Merle Haggard joins Art Bell to discuss extreme weather—unusual desert floods, Pacific thermal anomalies, and fish deaths from algal blooms—tying them to The Quickening, a book suggesting societal collapse. Haggard shares prison experiences, including meeting death-row inmate Carol Chessman, and critiques the death penalty’s racial disparities. They debate the drug war’s failures, UFO sightings near Vandenberg (1969) and Area 51, and Bell’s Egypt trip to investigate Sphinx prophecies. Haggard reveals a cayenne pepper fasting recipe for mental clarity, ties The Urantia Book to spiritual insights, and admits past songwriting regrets like "Out Among the Stars." The conversation ends with reflections on war, tobacco regulation, and Willie Nelson’s candid nature, framing chaos as a sign of humanity’s shifting values amid potential global upheaval. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, where the storms are raging, I'll tell you all about it.
This is Coast to Coast A.M., that show heard from in the West, the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains, eastward all the way to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, through Puerto Rico, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
This, once again, is Coast to Coast A.M., and I'm Mark Bell.
Good morning.
Well, I don't know whether El Niño has begun or not, but if this is what it's going to be like, we're headed for trouble.
Here in the desert southwest, as well as in California, we are experiencing violent thunderstorms.
And I mean violent, with torrential rains and hail.
We've had hail pelting us for the last, oh, I don't know, four or five hours.
It is remarkable out there.
And my understanding is that it also is occurring in Southern California.
Hail, lightning, it's all around us.
So we're getting exactly, I guess, what Southern California is getting.
And to add to the mystery, my network in Medford, Oregon, is getting clobbered tonight as well.
They've been having all kinds of technical weather-generated difficulties.
So it's going to be a dicey situation tonight, in more ways than one.
And whether we remain on the air and they remain on the air, it's going to be an adventure.
And if you hear a few lightning crashes in the background, thunder that is, as a result of the lightning, you'll know why.
So that's what's going on.
And I think that the express may be generating itself, or maybe this is just some sort of freak weather.
But let me tell you, friends, freaky it is.
All right, I've got some stations to welcome.
For example, KFMJ in Kachikan, Alaska.
Pretty well rounding out Alaska as far as I know.
Great to be on in Katchikan.
Do you know I was in Alaska last week?
As a matter of fact, the pictures, photographs of the visit to Alaska, along with being able to cozy up to a Blackhawk helicopter and all that kind of cool stuff, are up on the website at www.artbell.com.
So anyway, welcome, Ketchkin, Alaska.
Also, WWRC.
Anybody have any idea where they are?
In the nation's capital.
Washington, D.C. They're a monster, WWRC, 980 on the dial in Washington, D.C. Nation's capital.
So we have switched affiliates there to a real monster, and good morning, everybody, in Washington, D.C. This is a program that defies conventional explanation.
We do something different just about every night.
And tonight is going to be no different in that respect.
My guest coming up at a moment is Merle Haggart.
Country star Merle Haggard.
If the question were asked, who forged the genre that is known today as modern country music, only a very tiny group of country immortals could step forward to share the spotlight.
One out of that handful would be Merle Haggard.
No, he was not in the delivery room on the morning country music was born.
It just seems like he was.
Merle Haggard's not just a legend with a P.O. box in a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
He's a permanent condition of Country Music's soul.
And that makes him a very interesting individual.
I understand he does not do a lot of interviews.
So I'm honored in that regard.
Coming up in a moment from Nashville, Tennessee, appropriately, Merle Haggard.
I've been in situations similar to that where I'd be with people that were bigger stars than I was trying to get away from someplace, and it can sometimes be really dangerous, and I'm in question as to why they didn't ask them to slow down.
Princess Di, of course, was a very gracious, apparently very much loved person, but the reaction to her death almost seems disproportionate to the amount of knowledge we had of her here.
It just, it hit really, really hard, and I've yet to fully figure it out myself, but I'm actually working on that angle, why it's so all-consuming over here.
So there's something we all identify with that I haven't quite put my finger on yet.
It's interesting.
You, what about you, Merle?
Tell us about Merle Haggard.
How did you get to be such a big country music star?
Robert Duvall is producing, and Billy Bob Thornton and Everson are doing the script writing.
And it's going to be a full-blown major motion picture of my life, or a period of my life.
And I guess if you could paint a picture of a guy that was supposed to be a country artist, it would things happen to me that didn't happen to President Lincoln.
It was like it was all thought out.
If you believe in predestination, it proves itself almost every day.
My father passed away when I was nine, and I had an older brother and sister, but they were already busy with their lives.
So it left me with an older mother.
And it wasn't long from nine until about 11, and I felt out of place, and I started leaving home when I was that young.
I started riding freight trains, and I eventually got into trouble and wound up in San Quentin when I was 19 years old.
And all of a sudden I was there in a cell next to a guy named Carol Chessman, you may remember, who was 12 years in being put to death in the state of California.
I remember.
Well, I had been making some beer, and we got caught making beer in the yard at San Quentin, and I was in the, what you call the shelf.
I was not yet 21 years old, and I was talking through the vent to a man who was going to death and sleeping on a Bible for a pillow and no clothes.
And it just kind of hit me.
I said, you know, maybe this is not what you had in mind.
It wasn't really anything that I'm ashamed to talk about.
I grew up a poor boy, and I learned how to work early on in life.
I started working in the potato sheds in California.
I'm from California, and just happened to be in Tennessee tonight.
But they had a real strict currency law in California, and I wanted to work, and they didn't want me to work under 16.
Right.
So they would take me to juvenile hall and give me so many days in some juvenile road camp for not going to school.
And I broke out of there and stole a car and got caught stealing the car and wound up going to a bigger place and doing the same thing again and running from the law just trying to be a man.
I was too young to be a man.
They wouldn't accept me that way and I didn't understand it at the time.
And I never hurt anybody.
I just kind of hurt myself, stole cars, and wound up in the big house when I was 19 years old.
And they called me an incorrigible prisoner, you know, someone that would always be in jail.
And the reason they sent me there was because I'd ran away so many times from the other places, and they didn't feel Like they could hold me, I guess, because it wasn't that my type of crime was, my worst crime was a burglary.
I tried to, I went to jail for seven years to learn how to be a good criminal.
And, you know, I've rubbed elbows.
They put me in jail for currency, and I rubbed elbows with people who were going to rob people.
I was in there beside people who were actual real criminals.
And here was this young boy, under 16 years old, in Los Angeles County Jail, listening to these guys talk about how to pass bad checks, how to hotwire cars, and how to break into safes and things of that nature.
And I've always been a kind of a guy that I needed a lot of money.
I've never been able to hold on to money.
And I was fortunate that when I came out of prison, you know, jumping ahead with the story, I had a lot of God-given talent with the music and I came out and...
My father was very talented musically, and my mother was a writer.
She was the penmanship champion of the state of Oklahoma when she was 16 years old.
Wow.
So I got some writing from her, and I got some music from my dad.
And then all these things happened to me when I was very young, which allowed me to experience maybe some things that I would never have known about otherwise.
My sister compares me to Paul in the Bible.
I mean, it was like I had to go to jail or David.
I had to be king, then I had to go to jail, or I had to go to jail, then be king, or something, in order to see both sides of the coin.
I'm afraid they're going to lose the uniqueness of it all.
I have the pleasure of being well acquainted with Steve Wynn, and I disagree with a lot of things that he has done over the years.
I think he could have preserved some of the old Las Vegas as well as developed some new.
But I was sitting at a table with him and Benny Binion, and listened to him discuss what he was going to do with the old golden nugget.
And to me, it was a piece of history that was going to be torn down.
And I couldn't believe it.
I said, you know, you're going to put in another titty bar here and tear out this lounge where Bob Wills and all these people played.
Chet Atkins and Earl Travis, all the great names and country and Western music has been here over the years, and you're going to tear it out and make another titty bar.
But I want to talk to you about Las Vegas more than we have done to This point because I remember the way it used to be run, and this was one strange town.
But I'll tell you, it was run very efficiently by some very interesting people.
Well, I tell you, I used to play 21 at Benny's place down there, and I'd win some money, and maybe be up a couple days, you know, sitting there playing 21.
Oh, yeah.
And I remember one incident where Elvis was in town, and so he'd invited me and my band to come out.
There's a theory that they're calling the zero point, that we've sometime over the last 250 million years, some 40 times, we've wound to a complete stop and had the poles reverse polarity and stand still as it's spoke of in the Bible as the sun stood still.
And some people believe it actually occurred about 11,000 something years ago, and then we started in the other direction.
And I think it's foolish to imagine that we've just been around once.
I think that civilizations probably have come and gone, and that the Earth has been here a long time, but, you know, somehow, and I'm, you know, I'm really not an all-fired environmentalist, but I'm also not blind to what's going on.
And it's easy to see that we're undergoing, I mean, fish are dying by the millions off the coast with this new hard, they're closing waters in Maryland.
We can't go swimming because of this new pysteria thing.
And the Antarctic has cellular changes, not just cellular, but DNA changes in small animals, and our weather is changing.
It's all headed toward an event, and I'm really curious.
Well, you know, it's what we've, you know, we dug down 200 feet in Redding, California, and we have a well there, and we come up with cow urine in the water.
Well, even you take the case of North Carolina, the estuaries of North Carolina.
That's where this visteria thing began.
It's called the cell from hell.
This is this dumb little cell that lays at the bottom of water, even salt water, Merle.
And when enough pesticide pollutants and runoff from pig farming and that kind of thing reach this cell, it activates and it starts killing fish, which it is readily doing now by the millions.
They get open bleeding sores on them.
And now they're learning that this is affecting human beings.
It's almost an AIDS-like thing.
As a matter of fact, some call it fish AIDS.
And I am worried for us, but maybe it's like you said earlier, you know, things are sort of predestined.
Well, I learned more about him actually through being there while he was there than I did actually talking to him.
His case was an interesting case because of the fact that he was never really positively identified for the crime that he was going to be put to death for.
He was an armed robber who had like 29 counts of armed robbery on him.
And he was a guy that should have been locked away forever and all that.
But they never did he was supposedly the red light bandit, the guy that came out and found the lover's lane and raped the girl and would kill the guy or whatever.
And it was like he was politically put away and they hung this crime on him because they wanted to get it off the books.
He wrote two books while he was there, one of them on carbon paper.
And he wrote one book and got it out, and he stirred up so much problems for him that they didn't want him to write another one, so he wrote another one on carbon paper.
So he was a very bright man, and just, you know, he became an attorney while he was there.
He was on death row, I think, for 12 years.
And he educated himself, self-educated himself and defended himself.
I mean, he hired attorneys, directors, and him outside.
He wrote two books while he was there.
And when I got to talk to him, my questions were simple to him.
He had like three or four weeks before he was to be executed.
I hollered over to the vet and I said, my name's Haggard.
I said, I'm up from the yard doing seven days for drunk.
And I said, what's your chances?
And he said, oh, no problem.
He said, I'm going to make the stay.
And he did.
He made that stay.
He got a 60-day stay, and then he died, I think, one more 60-day stay after I talked to him, like 120 days after meeting him.
10.30 one morning they shot the gas to him and you know it it was uh that's quite a experience to be among someone and haven't spoken to someone who actually was exterminated.
There's a lot of racial things, I understand, that are in high-spirited fashion going on there, like, you know, between the blacks and the Mexicans and the whites.
And it's really bad now.
You can't even speak to someone outside of your own race.
I wonder, you know, prison is like just a microcosm of society, and we're a little bit more polite about our racism out here, but it's still everywhere, and it's probably worse, not better.
Everybody got two legs and a brain and the color of their skin is immaterial.
We're all individuals.
I raised fox terriers.
I can't even get a dog that resembles the other dog.
All dogs are different.
People are all different.
But we could take a lesson from the animals, you know, like all the birds of the feather flock together, but when they go to the water hole, they all get along.
I really believe, Art, there is an increased endeavor from the dark side to make it, to intensify satanic or the whatever, whatever represents the bad side.
There's been some intensification of that here lately.
but i have this terrible feeling that before it gets better Yeah, it's going to probably get worse.
All right, Merle.
Hindheight.
We're at the top of the hour and we'll be right back.
My guest is Merle Haggard.
He's in Nashville right now.
And yes, we will get to telephones.
But right now, we're just sort of chatting.
The lightning strikes are all around.
The hail is falling.
The winds are blowing.
I wonder if this is the beginning.
Anyway, that's what's happening here.
We'll be back.
This is Coast to Coast.
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On this air and ocean finally love and love don't change Running every time you do so you can stay inside Watch it in so motion as you turn around and play
I just watched the news, the local Las Vegas news.
Interesting, interesting developments.
They, as their lead item, had the storms that were going through here in Peru.
And I told you, we were having violent windstorms, hail, and rain.
And there's more of it apparently on the way.
But guess what?
Here in the desert, in the last several hours, we have had almost two inches of rain.
And people, I suppose, in California and areas where there's rain chuckle at that and say, two inches, it's not much.
Oh, yes, it is.
Believe me.
Dumped on a desert floor that's not used to getting rain, we have flash flooding.
We have the highway between my little town of Trump and Las Vegas, probably on the verge of being closed, they reported.
And looking to the west, there are more storms, they say, maybe headed for this direction.
So Las Vegas escaped, and we got clobbered.
And when I say we got clobbered, I mean we really got clobbered.
And the rain is just in gigantic pools, and it's very dangerous.
So if you're in my area of the desert right now, my advice to you is to watch very carefully where you go.
Flash floods occur with just about no notice at all and kill quickly.
So watch your step out there.
And if you don't need to drive, don't do it.
All right.
I have got something here.
I've got to read from Standalo that just arrived.
And it kind of punctuates what we're talking about and, in fact, what's going on right now.
And I'll just read it.
Art, as you know and have known for some time now, the El Niño effect is evolving into something new and devastating, especially in the North Pacific off the U.S. coastlines, Alaskan and Hawaiian coasts as well.
The increased temperature average for this time of year thermal anomalies for the western and northern sectors of the Pacific Ocean are enormous.
On my homepage, Stan's homepage, which folks can access from your website.
Under news bulletins on the homepage and under thermal electric maps for 3 September 97, on the page that comes up, you will see the current Otis Thermal Anomaly Image is from the U.S. Naval FNMOC at Monterey as of today.
It is the worst we have ever recorded already.
A large circular heat pattern is forming off the west coast of America.
It is about two-thirds the size of America.
It has a cold spot in the core and a heat ring around the outside.
It is producing unusual vortex thermals up into the jet stream.
The results are already beginning to flow into the newsrooms.
Over the next 18 months, the grain crops in America are going to be heavily damaged in some places from flood, from drought, from hail and snows at the wrong time in the wrong place.
And that's from Stan Dale in Perth, Australia.
So, Merle, there you go.
This is beginning to be very serious.
And if what we were talking about earlier is correct, I think that whoever it is has got their finger on the reset button.
Yeah, the weather controllers have decided to intensify the condition.
They're going to bear down on us a little bit, I think.
That's really, really interesting about that thing.
You know, that's been increasing for the last 20 years.
I've been noticing, you know, the only thing you can tell about the weather over the last 20 years is that there's no one year similar to the other.
There was no pattern at all, and it seems as though we've fallen out of our clock.
Our clock isn't right.
It seems more like October than it does September, more like November.
And even then, our rainy season doesn't begin to happen usually on the west coast until January.
And that's not been the case for the last couple of years, and certainly not right now.
It's starting with this, it looks like it's coming all the way from Baja, New Mexico, all the way up to your area, and then back coming back down to Roswell.
You know, I'm not a prophet, and I suppose you're not either, but I don't have to be a prophet to know that something's going on, something big is about to happen.
Yeah, so we just let it kind of a cheap way of making what we called eight-day beer.
And it really wasn't all that big of a sin, I don't think.
We were playing guitars down in the yard and drinking this homemade beer, and we just got a little too much of it and wound up on the shelf up there.
But it was the thing that scared the hell out of me when I looked around and really seen whoever was sitting among and where I was at and how old I was.
I came out and I was one of the 2% that go to jail and come out.
And I was fortunate in the fact that I was able to prove my worth out here with my talent and had it catch hold early on in my parole and was able to get off parole.
And then later on, President Reagan gave me a full and unconditional pardon.
You know, our values, our priorities, our double meanings for our double standards for everything is really beginning to bite us in the ankle, I think.
Well, I always thought, Merle, that the first time a Democrat achieved office, whoever it was, you know, after the Reagan years and so forth and so on, Bush, when a Democrat finally got to office, they'd probably legalize pot, or at least decriminalize it.
But here came this President Clinton who got himself in a political jam over, you know, well, I took a mouthful or a pot or something and never inhaled, somehow got himself in trouble over that to the point where he couldn't do anything.
They said, you know, like President Carter, I think I heard this on your show, said that if he was elected president, one of the things he would level with the public about would be the UFOs.
And when he was asked about that after he was in office, he looked and tears came in his eyes.
No, we called the center there and the tower at the Air Force Base, Vandenberg, and said, hey, did you guys shoot something at us?
And they said, we don't have anything working there.
I said, well, did you get anything on radar?
And they said, no, we didn't see anything.
But my wife saw during the Arizona skirmish down there with all the sightings.
Well, she was on her way back to see me in Texas to join me on tour.
She was parked at an RV camp on the Colorado River, and she watched five UFOs for about an hour and a half do their little dance back and forth like they're mapping out the Colorado River, or something.
What they act like, they act like they're doing a survey.
And she described it that way to me.
And she said that she watched it for a long time and went to the camper and finally just quit watching them.
They were still there.
And she went to the camper and she opened up this little square camper, lid on top of the air, opened it all the way up, and one of them was right directly over the center of our camper.
And we tried to call you on the line to let you know about that story.
And I have a real estate lady that lives in Phoenix and was one of the people that did, I think, got a VCR of that thing that hung over the city there for a while, whatever it was.
And, you know, it's pretty much believed to be a fact that that was just another front for something the government was trying to do without us knowing about it.
And over there, the, what they call the Project 12 or something like that.
Well, I've got some, I'll read after the top of the hour.
I've got a letter here from somebody who claims that he still works at Area 51.
This is a very, very unusual letter.
And I'm going to try to get fellow on the air.
But he makes some pretty incredible claims, and I think this is a credible letter.
I'll read it after the top of the hour.
Anyway, something's going on out there.
We see things in the sky here all the time, Merle, as things that are simply not, cannot be easily explained.
I was in the Air Force, you know, I know what aerodynamic flight is, and I know pretty well the advancements we've made.
Now, I'm sure there's lots I don't know, but I do know that we have not publicly claimed to have conquered gravity yet, the control of gravity, and the craft I've seen have defied gravity.
It's like two time zones rubbing together and things of that nature have occurred on the triangle out there where boats seemingly just fall off the edge of the earth.
Well, the increase of earthquakes alone, seismographic activity, is a reversal from all scientific ideas of the cooling of the Earth and of us being shut out of the sun some millions of years ago.
That's an opposite.
That shouldn't be.
We should be having fewer earthquakes, but we've had more earthquakes to a degree of like there was something like 18 in 1946.
Yeah, and there's got to be some sort of a there's got to be some sort of control in place or otherwise we're on the verge of a chaotic ending that no one wants to face up to.
It's made its way to the movie script, but it's never happened.
And it's really an interesting question as to how and why that hasn't occurred.
And, you know, think what a valuable thing it would be if America could pull off this deal about going to the moon.
We didn't go to the moon.
It would give us immediate, if we could convince China and the rest of the world that we went to the moon, they're going to throw down the wall, which they did.
Something that caught my interest is, you know, you take these prophets, you know, Naster Thomas, people like Master Thomas over the years that have made these prophecies.
yeah that's great the what I was The point I was driving to a while ago towards was the fact that there's been no predictions by anybody made after, I think, 2005.
Yeah, out of all the notoriety that I've acclaimed through music and all that, I built a model railroad and built a railroad car that had railroad wheels that came down to the track like the officials used on the railroad track.
Well, I just made a sort of a backyard model of that.
And for some reason, another life magazine was just blown away with the fact that I'd done that.
And all I used it for was like going on abandoned tracks and going back up and duck hunting and, you know, and finding abandoned water holes where old steam engines used to fill it with water and you'd find great fishing.
I'm going to read a letter that I promise to read here in a moment before we go back to Merle.
Tomorrow night, Joyce Riley is going to be here with some of the most incredible news, incredible news you've ever heard.
The next night is Mark Furman.
Remember Mark Furman.
And then Friday night, Saturday morning, Albert Taylor, the guy who wrote Soul Traveler, which also, by the way, is about to become a movie.
I want to read this letter to you, and I think it's the real McCoy.
I'll let you judge for yourself.
I have invited this person in the manner he prescribed to get hold of me.
I'll tell you more about that.
Dear Mr. Bell, I've listened to your show with interest over several months now and was tempted to call in on a few occasions when the subject of Area 51 came up.
I was a former employee at this installation with a top secret clearance and was privy to some rather interesting information and sights.
The reason I did not call, however, is because I don't want to simply spring this information on you or your audience without discussing a few things with you first off air.
Mr. Bell, I have information that I believe would astound you and your listeners up until now.
I have let fear for my safety and the safety of those around me stop me from going public.
Only recently have I realized it really doesn't matter what happens to me.
The American people have a right to know the truth about this installation and its true purpose.
I have also taken several security precautions to ensure my safety beginning with this email address.
Needless to say, this is not my real name, but it is one generic enough to blend in.
I believe the time has come for the American people to know the truth.
What puts me in a position to enlighten them?
A top security clearance at the installation does.
Although I'm no longer an employee of Area 51 as of March, I still hold my clearance because I am still called to work there occasionally.
Because of my clearance, I have been privy to a lot of things that most people could only hope to learn about.
To tell you the truth, Art, the information I have to share with America will probably not be believed by the masses.
It is too fantastic and terrifying.
If America only knew what was going on there, they'd be scared to death of their government.
Time travel?
Achieved.
Alien research, psychic research, reverse engineering of alien technology?
And it sounded like he was afraid of what was going on out there.
That disturbs me.
You know, I hear, I don't know if you hear them down on your side of the mountain, but every evening, not every evening, but about three or four times a week, at about 3.30 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we hear these explosions.
Do you think that that could be the results of pilots breaking the sound barrier several times over out there in some sort of a machine they're trying to learn to fly?
I think they're totally out of control when they look us straight in the eye and deny that the Area 51 exists is just bold rebellion in regard to the Constitution.
Well, America, the home of the free and the brave and all that, fed plutonium to kids, did all kinds of experiments on the American people that they had no knowledge of.
I mean, this is stuff you'd expect to have heard maybe back in Germany, but not here.
Well, we were the Buddy Holly, sort of the, between Buddy Holly and I don't know who else, something in that vein.
Wynn Stewart's band was a big band on the West Coast and I was playing bass for him over there at the time and was able to impersonate Wynn and Wynn could get away with not being there.
And I could uh I could introduce uh the band and pretend to be Wynn and and uh he got a big kick out of that.
And some of the people didn't know I did it.
But it was just I worked over there in radio and I have a friend that lives over there contacted you for me the other day that was in radio in Las Vegas for a long time.
I took off to find me a place to live somewhere in the desert.
And I went by like Tombstone and then turned left and went back over into Phoenix and saw some unusual things out there and couldn't find any place that wasn't taken.
There's somebody living everywhere out there.
But there's an eye that looks like a UFO that's sitting over on top of the mountain just outside of Tombstone, Arizona.
It has, I understand, the capability of seeing 200 miles in all directions.
And there's some intelligence in country music that maybe wasn't in tune before, you know.
And there was only a few country artists that were worth mentioning, like the greats, like Jimmy Rogers and Eddie Arnold and Ernest Tubb and people like that.
But those people I liked as a child and grew up listening to Bing Crosby and Bob Wills, but I did not like what they called Hearbilly music at the time.
I'm with you.
I liked Elvis Presley.
I liked Frank Sinatra.
I liked Bing Crosby.
I liked Bob Wills.
And I liked Lefty Gazelle and Hank Williams.
But I didn't like a lot of that stuff that sounded like it was coming from their closed down their nose.
And same as Eric Clapton has on rock and roll stations.
And in some places they play Johnny Cash and myself and Willie and people like a rock and roll artist.
In fact, they play us more, they're more likely to play us on a rock and roll station nowadays than they are to play us on what they call this new country.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about New Country, but before I get to that, the reason I asked you about money was because Ted Turner said something that's always haunted me.
And he's got an awful lot of money.
And he said, you know, it's a funny thing now that I've got all this money and he has got baseball teams and CNN and all this stuff.
He said, actually being rich is kind of an empty bag.
Well, I'm in the process of, as we speak, after working my tail off for 38 years in this fine America, of being somewhere near paying the IRS off.
You know, there was a lot of cattle buys that didn't really exist, that were only on paper during the 70s.
Willie Nelson, people like me, and Tennessee Ernie, and a lot of people were taken in on big scams that turned out to be scams, and they came back on us for a lot of IRS money.
And, you know, when you're talking about $12 million.
Yeah, it's a real, you know, there is a, you know, to not get religious or spiritual or anything, but there is somewhere in the Bible that says there has been some chosen out from the rest that your names were spoken before the worlds were formed.
We have a message, a continuing message to deliver as writers and as speakers and singers and people of integrity, placing our name beside nothing we don't believe in with our hearts.
it has to be there is someone someone uh there's there's a few people in the world that actually believe that someone spoke and not a thing became everything so unless and And it favors that way of thinking more every day as science probes deeper.
They're coming up with more reasons to find the spoken word just to be the thing that holds the whole deal together.
Somebody spoke it into existence, just like it said.
And if you take the Bible literally, it really bitty words and you take them apart and you analyze it.
Somebody here asked me to ask you, speaking of Willie, to ask you about a song that you did with Willie, somehow how you finished it, Poncho and Lefty?
And I'm telling you, your mind becomes so sharp, and your voice becomes so fine, and your ears become, And your eyes, you see the leaves are more brilliantly, they look like they did when you were five years old.
And everything changes when you go into a fast.
And we recorded that album while we were fasting.
And he came in and woke me up after five days of being awake with him and doing this fast and everything.
I'd laid down for 30 minutes.
If you've ever been up for a long time and laid down for 30 minutes, you're really tired.
From the kingdom of God, across the country, around the world, and throughout the universe, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the ZBC Radio Network.
It is kind of an odd, strange, Even eerie, discomforting feeling to see the things that I wrote about in my book coming true.
I just got this facts, and it fits in with what we've been talking about.
It comes from John in Falls Church, Virginia, dear art.
Hope you get this facts.
Our governor, rather, the governor of Maryland was on TV on Saturday and made an announcement that the Pokemon River, I hope I'm saying that correctly, was closed to all people and boats, etc.
This is due to the ongoing problem with dysteria in the river.
He also said four state workers who were trying to solve the problem have been infected from the water.
And they and one other case all had memory loss as well as lesions now showing up on their brains like the ones on the fish.
They're now worried about getting into the Chesapeake Bay.
No one knows what to do at this point in time.
And I'm wondering how much farther this is going to go.
That, John, makes two of us.
And with Merle, three.
And I suspect a whole planet full of people out there.
I don't know what's going on, but I'm not happy about it.
And it just tastes kind of like a hot orange juice is what it tastes like.
And you just stir it up and you drink that and then you drank an equal glass of water with it.
And you need something like some sort of a laxative also.
Otherwise once you start to cleanse your body, you'll become poisoned from these things that come loose from the insides if you don't have them pass on through.
You told about the sixth day there's like some sort of adrenaline sack that hangs at the base of your skull or something to break in case of emergencies.
Well, here's Buster, you know, and he said, he said, I had never felt anything like it in his life.
It was the greatest high or any experience he'd ever had.
I really, you know, your philosophy in some ways is a lot like him, and I really like him, and I like you even more now, and I'm going to be actually getting all your albums.
And I just really am glad that, you know, you're saying what you know and what you believe.
You know, there's a lot of people now that just don't do that anymore.
And when you were talking about your fasting, you talked about the bursts of energy.
And I like to think of that as like spontaneity, spontaneous energy.
And you're getting rid of poisons and things maybe that may have been in there since you were two years old, you know.
There's an incredible feeling, and I recommend it to anyone that's in, you know, I think they should probably see a doctor and let a doctor say that they're all right to do that.
I wouldn't want to recommend that and have somebody sue me and Art Bell.
It drags you back to something you really already mentioned briefly, but dear art, thanks for having Merle on the show.
Hope you can ask him what his opinion is concerning the state of country music radio today.
Radio today.
As it is, artists like Merle, George Willie, Tammy, etc., can't be found on major big city market radio stations.
These artists have had many, many hits that still observe rotation, and they still put out new albums, and it's criminal for country radio to outcast them.
Merle's last album, 1996, was a top 10 pick of mine in 96.
You know, it's just what the public is listening to right now is background music for videos.
These young kids have got a couple of stations, MTV, three, four different television satellite stations that are playing these videos.
And used to, music was written so that it stood up on its own instead of being a video, and that was the idea of trying to use words to describe a picture or a story.
You know, and to me, I wish I could say otherwise, there's exceptions to the rule.
There's been a few great songs, but it seems like we're way short of good songs to me.
I don't know.
I can't think of anything that I could whistle, or that you could whistle back at me in some time.
It's been a while since there's been a tune that actually had wide enough appeal that a youngster could whistle or would want to learn how to play on a guitar.
I wonder if it really is that change, and I suspect it is, but I remember when I was young, my dad would come in, and I mean, this is stuff that's great now, 50s, early 60s, but mid-50s, my dad would come in, I'd be playing whatever was on the radio, and he'd say, my God, how can you listen to that crap?
Turn down, turn it off, I don't want to hear it.
And here I am now, looking at most of the music they're playing today on rock stations, and I'm saying, how can people listen to that crap?
And I guess some of the same things going on in country, huh?
Well, Sirant, it's the human element of music or the expression, the producers allowing an artist to express himself is not really part of the scene anymore.
He has to fall into a criteria or they won't even let him in.
That's a good point to pick up on after the bottom of the hour, and that's where we are right now, the bottom of the hour.
Earl Haggard is my guest.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. Say Art, about a week ago we had the most intense lightning storm in 10 years of my time here in Albuquerque.
It lasted for hours and hours, poured, hailed.
The lightning was something like a bad science fiction movie.
Well, I think you've answered a reason to why there's not as much success in my backyard right now is because a lot of these same people that you're talking about can't really sincerely identify with a guy like me.
They've been so good that I can't think about having to go to prison, you know.
Or in some way or another, I don't think they identify with me right now.
Yeah, it's like the trip that, you know, the Mark Twain, legendary Mark Twain, he traveled everywhere and the stories were about what he saw and what he lived.
And my father passed away and it was devastating to me.
I think that's why the Princess Diana thing was personal to me is because my father was the hero of my life and he died when I was nine.
And I thought about those boys and, you know, take all the royalties, strip them from everything, and just make them human beings.
Yeah, it was when the century is all done and it's all boxed up and we look back at it, it's going to be the most notorious death in the entire century.
I think, I mean, it's real down to earth, and I really get into that.
I mean, all these, like you were saying earlier, the people now, I mean, the videos are that's just what's ruling it.
But I have a question.
You were talking about where y'all were mentioning the Phoenix lights, and Mr. Bell had a guest room before that said he could make the lights appear over per up here.
I lean in that direction myself because it seems to me if they have something secret going on, the last thing they want to do is display it over an area of about two million people plus.
Well, I vacillate between several theories regarding our government and U.S. one is that they know exactly what they are and are somehow made some sort of the technology.
And then on the other hand, I sometimes think they have the slightest idea, either, what these things are and what they cannot explain, they deny.
So I don't know what the truth is, but it's one of the above.
What if I had a theory, a religious, religious people were like me, or just a theory, but what if the Christ was God and in the flesh in the Bible said he's going to reappear on this planet when we and what if nobody knows about Ferris Field and we do,
and from all over the universe, they're coming here because it's nearing the time in which he said he might talk about the biggest show in the universe.
Back now to Merle Haggard, and Merle, here's the facts I want to read you.
I recall Mr. Haggard when I was growing up in East Bakersfield in the 50s and 60s.
I was a boy at the time, and I remember him to be a near desperado musician, always at the forefront of the local country music and always in trouble with the law.
Please ask Merle about his memories of Bakersfield in the 50s and 60s, most particularly how the country music scene in the honky-tonks along the Edison Highway affected his music style, and did he play with cousin Herb Henson, Buck Owens, or Rose Maddox?
Did he work for or know Semi Mosley?
Can he tell us his most memorable experience from that time?
Yeah, it runs ahead of you even, you know, no matter how much good I may do in my life, you know, it seems, it's almost a bit of a shame that that has to somehow, you know, get all the attention.
And for some of those motives, I went in the Air Force, and I remember being down at Lackland Air Force Base in basic training with a first sergeant screaming and yelling in my face.
And I remember lying in the bunk in those early days of basic training saying to myself, oh my God, what have I done to myself?
Art, I missed the recipe that you were talking about, the cayenne recipe, and so in order to prevent my having to answer this question for the next year and a half, would you one more time?
Although, listen folks, we must, for the sake of our own tales, say you should go and see your doctor before you ever endeavor to do something like this.
Having said that, what is the recipe that you used?
You take a lemon, you cut it in half, and if it's a juicy lemon, you try to get about a quarter, a little more, a quarter of an inch of lemon in the bottom of an eight-ounce drinking glass.
And you take a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, preferably fresh cayenne pepper, and the same amount of pure maple syrup as you had with the lemon.
One part lemon, one part maple syrup, about a quarter of an inch, a quarter of an inch of each.
Then you pour it up with water and you just stir it up.
You drank that, and you drank another glass of water, a matching glass of water with that.
And then the cayenne pepper is a healer, and it's also loaded with vitamin C. And then you want to do like a spherinoplankton type laxative, something light that takes the things that begin to jar loose from your interior out and takes it on out.
And a subscriber seemed to think Merle was familiar with this book, and some of the things Merle has said recently in the interview, particularly the possibility that there's conversions of celestial persons coming to this world in some way connected to the teachings of Christ.
The Urania book deals with some of that.
So my question is, Merle, are you familiar with the Urania book?
It's supposedly the only book containing the entire 33 years of Christ's life.
Yes.
And some of the things that he did that is not recorded anywhere else.
It claims to be in this book.
And it makes it worth at least an opinion.
You need to read and see if not some of the great philosophy found there is almost remarkable to the point of being from a Messiah's mouth.
unidentified
Yes, I find it also a beautiful rendition in the English language, but I agree there's some problematic parts in other places of the book, but again, many different authors.
He's been advisor to two popes, and no, you're exactly right.
You have that sense when you listen to the man that he well may know a whole lot more, and he alludes to the fact that he knows more, and he's such an honest guy that I believe it.
Anyway, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Merle Haggard.
But the one question from Merle is, what do you think about Art's book, The Quickening El Niño in the Pacific and possibly this upcoming winter and all how basically going to break loose on the West Coast?
It has to do with our social behavior changes, our economics, our government.
It really touches on every aspect of human life.
And I came up with this theory that things are moving faster and faster, exponentially faster, and people began to say to me, uh-uh, no, it's not true.
What you're observing is our increased amount of communication.
In other words, we hear about things faster and more than we used to.
And so I felt that I needed to prove my case, and that's why I wrote the book, because I wanted to prove that, no, it's not just communication.
social behavior is changing and it's not just that we're hearing about it more we've got gangs we've got people killing each other we've got children killing each other we've got i had And you'll relate to this.
I've said this on the air many times.
There was a time in this country when if you were down and out and you were going to go rob a 7-Eleven or whatever, you'd walk into the store with a gun and say, give me your money.
And the guy would give you the money and you'd back out the door and take off in a car.
Today, it's a little different.
More times than not, the guy goes in with a gun, says, give me your money.
The guy gives him the money.
And as an afterthought, he puts a bullet through the guy's head and then takes off.
They're in the process, but for some reason, the government has taken on the task of training several hundred cities in America over a period of the next four years in the event of germ warfare or chemical warfare.
As to what to do, I guess the thing would be to invest in masks.
You know, I'm not a weather expert by any means, but I would have thought with what came through here last night, which was unbelievable, the temperature plunged to about 60 degrees right now, which is cool for, believe me, for our desert at this time of year.
And there should not be enough energy out there to be producing what I see headed our way right now.
Yeah, first art, I just wanted to tell you, I saw in the news a little while ago, they're showing surfers off the coast just south of San Francisco surfing without their wetsuits on, which is highly unusual.
Well, Hank, being a musician, I've played your music in hockey-tonks and barrooms up the eastern seaboard for the last 20 years and always respected and enjoyed your music.
Back 10 or 15 years ago, I was given a record, a recording of a song called Out Among the Stars.
And it left an impression on me that kind of, I guess Art could explain to you when he listens to Willie's The High, kind of a haunting impression.
And I was wondering if he could tell us something about that song.
And maybe who sang that song with you, the female voice that was on that recording.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Merle Haggard.
Hi there.
unidentified
Merle, first I got to thank you for the music you've been putting out over the years.
And maybe, Art, you and the listeners don't know that Merle is not only a major influence and a major singer in country music, but is actually a founder of a whole genre of country music.
And there's a whole sort of Bakerfield scene now that emerges from his music.
And your music has just moved me so much over the years.
But I did have a bone to pick with you, and it's admittedly at this point kind of an old and moldy bone.
But back in the 60s, you were really negative on the people like me that were protesting the Vietnam War, that said there needs to be change in this country.
And I think that you're, you know, there's a lot of people in the counterculture, in the left, that really love country music.
Well, you see, the song he's referring to is called I'm Proud to Be an Okie from Muskogee.
And it was written about my father, who was from Muskogee, Oklahoma, and about people who lived there who felt the way that I would imagine they felt about the time that he's talking about when there was a period of disrespect for anything.
And I was as dumb about it as anybody.
And that's the result, the song is the result of my ignorance if it's not written correctly.
And I don't think a lot of people, the people that were protesting, knew enough about it or had enough actions to be making the noise that they made in rebuttal to what he said.
I'm Becky from Vancouver, Washington, and first of all, it's a great honor to talk to both of you.
I never thought I should live so long as to have Merle Haggard on the phone.
I have a comment and a question for Merle.
My comment is that, you know, you were talking about putting feeling in your songs.
Am I wrong in thinking that part of that has to do with the way you grew up?
I came from an abusive family myself, and I think because of that, I tend to feel things more intensely.
And it seems like that comes through in the music from the vintage that you and Willie Nelson and Freddie Fender and all of those good old boys put in their music.
Yeah, there's definitely a missing element in the music today for whatever reason, be it the lack of an interesting childhood or the lack of a hard childhood or whatever.
There is a missing element there.
And I don't know what to say about it.
You know, I think probably there's some people out there that have that sort of music to offer.
But we're not here because we're into some sort of sameness that has to do with computers.
And people are making decisions about music that don't have any here.
Well, it's made, and the decisions are made like, you know, they don't make decisions on who operates on the doctor doesn't make a decision that the insurance man does.
There's a target that they're after, and they're not interested in the culture of the music anymore at all.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, my question For you is about Willie Nelson.
Years ago, and I mean years ago, when I first heard Willie Nelson sing, just over the radio, I got the impression that he was just an honest, open, down-to-earth kind of nice guy, that he'd be real fun to sit across from a table with over coffee and just converse.
We played for President Nixon and Pat Nixon's birthday, and they had guards at the bottom of the first floor going to the second floor where Lincoln's bedroom was.
And Ron Ziegler was the press secretary at the time.
My press secretary was running around with a guy he was calling Horsefly all he'd been during this cocktail party at the White House.
Well, during the night, they conned these blue uniformed Marine officers into letting them go upstairs, talking about my press secretary who was wanting to meet Ron Ziegler, but he didn't know he was anywhere around him, but he was with him.