'Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,' by Joe Nick Patoski

An Epic Life

Joe Nick Patoski

Little, Brown: 568 pp., $27.99

MY favorite Willie Nelson story is of the young harmonica player who wanted to be in Nelson's band so much that he'd drive to shows just for the chance to sit in on stage.

Nelson liked the guy's soulful sound and figured the leader of their struggling group had hired the harmonica player. After a few nights, he asked what the harp player was being paid. When the bandleader said, "Nothing," Nelson declared, "Double his salary!"

The musician was Mickey Raphael, who's been at Nelson's side for nearly 35 years, as much a fixture in their live show as the Texas flag that unfurls each night -- and the story tells a lot about the good-natured, carefree approach that has helped make the singer-songwriter a widely beloved figure. He turns 75 on April 29.

Whether bringing hippies and rednecks together in the 1970s with his "outlaw" style of country music or encouraging politicians via Farm Aid concerts to help troubled family farmers, Nelson rests in the national consciousness just east of the folksy warmth of Will Rogers and west of the crusading stance of Johnny Cash. Most of all, he's a great singer, songwriter and storyteller.

I've experienced Nelson's music through his recordings and concerts but was lucky enough to hear his storytelling firsthand -- in dozens of hours interviewing him, mostly on his custom tour buses.

Another favorite is the one about the wily Dallas promoter who would oversell a concert, then put "men's room" signs over all the exits, so that fans, after guzzling a few beers, would race to the restroom only to end up in the parking lot, the door locking behind them, thus allowing the promoter to let more people in the front door.

It was also fun watching Nelson bust up laughing about how his first wife, Martha, got so tired of his coming home drunk that she wrapped him in a blanket after he passed out on the couch, sewed the ends then beat him with a broom. (Martha, pretty colorful herself, claims the story is nonsense. It'd be way too hard to sew a man in a blanket, she said. The truth, she adds: She tied him with a jump-rope then hit him with the broom.)

Veteran author and music writer Joe Nick Patoski spent enough time around Nelson and his friends to fill a few dozen chapters of "Willie Nelson: An Epic Life" and still leave us wanting more. Though it's normally a problem to talk only to a subject's admirers, you've got to cut Patoski some slack. In nearly 40 years on the music scene, I can't remember anyone saying a bad word about Nelson.