The Great Willie Nelson Commando Hoo-Ha and Texas Brain Fry

when those good ole boys get together to have a party, they really mean business. need we say more?

People kept telling me the Austin, Texas, scene was the only thing happening in Jerry Ford's America other than inflation, the CBS Evening News and Tupperware parties Austin was represented as the new Haight-Ashbury and the new Nashville, the only wide-open dope-and-music resort available now that students were studying again and Tom Hayden was wearing neckties and kissing babies. So I was properly startled when Dub, an old Austin friend, telephoned me in New York to invite me to a picnic. It seemed a long way to travel unless he could throw in a quilting bee or a big night of bingo over at the Elks Lodge.

"This will not be your ordinary family picnic," Dub pledged. "There will be many thousands running around in varied stages of undress and craziness. There will be nonstop music, screwing in the bushes and 19-year-old good things to eat."

"There's a catch to it," I said. "Congressmen and ex-Communists are gonna make patriotic speeches from start to quit."

"Severely untrue," Dub said. "This will be an unfettered celebration of your basic freedoms. Free beer. Dope. Bonfires. Fist-fights. I predict that four or five people will be killed in interesting ways."

On that assurance, I was drawn to Willie Nelson's Third Annual Independence Day Outdoor Brain Fry, Ball Break and Mixed Doubles Doping, Picking and Trashing Ejacorama.

You can look around Austin and decide that the Sixties cultural revolution arrived on the Texas & Pacific several thousand trains late. Perhaps this is because Sheriff L.B.J. effectively kept home fires doused even as Watts, Saigon and Gene McCarthy burned. Maybe it's only that Texans are as backward as their Oklahoma cousins claim. Some credit, or blame, Willie Nelson: Music, after all, is the prime reason for Austin's special ambience. The idlers and bums and dreamers--the credit-card revolutionaries, cosmic cowboys, street urchins, fake rednecks and genuine shitkickers, crazy artists and writers--cannot get drunk or high unless guitars are thumping in their ears. One weary of the realities--Grinning Jimmy, bankrupt cities, Solzhenitsyn's bullshit, the Watergate hangover--may get lost in the music and hazes of 30-odd clubs offering live bands and costumed hustlers wearing everything from fey glitter to smelly brogans. There is a little something happening there, though it is neither Nashville nor Haight-Ashbury. Dodge City on acid, maybe. Alamo II. Despite trouble defining it, I'll take Austin and give you Grand Rapids, Marvin Gardens and the Short Line Railroad. That was my mind-set, at least, when I flew in for Willie Nelson's Brain Fry so full of airline hospitalities that I'd captained a sing-along among recalcitrants in the first-class cabin. As with New York, I always approach Austin improbably convinced that adventures both spiritual and carnal shall seize me and shake me and make my lights shine.

Dub appeared in the airline terminal wearing an Indian blanket, a dreamer's smile and an Abe Lincoln hat. Travelers competed to ignore him as he swayed in invisible breezes near the luggage counter. "We're gonna have us several tons of fun," he prophesied, "unless we sober up or happen to get shot." Who, shot? Dub told about last year's picnic, when Billy Cooper ran such Independence Day fevers that he taught Dr. Jay D. Milner to dance. Cooper is Willie Nelson's chauffeur, famed for being found asleep in the back seat while the boss was being busted for drunk driving; Dr. Milner is Nelson's publicist, a self-described 50-year-old groupie. Dub said, "They got to fussing over 15 cents or cats or dogs or something. Anyway, Billy pulled out what he calls his 'bidness'--I think it was a .25 automatic--and placed a few warm-up shots in a spectacular pattern very near Jay's feet." Milner, a college professor before redneck rock beguiled him, remained intellectual enough to imitate Bojangles Robinson--the great Broadway tap dancer--all the way to Fort Worth and was not seen again until the Moon of the Cold Winds.

Dub told about Gino McCoslin, the slick little promoter of Willie Nelson's Brain Fry, doing business for Crackerjack Productions. Gino once ran such a rowdy club in Dallas that lawmen appeared each night with police dogs and to photograph the customers. Gino considers that his reaction was in the best traditions of civic spirit. "I didn't want to shoot their dawgs," he says, reasonably, "so I closed up."

Willie Nelson himself had known experiences with firearms. "When Willie was living in Nashville," Dub said, "one of Ray Price's fighting cocks kept molesting Willie's laying hens. Ray Price was important to Willie, being a superstar who recorded a lot of Willie's original songs. Ray didn't pay much attention to Willie's complaints about the fighting cock, so one day Willie took a shotgun and wasted the booger. Well, Ray Price had a running fit and said he'd never again record one of Willie's songs. And he hasn't. Willie says he reckons that shooting Ray's 'mean rooster' didn't cost him but about $60,000 and change." Lately, Willie had toted around a .357 magnum until a Dallas policeman talked him out of it.

Dub said, "Then there's Jerry Jeff Walker. One time he----"

I groaned. It was not necessary for Dub to inform me of Jerry Jeff Walker, a.k.a. Dr. Snowflake, a.k.a. Jacky Jack Doubletrouble, a.k.a. Scamp Walker. He is the man who got reasonably rich off writing Mr. Bojangles, which Richard Nixon claims as his favorite song; this gives Nixon and Walker something in common besides their having been born natural outlaws. Once I was hosting this sedate cocktail party at Princeton, see, for delicate literary types and their proper wives, when Jerry Jeff Walker--who'd been playing a club in New York--appeared very much unannounced, dressed like a buffalo hunter and looking like three months on field bivouac complicated by the blind staggers. Jacky Jack Doubletrouble proved that he was a natural showman by immediately imitating the walks and lisps of sherry-sipping academicians; he crashed about, stepping on long gowns and howling for Lone Star beer. He asked a highly placed faculty wife her relative expertise in the cocksucking discipline and generally cleared staid old Maclean House as efficiently as a drunk spade with a switchblade. He left in a snowstorm, at supersonic speeds and in a rental car charged to my American Express card. The car was found abandoned in midtown Manhattan, long on traffic tickets and short on operable parts. Jerry Jeff's explanation was that he couldn't remember being in a car that night. No, Dub need tell me but very little of Ole Scamp Walker.

But he was saying, "And after these rodeo cowboys beat Jacky Jack up--I mean stomped a mudhole in his ass--he lay there in a buncha broken furniture and looked up through the blood and said, 'Y'all ain't so fuckin' tough. I been beat up worse than this by motorcycle gangs.' "

•

Delicious paranoid rumors shivered through the Austin underground. In beer joints and dope dens, where locals congregate to hear redneck rock, were many dire predictions of shit storms. "They're gonna stop traffic for driver's-license inspections as a way of holding down the crowd," one heard. "Then they'll use that as an excuse to search cars for dope." "They" were understood to be grim-jawed agents of Texas law-enforcement units, reportedly half bonkers at the prospect of maybe 100,000 Independence Day outlaws invading Liberty Hill--a small community 30 miles north of Austin--for 24 hours of assorted outrages against the bucolic calm.

Liberty Hill's good burghers were said to be recalling Altamont's stabbings, Brando's town-trashing Wild Ones, all the hairy freaks and bare asses and general chaos of rock concerts or street theaters past. Willie Nelson's outdoor brain fry would simply flout the law more than the law could allow, Austin already' having known its nasty dope-war shootings and having a controversial sheriff who enraged the squares by refusing to hunt down anybody who occasionally sucked personal amounts of marijuana. Liberty Hill's county commissioner threatened a halting injunction; a grand jury was rumored to have returned a sealed indictment against a big-name musical biggie said to tote around astonishing heaps of cocaine in a brown-paper bag; farmers and ranchers near the concert site were reported to be erecting barricades they would reinforce with shotguns. Austin's underground soldiers.

Then along came an outlander, full of enough chemicals and wet goods to see very small profits in diplomacy, who said, "Bullshit. None of that bad karma is likely to come down." Everybody glowered and sputtered as if it had been suggested they get haircuts and jobs. The outlander persisted: "Too much money involved. Music's become a big economic (continued on page 108)Texas Brain Fry(continued from page 102) factor here. And Willie Nelson is the papasita, the grand old man, the Hemingway and the Moses and the Chet Atkins. Hell, children, don't you read the goddamn papers? Willie's become a Texas folk hero second only to Darrell Royal! Darrell and Willie play golf and pitch washers and scarf Mexican food together three times a week. Willie played in concert with the Dallas Symphony and all the moneyed culture vultures flipped. The state legislature legitimized him by proclaiming Willie Nelson Day. Willie Nelson hosted six Lone Star Cross Country Music Specials on television. Now, why, children, why?" They sulked over their pipes and bottles. "Why, children, because the big boys smell money. Ole Willie, he's becoming a business asset to Texas. These old thumb-bustin' sheriffs and highway patrolmen you've been worrying about, they may not quote much poetry or bore you with small talk about international finance, but, by God, they've been bred to read the signs! You think a few snuff-dipping little ole peckerwood badge wearers are gonna buck the powers? Do you young semirevolutionaries honestly think the sheriff fucks with the Fords up in Detroit or the Johnsons over here in Johnson City? Why, hell, how you kids expect to overthrow anything if you don't recognize the nuances of elitism?"

It's true. Not only is Willie Nelson welcome in the better homes, he has trouble getting arrested. When Texas lawmen discover him driving with his eyes unusually aglow, he hands 'em his latest album and a big country grin and goes on his way as free as Dred Scott. Probably he could beat on a tin lunch bucket with a rusty file, while calling up his hounds, and fawning music critics for Rolling Stone, Picking Up the Tempo, The Village Voice and others would proclaim a new native Art Form awash in social significance. The fact that Willie may be the best thing since Bob Wills, Hank Williams or the butter churn is slightly irrelevant. The point is, Willie holds Texas in the palm of his hand. People even talk about his running for governor: pretty good for a former door-to-door salesman of Bibles, vacuum cleaners and kitchenware.

All of which is about half funny, Willie Nelson being reputed as a member of a group of music makers loosely known as the Nashville outlaws. These are talents who never got accepted by the Grand Ole O pry or Nashville's glad-handing Record Row executives, because they failed to shave, wore earrings, racially intermarried, smoked other than menthols, snorted rather than dipped or wrote and sang of more than calico visions, sweet fading mothers or honky-tonk angels. They were considered "political," people making statements in the discharge of their art and by their lifestyles, all of which cut much against traditional country-and-western grains. Willie got discouraged, returned to his native Texas and saw something waiting to happen.

Eddie Wilson booked Willie into his Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, where he gained quick acceptance among youthfuls who'd been raised on deafening doses of rock 'n' roll. As all intelligent adults know, your average rock-'n'-roll band is made up of hairy apes, rapists and transvestites, who, the moment they sing a single intelligible word or strike one pleasing chord, doom their careers. Rock was invented, and is promoted, by the hearing-aid cartel and serves no other use. Anyway. . ..

Author Edwin "Bud" Shrake, perhaps Austin's most persistent midnight cowboy, says, "I guess redneck rock or cowboy rock or progressive country--whatever you call it--got its start the night Willie Nelson blew everybody's mind at Armadillo about five years ago. Traditional country music had been around here longer than the Baptists, but it was a stepchild or even a idiot child. It was strictly for 'necks and 'kickers. There was a shame to it, sort of like having the itch. And if you had long hair and walked into a beer joint to hear live country bands, then you took the same risks as hunting tigers with a slingshot. Willie melded the dopers and the ropers."

When Armadillo was founded, in 1970, it depended on imported rock groups until Willie Nelson opened the door with his mixture of traditional country and progressive country licks. Soon Jerry Jeff Walker drifted to Austin from Florida, Billy Joe Shaver had come in for a while from Nashville, Michael Murphy arrived from North Texas State to put "cosmic cowboy" in the language, the son of an Austin professor unleashed himself as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew-boys. Music began to hear of Austin-based people named B. W. Stevenson, Doug Sahm, Milton Carroll, Steven Fromholz, Dee Moeller. Maybe in Nashville Willie Nelson was known only as a fine songwriter--Hello Walls, Crazy, Night Life, dozens and dozens--who sometimes tangled the fingers of studio musicians because of his unusual phrasing and weird uses of meter. In Texas, however, up to 100,000 were expected to pay $5.50 for advance tickets or $7.50 at the gate to suffer and sigh through his latest musical brain fry. We waited.

•

Jerry Jeff Walker was onstage at the Alliance Wagon Yard, passionately misquoting the poet Dylan Thomas. Possibly he wanted to recall the lines "Do not go gentle into that good night./Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Walker's brain was not doing its best work, however, and he settled for repeating "Rage. . . rage . . . RAGE against the goddamn dark." Several dozen times. People raged from the goddamn dark, urging Walker to permit the show to proceed; J. J., who was born with enough chips on his shoulder to make up a two-by-four, howled his own curses, along with demands for beer, pussy and nose candy.

Dr. Snowflake was dressed in green shorts, a dingy T-shirt probably disadvantaged by inferior Brand X applications and tennis shoes; one had the impression he'd left the house on Sunday morning to pick up a quart of milk and the newspapers and simply forgot to go back. Which is pretty much what Susan Walker would claim when she tracked her husband down to remind him that he had an early flight to Nashville to oversee the mixing of his next album.

This was near the end of one of those perfect days when Jacky Jack had attacked assorted inanimate objects with swift kicks before tossing his color-television set into the swimming pool. Characteristic of his mood, he greeted me, "Hey, you pussy, you don't know enough about country music to write it on my balls. Man, you don't have no fuckin' notion of what we're doing down here." I murmured that possibly I might help him with his Dylan Thomas. Dr. Snowflake selected from among random spectators a young woman, whom he shoved forward: "She ought to be writin' the piece, not you. This gal's got answers where you don't even know any questions, you ignorant piece of pigshit." I began to suspect that perhaps I'd offended Jerry Jeff a night earlier, when he'd volunteered to be interviewed and I'd dismissed him on the grounds of not feeling like asking questions. "How the fuck's a asshole like you gonna write two paragraphs?" the good doctor now inquired. I said, well, I currently had it in mind to stomp the eternal pluperfect dog-shit out of him personally and then write three pages about it. Dub and Bud Shrake moved in to lead Dr. Snowflake away before he could learn whether I fought any better than rodeo cowboys or motorcycle gangs.

Gino McCoslin, official promoter, was reputed to be "proud crazy"; this I interpreted as meaning he wouldn't do to mess with. He proved to be a bearded wiry little fellow who looked bigger and bigger once one realized that the metal stick of "bidness" in his belt appeared to be no worse than a first cousin to your (continued on page 206)Texas Brain Fry(continued from page 108) average cannon and that he was tossing off double vodkas like Prohibition might be coming back on the next train. Gino explained that he needed the cannon to guard gate receipts and occasionally to negotiate with the unreasonable. When he learned that I'd once lived in Odessa, he offered a brilliant smile and the observation, "Oh, yeah, I stabbed a cat from Odessa one time." This put me at ease, being very much better news than that he had stabbed the cat five or six times. Gino wished me a good show and I backed away, bowing and scraping, as if departing the odor of royalty.

We left our fifth or sixth Austin club in time to see two strangers break another stranger's leg with what appeared to be iron bars. "I never seen the shit-asses before," he gasped. (This was translated in the newspapers as "The attack was unprovoked.") I asked Eddie Wilson at Armadillo World Headquarters to explain such recurring outbreaks of violence. "Oh," he said airily, "it's all a matter of manners. We're arbiters of manners down here." Beg pardon? "Aw, you know, some ole boy will call another one a chickenshit cocksucking motherfucker and the second fellow will think that's ill-mannered and break the other fellow's jaw."

The night before his big concert, Willie tossed a Giant like bash for himself and friends at Austin's new Hilton Inn, which, in a classic case of bad timing, had opened its doors only a few days earlier; something is inherently sad about seeing brand-new doors splintered and carpets burned bald fresh out of their wrappers. Willie had meant to hold it down to a roaring 500 intimates, but tickets got forged and security broke down. I doubt whether over 2200 persons crowded in; the fire marshal came with a summons but couldn't get within two blocks. The little sausages with the toothpicks in them, the chili con queso and the booze lasted but about 18 minutes, though there was sweat and smoke enough for multitudes. Willie came out with his band and bravely shouted Whiskey River, Red Headed Stranger and for a cab. A select 100 or so repaired to the Governor's Suite--though Willie was too smart to be among them--and conducted themselves so sedately until past dawn that chambermaids ultimately wept among the breakage. By midnight, though the concert wouldn't begin until noon, there were reports of 20,000 waiting near Liberty Hill in a huge pasture containing a stretch of the San Gabriel River and two lakes.

•

Though the concert lasted 18 hours, I am critically disadvantaged in that I heard absolutely no music. This is partly because my day contained certain gaps and partly because The Press and roughly 3000 pretenders claiming to be The Press were confined two or three fenced compounds away from the stage--and behind it--in what I came to think of as Andersonville Prison. Like its Civil War namesake, this new Andersonville exposed its residents to sunstroke, rain, dust, thirst, hunger, ticks, chiggers and brutal keepers. But, then, I am getting ahead of my story. . ..

Willie and Dr. Milner, his public relations genius, had provided The Press with individualized T-shirts bearing our powerful names and literary connections. These would permit us to roam at will, even breaking into song with Kris 'n' Rita or Willie himself if being onstage with them tempted our good judgments, and generally were advertised as guaranteeing everything but romance with the Pointer Sisters. "Willie don't want a lot of confusion backstage," Dr. Milner told The Press. "Accredited press people only will be admitted. You may visit with the stars at your leisure." Rita! Hot damn! You in trouble, Kris!

Dr. Milner depicted an oasis of trailer houses full of frigid air-conditioned breezes, warm-blooded hostesses, hot food, cold liquors and maybe palm trees. When we ladies and gentlemen of The Press had gorged our souls on angel's music or celebrity contacts, we would be free to repair to this perfect oasis where everything would be provided except house slippers: Just don't forget to wear your individualized Willie Nelson T-shirts. Ten minutes later, Dr. Milner came back to say that, well, er, ah, our T-shirts might not mean all that much, since they'd apparently been copied and were going for five dollars each all over Texas. We lined up for press passes. Mine was blue. Blue press passes were represented as passports to everything but heaven and Albania. These would eventually entitle the bearers, if otherwise qualified, to drive on public roads.

We inched toward Liberty Hill at speeds more indigenous to the tortoise than the hare. Signs only 12 miles from the concert site promised parking at two dollars; signs a mere two miles away proclaimed the same service for eight dollars. People walked along burdened by beer coolers, tents, watermelons, crying kids, folding chairs, picnic hampers and their hindsight judgments: walking cases of sunburn, drunkenness and shell shock were noted. Cars overheated and were abandoned where they exploded: grim rustics, sure enough, guarded their private roads with barricades of pickup trucks, scowls and shotguns. My car required less than three hours to conquer 30 miles, a statistic causing much envy. The last 100 yards included fording a swift stream. It would be the last water I would see until it rained.

We swaggered to the special gate reserved for The Press, confident in our individualized T-shirts and flashing our blue passes. These so impressed security guards that they turned their backs. We then had the good luck to be joined by Gino, who proclaimed his importance as official promoter and vouched for us as his good friends of The Press. One of the security guards grinned, grabbed Gino's head, trapped it in a wire fence and began to beat on it. Gino did not appear unduly surprised but coolly reached into his belt and got us admitted at gunpoint. We had broken into Andersonville Prison. It was heavily over-populated. Security guards at gates leading to the next compound, nearer the stage by 300 yards, had guns of their own and didn't seem to fear Gino's. Gino ran away and came back with a stamp machine, which he applied to our blue press passes, causing them to say Payment Approved. He said this would permit us to go anyplace we wanted. He was full of shit.

Bud Shrake and I decided to break out of Andersonville; our escape gave us a view of a broiling mass 70,000 strong. It was scary. Writhing human forms as far as the eye could see. Tents and banners and bonfires and scorched earth and burned asses. Garbage and litter. Fellini's version of hell. There were shanties reminiscent of Hoovervilles, where people hawked blue jeans, souvenir programs and fireworks. People noting our official Willie Nelson T-shirts complained because beer wasn't available, their hair hurt, the temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit and no big-name acts had appeared yet. "They are going to rip our official T-shirts off and stuff 'em up our asses," Shrake whispered. We rapidly headed toward the relative safety of Andersonville Prison, smiling and waving like Nixon-Agnew going up to claim the nomination, making loud promises of all the shameful conditions we intended to improve. Now, however, Andersonville Prison was guarded by a 300-pound Samoan whose stick was big enough to please Teddy Roosevelt. He whopped my shoulders and neck with it awhile. Shrake squatted in the shade of the big fellow's considerable shadow, watching him work and frequently chuckling.

We found a friendlier gate. It was in the charge of Paul English, a member of Willie's band who is also the boss's alter ego. English is a double for Satan, except for being too skinny; Willie has written such songs about him as Devil in a Sleepin' Bag. Paul waved us in while accusing a security guard of pocketing gate proceeds. The fellow denied it. When a bystander shouted that the guard had, indeed, pocketed his $7.50, Paul threw the guard to the ground and ripped out his pockets. What looked like $300 fell out. Paul kicked him in the jaw with a cowboy boot, prompting the guard to resign on the grounds of guilt by association. While Paul was recovering the money, several dozen music lovers decided to crash the gate. English produced a "bidness" of about .22 caliber, with a long barrel, and had the scientific satisfaction of seeing a moving mass immediately reverse its direction.

We found the oasis of trailer houses Dr. Milner had reserved for The Press. They were stoutly locked from the inside and under siege from about 3000 howling Andersonville inmates. By now, we spat cotton and knew enough to whine and beg. A tall blonde hostess named Cookie admitted us. Probably, she only wanted to share her misery: Somebody had forgotten to connect the air conditioning and to order food and drink. Cookie offered a choice of pretzels or salt tablets, though she couldn't provide water in either case. We gasped and made sweat and occasionally fainted. I do not recall any palm trees.

A friendly musician produced white powders from twin vials. One assumed them to be varied grades of cocaine. One should not have. One should have presumed them to be Methedrine and THC, or, more accurately, a bastard variety of the latter used to tranquilize hogs. One soon began to feel peculiar. One remembers trying to turn over somebody's camper, somehow shorting an electrical circuit, rooting in the dirt and oinking and being begged to sit in the shade.

The Press was shrieking and whining to Gino of betrayals and brutality. Gino leaned against a tree he thought he was propping up, focused on Europe with a dazed smile and said, "Wheah!" about every eight seconds. Had I been a cop, I'd have arrested him on the evidence of his eyes; they appeared to be made of red glazed tile and probably could have fooled a ceramics expert. Gino did his best to talk. We leaned in and cupped our ears as if taking a deathbed confession. Gino appeared to be talking in strange tongues. Shrake translated approximately as follows: "Fuck it, I paid the goddamn politicians $20,000 to ensure security and all they done was provide a bunch of killer bikers ripping off gate receipts and stomping the customers. You spoiled and pampered press shitasses might do well to avoid the mean bastards. Git away, I'm busy holding up this tree." Somebody shouted, "Goddamn it, you promised commodious accommodations and we're paying two dollars a warm can for bootleg beer." Gino mumbled that he'd take a six-pack hisself if somebody would fetch it.

There was elected a Committee of Unrest and Indignation. Its purpose was to locate Willie Nelson. Better it had gone looking for Judge Crater. Willie and the other big stars had locked themselves in their private trailers and would not give out their addresses among the acres of cars, campers and trucks. Somebody said he'd seen Willie come out and sniff what appeared to be baking soda but that he'd disappeared in a cow pony's lope when a giggling gang of groupies began ripping off his clothes. "Willie was grinning," the informant volunteered. Willie is always grinning. When you talk to him, he looks at you and grins and grins and nods and appears to be the world's best listener, until you realize he is not listening at all.

We found Dr. Milner, wearing a false beard and pretending not to be himself. Unmasked, he cleverly touted us to his press-trailer oasis, where--he claimed--refreshments had newly arrived. We broke in by main force amid much shouting and grappling. The lucky got one can of beer, two bell tomatoes and leavings of potato chips. It was exactly 144 degrees in there. All the hostesses were crying and trying to garrote people with their Official Hostess banners. No more than 150 people milled, cursed and shoved in a space God had made for 20. I spotted a tray of delicate steak sandwiches, dug in my heels, used my huge body as a shield and wolfed them down quickly enough to qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records. A frail fellow in fruit boots began to beat my broad back with his tiny little fists and screamed, "You son of a bitch, you just ate the Pointer Sisters' supper!" I said there hadn't been enough to sponsor a good burp, anyway, and why didn't he just send 'em some watermelon? "Oh, you reprehensible racist poot," he screeched. They led him off burbling about steak sandwiches' being required in the Pointer Sisters' contract.

We were herded back to the stifling open air of Andersonville Prison, whereupon it began to rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. The baked and blistered thousands cheered. There was a sharp retort--unmistakably, gunfire--and the cheers increased. "My God," Shrake said. "Somebody just got shot and people are celebrating." Crouching in the rain and goofy with hog chemicals, I fervently hoped it had been Willie Nelson and that he'd been blown away as effectively as Ray Price's mean rooster. Unfortunately, it had only been Paul English firing into the tent roof above the stage to rid it of dangerous accumulations.

The Pointer Sisters' road manager appeared to announce that his charges refused to go on stage. Wouldn't sing without their supper, huh? But it proved to be merely a matter of pure terror: "Lissen, you blame 'em? I mean, thousands of crazed honkies out there and them the only blacks? And people shooting guns and shit!"

Scott Hale of the Willie Nelson group led the manager on stage to convince him of security. "See how nice it is?" Scott beamed. "Everything's fine."

The manager said, "Yeah? Then how come your leg is on fire?"

Scott looked down to see that a bottle rocket had come out of the crowd and lodged in his right boot, which was sending up enough smoke and flames to lift off a moon shot. He immediately began to stomp and thresh across the stage, making owl-hoot noises. Many cheered, thinking he was dancing a cowboy polka. The Pointer Sisters agreed to come out only if a flying wedge of 100 reasonably unzonked honkies would lead them on stage and off. The security guard leading the flying wedge was so loaded on Scotch and Quaaludes that he fell backward at the top of the steps, causing a domino reaction. The much-buffeted Pointer Sisters squealed and grabbed their wigs and probably wished for Detroit City.

Along about midnight, sufficiently baked and wet, I decided I'd had enough entertainment, even though I'd not heard any music, seen Willie Nelson or had a chance to strike on Rita Coolidge. It took only two hours to bog through the sea of mud, past grungy bikers pissing in open fields and assorted wounded groaning from the bushes in passion or despair, to find that my car was missing. The fellow who gave me a lift toward civilization kindly consented to sell his bottle of Scotch for $27; by the time he dropped me at my hotel, it required only two bellmen and a baggage cart to get me to my room.

•

Gino McCoslin managed to make it sound as if the Willie Nelson concert had been an artistic triumph and a financial disaster. How was that possible, with huge multitudes paying what theoretically had to approach a half million dollars? Gino seemed to say that while maybe 100,000 people had heard the wonderful music, pitifully few had paid for the privilege. He spoke of gate-crashers, counterfeit tickets, 8000 or 12,000 tickets allegedly stolen, receipts pocketed by security men, expenses. Tell me about the expenses, I said. Gino mumbled huge sums rapidly, sticking to generalities and claiming he was not authorized to open the books for inspection. How much had he spent on press arrangements? Gino said it was $15,000 or $25,000 or maybe $50,000: He remembered it had a five in it. I said if he spent over S12.98, other than for the goat fencing surrounding Andersonville Prison, then he'd been ripped off. Gino expressed absolute astonishment in saying mine was the first complaint he'd received. "Ole Willie's generous," he said. "Willie spent so much making sure his friends and fans would be comfortable that he probably lost his ass." It was suggested that Gino might be rehearsing his speech to the IRS folks. "No shit, now," he said. "It'll take days to tote it up, but I'd bet my ass we didn't no more than break even."

I recalled Willie's comment after his second Independence Day picnic, where he also allegedly only broke even, when asked if he would hold another: "Hell, I guess so. I'd hate to throw 4000 thieves out of work."

Gino was painting Willie Nelson as a goodhearted raggedy-ass who might have to sell his horses or find his wife a part-time job, when two pistol-packing cowboys came in. They grunted under the burden of several sacks, which they dumped onto a table. One said, "This here's the $40,000 from advance ticket sales in San Antonio." Gino had the grace to wince.

I wanted to see Willie, I said, to commiserate with him in his poverty and maybe to kick his ass for sponsoring such a confused show. "Willie?" Gino said, surprised. "Shit, man, Willie ain't here. Willie and his old lady went straight to the airport for two weeks in Hawaii."

Later, at my friend Dub's house, we drank beer and smoked dope with various youthfuls while listening to Willie Nelson sing to us of redheaded strangers wild in their sorrow, of how cold it is sleeping out on the ground, of life's rough and rocky traveling. People muttered, "Great, man," and "Outasight" and "Pick up on this, baby," as the joints were passed around the worshipful circle. I'd been a Willie Nelson fan for years, back when there had been so few of us we took pride in being a cult, and his mournful, melancholy music never had failed to reach me. But now all I could think of was Willie picking up the phone in the Waikiki Hilton to call room service, he and God grinning together at the irony of his poor-boy songs.