Today, Nelson is wearing a black hoodie, sunglasses and dirty New Balance sneakers, his semibraided hair tumbling out of a black baseball cap that says ZEKE'S SOCIAL CLUB. He steers his Chevy through the property with sharp, jagged turns, occasionally lighting up a burned-out joint in a cup holder. At one point, he stops the truck and singles out a stable: "I have a sick horse in there – we tried to isolate him from the herd a little bit," he says. "This is just old, rough country. A lot of room to drive around, a lot of privacy. I like Texas." (...)
He fires up his coffee maker, then reaches into a 1950s-style Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox packed with loose green pot and pulls out a tightly wrapped, torpedoshaped joint. He takes a slow hit, holding it in as he looks at a mounted cow's skull near the fireplace. Next, he produces a vaporizer pen. "Do you ever smoke these?" he asks. "It's just pot – no smoke, no heat. You can smoke 'em on the plane!"
Nelson has been arrested at least four times on marijuana offenses. In Waco, Texas, in 1994, police found him asleep in his Mercedes on the side of the road, a joint on him, after a late poker game. In Louisiana in 2006, en route to Texas Gov. Ann Richards' funeral, Nelson's bus was pulled over and police seized 1.5 pounds of weed and two ounces of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Four years later, he was driving back from Thanksgiving in California when the border patrol arrested him in Sierra Blanca, Texas. ("He feels great – he said he lost six ounces!" joked his harmonica player Mickey Raphael at the time.) "They mostly want autographs now," Nelson says of the law. "They don't really bother me anymore for the weed, because you can bust me now and I'll pay my fine or go to jail, get out and burn one on the way home. They know they're not stopping me.
"Weed is good for you," he says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel – there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Abruptly, he changes the subject. "Wanna ride around a bit?"
Nelson turned 81 in April. He can be forgetful – in concert, he sometimes needs to look over at Raphael, a veteran of his band for more than 30 years, to see if they've played "Georgia on My Mind" or some other song yet ("But I think that's the dope more than anything," says Raphael). His hearing is shot, and he no longer signs as many autographs as he used to. But he still practices tae kwon do and sleeps on the Honeysuckle Rose, his 40-foot-long biodiesel-fueled tour bus, while the rest of the band check into hotels. At one point on the ranch, when he stops to show off his favorite paint horse, Billy Boy, he easily hoists himself up to the secondhighest fence rung, balancing about four feet off the ground. (...)
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He's an uncanny vocal phraser: "The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson," said the late producer Jerry Wexler. "The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they're going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It's some kind of musical miracle."
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. "The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers," says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, "Oh, why does a guy write? I don't know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it." Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, "a bit of a mystery." "He's really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you're talking about," says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. "You're like, 'Fuck, Willie, answer the question!' There's a lot of exterior there. That's why you'll never quite fully get that picture."
"You never get to know him like you should, but you know there's more there than what you're seeing," says Loretta Lynn. "I know there's more there because of how he writes. He can't fool me!"
"He's a hard man to know," Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. "He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn't talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him."
He fires up his coffee maker, then reaches into a 1950s-style Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox packed with loose green pot and pulls out a tightly wrapped, torpedoshaped joint. He takes a slow hit, holding it in as he looks at a mounted cow's skull near the fireplace. Next, he produces a vaporizer pen. "Do you ever smoke these?" he asks. "It's just pot – no smoke, no heat. You can smoke 'em on the plane!"Nelson has been arrested at least four times on marijuana offenses. In Waco, Texas, in 1994, police found him asleep in his Mercedes on the side of the road, a joint on him, after a late poker game. In Louisiana in 2006, en route to Texas Gov. Ann Richards' funeral, Nelson's bus was pulled over and police seized 1.5 pounds of weed and two ounces of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Four years later, he was driving back from Thanksgiving in California when the border patrol arrested him in Sierra Blanca, Texas. ("He feels great – he said he lost six ounces!" joked his harmonica player Mickey Raphael at the time.) "They mostly want autographs now," Nelson says of the law. "They don't really bother me anymore for the weed, because you can bust me now and I'll pay my fine or go to jail, get out and burn one on the way home. They know they're not stopping me.
"Weed is good for you," he says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel – there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Abruptly, he changes the subject. "Wanna ride around a bit?"
Nelson turned 81 in April. He can be forgetful – in concert, he sometimes needs to look over at Raphael, a veteran of his band for more than 30 years, to see if they've played "Georgia on My Mind" or some other song yet ("But I think that's the dope more than anything," says Raphael). His hearing is shot, and he no longer signs as many autographs as he used to. But he still practices tae kwon do and sleeps on the Honeysuckle Rose, his 40-foot-long biodiesel-fueled tour bus, while the rest of the band check into hotels. At one point on the ranch, when he stops to show off his favorite paint horse, Billy Boy, he easily hoists himself up to the secondhighest fence rung, balancing about four feet off the ground. (...)
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He's an uncanny vocal phraser: "The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson," said the late producer Jerry Wexler. "The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they're going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It's some kind of musical miracle."
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. "The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers," says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, "Oh, why does a guy write? I don't know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it." Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, "a bit of a mystery." "He's really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you're talking about," says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. "You're like, 'Fuck, Willie, answer the question!' There's a lot of exterior there. That's why you'll never quite fully get that picture."
"You never get to know him like you should, but you know there's more there than what you're seeing," says Loretta Lynn. "I know there's more there because of how he writes. He can't fool me!"
"He's a hard man to know," Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. "He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn't talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him."
by Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: LeAnn Mueller
