Music

Larry McMurtry and Willie Nelson in Houston

Continued from page 1

For a man like Daily, who was born in Yoakum in 1904, "Nite Life" took too many chances. It wasn't safely white nor was it respectably mediocre, and in those days in low art no less than high, insecure boomtowns like Houston yearned above all else for gentility. The result of that exception to McMurtry's "youthful confidence" is usually mere competence.

Daily's error was a symptom of Houston's then-stunted imagination. To his way of thinking, a transcendent bluesy country tune like "Nite Life" was just plain tacky. "The fact that it was rejected because it was too bluesy, to me that's Houston in a nutshell," says Patoski.

All too often, we hate what we are. The only worthy culture is that which we import from classier locales from either afar or from arts that are viewed as "higher." (In 1959, the Nashville country music world, as much then in the throes of self-hate as ever, was on the verge of gilding every song with "classy," vaguely classical strings.)

Here's McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave again: "The arts are stolidly but dutifully supported, and there is the usual self-congratulatory talk about what a cultural center we have raised on the once-barren plain."

McMurtry, Willie Nelson's closest literary counterpart, knew whereof he wrote. He was born three years after Nelson, and only a couple of counties to the northwest. When he got to Rice as an undergrad in 1954, he was just as energetic and almost as crushingly ignorant as the rest of the thousands of newly urbanized Texans in the target audience for "Nite Life."

And yet six years later, at the same time Nelson was scuffling along in Pasadena, McMurtry was working on his master's degree at Rice and on the cusp of publishing both Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne. As with Nelson, it wouldn't be apparent until a few years after he left, but Houston had worked its magic on McMurtry, too. He came here a rustic clod and left just before he became the first widely respected Texas novelist.

In his 1999 essay collection Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry described the process like this: "Houston was my first city, my Alexandria, my Paris, my Oxford. It was the place where I could begin to read, and I did, in Rice's open-stack library. I didn't know I was going to be a writer, nor did I suspect that the contrast between old and new, province and capital, wild and settled would occupy me for most of a writing life that has now passed the forty-year mark...(E)very time I stepped into the Rice library I felt a mingled sense of security and stimulation — a rightness of some sort. I felt that I had found my intellectual home and began to relax in ways that had not been possible on the ranch..."

Houston had set McMurtry free of his upbringing. In a way, Rice had transformed him into a verbal jazzman, just as the beer joints and people like Buskirk and English had enabled Willie to relax in ways he could not in Fort Worth.

After their rejection from Daily, Nelson and friend/mentor Buskirk would smuggle "Nite Life" out on their own as Paul Buskirk and his Little Men featuring Hugh Nelson, but without Daily's clout, "Nite Life" seemed as bound for obscurity as its forlorn, doomed subjects. (Ray Price hauled the song out of the land of broken dreams in 1963.)

With the apparent failure of "Nite Life," Houston had officially rode Willie Nelson hard and put him away wet. But he was due one final humiliation. He'd already been told he couldn't sing, that his best song was crap and that he couldn't keep time. But after he was reduced to begging for a job as a sideman in a rough Canal Street dive, he was fired after the club owner told the bandleader that Willie and his eccentric sense of rhythm had no place on his stage.

And with that final kick in the ass, Houston launched Willie Nelson on to Nashville, and then Austin, and then the world. "If he had stayed in Houston we probably wouldn't be talking about him now," says Patoski. "The fact is he had to go to Nashville so he could come back [to Texas]."

With all that has changed since that time, that's no longer the case. We could keep our Willie Nelsons here so long as our imagination starts to match our money.

john.lomax@houstonpress.com

• 1
• 2