Working one night as a fill-in covering pigs for the City Desk in the World Capital of Live Music. To set the scene.
There was a shooting at a lake house on the western edge of the county. That meant drugs. It was a given, westside gunfire inevitably meant dealing, usually large quantities as cocaine became widely fashionable. While trouble on the eastside meant using and smaller quantities for sale.
The sheriff caught the case.
At the Travis County Courthouse that night—me trying to sort out who was who—someone pointed out a wiry good-looking white kid who had been at the house when the gunfire started. “That’s Billy Nelson,” my informant whispered to me, Billy Nelson as in country music star Willie Nelson’s son. The days passed and there was more whispering about Billy, that he was involved in an after-school activity other than band. He dropped out of sight.
Somebody in the music business told me that even if Billy was in hiding, Willie himself, the Red Headed Stranger of the album, was around.
This was the “old Austin” and whatever celebrities lived here did not hide. They couldn’t, not in a small town. In between albums Willie was said to like golf, living next to a golf course south of the river. To set the scene again.
A check of the newsroom located a critic who was able to give me the name of the golf course but not much more. The idea that began to take shape was getting to Billy through his dad—dirty work indeed for a reporter—but the kind of task that suited my ethically-immature skill set. Still you had to be careful. Willie Nelson was the city’s most prominent citizen, more important than the mayor and better-liked than the new governor, who was the first Republican in a century. To set the scene again. An odd sense of decorum suffused my very soul as the American-Statesman staff car carried me south of the Colorado River to a residential area that wasn't normally my hunting ground.
The problem was that my source did not know what address, on which street beside the course. He said only that the house was next to the green.
My plan? To knock on every door.
At the first door The Man himself answered.
Willie Nelson answered his own front door, no maid, no assistant, no manager or life coach, no gofers or groupies. Willie was wearing funny-looking golf shorts and golf shoes and was very gracious—the whole good host thing. He was cool with a complete stranger and it was genuine because he was polite before he saw my business card.
You could tell right away that he knew what was prompting the visit. When kids fuck up, their parents always seem to know. Covering cops you ended up talking to a lot of moms and dads who had the good sense to fear what their children did not.
You could tell that Willie was steeling himself for a response to something about his boy. There was no need for him to worry because my nerve failed. The questions never got asked. Sympathy for the interviewee has not been a big factor in my work either before or since that day, beside a golf green in the World Capital of Live Music. But Willie Nelson was different. The circumstances were different too.
This wasn’t the Lieutenant Governor driving drunk after hours with a babe not his wife. It was not the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives taking $5,000 in FBI-marked bills and putting it in his safe and forgetting about the money because, as he explained later to a federal jury—in a justification the jurors accepted—so many people gave him cash.
It was Willie Nelson, superstar and, ultimately, a father worried about his son. My almost-talk with this particular dad would only be important as a counterpoint, because another prominent Texas father with a wild child influenced-by-coke was coming my way on the cop beat, a high-level Democratic politician and his errant daughter. For whom there would be less reason for consideration.
So, like, all that hard-ass crap you hear about low-life police reporters, how we’ll sell our own mothers for a story, is true or mostly true but not always true. In the newsroom, after my visit to the golf course, the City Editor looked at Willie’s autograph on my business card, flipped the card front to back as if he were looking for something more, notes of an actual conversation—evidence of an interview? Then he looked at me, like, what's up with this? Didn’t get the interview, no. My instincts proved right though.
Billy Nelson got into a lot of shit over the years, including booze and drugs, we all did, in this town the pussy alone could drive a man—or woman—to ruin.
Which is what it presumably did to Billy. He got out of Austin but he left too late. That’s my take, not that it's my business now. Killed himself somewhere out east, Tennessee or the Carolinas, somewhere in there, Billy Nelson did, after escaping River City. It was too late for him, Austin had already taken a toll. They say Billy’s death broke Willie Nelson’s heart and began a long bad stretch for him too.
Austin!
That was practically all the coroner needed to write on the autopsy report.
We saw it all the time, back in the day. You started out so high, literally—good weather, good vibes, good drugs—the lake, fine pussy and all. Dick if that’s your thing. And after that it was just so easy to spiral down or spin completely out of control. You'd start out the weekend drinking shots on the patio at Scholz's and by Saturday you were "out on the lake," which could mean anything.
If you've lived in River City, and everyone has lived here, everyone knows the town, you know it's true. Everybody comes here for the music and maybe ends up out on the lake too. The day chasing Willie was important only, looking back, as my first introduction to the power of the press. Cornering a worried father wasn’t pretty but someone had to do it.
It wasn’t Billy’s fault, it was the city, ATX, the Live Music Capital of the World. That was my feeling at the time.
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