“This is his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director Budrock Pruitt told me on the way to Camden. He was referring to the stage, specifically the twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon carpet that Nelson's team rolls out on each set before placing all the instruments, amps, and monitors in the same places as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace a bus, the company he's worked with for decades recreates the same interior as closely as possible on the next bus. And Nelson rents his buses year-round, whether they're in use or not. “They park and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”
Nelson's group does not have its own name. Ticket stubs and marquees simply say “Family,” as in “Willie Nelson and the Family.” For fifty years, Nelson's sister Bobbie led the group from the piano. He and Willie had an agreement: they would play until the end of the road. When Nelson's drummer Paul English died, his brother Billy replaced him. Jody Payne was Nelson's longtime guitarist; His son Waylon now plays in the band. Bee Spears began playing bass guitar at age nineteen and remained there until his death at age sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the group at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.
Nelson's road crew is family too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who managed the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, right out of college. Pruitt and Larry Gorham, the Hell's Angel in charge of security, have been working with Nelson since the seventies. Nelson's manager Mark Rothbaum did the same. Rothbaum's parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was mad as hell,” Rothbaum told me. He took a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day he saw Nelson behind a glass partition in his office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum made his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson never had a contract. “Could you put a piece of paper between us,” he says.
Family members call this world Willy, and it is also elastic. When steel player Jimmy Day drank, Nelson did not replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge of the Flying Burrito Brothers to play bass, and when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge in the lineup. He toured for a while with two bassists and two drummers: a full-fledged boogie band recorded on 1978's Willie and Family Live. Around the same time, Leon Russell joined on piano, taking with him his saxophonist and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, Nashville's top session musician, retired from studio recording, he too went on tour, turning the number of people on stage up to eleven. “Willie was kind of in charge of the refugee camp,” Steve Earle told me.
Bea Spears died in 2011, Jodie Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020 and Bobby Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Bobby’s sister,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of each song. After her death, Smith was shocked by how little sound there was on stage. Nelson and Raphael are doing all the solos now. The sets are shorter. Lucas stays home when he's not touring alone; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins in when he can. But Nelson's sound was stripped of its essence. “Now it’s more like spoken word,” Rafael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”
Nelson moves from number to number with little fuss, an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he read twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or sip from a Willie's Remedy mug full of warm tea. There was no sense of urgency on the set—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song's ironies and regrets room to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin and finally with Farm Aid at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months of touring. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “It's Benjamin who scares me.”
I met Annie in Camden while she was doing laundry backstage near the catering station. She and Nelson met in the Eighties on the set of the Stagecoach remake. Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, caring and unflappable, with a wide smile and long curly hair that she has allowed to turn grey. She told me that construction on Farm Aid was scheduled to begin that same day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live television broadcast. But the local 320 team of Teamsters, made up of caretakers, groundskeepers and catering workers at the university, chose this moment to go on strike. Members IATSEthe stagehands union wouldn't cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. However, canceling the concert would violate the faith of the people Farm Aid was supposed to serve. “It doesn't look good for us,” Annie said. “But who is really suffering? The farmers. This year of all years.”
