A jab of pain in my back, above my right hipbone, meant morning had come for me, no matter that I could see stars in the plum summer sky through the window. I rolled over on my pallet on the floor of the upstairs room, trying to settle into a position for a few more minutes’ sleep. I could hear the electric fan humming on the floor and felt a wash of cool air across my naked body. In hours it would be a typical Texas midsummer afternoon, 1987, my fifteenth Fourth of July Picnic—the sun so hot and the sky so bright that you couldn’t stand to look at them—but for now there was a nice, wet breeze and I could gaze out the window and lie and bathe in starlight, the stuff that makes us all.
The pain hit again. I rolled over onto my knees, straightened up slowly, and walked to the window. Abbott, in the middle of Texas, is a smaller town than it was fifty-four years ago when I was born a hundred yards from where I was now standing. The sky is still clear in Abbott, and the stars look close to the earth, like they did when I was a kid.
With my arms raised at the window, I could smell grass and trees on the breeze, and the sharp odor of fresh paint. Old Bill Russell was painting the house for me and had worked late. I saw his ladder and buckets down in the yard below the second-floor window, throwing shadows toward the barn. With both hands I combed back my hair and felt it fall free against the bare skin of my shoulders. Listening to the hypnotic vibrations of the electric fan, I inhaled deeply, swallowing air into my diaphragm like my grandmother had taught me. I held my breath until I was almost dizzy—as kids we’d hold our breath for fun until we passed out—and let it all out slowly and thoroughly, relaxing my neck and shoulders, letting my arms hang limp.
I did twenty-five deep breaths standing naked in the starlight. I felt strong and clean. Deep breathing at an open window is a wonderful thing unless you live in Los Angeles or down the block from an asbestos plant. Everybody knows that filling your lungs with oxygen is good, but not many people do it. It’s like most of the choices you have in life. You know inside what is right. Whether you do it is up to you.
A lot of people think I sing nasal. It’s not true. It may sound nasal to some ears, but actually it’s the sound that comes from deep down in the diaphragm. That’s where you get the most strength. It’s the result of controlling your breathing, which is the secret to many things, including peace of mind. Indians, for example, concentrate on listening to themselves breathe. As they listen to their breath coming in and going out, they are hearing the sound of God. Breathing is a way for all of us to meditate and get close to the spirit. It’s a key to mental and spiritual health. We’ve all heard the advice to take ten deep breaths when we’re excited or agitated. Ten breaths will slow your mind, your metabolism, your heart rate, so you can get control and avoid making a dumb move or saying something stupid. Deep breathing gives you energy and makes you high.
You can bring divine energy into your lungs by breathing. Feel the beat of your heart. It is holy light. When you become conscious of the Master in your heart, your whole life changes. Your aura goes out and influences everything around you. You have free will to recognize it or to blind yourself to it. Be quiet and ask your heart. I mean, really shut up and listen to your inner voice. It will tell you this is the truth.
I looked at my watch. It was 4 A.M. We had come back from pre-production meetings at the Picnic site at Carl’s Corner about midnight on the Honeysuckle Rose. I must have slept three hours. Not bad. Three or four hours is a good night’s sleep for me.
Stepping away from the window, I started my stretching exercises. Putting one foot on a chair and bending toward it to pull the hamstrings. Standing on one foot, grasping the other behind me with my hand and lifting my head toward the roof. I took my time, not racing against time but forgetting about it, as I went through a stretching nonroutine—some of it yoga, some of it chiropractor, some of it Hawaiian Kahuna medicine, and the rest of it me.
The thought crossed my mind that my wife, Connie, wouldn’t be at the Picnic today. In the fifteen years since I had begun these annual concerts, Connie had been backstage at nearly all of them. That first crazy but important Picnic in Dripping Springs in 1973, she was eight months pregnant with our youngest daughter, Amy. It made me sad to think of Connie not being around anymore. But we had recently separated again. Even though I’ve been married for what seems like my whole life—ten years to Martha, ten years to Shirley, and now eighteen years to Connie—I ain’t really cut out to be a good husband and a perfect father. This time I had stomped out of the house Connie had bought in Westlake Hills on the shore of Lake Austin and said I wasn’t coming back. It was after yet another argument about the same old subjects—I didn’t spend enough time with Connie and our daughters, and I smoked too much weed. For me, the choice came down to staying in the Westlake Hills house with Connie all the time when I came off the road—which meant giving up all my pals who I hung around with on the golf course or in my recording studio in Texas—or never going back to the Westlake Hills house again.
Apparently, my third marriage was headed toward the divorce court, just like my first two, and for the same reason.
It’s not easy to be married to somebody like me and be a wife and stay home and take care of the family while I’m out here traveling around and acting like a big star. I mean, it rubs. It’s hard to find a woman who would put up with that. Now Connie put up with it for a long, long time and it’s just too much strain. So whatever happens to my and her relationship, it has nothing to do with anything she did wrong. It was just one of those things. If I had to make a list of all the things that Connie did right, and all the things that she did wrong, there wouldn’t be anything on the wrong side, zero. Because she did what she instinctively thought was the right thing to do and you can’t blame a person for that.
I am as simple as I look, hard as that may be to understand. I am an itinerant singer and guitar picker. I am what they used to call a troubadour. I would love to be married, I love having a home, but my calling is not compatible with staying put. Sorry to say, I felt the time had come when I had to move on down the road again into the next phase of my life.
Whatever the next stage is, I don’t believe it will include another wife.
Groping in a pile of clothes on the floor, I found a T-shirt and put it on. It read WHEN IN DOUBT KNOCK EM OUT. I pulled on a pair of shorts that looked like the Lone Star flag of Texas, stuffed my feet into running shoes, and crept down the stairs, trying not to wake my daughter Lana and her four kids who were sleeping on their pallets in what will be the living room when we finish restoring the house like it was when Dr. Sims owned it. Dr. Sims and his wife lived in this house in 1933, and on an April night of that year Doc was fetched by my cousin Mildred to tromp across the field to the little frame house where my mother, Myrle, was laboring to present the world with a new old soul—me.
I had bought Dr. Sims’s house early this year for $18,000 and started fixing it up to look as pretty as it did in 1933. I would have bought the house I was born in, but it had been torn down. Only our old bedroom was saved, and it has been moved to the other side of the highway and added to the house of a black family.
One of the first things I did after buying Dr. Sims’s house was set about removing the big signboard outside of Abbott that says HOME OF WILLIE NELSON. Me and Zeke Varnon got drunk and tried to burn down the sign with a gasoline fire, but five gallons only singed those old creosote posts and blackened my name so it looked even worse. At least, I showed I was serious. I got them to change the sign to HOME OF THE ABBOTT FIGHTING PANTHERS, my old high School team.
I heard Lana and the grandkids sleeping. The sound of children sleeping entrances me: their slow, peaceful breaths, their little snorts and yips, the occasional words spoken aloud in their sleep, all coming from a soul that is living in sleep in realms that, not knowing how else to put it, we say dreams are made of.
Stepping over paint buckets in the kitchen, I let the screen door close quietly and slipped into the warm, purple morning and began to run.
I set a slow pace down the road by the house of my old childhood friend Jimmy Bruce, who still lives in the same house and is now the town postmaster. I ran past the old tabernacle—the scene, in my youth, of singing and preaching and playing knuckles-down marbles—and on past the Baptist church a few blocks away, and past the Methodist church across the street, where I sang every Sunday even though I thought I was doomed to hell, and way deep into the fields of Abbott, home of my heart.
When I was young in Abbott, on summer nights and early mornings like this you could look up and see the Milky Way and it was awesome. Kids in urban areas today have no idea how the Milky Way looked forty or fifty years ago. It was like Bill Russell had taken his brush and painted a wide white swath across the sky. We knew this white celestial highway was made of countless stars and constellations inconceivable distances away, yet the Milky Way looked like a solid white path near enough that you thought you could hit it with a cannon. And somehow you knew that the starlight reached you from glory, that you drew all your strength from the starlight, that eternity was immense and your knowledge was small. There are countless planets full of life out there among the stars. How do I know? I’ve been there. So have you.
Beholding the Milky Way in the night sky in Abbott when I was a kid would reveal me to myself—in a mystical sense—so strong that I could only reconcile my vision with real life in a broke farm town during the Great Depression by picking fights and showing off.
I ran towards Willie Nelson Road, a stretch of county road between Abbott and West, the town where I first played in a band when I was about eight or nine years old. It was funny to think about this road being named for me. If they’d named it for me fifty years ago, when I walked down this road to go pick cotton, they might have called it Booger Red Boll-evard. Booger Red is what they called me back then.
Running along the road, at home in my thoughts, I was aware that grass and trees and crops and animals are among the essence of life, and I am a part of them and need continual support from them. The Indians—which means me and my brothers and sisters of like mind—say only the spirits and the earth endure. When I see the destruction wrought upon our small planet by human beings who forget the supreme good of caring for our natural world that mothers us, I wonder if our species will last long enough to wake up to the truth that we must obey the old laws of cause and effect and treat the earth as our mother instead of as our gravel pit and garbage dump. The trash that washes ashore on Texas beaches—bleach bottles, syringes, plastic bags, ice chests—comes from Venezuela, France, Brazil, and Greece, among other places. West Germans and Saudi Arabians own half the buildings in downtown Houston. It is a small world, indeed.
The constant struggle between good and evil is approaching another great climax in our lifetime. By good I mean your inner voice that comes from God—maybe you call it conscience—and by evil I mean negative thinking, materialistic, greedy attitudes that you know are wrong but can be reduced into acting as if you believe they are right. This is the Devil—to be overwhelmed by desire for things of the material world, to be swept under by negative thinking, to be selfish and petty, to use power and wealth to dominate others: this is hell and we make it for ourselves.
Running alone in the dawn, this is the sort of thing I think about. It’s nothing mysterious. People may think I’m mysterious, but I don’t plan it that way. It all seems clear enough to me.
The sunrise began to glow at my right shoulder, clods of earth and brown shoots taking shape in the growing light. I felt a real déjà vu. This is how it had looked when I had walked these same fields during the Great Depression with my grandmother and my sister Bobbie, filling our burlap bags with cotton. I turned and ran back toward the house with the sunrise over my left shoulder.
On a soft spring afternoon a few months earlier, the kind of day when I open the moon roof of my car and lower the windows and thank God for putting me in Texas, I was cruising along the back roads of Hill County in my silver Mercedes 560 SEL—I’ve always loved to drive a good car whether I could afford it or not—with my old buddy Zeke Varnon, who could have been the world domino champion if he’d been willing to leave home.
Zeke was drinking a beer and scratching the stubble on his chin. We had been up most of the night playing dominoes and passing the tequila bottle back and forth in Zeke’s trailer house outside of Hillsboro. I’ve been close friends with Zeke since our teens, when we’d decided we were both insane, by the standards of the time. We loved being insane. We thought of ourselves as true rebels, living strictly by our own rules. Of course, when we had a sick hangover and a nagging piece of memory about some outrageous act we’d pulled the night before, it helped a little to think of ourselves as rebels instead of just nuts.
“Willie, there’s a guy you ought to meet,” Zeke said after we had been driving a while.
I had been looking out the window at fields where forty years ago I had picked cotton and baled hay. I was remembering when cars first got air conditioners after World War II. I would look up, sweating like a pig in the field, and see cars zooming down the highway in the middle of the summer with their windows shut. That, for me, was what it meant to be rich—to drive down the highway in the middle of the summer with your windows shut.
Zeke began to tell me about Carl Cornelius.
Talk about crazy. Listening to Zeke, I knew Carl Cornelius was some kind of brother. Actually, he was living one of my biggest fantasies: he owned his own town. I’ve always wanted to own my own town. We’d built me a town once in the hills outside Austin—an authentic, one-street Old West town like Texas in the 1880s—for our movie Red Headed Stranger and for the Pancho and Lefty album video I did with Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt. But when the cameras quit turning the citizens of my town went away, leaving the paint to fade and the brush to blow across the dirt road, except on Sunday afternoons when Lana gathers a group at the little church for nondenominational services. Somebody will play the piano and we’ll sing hymns standing in our old-fashioned pews, and maybe somebody in the crowd that always includes lots of kids will want to tell a story. Or we’ll get out a portable machine and play a tape of a lecture by Father A. A. Taliaffero of St. Alcuin’s Church in Dallas. Father Taliaffero is a wise man. I listen to him as I would listen to a great teacher. I must have fifty of his taped lectures in a cabinet on my bus. It sort of surprises strangers who expect to hear music always blaring from the speakers on Honeysuckle Rose to hear a man telling them instead there is no such thing as death, and that creative imagination rules the universe.
But the rest of the week my town doesn’t even have a sheriff in it. When I first built the town I wanted to hire a sheriff who would dress like Wyatt Earp with two big six-guns, and rock back in his cane chair on the porch in front of the jail with his spurred boots propped up on the hitching rail.
My fantasy was I would amble up to my sheriff and offer him a hit off my Austin Torpedo and the sheriff would squint at me and drawl, “Well, no thanks, Willie, I’m on duty. But you ain’t harming a soul or tearing up nothing, so you go right ahead and smoke all the weed you want. Can’t nobody bother you here, Willie—not in your own town with your own sheriff on duty.”
Carl Cornelius, however, owned a real town and his own gang of law officers who dressed like state troopers.
Until eighteen months ago, Carl’s Corner had been just a big truckstop and cafe. But Carl dreams big. He took the circus-size, ten-foot polyurethane musical frogs down from the roof of a fancy Dallas disco and put them on the top of his truckstop. He erected a drive-in movie and a sauna and a swimming pool and surrounded them on three sides with a bunch of mobile homes—“changing rooms,” Carl said.
Carl found some backing in Dallas and bought a couple of thousand acres of the flat farmland around his truckstop. He made it easy for 180 people to move onto the land in mobile homes and stay until they qualified under state law as local voters. At that point they called an election and voted themselves an official town called Carl’s Corner with Carl as the mayor. Carl owned the liquor sale permit and the water well and held notes on the land. The only other business was Paula’s Pet Boutique.
Approaching the town of Carl’s Corner in my Mercedes, I saw a thirty-foot advertising billboard rising up from the highway—a huge painted cutout of three figures standing arm in arm and peering out at the landscape. The figures were Carl, Zeke, and me.
“Ah . . . there’s something I ain’t told you yet,” Zeke said.
I parked my Mercedes in the lot crowded with trucks. Zeke led me though the back door.
Inside the truckstop I could smell chili, an aroma of cuminos that watered my sinuses. There, in front of a big projection TV screen, were a dozen truckers eating chicken fried steaks and cheeseburgers, watching soap operas.
A burly fellow with a big open country face approached me, his cheeks blooming with whiskey flush, a straw cowboy hat pushed to the back of his head, his belly hanging over his big silver belt buckle on crumpled jeans over lizard-skin boots. He had a wide, yellow-tooth grin and eyes that looked like they had just been through a sandstorm.
Carl is not bashful. He cut straight to the meat of the matter.
“Hi, Willie,” Carl said. “Let’s have your 1987 Picnic right here in my town this Fourth of July. Carl’s Corner is ideal. There is not a single tree to block the view of the stage.”
I wasn’t real sure I wanted to have a Picnic this year. I say that every year, and I always mean it.
“Why don’t we start off with a beer and a bowl of chili?” I said.
Carl served Great Depression chili, the greasy red ambrosia that used to cost a dime a bowl with all the soda crackers you wanted. Dish of pinto beans on the side. Jar of jalapeño peppers on the table next to a bowl of chopped white onions. Not a trace of tomatoes or celery or other foreign objects that over the years have drifted into what people who don’t know better call chili. Chili was invented in South Texas as a dish to make tough stringy beef taste good, and sold by vendors on the streets on San Antonio before the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Chili is a serious matter to any native-born Texan old enough to remember when a ten-cent bowl of red would keep you feeling feisty all day.
After our chili and a couple of beers, Carl drove me and Zeke to the Picnic site he had picked out—177 acres of grassland at Interstate 35E and FM2959 four miles north of Hillsboro. Like Carl had said, there was nothing to block the view—or to block the sun and wind. But the site was within easy driving range of maybe four million people, counting Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and Austin. We went back to the truckstop and played dominoes in Carl’s office where he kept glancing at his empire on ten television monitors
Carl is a good domino player. I am better than good. Zeke is better than me. We all drank from the ample supplies of beer and tequila. At some point during the night Zeke and I were about to win the truckstop and the town from Carl.
I got up to go to the bathroom and took another look around the truckstop. There was lots for sale: sacks of cookies, cans of motor oil, glass unicorns, bronze western statues, a rackful of books by Louis L’Amour, stacks of trucker logbooks. Coffee mugs and T-shirts with Carl’s face on them. There was a jar of peanut butter on every table. Carl had been telling me his plans to open a trucker chapel for prayers and weddings soon, and then a trucker museum and a trucker bank. “Your Picnic,” he’d told me, “will put this place on the map.”
“Okay,” I said. I admire dreamers, being one myself.
I woke up the next morning on the couch at Zeke’s house. Zeke was standing at the refrigerator making breakfast, which means, for him, popping the top on a can of beer.
“Do I remember telling Carl he could have the Picnic at Carl’s Corner?”
“Yep. She’s all done sealed, pardner,” Zeke said. “We’re dedicating it to truckers.”
“We didn’t win the town, did we?”
“Naw, the game sort of fell apart. We’ll pick it up later.”
Carl announced the Picnic in newspapers and on TV. Crews showed up to dig ditches and lay pipe for water. Surveyors were sighting out the parking area. My old Austin Opera House pardner, Tim O’Connor, took over as the producer and built a stage, cleared the ground, chose the spots for concession stands and portable toilets. The Hard Rock Cafe jumped in as official Picnic restaurant. Tim started selling tickets. The Picnic at Carl’s Corner was rolling with its own momentum.
I climbed onto Honeysuckle Rose and rode a long way out of town to a series of shows, which I had learned was the best place for me to be while the Picnic was being put together. I had, after all, fifteen years experience with Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnics. They usually ended with me slipping into a plane in the middle of the night and flying off to Hawaii to hide for a week while the damages were assessed. Over the years I realized it could be an advantage to be unfindable before the Picnic, as well. The Picnic grows beyond control, and I try never to worry about what is out of my control—just to give it my strongest positive thoughts and trust for it to turn out well.
Now I loped back to Dr. Simms’s old house in the early Abbott morning—daydreaming, several voices inside me talking all at once, as they usually do, telling me tales, offering advice; they are my guardian angels mixed in with some malicious spirits. I listen to the voices argue all the time but my inner Mediator makes the decisions unless my ego jumps in front and screws it all up.
Honeysuckle Rose’s generators were humming in the yard as Gator Moore, my driver, got the bus ready to roll. Gator is a tall, well-built guy with long hair and a beard and healthy biceps. He’s a good companion on the road and a conscientious driver who always gets me to the show on time, or the movie set or the recording studio or the motel. I depend on Gator.
I stopped in the kitchen to eat two plums and a bowl of plain yogurt with walnuts and sliced bananas and strawberries on top. I washed down a couple of painkillers with a slug of grapefruit juice, hugged Lana, and talked to my grandkids.
I climbed onto Honeysuckle Rose with a random group of friends. Gator drove us along the streets I ran that morning and headed up the highway until we came upon an enormous Texas flag—I mean it looked like it was ten stories high—and turned down a side road into the backstage area. I climbed out and walked up onto the stage to gaze at what we had brought forth.
Beyond the stage the ground fanned out in a field that could hold the 80,000 capacity crowd Carl and Zeke had been predicting in the papers. It was already getting hot. I found myself sweating on stage, and not only because of the heat. I had begun to realize that a crowd of 80,000 was a crazy prediction for a blazing 100-plus-degree day out here on this shadeless prairie at Carl’s Corner. You would have to be a lunatic to fight the traffic of the predicted mob to Carl’s Corner on such a blistering day, no matter that we had loaded the show with Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller, Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, Billy Joe Shaver, Don Cherry, Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Rattlesnake Annie, Bruce Hornsby, Jackie King, Joe Ely, Joe Walsh, Eric Johnson, and had a hell of a show scheduled.
I heard a mellow, husky voice crooning behind me. The voice was singing gibberish—“the old church . . . the bells . . . the yellow house on the corner . . . oh I am fucked . . .”
Don Cherry was pacing back and forth at the rear of the stage, rubbing his hands together. Besides being a good, stylish singer, Don is a scratch golfer who used to play on the pro tour—two qualities that I admire above most others.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
Don stared at me with blue eyes that showed intense concern, like maybe a contact lens had gone crooked.
“Oh, shit, Will,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you know the lyrics to ‘Green Green Grass of Home’?”
I thought about it for a moment. I could hear the melody in my head, but the words didn’t come.
“No,” I said.
“I’ve been driving up and down the highway for two hours trying to remember that fucking song. I must have sung it five thousand times in nightclubs. I could walk on stage in Vegas right now, and ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ would burst out of my throat, I couldn’t stop it. But now it’s gone. I can’t remember the fucking words.”
“Sing something else,” I said.
“Are you crazy? That’s what I open with.”
I left Don huddling onstage with Bee Spears, Mickey Raphael, Grady Martin, and Poodie Locke—stalwarts of my band and crew—all of them singing at the same time, working on the words to “Green Green Grass of Home.”
At 10 A.M. my band and I kicked off the show to a couple of hundred folks camped below the stage with folding chairs, umbrellas, and coolers. I recognized many of them, people I had seen at my outdoor shows in Texas for twenty years, aging hippies like me with earrings and tattoos and hair under the women’s armpits. They danced and waved their hands. A big Viking woman in a green undershirt pulled out two breasts the size of volleyballs and bounced them in her palms while her biker old man screamed with toothless joy.
I introduced Don Cherry at 10:30 in the morning. Looking cool, loaded with big-time nightclub aplomb, Don snapped his fingers and swung into “Green Green Grass of Home.” He sang that song as good as anybody could sing it, like he was headlining the song to a sellout crowd at a star hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas.
The aging hippies listened with a sort of bemused curiosity. When Don gave it his show-biz finish, they sat and looked at him like he was a Hottentot. The crowd—if you could call it that—clapped politely and began to yell “Let’s boogie!”
Instead Don sang them a patriotic song about what this country means to him and every true American within hearing. This time the people cheered and whistled when he finished with his arms outlifted and his head held high. Pro that he is, Don bowed and fled the stage while they were still whistling—we call it getting out of Dodge.
“Fuck it,” he said as he passed me on the steps. “Which way is the airport?”
By the middle of the afternoon the temperature was 103. The wind had started blowing hard enough to flap the banners on the stage so they sounded like horsewhips cracking—it was some relief from the heat. The crowd had grown to about 4,000. It was clear the prediction of 80,000 had been nuts.
Darkness fell. My old pals Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller showed up. Kris was, as usual, in an uproar. In the newspaper that morning had been a story that accused Kris of throwing away a plaque some Vietnam vets had given him after he played a benefit for them up East the night before.
“How could they say such shit?” Kris yelled. “In all the confusion backstage, I didn’t know the plaque got left behind. For God’s sake, I’m on these guys’ side, I’m busting ass for these guys, I’m not gonna do anything stupid and humiliating like throw away their plaque!”
Kris would be happy if this was coffeehouse time again, like the fifties and early sixties, where he could sit on a stool with his guitar and sing his songs to a packed house of beatniks. Kris is, of course, one of the best songwriters of all time. He shows more soul when he blows his nose than the ordinary person does at his honeymoon dance. But commercial is a word Kris refuses to hear. He has written a lot of hits and some standards, but he writes what he wants and sings what he wants—even if the record labels drop him—and for my Picnic he was going to do his new songs about the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and about Jesse Jackson. By now the night wind had dropped the temperature into the 80s, and the crowd had grown to an estimated 8,000.
My manager, lawyer, and accountant arrived, counted the house, looked at the bills, and slunk around with subdued and mournful expressions. The Picnic stood to take a $600,000 bath.
Zeke was a pardner for profits but not for losses. That was understood from the start. I would never put Zeke in a loser. The money to pay the losses would have to come from Tim, Carl, and me.
Carl got drunk as soon as he saw the size of the afternoon crowd, had slept it off and was back aboard Honeysuckle Rose telling me with all the certainty a forty-seven-year-old guy born in Kleburg County in South Texas, father of seven children including a two-year-old, could muster that in another hour we’d have a crowd of 50,000. He hit the tequila again.
“Want to play some dominoes?” Carl asked.
“Mix ’em up,” I said.
“What’ll we play for?” Carl said.
“Your town.”
“Shit, you own it already. Let’s play for cash,” Carl said.
I went onstage with my band to play the last set at 2 A.M. I couldn’t tell how many people were listening down there in the dark. I knew I was going into the tank financially on this Picnic. We had made some major miscalculations. But none of that mattered when we struck up “Whiskey River” to open the final set. That was only money—this was music. The excitement I felt at that moment was too powerful to carry a price tag.
Standing in the spotlights, with the old stars above me in the Abbott sky, I saw the satellite TV truck sending our picture and our music all over the cosmos. And from that stage at Carl’s Corner I could see, too, the dark blanket of the fields where little Booger Red had picked cotton and busted his back baling hay so many, many years ago.
Regardless of what this 1987 Picnic may have cost me, in the end we wound up with a good permanent concert site not ten miles from the barbershop where I used to give a shoe shine and a song for fifty cents. How’s that for using the creative imagination?