This is part four of a five part series exploring Willie Nelson’s 1975 Fourth of July Picnic through the eyes of an attendee. To start at the beginning, click here .
After a short rest and some food and beer, we began to make our way toward the stage. This proved more difficult than we imagined. The rain shower had been intense and long so that the parched ground had absorbed a good amount of moisture. With the thousands of people tromping in and out of the venue, our impromptu road and trails had become thick channels of mud. Walking in the center of a path was tricky and dangerous. The mud was thick enough that it would grab your feet, which required great effort to free your foot for the next step. It was also quite slippery, so any loss of balance could send a hiker on a spastic dance to their face. To stay out of these lanes, walkers moved further out and continued the process of expanding the mud pits. By the time we got near the stage, we were in a virtual sea of mud; we would be standing from here on. Most everyone of us was wearing evidence of the trek through the muck.
“You know, this is pretty perfect,” Mike said. “The temperature has dropped, the concert is moving, the best acts are on… we should have waited till now to come.”
“Well, you’re right about the temperature and the music,” I agreed, “but you realize we are standing ankle deep in mud, and I don’t know about you, but I’m dog tired. This concert was scheduled to be over a long time ago. I’ve been up more than 20 hours after a short night last night. Besides, planning on a rain delay and coming late would not have made sense this morning.”
Looking around at the crowd and the movement of people, it appeared maybe that many people had planned to skip the heat of the day and arrive after dark. It seemed there were as many people streaming away from the stage toward the exit as there were people picking their way toward the stage. Those coming in seemed more rested and somewhat cleaner than those leaving. It looked like shift change at a giant factory.
“My word, I’ve never heard such whining. Buck up, man, this is what we came for. You’ll get a second wind,” Mike encouraged.
He was right. Kris Kristofferson was on, and it was like he had the audience on a yo-yo. He could sing a sad, soulful song like Sunday Morning Coming Down and have the audience in a silent trance, only to finish and start making jokes. The transition would revive me from a reverie with his jokes, then he started his great ballad Me and Bobby McGee and had the crowd singing along.
It was about this time I noticed an extremely drunk dude careening through the mud. He had obviously been down once or twice, but he was up now and zigzagging his way through the crowd. Suddenly, his foot slipped, his leg kicked back over his head in cartoon fashion, and he went face down in the mud.
We watched the fellow pull his face out of the mud and push himself to his knees. He rested there for a moment and then slowly brought a foot to the ground and attempted to stand. Unfortunately, his foot slipped, he returned for another mud kiss, and lay motionless. We instinctively started moving toward him to pull him out.
“No, he’s moving,” Mike replied.
Sure enough, he rolled to his back. He spat mud from his mouth and raked his eyes with muddy fingers and lay there for a while. There was now not a single part of his body that wasn’t coated in muck. I walked to him and leaned over to stare into his face.
I moved to him and bent over with my hands on my knees. “Hey, dude, if you’re going to vomit, you need to get off your back and stand like me. You don’t want to vomit lying on your back,” I advised.
He stared at me a moment and then said, “I’m not going to be sick.”
“That makes one of us. This position always brings me bad memories that I’m beginning to feel now,” I told him.
He was quiet a moment as he processed the implications of my words. Suddenly, he spun to his side and pushed himself to his feet. He hurried away with a few nervous glances over his shoulder.
I returned to Mike saying, “I thought he was putting on some kind of bullshit act.”
Mike was still watching the drunk when he suddenly ducked his larger frame behind mine. I turned to look and see what had startled him. The drunk, in his haste to get away and looking behind him, had stumbled into our intrepid deputy. The deputy held him at arm’s length and peered into his face momentarily, then pushed him away and followed his gaze toward me.
With unaccustomed acuity, Mike had realized the deputy, like the monomaniac Ahab circumventing the globe in search of the white whale, was roaming the concert grounds in search of him. His fixation on my friend was inexplicable, but the feeling was almost palpable even to me.
Again, with resourcefulness beyond his normal abilities, Mike adroitly joined the fringe of a group of concertgoers moving toward the deputy. They were all laughing and joking while Mike kept his head down and moved with them. The deputy barely noticed the group as they passed him; rather, he started moving toward me with some vague recognition.
He was a step or two past me, and I was beginning to relax, when he stepped back and looked me in the face and asked, “Where’s your friend?”
“Friend?” I responded.
“Didn’t you come in here this morning with that big, curly-headed motherfucker with the pot shirt?” he continued.
“Oh, him. I only met him on the road coming in. I haven’t seen him since we got through the gate this morning. Has he done something?” I replied.
“Don’t worry, I’ll find him, and if I find you two are connected, you’ll be going down too,” he warned. Then he continued on, scanning the crowd as he drifted in search of his whale.
The exchange had left me unsettled and confused, so it was helpful when action on the stage brought me back to reality and Rita Coolidge stepped onto the stage.
She started her set with a cover of Bob Dylan’s I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. All her songs were good, and in other circumstances, it would have been great, but the soulful, bluesy songs were making me more tired. Fortunately, Kris joined her for a few songs and livened things up a bit. I admit I was feeling jealous of Kris when they sang the duet Loving Arms.
I was considering heading up to take a nap, but I knew Charlie Daniels was coming up next. He finally took the stage carrying his fiddle, and after a cheery “Howdy, y’all!” he broke into Texas, followed by Fire on the Mountain. It was like coffee had been poured out on the somewhat lethargic group. He kept the energy up with a few more songs featuring his fiddling and ended a short set with his famous tune The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
He took a short break as he put his fiddle down and started to strap on a guitar. He told a story I’d heard him tell before at another concert about how he was primarily known as a fiddle player and had been a studio musician for many other artists, but his real love and what he thought he was best at was the guitar. After such a bold admission, I knew he was obligated to demonstrate, and he did.
With the first notes of Caballo Diablo, I could tell where this was heading. He got a little bluesy with Whiskey. After a few more songs, he started the opening of Long Haired Country Boy, and I decided it was an appropriate time to get some rest. I figured even great musicians had to play some crap to pay the rent.
I decided to head up to our camp and lay down for a while. I needed to rest before Willie came out or the sun rose. I wasn’t sure which would happen first.
I started picking my way back up the hill. The going was easier now that the crowd was beginning to thin out. There was still a lot of mud, but I was getting better at stepping around, over, or through as appropriate, and I had a goal in mind.
I made it to our encampment and sat on the blanket, observing the starry night. I’d forgotten the discomfort of the hot afternoon and the annoyance of the rain delay; it had all turned out right in the end. I smoothed out the blanket and made a pillow of a towel and crawled into our little shelter. As I was drifting to sleep, I heard the opening strains of Whiskey River playing in the distance.
