Give Me the Willies

NEW YORK (Reuters) – At 73, country music legend Willie
Nelson is still doing headstands and smoking joints in the back of a
tour bus at hundreds of concerts and, far from slowing down, he’d like
to tour with the Rolling Stones.

"They like country music, we get along fine and Keith (Richards) is
a good buddy of mine, so that would be good," Nelson said, adding
that he’s not much of a dancer compared to Stones front man Mick Jagger
but he might
give it a try.

"I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes," Nelson
said with a smile, sitting in a luxury suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel,
a whiff of marijuana drifting down the corridor.

Nelson admits he’s had a few run-ins with the law over his pot smoking
habits. "If you’re going to be out there with it, somebody’s going
to pull you over, just because they can. … I talk about it a lot, but
I’m not going to walk into some police station burning one down and say,
‘How are you all doing?"

He says the pot smoking hasn’t hindered his songwriting. On the contrary,
it may have helped filter out the duds.

"I figured if it wasn’t worth remembering it probably wasn’t a very good
song, so that would be the test, to see if I remembered it until I got
back to a guitar or a piano," he said. "That was usually a
pretty good measuring stick, but I’m sure I forgot a few that might have
been OK."

Much of his advice in his book is as simple as urging
people to breathe deeply and drink plenty of water, and he draws examples
from his past to show the importance, for example, of not getting angry
for the wrong reasons.

"I could have gotten all pissed off thirty-something years ago when
my wife Shirley tied my drunk ass to the bed with a clothesline and woke
me up by beating me with a mop handle, but instead I figured I probably
had it coming," he writes.

He just can’t exactly remember for what…

from Reuters