One of the most iconic
Willie Nelson has a new book, The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity—and My Longest Love Affair, which is out everywhere today, and I’m still making my way through it, but of course, he provides tons of insight on his music and his family, particularly his wife, Annie.
Willie has plenty of legendary outlaw stories to his name, but it’s hard to top his whole ordeal with the IRS…
Back in August of 1990, the IRS showed up at Willie’s door, and federal agents actually 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.
They claimed that the country legend owed $16.7 million in unpaid tax bills to Uncle Sam, and while they tried to auction most of it away in order to recoup part of the money he owed, many of his loyal fans and fellow Texans stepped in to buy it all back for him.
And in his 2015 memoir It’s a Long Story: My Life, Willie detailed some of what happened from his perspective.
He cleared up rumors that his band ever disbanded, saying they were willing to work for less money during that time and they never broke up… quite the opposite, in fact. And while obviously when you’re in trouble with the IRS, that typically spells major trouble, Willie handled it a whole let better than most would:
“I’m not saying I wasn’t in a serious financial stew. I sure as sh*t was. But I had my health and my fighting spirit.”
Willie added that he “never” thought of declaring bankruptcy, and he went along with the plan created by his manager Mark Rothbaum, which was supported by his attorney’s Joel Katz and Jay Goldberg, as well as tax expert Larry Goldfein, to fight the IRS.
In The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity—and My Longest Love Affair, Willie explained that this all happened the same year his youngest child, Micah, was born, and he could have never seen it coming.
He recalled getting a call from a woman from the IRS telling them all of their assets have been seized, and thankfully Willie had his longtime guitar Trigger with him, though the family lost a lot of personal items including things like baby photos, which they never saw again:
“I didn’t see the storm coming. That same year of Micah’s birth, the IRS showed up, guns abalazing. Froze my bank accounts. Grabbed my assets. Seized all my property. Padlocked my homes. Said I owed them $32 million. That was the start if the 1990s, when suddenly God’s problem child had a problem.
We were on the road in the middle of a tour when we got a call telling us that some woman from the IRS had seized our property and was auctioning off our personal belongings. Heaven knows what her real name was; we called her ‘Ice Queen.’
Trigger was with me, thankfully, but we lost baby pictures and tons of personal items we never saw again. There was nothing we could go but watch all our memories be sold.”
Their accountant, Larry, was able to secure a deal for them, and he continued to help them through it in the years following:
“Larry Goldfein, a brilliant accountant, former trial attorney for the IRS, and partner of a preeminent accounting firm, got us through a stressful time. Within a week, Larry had reduced the $32 million debut the $16 million. Still a lot of money, but we knew we were in good hands.”
Through “genius negotiations,” Willie says Larry continued to reduce his tax debt even further, and he got any liens on his royalties released without him having to go bankrupt.
But of course, as you can imagine, the IRS wasn’t done yet…
Willie recalled getting a call from Larry one afternoon, informing him that the IRS wanted his publishing rights to his music as part of the negotiations. The publishing rights means they simply wanted the ownership of Willie’s song, i.e., how he makes money, and it was his wife, Annie, who told them they were not doing that, because she understood that it would be like someone “taking away” Willie’s children.
They meant everything to him, and so the Nelson’s told the IRS ‘f*** no’ to that one:
“Larry called us one afternoon and told us the IRS was asking for our publishing as part of the negotiations. I remember Annie said, ‘But that would be like taking away your children. You birthed all those songs.’ She’s right. It felt terrible.
We asked Larry to let them know our answer was f*** no. We ended up being able to keep our publishing.”
The rest, as they say, is history, and Willie knew how to “sing for [his] supper,” and that’s exactly what he did. He famously made a double album of sorts, the aforementioned The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?, which were created as low-budget as possible.
The feds agreed to his plan of using that project as a way to make money and pay them back, and Willie was the only musician that played on the songs, creating a bare-bones collection of 24 songs in total.
Sony, who had him under contract at the time, also put in some money to help and the album was mainly marketed as a TV commercial. The cover of the album featured Willie wearing a cowboy hat with a T-shirt that read “S*** happens.”
The red headed stranger also once said that he made the album as a way to “test their sense of humor,” making him probably the one and only person who ever had any desire to “test” the IRS, but hey, they don’t call him an outlaw for nothin’… you have to earn that kind of nickname.
Clearly, no one in the Nelson family is scared of the IRS, and we all got a heck of an album out of it too… and Willie is still here to tell all of the wild tales about it. I call that a huge win…
“Who’ll Buy My Memories”
“Yesterday’s Wine”
“Pretend I Never Happened”
