It’s not a stretch to say Willie Nelson has lived maybe the most interesting lives in country music.
The legendary outlaw country singer turns 93 today, and it would probably take that long to tell all of the iconic stories from Willie’s life. From taking on the IRS – and winning – to stopping a police shootout, here are 5 of the best Willie Nelson stories to celebrate the living legend.
Burning Down A Billboard
Willie is obviously one of the most recognizable people…well, in the entire country. And once he became a household name, he wanted a place where he could get away from the spotlight and live a normal life, so he bought a small house back in his hometown of Abbott, Texas. (It was actually the home of the doctor who delivered him).
As he explained in his 2015 memoir It’s a Long Story: My Life, he kept a months worth of clothes in the unassuming home so he could go back whenever he wanted to get away. But the city saw their most famous resident as an opportunity to promote themselves, and put up a billboard advertising Willie’s location:
“Abbott, home of Willie Nelson.”
Well Willie didn’t want tourists to start coming to his hometown to try to find him. And one night while playing poker with his childhood friend Zeke Varnon, he began complaining that the billboard blew his anonymity.
Varnon asked Willie what he wanted to do about it, and the country music outlaw didn’t mince words:
“Burn the f—er down!”
Well his friend was all in, so they headed out “like two teenagers” to complete their mission. And they even told a cop about their plans while stopping to get gas:
“We stopped to buy a can of gas. A cop came by, recognized me, and said, ‘Hey, Willie. What are you guys up to?’
‘We’re going to burn down a sign,’ I said. He just laughed and went on his way. He didn’t believe the truth.”
I mean, if you’re a cop and Willie Nelson just straight up tells you he’s going to go commit arson, you would probably assume he’s joking too, right?
Well they weren’t joking, but when they got to the billboard they ran into another problem: They couldn’t get it to light.
“We then drove over to the sign, soaked it with gas, and lit it with a match. It started to burn but then stopped. Must have been treated with some anti-inflammatory fluid. Pissed me off.
So we poured more gasoline and lit another match. Still no go. We went home frustrated.”
The next morning though, they realized the sign DID actually end up burning down after they left – but the police thought it was some teenager who did it, and ended up arresting the poor kid for Willie’s crime.
Willie made sure that the kid was cleared, but the officer still wanted to know why he did it:
“I didn’t like the sign. I didn’t want the attention.”
Fair enough.
Smoking A Joint On The Roof Of The White House
Willie first revealed that he smoked at the White House back in his 1988 autobiography, where he said that he was let on the roof by an “anonymous servant” at the White House, describing it as being up there with “a beer in one hand and a fat Austin Torpedo in the other.”
But years later, Willie confessed that it was actually President Jimmy Carter’s son who let him on the roof to smoke a joint, with the former president himself confirming that he knew it was his son Chip all along:
“When Willie Nelson wrote his autobiography he confessed that he smoked pot in the White House and he says that his companion was one of the servants at the White House… actually it was one of my sons.”
When asked whose idea it was to go to the roof, Willie blamed it on the president’s son:
“I think it was his. I’m gonna blame him for it, anyway. Of course it had to be a lot of his, because he was the only one who knew how to get up there.”
But he also admits that it was both of their ideas to spark one while they were up there. And while he knows it was illegal to take a joint to the White House, it doesn’t sound like he has any regrets:
“Oh we had a ball.”
Only Willie.
Shooting Bibles On His Tour Bus
This story comes to us from Phil Kaufman, who’s one of the most well-known (even infamous) tour managers in history, and at the time was serving as tour manager for Emmylou Harris while she was opening up for Willie.
And one day, Willie’s long-time stage manager/bus driver Randy “Poodie” Locke comes over to the other camp’s bus and asked Phil if he could ride on their bus for a while.
When Phil questioned him about what was going on, Poodie told him that Willie and his band members had taken the Gideons Bibles from their hotel rooms, and were shooting a gun at the Bible while taking bets on which chapter the bullet would land in.
It sounds absolutely insane, and obviously pretty unsafe. But it was also not very conducive to getting much rest if you have to listen to that all night…
“Well, Willie and the boys are back there. They got these bibles from the hotel, The Gideons Bible, and they’re taking bets. They’ve got a gun, and they’re shooting the gun into the Bible and they’re taking bets on which particular chapter of the Bible the bullet will land in.
So you’ll hear somebody scream out, ‘Deuteronomy!’ and then ‘Bam!’ The gun goes off. There’s a pause and everybody starts cheering. And then you hear, ‘Proverbs!’ Bam! The gun goes off. Pause, somebody starts cheering…
So they’re taking bets and firing a gun into a Bible. And Poodie just wanted to have a little bit of quiet.”
Wild.
Stopping A Police Shootout
Back in the ’70s, Willie and the boys were loading up the bus after a show at the Birmingham Coliseum when they found themselves in the middle of a gun fight in a six-story parking garage. According to Locke, who told the story in Willie: An Autobiography:
“People are piling out of the show and they start scattering. Here come the cops from every direction. They’re flying out of their cars, hitting the parking deck, spread-eagling the whole crowd… ‘On the deck, mother****ers!’… because the cops don’t know who is shooting at who.”
Well the shootout finally reached a standoff, so Willie decided to take matters into his own hands:
“And here comes Willie.
He walks off the bus wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes, and he’s got two huge Colt .45 revolvers stuck in his waist. The barrels are so long they stick out the bottom of his cutoffs.
Two shining mother****ing pistols in plain sight of a bunch of cops nervous as sh*t.
Willie just walks over and says, ‘What’s the trouble?’ Well he’s got some kind of aura to him that just cools everything out. The cops put up their guns, the people climb off the concrete, and pretty soon Willie is signing autographs.”
What a legend.
Taking On the IRS – And Winning
Back in the early ’90s, Willie found himself in trouble with Uncle Sam when the IRS went afterhim for what they claimed was $16.7 million in unpaid tax bills.
Willie and his team tried to work with the IRS and challenge the tax bill, but with no success. So in August 1990, the IRS showed up at Willie’s door, which is pretty much the last thing anybody wants.
Federal agents seized Willie’s property in six different states, including his houses and land, his master tapes, his recording and touring equipment, his gold records, and even his clothes. But there was one thing the IRS didn’t get their hands on: His iconic and beloved guitar, Trigger.
That’s because Willie suspected that the IRS was eventually going to come knocking, and gave Trigger to his daughter Lana to take to Maui for safekeeping.
The rest of his possessions eventually went up for auction…but it didn’t go well.
The IRS tried to auction off a 44-acre ranch in San Marcos, Texas that he’d bought from the doctor who delivered him as a baby. But nobody would buy it.
After two failed auctions, the property was finally bought for the minimum bid: $203,840. And the lucky buyer? A farmer’s lobbying group, who Willie had previously helped through his Farm Aid benefit concert. They had bought the house so they could sell it back to Willie.
Another property up for auction was the Pedernales Country Club, which also housed Willie’s studio where he had done much of his recording in the 1980s, including his Pancho & Lefty album with Merle Haggard. The IRS did manage to sell this one: To Darrell Royal, former University of Texas football coach and friend of none other than Willie Nelson.
When the IRS learned that Royal had bought the property for safekeeping to return to Willie after his tax debt was paid off, the government canceled the sale to Royal and refunded his money.
When the club went back up for auction, they eventually did find a buyer in an investors’ group, but this time the recording studio was auctioned off separately. And it was bought by Freddy Fletcher – Willie Nelson’s nephew.
You see how this is going.
Well apparently the IRS saw how it was going too, so eventually they decided to stop fighting it.
A collection of Willie’s gold and platinum records, instruments, posters and other personal items were sold to the “Willie Nelson and Friends Showcase” for the low, low price of only $7,000. And the IRS, seeing the writing on the wall that they were never going to get their money by trying to sell off Willie’s property (at least not if his fans and the fine folks of Texas had anything to say about it), they went back to the negotiating table with Willie and his representatives.
Willie, for his part, remained surprisingly upbeat. At one point he even parked his bus outside of the IRS offices in Austin and, during breaks in their meetings, would go out and sign autographs for fans (including IRS employees themselves).
And finally, in 1993, Willie and the IRS settled their dispute for a little over half of what the government initially claimed that he owed, with Willie agreeing to pay $9 million, $3 million of which had already been paid.
One of the results of these negotiations, of course, was the infamous “IRS Tapes.” The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories? double album, featuring acoustic recordings of both new and unreleased songs, was released in 1992 to help pay off some of his debt, and the IRS agreed to help promote the album to help Willie raise money.
Eventually Willie would enter into an agreement with Sony to distribute the record to stores, and through a profit-sharing agreement that included the IRS, the album would help Willie raise almost $4 million to go towards his tax bill.
Oh, and he also made a Taco Bell commercial to help him raise some cash too.
Willie also filed a lawsuit against his accounting firm that had set up the tax shelters, Price Waterhouse, and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount of money to be paid to the IRS towards his tax bill.
Reflecting on his battle with the IRS, Willie didn’t seem too bothered by the entire ordeal, telling Rolling Stone:
“Mentally it was a breeze.
They didn’t bother me, they didn’t come out and confiscate anything other than that first day, and they didn’t show up at every gig and demand money. I appreciated that. And we teamed up and put out a record.”
And he wasn’t even too upset that his belongings were auctioned off, calling them “just things, nothing that can’t be replaced.”
Just another chapter in the incredible life of Willie Nelson.
Happy birthday to the Red-Headed Stranger. Here’s to another 93 years of amazing stories.
