We were rolling along the highway on Honeysuckle Rose aiming for Salt Lake City in the very early morning for a show at the Salt Palace. Out the window I could see patches of blue snow in the fields. Crowns of snow on the mountains looked like starched white nurse caps—like most musicians, I owe my life to nurses and waitresses—and the jagged rocks turned purple in the rising sun, like you might see in a Zane Grey novel or a good Western movie.
From my mound of coats and blankets on the floor at the foot of my king-size bed in the rear of the bus, I could see Gator Moore sitting up straight at the wheel. Gator had been driving all night, since we left our last show at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. It would be another six hours before we reached the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. I pulled the blankets closer around me in the cold. I could hear Kimo Alo, the Kahuna I had met in Maui, breathing in a deep sleep in my bed. My back was hurting. I had been to Kimo’s people in the mountains in Maui to treat my chronic ailing back, and what they did to me worked for a while. But on the road, my back started hurting again. I couldn’t get comfortable in my bed, so the Kahuna medicine man slept in my bed and I shifted around on the floor, as usual, aching and sore. It might sound like some kind of metaphor for show business that the doctor was in the bed and the patient was on the floor. But I had suggested Kimo sleep on the bed, told him I’d be happier on the floor. Hell, maybe it is a metaphor for show business.
I had been up half the night prowling around Honeysuckle Rose, listening to a tape of our last show, playing computer golf, cleaning up. I was tired, but I was pumped up from the show. We had played our music with a lot of power and the crowd gave us their energy and love in return. That feeling really jacks me up. Friends like Dennis Hopper—so clean and straight these days he looks like a mad scientist preppie—joined us onstage for “Amazing Grace.” When Larry Gorham hustled me to the bus, I found out he and Gator had hidden it to avoid the after-show visitors. I didn’t really want to avoid anybody, but L. G. and Gator must have seen I was tired and hurting.
My old friend Jan-Michael Vincent found me, anyhow, and we sat at the table on the bus and talked movie bullshit for a while. Jan and I are always just about to make a movie together, and I guess one day we will. Meanwhile, we swap a lot of good bullshit, and in honor of Jan’s visit and my aching back, we drank a few swigs out of a brown bottle of rare Sauza tequila and burned a joint that smelled like a cave where skunks went to die.
So I was feeling mellow by the time Jan bailed out in his dark glasses and his limo, and our convoy got loaded—five buses of people and two semi-trucks of equipment. Gator drove Honeysuckle Rose down the winding hill through the lights of Burbank, and all seven vehicles took off rolling toward Salt Lake City.
In the early morning now, after maybe two hours of sleep, I could hear the tires humming on the highway and feel Honeysuckle Rose singing with energy. I went up front to drink a cup of coffee and watch miles and miles of Utah roll past the window.
It makes me feel good to gaze out the windows of the bus at the towns and signs and landscape going past. It’s like the other side of the feeling I got when I was a little kid and heard a railroad train whistling and rumbling into the distance in the middle of the night. This is what might have happened if you had ever really caught that mysterious midnight train.
Most people have that fantasy of catching the train that whistles in the night. It’s a hunger for freedom, I guess, that holds in the heart. The last time I was on David Letterman’s TV show, the first thing he said was, “Willie, can I ride on your bus?” I told him sure he could, and I meant it, but he wouldn’t really do it, which probably is why he brought it up so fast.
A couple of days ago, taping the Johnny Carson show in Burbank, we’d parked our bus convoy in the middle of the NBC lot at Universal, causing much comment. Johnny Carson had to work his way through the buses to slip his sports car into his own parking spot, which is right by the front door to the NBC studio.
So on the show, the first thing Johnny talked about was the buses. The day before, one of his producers had phoned me at L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills and drilled me on the questions Johnny would ask. I remember one question was how did I handle female groupies. The producer said, “I guess you just get rid of them, huh?”
I said, “Sure. I can do that.”
But on the show, Johnny kept talking about the buses being the center of attention in Burbank that day, and how he could barely squeeze his car into the lot, and what a wild, free, glamorous kind of life it must be out there on the road rolling on the bus.
He said, “How do you handle the groupies?”
I said, “Well, I try to give them whatever I can.”
That broke up Johnny, because he was expecting the answer about getting rid of them. It got a real big laugh everywhere, in fact. But, shit, it’s the answer I was going to give the producer, because it’s the truth.
Whatever I can don’t mean what it used to.
As I stood in the aisle, pouring a cup of coffee, my sister Bobbie was in the lower berth with her curtains shut. Honeysuckle Rose has two Pullman-type berths, except they’re big enough for a guy like Ray Benson, who’s 6′6″, to stretch out in. There are color TVs at the foot of the mattresses and reading lights at the head. It is the bunk you should have had on the old midnight mystery train, for sure.
With her curtains shut, I couldn’t tell if Bobbie was asleep. She might be looking out the window at miles and miles of Utah. Or possibly she was fingering chords on a practice keyboard she carries, working on a piece by Beethoven or Mozart, hearing it in her mind while her fingers touched the board. Bobbie is pure music. In her soul she is a spiritual Indian who vibrates music. My sister has put in about as many miles on the road as I have, playing her music.
Traveling was always one of the things I was supposed to do in conjunction with music. The fact that my family sort of disintegrated when I was a youngster made it easy to become a gypsy whose home is wherever he finds his hat. The home that was Abbott faded away in my teens. I had a home wherever my mother was, or wherever my dad was, but they were the traveling kind, too. All of us in the family were constantly moving up and down the highway. Even my great-grandfather, Mama Nelson’s daddy, was a circuit preacher who rode the hills of Arkansas in a buggy and horse.
I think everybody is looking for a home. It’s one of the strongest motivations in life. The movie Songwriter was about artists struggling for freedom against bankers and greed and the sometimes crooked rules of the music business establishment. But at bottom the character of Doc Jenkins that I played was looking for a home. Bud Shrake used to say he thought of Doc Jenkins as a boll weevil. Remember the Boll Weevil song? It was a big hit for Tex Ritter.
“First time I see de boll weevil
he’s settin’ on de chair;
Next time I see de boll weevil
he’s got alia his family dere . . .
Jus’ lookin’ for a home, Boss,
Jus’ lookin’ fora home.”
This is a universal truth. It’s just as true for the old as the young. Chinese, Russians, Republicans, Mexicans, cowboys, university presidents, preachers, you name it, under the skin they’re all just like us country singers on the road—their hearts break, they know loneliness, they want love, they’re looking for a home.
One of my homes is Honeysuckle Rose, my bus.
Could be that’s the fascination people feel about life on the bus—you’ve got a home, but you don’t have to stay too long in one place.
If you get tired of Texas or California, you can move your home to Florida or Maine with no problem.
My bus is like a cocoon, too, that I can seal myself up in if I need to be alone.
I’ve always enjoyed being alone. I’ve never had a problem with talking to myself, because some of my best conversations are between me and just my own self cruising down the highway. There are plenty of times I like to have people around me. But if I need privacy, my bus gives it to me. I can be close enough to the so-called real world that I could reach out and touch it from inside Honeysuckle Rose, yet I can be as quiet and alone as I wish.
There is a telephone on the wall beside my seat at the booth on the bus to use when I need to check in with Mark Rothbaum or somebody, and we put a TV satellite dish on the bus so I can watch Cable News Network no matter where I am.
Despite how people fantasize what is going on inside Honeysuckle Rose on the road, most of the time these days it is like this run from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City—just Gator and me and Bobbie and probably somebody I might never have dreamed would be there, like Kimo the Kahuna.
Kimo woke up in my bed and came down the aisle rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, wearing jeans and sandals. He’s a tall, ropy-thin young fellow who took me into the mountains on Maui and got his Kahuna relatives to work on my back and my sinuses. I believe in the Kahunas. Then Kimo followed me to the country club in Austin and later got on my bus for this tour. The crew and the guys in the band were still checking Kimo out. A newcomer doesn’t just walk into our gypsy family without arousing distrust and suspicion. We’re too close for a secret agent to penetrate our circle. It’s not like the old days of the Outlaw Tour when we had roadies out the ass and every third guy wearing a Waylon or Willie T-shirt was a narc.
There was a lot of well-deserved paranoia on our buses in those days. I remember when one of Waylon’s guys proudly told him he had rigged a trap to catch the narcs on Waylon’s bus.
Waylon asked what did he use for narc bait?
“Simple,” the guy said. “I planted transmitters all over the bus—under the table, in the bunks, in the bathroom—everywhere but your bedroom. Now you can go in your room alone, shut the door, and tune in to any conversation on the bus. You can hear what everybody is saying.”
Waylon shouted, “You’re fired, you dumb son of a bitch.”
“Fired? I did this for your own good.”
Waylon said, “Don’t you understand one fucking thing? If I heard what the guys in the band are saying about me, I’d have to fight every one of them assholes every day. I don’t want to know all that shit. Get your ass out of my sight.”
But now the paranoia level has justifiably gone way down, and so have the numbers on my bus. Once I hit Austin or Los Angeles or some other big town where I know a lot of people, the bus gets crowded before and after the shows. I see folks I’m glad I got to see. But when we reach Salt Lake City, it’s a totally different scene. Fans will gather around the bus, but there’s not a lot of old friends to come on board.
I went through a period of leasing a Learjet in 1983 and flying to a lot of my shows to meet the buses. It was not economically a sound practice to be spending $400,000 a year leasing a jet, but it made sense to me to shell out $1,700,000 to buy one. So I did. Paul said, “Same old Willie. Spends more money than he makes.”
Marty Morris had been my pilot while I was leasing the Lear 25—a seven-passenger model built in 1979—and Marty stayed at the controls when I bought the plane. Our most frequent trip in the Lear was from Austin to Denver. Marty was bringing us into the lights of Denver one night when our co-pilot, Ken Miller, handed me a set of earphones and said, “You’ve gotta hear this.”
Marty had just finished telling the tower we were ready to land. An air traffic controller was talking on the radio. “You other guys shut up. This is my big chance,” he said.
Over the earphones I heard the air traffic controller sing On the Road Again. He sang it all the way through. He wasn’t half bad.
The Lear has a small refrigerator and a good sound system and those big soft, sweet-smelling leather seats like you used to get in a good Cadillac in the 50’s. Connie had notepads and matchbooks printed up with the logo Air Willie and a cartoon of me sitting in a running shoe with wings on it.
I’ve sold the Lear back to the company again—somewhere I heard the chorus of voices that kept telling me I had no business buying a jet—but I still lease it all the time.
Here’s an example of the way I use the jet now. In September of 1987 I was in Los Angeles playing in a CBS-TV Western movie called The Last Texas Train. The director worked us all day until after dark shooting a dancing scene in the ballroom at the Wilshire Temple. The company finally wrapped—and the next shot was to be the following afternoon at the Old Tucson movie town outside Tucson, Arizona.
Gator drove me overnight to Tucson in Honeysuckle Rose, which was my home during the filming. We shot until late Thursday night at Old Tucson.
On Friday at noon Gator drove me to the location at Mezcal, about forty miles on the other side of Tucson. Mezcal is where Steve McQueen shot his last Western, Tom Horn. The scenery there is so big, the distances so vast with the mountains rising close around but also very far away, that it makes you want to sit around a campfire and be close to people.
I like Burt Kennedy’s style of directing. He knows what he wants, works fast, and shoots with two or three cameras at the same time for coverage. Burt is an old pro, so he didn’t panic when Gator cranked up Honeysuckle Rose at 9:30 Friday night and drove me to the Tucson airport.
The Lear was waiting for me at midnight. We took off and flew from Tucson to Lincoln, Nebraska.
At the airport in Lincoln, Johnny Sizemore picked me up in one of our tour buses. Johnny drove the bus to the University of Nebraska football stadium, underneath the stands. It was about 5 A.M. by now. I slept on the floor a couple of hours.
Out the windows I could see people already walking around in large numbers. In about three more hours, there would be 75,000 people in the Nebraska stadium for one of the strongest concerts I’ve ever taken part in, both musically and in response from the audience and the whole state.
You might have seen it on television. It was Farm Aid III. Although this was the final Farm Aid concert—I think—I’m happy that we have been able to raise the national consciousness to confront an intolerable farm situation. Everybody from the White House through Congress should have been in the Nebraska stadium for Farm Aid III to feel the heartbeat of the country.
The minute the concert ended, Johnny Sizemore drove the On the Road Again bus back to the Lincoln airport. At about 1 A.M.—roughly twenty-four hours since we had set out for Lincoln—I was again in Tucson, ready to go back to work on The Last Texas Train again.
I lived on Honeysuckle Rose, when I wasn’t in my motel suite, for the next seven days while the movie was shooting. On Saturday afternoon the movie company broke the Tucson location to return to Los Angeles and resume shooting the following Monday.
But I had gigs to play Saturday night in Waterloo, Iowa, and Sunday night in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Gator dropped me at the Tucson airport and headed Honeysuckle Rose toward Los Angeles. Marty Morris, my longtime pilot, picked me up in the Lear and flew me to Waterloo, where the band and crew were waiting. After the Waterloo show I rode in Paul’s bus to Grand Forks. We rang down the flag at midnight in Grand Forks, and Marty picked me up in the Lear again and flew me to Los Angeles in time to be on the movie set Monday morning.
And that’s just a routine schedule. I really couldn’t make it without the Lear. It’s practical. But I do admit that when I owned the jet, it was like a new toy I wanted to show off. Roger Miller had a jet years before I did and used to fly me around in it some. Now it was my turn. Roger was living in Santa Fe, and we flew in to pick him up just to run him to Los Angeles. We took off and circled the Sangre de Christo Mountains and headed west.
Roger tapped me on the shoulder.
“Willie, I got to piss.”
“I believe we can arrange that,” I said.
“Listen, I ain’t gonna piss in one of these Lears. I know all about these sons of bitches. I want to piss on the ground.”
“Would a regular size bathroom do?”
“Yeah. But I don’t see one up here.”
I told Marty to put the jet down at the next opportunity. Turned out, it was Palm Springs. Marty landed and Roger got out and went to the bathroom.
But how can you put a price on a good piss?
Another time we landed at the strip in Santa Fe to pick up Roger, and he wasn’t there. I went walking along the road toward town, hoping Roger would show up and I could jump his ass about making me wait.
Here came what looked like a taxi with a driver in the front seat wearing a cabbie’s cap. Roger was slumped in the back. I jumped in bedside Roger and said something like, “Airport, buddy, step on it.”
We roared off in the taxi, showering sand and rocks. I grabbed for something to hang on to and was about to shout at the driver when I noticed he looked sort of familiar under that cap. He turned around to me and said, “How about all them royalties you owe me for making you famous? I’m here to collect.”
Then I got a good look at his face and realized it was Don Meredith.
For several seasons, at the peak of the show’s popularity, Meredith had been singing “turn out the lights . . . the party’s over . . .” on ABC-TV Monday Night Football as his way of telling the viewers the game was about wrapped up. Meredith, Frank Gifford, and Howard Cosell were the hottest thing on sports TV with their Monday Night Football for a decade or so. I had known Don since back in the sixties when he was a great quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Most people don’t realize he came within four feet of winning two National Football League Championships in a row, and he retired from the game at age twenty-eight. I used to watch Don play football, and he’d come to my shows and get onstage. Don had career ideas as a country singer—he cut a couple of records, in fact.
As I recall, I had sent Don a bouquet of roses the first night he sang “turn out the lights . . .” on Monday Night Football. Then as he kept using the song, year after year, I was thoroughly enjoying it, of course, but I thought I would kid him about it. I had my office put together a thick stack of royalty statements and sent them to him with a letter that said, “Look, Don, I know how badly you need material, but my family has got to eat.”
A couple of weeks later, Meredith sent me an accounting of the royalty statements I had unloaded on him. “Turn Out the Lights” had shown a sharp increase in sales in the years Meredith had been singing it on Monday Night Football, he said, and by rights, I owed him a percentage.
This was the first time I had seen him since.
Don said, “No shit, now, Willie, I want my royalties. I’ve made you so famous you’ve got a jet plane, and I’m reduced to driving bums around in a taxi. Give me my money.”
I said, “Well, first I’ll have my people take lunch with your people. I think the truth is, you owe me money.”
Don was kidding, of course, about him needing money. He got richer than a honeybee cave from TV commercials and endorsements and speaking engagements. He lives back and forth between Santa Fe and a huge apartment that overlooks Central Park in Manhattan. He can sink down in a giant bathtub full of bubble bath and look through a plate-glass window at the kids playing touch football in the park. Don needs money about as bad as I need fleas.
Maybe if he turns his apartment over to me on demand, I will call my mean lawyer off his case.
In my early frequent-flier period on the jet, I used to figure I might as well use the plane all I could before somebody took it away from me. Any of my old beer joint fans who might resent the thought of me flying around in a Learjet wouldn’t be upset for long, is the way I looked at it, because the plane was bound to be repossessed.
But the money was stacking up so fast for a while it was hard to get rid of. We tried our best though. I do believe money is not to be hoarded—it is to be spread around. That is what true capitalism is about, using money for energy instead of fat. Look at all the people whose lives were made better by the fact that I didn’t care how fast I spent money.
When I was in my twenties I used to say I hoped I owed $50,000 at my funeral. Twenty years later, I changed the number to $1,000,000. Now even $10,000,000 don’t look like half enough to have seeded the planet with by the time I shuck off this body and start the process of choosing a new one.
With the jet I could wake up in the morning in my own bed in Austin, play golf at my country club, leave the last hole about four or five in the afternoon, and fly to Kansas City for a show that night. After the gig, I’d fly back to Austin, sleep in my own bed again, play some more golf at my club, then fly to a show that night in Omaha or someplace.
It was definitely a luxury. I was high rolling. At first I told myself I’d get some writing done in the quiet hours on the plane cuddled in those soft leather seats, but instead I got more sleep than I had counted on.
Having your own jet is a stage you reach if you are successful enough in show business—exactly like getting your own bus is your symbol of success when you put together a band. If you were still riding in a station wagon with the fiddle sticking in your ear, you needed a bus. So you bought the first bus that came along that you could get into financially.
However they’d let you have it, wherever you could sign your name, you took the deal. The first bus I bought was Marty Robbins’s old bus that Hollywood people had used in a movie. I made the deal in front of a motel in San Antonio. I told the guy, “Okay, I’ll take it.” Ten minutes later we started up the motor and the bus died right there in the driveway. We named it the Open Road.
The Open Road broke down in Louisiana, in Arkansas, in a lot of strange places. Johnny Bush or Paul or me, whoever was sober enough to climb behind the wheel, was the driver. But we needed a mechanic as often as a driver, and none of us could put together a Christmas toy.
The last time I spent the night on the Open Road bus, the wood had rotted through above my bunk and I could see the stars and feel the wind and rain blowing on my face.
The next bus I bought was Porter Waggoner’s when Dolly Parton was working with him. You could smell her perfume inside. I used to sort of fantasize about it.
The Honeysuckle Rose bus that was taking me toward Salt Lake City was built by the Florida Coach Company. My bus must have cost $500,000 to put together, with all the hand-carved woodwork and a bedroom bigger than some of the joints I’ve played in. There’s a plaque on the wall inside that says, “This coach built for Willie Nelson and family, Connie, Paula and Amy by Florida Coach Company.” But Connie and the girls never rode Honeysuckle Rose much.
Kimo poured a cup of Gator’s power coffee, lit a cigarette and slid into the booth. I don’t like to see a healer or a doctor smoke cigarettes. I’ve had guys walk up to me in bars with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other and say, “Willie, I am Dr. so-and-so, the eminent brain surgeon.” It makes me shudder.
But Kimo is an important step in the evolution of things. He’s a very logical, bottom-line thinker. The bottom line is love thy neighbor and do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I put a can of chili into the microwave and ate it with soda crackers and skim milk for breakfast. From my table I could see the broken land that led off toward the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Consistency is the main requirement for a performer on the road to keep in mind. I have always been dependable. If I am supposed to be there, I show up. In my own mind, I’m still playing for the gate.
It’s kind of like everywhere I go on Honeysuckle Rose, whatever town I wake up in, I’m in my old hometown. I go out and walk the streets, drop in for coffee at some cafe. People say hi to me. It’s very flattering to be recognized.
I personally think the more security you have, the more problems you are going to have. Larry Gorham’s job is to watch out for me on the road—always from a discreet distance—but if I’m not on tour, there’s no entourage marching around me to clear a path. People have asked, “Aren’t you worried about being kidnapped?” Who the hell would want to kidnap a guy like me? Of course, it might happen tonight. But the point is, if anybody has a mind to kidnap you or blow you away, you could be surrounded by security guards and they’d still get you. If somebody drove up with a car full of machine guns and started shooting, the security guards next to me would keel over at the same time I did. I ain’t learned how to stop bullets in midair yet.
A few years ago in Dallas, a girl climbed halfway up on stage to kiss me. So I leaned over to kiss her, and her husband took a swing at me. He was boozed up and probably pissed at her for something else, anyway. That didn’t make me mad. It was some guy in Phoenix who reminded me I was still an animal with a long way to progress up the spiritual ladder.
I was in the dressing room in Phoenix and this guy came back and said he was looking for Willie Nelson. He said he wanted some autographs for folks who were waiting in a car behind the club.
I walked out the back door with him into the parking lot. It was dark and I was looking for the folks in the car when—wham! The guy slugged me in the head with a crescent wrench. My head poured blood.
I picked up a two-by-four about four feet long. Every time the guy swung at me with the crescent wrench, I dodged and whaled him with the board. We fought for twenty minutes, breathing hard and drenched with blood and sweat. I kept whacking the poor bastard with the board, and he kept coming after me with the crescent wrench. We hardly said a word except for cussing. It was like Bad Day at Black Rock.
Finally somebody broke up the fight. It turned out that the last time I’d played Phoenix a few months earlier, the band had been out with this guy’s wife. She went home and told him she’d been with me.
Barroom brawls are something I try to avoid. I know my temper has always been a problem, whether I inherited it or developed it. Having a hot temper is like being an alcoholic, you always know it’s there. I don’t like to get mad. It makes me feel terrible. I am not pleasant to be around when I get mad. People actually get up and leave the room. Anger and anguish are basic emotions everybody feels. I’m sure I’ll always feel them, but I hope it’s for more important reasons than just to get pissed off. I guess life is a continual process of trying to wise up.
Honeysuckle Rose and our caravan rolled into the outskirts of Salt Lake City early in the afternoon. The buses parked in the alley and around the corner. The Holiday Inn had a swimming pool indoors, so the lobby and the bar were kind of warm and humid.
Darrell Wayne English, Paul’s son and our tour coordinator, had already checked me and Bobbie in under an alias. She went to her room. The guys in the band drifted to the bar beside the swimming pool inside the hotel. We had the night off. The pleasures of Salt Lake City beckoned to the band and the crew—fellows with imagination.
In my room, I switched on CNN on the TV and ordered a cheeseburger and a glass of tea from room service. I checked through a dozen phone messages. All of them were from people who knew enough to find me, and most of them I should call back.
The room service kid took the lid off my cheeseburger and unpeeled the plastic wrapper off my glass of tea. He acted pretty suave.
Day after tomorrow the band would be at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I would be in a suite as big as a house. I knew the Caesar’s Palace suite well—I like washing my jeans in the bathtub there and hanging them out the window to dry in the desert wind.
The toughest spot to work up a frenzied exchange of energy with the crowd is Las Vegas. Most of the people who come to the big dinner shows when I work on the Strip are just glad to be sitting down. They’ve been standing at the slot machines all night, or losing at the tables. What they want is a couple of hours of rest and relaxation. If they get to eat something and hear some music, so much the better. Mainly, though, they’re trying to get off their damn feet.
A Las Vegas dinner-show crowd is not a rock and roll crowd, that’s for sure. In his heyday, when he was really hot, there was an explosion of energy between Elvis and his audience. I wasn’t a wild fan of Elvis’s, but put the man onstage doing his music, and you got something more powerful than the sum of its parts. You got magnetism in action. Maybe it was sexual, I don’t know, but if ever a performer could get up onstage and turn a crowd into crashing waves of energy, it was Elvis.
Yet Elvis couldn’t really whip up a Las Vegas dinner-show crowd on a regular basis. I went to see Elvis one night on the Strip and I slipped in at the back of the room and listened a minute and thought: what is going on here? There was Elvis up there working his ass off, and the crowd was just kind of politely exhausted. They clapped and whistled, but you couldn’t feel them giving anything back. I felt like jumping on top of a table and yelling, “Hey, everybody, that’s Elvis Presley up there! You should be jumping up screaming.”
But the crowds in Las Vegas are normally not screaming crowds. Las Vegas is the place where you make more money than you do anywhere else, but it’s not the place where a performer is the most appreciated.
When I finished my cheeseburger and tea and made a few of my phone calls in the room at the Holiday Inn, I sneaked back out to Honeysuckle Rose and put some ballads on the tape machine and drank a couple of beers to make me sleepy and burned one down and crawled into Bobbie’s bunk and shut the curtains. It was cold, so I pulled the blankets around me and snuggled up. I felt like a kid camping out, real cozy and nice. Maybe my back wouldn’t start hurting.
For all you fellow pilgrims, here is my list of statements to watch out for on your journey:
1. The booking is definite.
2. Your check is in the mail.
3. I promise not to come in your mouth.
4. We can fix it in the mix.
5. This is the best dope you’ve ever had.
6. The show starts at eight.
7. My agent will take care of it.
8. I’m sure it will work.
9. Your tickets are at the door.
11. Sure, it sounds fine at the back of the hall.
12. I know your mike is on.
13. I checked it myself.
14. The roadie took care of it.
15. She’ll be backstage after the show.
16. Yes, the spotlights will be on you during your solos.
17. The stage mix sounds just like the program mix.
18. It’s the hottest pickup I could get.
19. The club will provide the P.A. and the lights.
20. I really love the band.
21. We’ll have lunch sometime.
22. We’ll have it ready before tonight.
23. If it breaks, we’ll fix it free.
34. We’ll let you know.
25. I had nothing to do with your marriage breaking up. Your marriage was on the rocks long before I ever met you.
26. The place was packed.
27. We’ll have you back next week.
28. Don’t worry, you’ll be the headliner.
29. It’s on the truck.
30. This coke hasn’t been cut.
31. My last band had a record deal, but we broke up before recording the album.
32. Someone will be there early to let you in.
33. I’ve only been playing for a year.
34. I’ve been playing for twenty years.
35. We’ll have the flyers made tomorrow.
36. I’m with the band.
37. The band gets free drinks.
38. You’ll get your cut tonight, no problem.
39. He’ll work the door tonight for us.
40. You’ll have no problem fitting that speaker cabinet in your trunk.
41. There will be lots of roadies when you get there.
42. I know we’ll get some applause after the next tune.
43. We’ll have more than enough time for a sound check.
44. This is one of Jimi’s old Strats.
45. We’ll definitely come see you play tonight.
46. You can depend on me.
47. You won’t have to play any requests.
48. We have this great gig in Vegas next month.
49. The other band will be glad to let you use their P.A.
50. I am singing on key, the P.A.’s screwing up.
51. Sounds good to me.
52. You won’t have any trouble finding the place.
53. I’ve played there before.
54. We can turn the volume down if it’s too loud.
55. I just use this little amp for small gigs. I’ve got a Marshall stack at home.
56. This tour itinerary you can count on being correct.
57. You only have to do two sets.
58. The laundromat is just around the corner.
59. Best party club in town. Go check it out.