"When I came to Nashville, the people I hung out with were serious songwriters, none of whom were successful yet," said Kris Kristofferson. "Willie was the hero of the soulful set -- the people who were in the business because they loved the soul of country music. They loved Willie, John [Cash], and Roger Miller, the singer-songwriters. The closest I got to Willie was Jimmy Day. He used to hang out with us. We'd sit around at these jam sessions, sing Willie songs. I went out to his place in Ridgetop, hung out with Jimmy Day, but I never did meet Willie."
Still, Kris was a fan.
"When Johnny Cash had his TV show, Mickey Newbury and I were talking to Linda Ronstadt's manager, telling him about Willie, how he was like a jazz singer. 'You're really missing a bet if you don't pick up on him,'" Kris told the manager. Kris knew Willie had it, for all the wrong reasons as far as the Nashville establishment was concerned. "Ray Price came out to talk to me on the road once. He said performing was going to ruin my songwriting like it did Willie."
In November of 1970, Willie recorded a new song he and Hank Cochran had written called "What Can You Do to Me Now?" The lyrics were prophetic. Two weeks before Christmas, Willie bought [wife] Connie a new Mercury Cougar, the first new car she'd ever had. On her way back from the grocery, one of the first trips she'd taken in her new ride, she stopped at the mailbox to fetch the mail. As soon as she stepped out of the car, the vehicle started rolling down the hill. She tried jumping back in but couldn't engage the brake. The car headed into the woods and rolled over, stopping just before a steep drop-off. Connie's arm was cut from broken glass, but otherwise she was fine. When the wrecker arrived to tow the car out, the front seats were missing. Someone had stolen them, someone, evidently, who knew that a brand-new car had crashed in the middle of nowhere.
Then, two days before Christmas, as a light snow dusted the Cumberland Valley, Willie was in Nashville at a pre-Christmas party at Lucky Moeller's, when he got a phone call.
"Hey, Willie, your house is on fire. The house is melting." It was Randy Fletcher, one of his nephews.
"Well, pull the car in the garage, let them have it," Willie said calmly. If his possessions were going up in flames, he could at least collect more insurance money.
Connie had been alone in the house that night with [daughter] Paula Carlene when Randy stopped by, waking her from a nap. She went to check on Paula Carlene so she could show her off to Randy when she saw smoke scaling up the wall by Paula's bed. The wiring that Willie's stepfather, Ken "Kilowatt" Harvey, had rigged in the basement had caught fire. "He had wired the whole house," [Nelson's daughter] Lana said. "When you'd sit on the toilet, you'd get shocked. When you swam too close to the underwater light in the swimming pool you'd feel little shock waves."
Connie grabbed Paula Carlene and ran out of the house. Randy called the fire department and Willie. Willie was on the scene in less than thirty minutes. While he'd meant what he said about driving the car into the garage, he forgot about some other valuables that needed fetching. While the volunteer fire department was dousing the flames, Willie leapt over the fire hoses and dashed into the house, ignoring repeated warnings. He emerged from the smoldering ruins with his guitar, Trigger, and a plastic trash bag containing his stash of fine Colombian Gold marijuana. A few days later, Pop Nelson -- his father, Ira -- found in the debris a footlocker containing the first demos Willie had recorded in Nashville in 1961 and files of song lyrics and memorabilia.
The night of the fire, the family moved into the two-bedroom trailer Willie kept at Pop's place, where [Nelson's daughter] Susie was living. Susie fashioned a Christmas tree out of one of Willie's boots with an evergreen limb stuck in it. They spent Christmas Eve at musician and songwriter Dottie West's home, where Dottie took Connie aside for some woman-to-woman advice. It could've been worse, she told her: "You've got everything," Dottie said. "You didn't lose anything but stuff. I've been through a fire. I'm older than you and lived longer and I've come to realize what's really important. You've got your family, everybody's healthy. That was just stuff. And you get to get new stuff!" The way Dottie put it made Connie think starting over wouldn't be so hard.
From Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski. Copyright 2008. Published by Little, Brown and Company. This excerpt published by permission.
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