Farm AID's Founder: Willie Nelson

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That sort of adulation was to become common, but inserting Willie's name in the place of St. John was somewhat off the beam. Nelson is more your basic St. Paul type, an apostle of the distinctly worldly sort, and therefore he deserves a more worldly testimonial.

The best of these, perhaps, comes from a Nashville music business executive who negotiated with Willie at the point where, thanks to those Austin freaks and their counterparts across the nation, the man's music was in big, big, big demand. At the time Willie was managed by Neil Reshen, an outrageously aggressive New Yorker described by his client as "my mad dog on a leash."

"It was amazing, just wonderful," says the victim. "I've never seen anything like it. Neil was so bad—I mean, you really wanted to have the man arrested; the secretaries used to run for the bathroom when he showed up—that when you talked to Willie, it was like negotiating with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and you were so relieved you didn't have to deal with Neil that you gave Willie whatever he wanted. But, of course, what Neil wanted and what Willie wanted were the same things. They were working the good cop-bad cop scam, the oldest con in the world, but they did it so well you didn't realize what was going on till it was all over. And by then you'd done a deal you'd never have even dreamed of otherwise."

That's not all. You might expect the victim to be resentful, but he isn't. "Well, the man wasn't at all dishonest or unethical," he says. "Far from it, in fact. He just outplayed me, and he ended up getting what he really deserved. And all that means is that he's smarter than I am. I don't hate him. How can you hate Willie Nelson? He just has to turn that smile on you, and you're hooked. But now I take him seriously. He may be beautiful, but he ain't dumb."

Such a man—with his hard-earned combination of country compassion, common sense and carefully honed business skills—would have been the perfect choice if American farmers had gone looking for a leader in their hour of need. That's not how it happened, though. It was Willie who went unbidden to the farmers.

September 1985 was when it began, in Champaign, Illinois, as a notion kicked around between Willie and his crew in the wake of Bob Geldof's Live Aid marathon. As Willie recalls, in the low-to-vanishing key for which he is renowned, "I have no idea how it got started. I was just sitting in the bus . . ."

Like a large proportion of the projects Willie judges worthy, the 14-hour Farm Aid benefit moved from idea to action with little further ado. It was set up with minimum fuss and executed with slightly less toil and craziness than usually attend a mammoth outdoor music festival featuring multiple Major Entertainers. (Which figures. After more than a decade of organizing and hosting his legendary Fourth of July picnics, Willie is perhaps the world's premier mastermind of such events.) When it was all over—when Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Alabama, Billy Joel, Kris Kristofferson, Bon Jovi, Joni Mitchell, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, John Cougar Mellencamp and some 45 other acts had done their thing and the TV viewers who watched them had sent in their donations—Willie and his crew suddenly found themselves in temporary possession of a great deal of donated money.

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