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Besides drinking "a lot of whisky," Willie has been through many drug scenes, including pills, acid, mescaline and cocaine (which he didn't like). He is now a confirmed marijuana smoker. When he goes too long between tokes he says he gets "hyper." His famous quick temper begins to flare at insistently ringing phones (he rips them out of the wall), officious security guards or—a special vexation—closed doors. "I can't tell you how many doors he has kicked down," laughs Connie. "Sometimes he even has the key in his pocket."
Yet Willie is a roughneck with a poet's soul. When his dander isn't up he is courteous and softspoken, with some of the grave self-possession of the country man. His favorite reading is Kahlil Gibran and Edgar Cayce. Sitting around hotel rooms, he muses often on the theory of reincarnation and on karma as a sort of Newton's Third Law of the spirit ("Whatever goes around, comes around"). Willie is "irresistible to women," says a female member of his entourage, "because he's so sensitive along with being so masculine—like Shane." Willie acknowledges that people find his calm or silent phases "mysterious." He pauses and smiles. " 'Course they don't know I'm completely ripped."
Willie also seeks detachment from the pressures of performing by jogging almost daily. Motion is the primary law of life for him. He writes most of his songs on the run, scribbling them on cardboard boxes, napkins, the backs of airline tickets. Best of all, he likes to compose them in his head while roaring down a highway in a car. Four years ago, he and Connie sketched out the whole of his Red Headed Stranger LP during an all-night drive from Colorado to Texas, fitting new songs side by side with traditional tunes and country standards to form a unified narrative of love and death, sin and redemption.
In my mind," says Willie, "I was seeling a movie unfold." Sure enough, Universal Pictures is interested in making a film based on the album. Willie has formed a production company to handle the deal. A canny businessman beneath his roistering exterior, he usually produces his own albums, has several real estate holdings in Texas and is majority owner of a record label and publishing company.
All of which has made Willie a millionaire on paper. He could afford to ease off before risking a fall from the charts, to quit the road and spend more time with his family (he and Connie have daughters, ages 8 and 5, scarcely older than the four grandchildren that stem from his first marriage). But Willie knows the touring will never end. First and last he is a honky-tonk troubadour. To see him on a bandstand is to see a man truly in his element. He is hunched over his battered Martin acoustic guitar, nodding and smiling as the applause of recognition washes over the opening bars of each number; singing to a shouted obbligato of "You said it, Willie! Sing it!"; swigging a beer between phrases or cheerfully knocking back the shots of booze passed up to him from the audience; remaining unperturbed even when a burly fan in sheer exuberance hurls a table onto the bandstand—bottles, glasses and all.
People are sayin'. . .
That I'm livin 'too fast