that's not. | |
| And I drove up, and sure enough, it was you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they said that you were in Wilmington someplace getting ready for a concert. | |
| And I really had a hard time believing that. | ||
| I thought you were out on the golf course somewhere, but they would tell us where. | ||
| Do they protect you that way, Willie, just so you can at least once in a while go off and play around quietly? | ||
| Well, you know, as soon as the guys hit the stage area, well, everybody's kind of saying, well, where's Willie? | ||
| And none of them know nothing. | ||
| Yeah, that's nice. | ||
| People in my little town are good about that, too. | ||
| A lot of them know where I am, but they don't say. | ||
| They just don't say. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, everybody. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Art. | |
| I was surprised a couple breaks ago you played What a Wonderful World, and not too long ago I sent you Willie's rendition of it. | ||
| I love that song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I wish you would have played that tonight. | |
| My question to Willie was if he's reviving that song at all since it's becoming popular once again because his rendition is quite original as well. | ||
| Yeah, I love that song, Willie. | ||
| Well, thanks, I do too. | ||
| And of course, I learned it from Satchmo's record, and he does such a great job on it, I had a lot of nerve even trying it, but I liked the song so much I did it anyway. | ||
| There's just so much basic truth in that song. | ||
| It's a funny thing. | ||
| I sat here sometimes during breaks, you know, I've got these four or five-minute breaks, top and bottom of the hour. | ||
| I play music for myself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it sets my mood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| it's just my mood somebody's asking here and i'll ask have you ever had any any experience with Have you ever had any experience that you could not explain with regard to something like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I believe other people do have them, but I've never had one. | ||
| That's me, too. | ||
| Except that I can feel the presence of those who have left, I think. | ||
| I mean, it's not like some misty white thing appearing or something. | ||
| Just they're with me. | ||
| Yeah, but it doesn't appear to me as a ghost-like thing. | ||
| It's more of a natural thing. | ||
| Yeah, it is natural. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Willie Nelson in a marathon now. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Willie, I'm calling from Somerset, Kentucky. | |
| Hey, this is Mike. | ||
| Are you coming to Renfro Valley anytime soon? | ||
| Well, I'd like to. | ||
| Is that still going strong? | ||
| Yeah, it's doing pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had a question to ask you. | |
| Do you ever do anything with David Allen Coe anymore? | ||
| I haven't seen him in a while. | ||
| I think the last time I saw him was the 4th of July picnic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Last year. | ||
| I don't know what he's into these days. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a lot of your old albums, his old albums, and I think the songs you've done with him are great. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a lot of talent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is he still recording? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| I think he is. | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| I hadn't talked to him in about a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Willie, I appreciate it. | |
| I hope you get around to Rinfo Valley. | ||
| I hope so, too. | ||
| Tell him hello up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, sure, Will. | |
| Boy, there's a lot of places to go, aren't there, Willie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of places. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Willie Nelson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Glad. | |
| I'm glad I made it through here. | ||
| Let me kill my radio. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hey, Art. | ||
| Hi, Willie. | ||
| How are you guys doing? | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I just wanted to ask Willie and actually thank him. | |
| How did he, and he touched on it earlier, how did he and Julio Iglesias ever get together? | ||
| Because they seem to be just diametrically opposed to each other. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I thought the same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Julio Iglesias is the international playboy, you know, and Willie Nelson is the down-home country boy. | |
| It just seemed like a... | ||
| So maybe that's. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| But anyway, it's kind of funny. | ||
| The whole thing is, you know, I'm in the military, and every now and then, you know, you get called to do talent shows, you know, for your Christmas party. | ||
| You know, we can't afford professional entertainment usually, so you just get to get a bunch of guys from the outfit, you know, go on, act crazy, and, you know, there's your show, right? | ||
| Well, I always usually win because I do the Julio Iglesias and the Willie Nelson song, and I kind of like end my act with it. | ||
| It was kind of funny, though. | ||
| I just wanted to hear from Willie how he got together with Julio and who originally had the idea. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is a pretty good question. | ||
| It seems like you're two very, very, very, very different people. | ||
| So how'd that happen? | ||
| I was in London, and I was listening to the radio at about three and four in the morning. | ||
| And in London, at that time, you could only get a couple of stations. | ||
| And there was a BBC, and then there was a BBC. | ||
| But that was about it. | ||
| But I heard this guy singing. | ||
| And I told Connie, I was married to Connie at the time. | ||
| I said, Connie, you're a great singer. | ||
| And she said, yeah. | ||
| And so the next day, she went down and picked up his album because the guy said, no, it's Julio Iglesias. | ||
| I thought I had discovered somebody. | ||
| I didn't realize the guy had already sold 100 million albums. | ||
| But so I called my manager, Mark Rothbell, and I said, see if you can find out anything about Julio Iglesias and if he wants to do a song with me. | ||
| So at that time, he was in Los Angeles doing his first session that he'd ever done in this country. | ||
| And when Mark ran down his manager and found out where he was, and they asked him if he wanted to do a song with Willie Nelson, he said yes. | ||
| So he came to Austin, Texas, brought a track to all the girls, to Austin, Texas to my studio. | ||
| And we went in there and I did my voice. | ||
| He put on his voice. | ||
| And then he went back to L.A. and spent another, I guess, 90 days working on his part because he wasn't satisfied with his English. | ||
| And that's when classic. | ||
| The whole thing has been classic. | ||
| Willie, we're out of time. | ||
| Good. | ||
| And I don't mean good. | ||
| I mean, like, you've hung in there for the entire five hours. | ||
| What a total pleasure it's been. | ||
| Same here. | ||
| When you come out, play some golf here in Prump. | ||
| We'll get together. | ||
| I'd love to do it. | ||
| Willie Nelson. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| I'll talk to you later. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| All right, bye. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| That's it, folks. | ||
| That's all there is. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
| Good night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was a highwayman. | |
| Along the coach roads I did ride. | ||
| With sword and pistol by my side. | ||
| Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade. | ||
| Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade. | ||
| The masters hung me in the spring of 25. | ||
| But I am still alive. | ||
| I was a sailor. | ||
| I was born upon the tide. | ||
| With the sea I did a fight. | ||
| I sailed a schooner round the Horn of Mexico. | ||
| I went aloft and whirled the mainsail in a blow. | ||
| And when the ice broke up, they said that I got killed. | ||
| But I'm living still. | ||
| I was a damn building across the river deep and wide. | ||
| Where steel and water did collide. | ||
| A place called Boulder on the Wild Color. | ||
| I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below. | ||
| They buried me in that crater that no sound. | ||
| But I'm still around. |
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