Willie Nelson's Crusade To Stop Big Pot

- Wil S. Hylton, photograph by Martin Schoeller

Backstage at farm aid is a hidden city. You enter through a guarded gate just north of the concert pavilion, leaving behind the woozy crowd and vendors hawking organic snacks, then you drift through a gaggle of agitated assistants, past the roadies bustling about, and you follow a trail of golf carts heading for the residential district, where dozens of tour buses have been crammed together to accommodate the sheer number of headlining acts, with John Mellencamp’s people over here and Neil Young’s entourage there, with Dave Matthews and Kacey Musgraves and Jack Johnson each presiding over a small convoy of RVs, which you slip between and among, ducking down the narrow alleys, until at last you burst into the enormous plaza that surrounds the ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’

The Rose is parked just slightly akimbo, with its front wheels cocked to one side. It is a 45-foot Prevost X3 with a 334-foot wheelbase, which is the same model used by President Obama during the 2012 campaign or, to put it another way, it’s just about the sweetest ride a tour bus can be. Unlike the president, Willie Nelson doesn’t require a lot of armored plating. He keeps an old Winchester rifle onboard, tucked into a cabinet over his bed, but otherwise the custom details of the Rose tend to be personal, pragmatic touches, like the twin biodiesel generators he installed in the under-floor compartment, with a special exhaust line that runs through the roof to avoid drowning the bus in fumes. Today, a crisp September afternoon under the yawning Illinois sky, there is a far more pleasant smoke wafting about the plaza—billowing, in fact, from every crack and gap in the carapace of the Rose. That’s because Willie is onboard, wailing on a monster spliff.