Poker, acid, and feral bears: when Willie Nelson bailed Dennis Hopper out of a New Mexico jail
There’s not much about either Dennis Hopper or Willie Nelson that would surprise anyone, but the fact that they’d never even met before the latter bailed the former out of a New Mexico jail might just do it.
The hell-raising actor and the hard-partying musician knew a lot of the same people, they liked a lot of the same things, and they travelled in a few of the same circles, which makes it all the more remarkable that they hadn’t come face-to-face until Hopper was up to his usual debauched antics in Taos.
This being the industry’s most infamous wild man, it wasn’t your typical drunk and disorderly arrest. Since he seemed to have no idea how to do things by half, the Easy Rider mastermind’s reasons for ending up behind bars involved casinos, poker games, tabs of acid, firearms, and hallucinations.
Reflecting on their first encounter, the picture painted was nothing if not vivid. “I was in jail in Taos,” Hopper told Texas Monthly, setting the scene. “I’d gotten in a poker game in the Taos Plaza, and part of the winnings were some tabs of acid, so I just took them and continued to play. I ended up out in the plaza with my gun, shooting at a tree.”
Why was he shooting at a tree while under the influence of narcotics? Because he was convinced it was a feral bear with designs on turning him into dinner, obviously. Once he was apprehended and locked up by the local authorities, an unlikely guardian angel appeared when Nelson and his third wife, Connie Koepke, descended on the scene.
“Willie and Connie got me out of jail,” Hopper continued. “I got in the car, and Willie said, ‘We’re going to Vegas’. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go get some clothes, Willie’. He said, ‘No, you don’t. We’re going straight to Vegas. We’ll get you clothes when we get there’. So we drove from Taos to Vegas. He had a gig at the Golden Nugget. Actually, it was the last time Elvis played.”
As if the situation couldn’t get any stranger, since Nelson had already bailed someone he’d never met out of jail, placed them in a car, and embarked on a ‘Sin City’ road trip, they bumped into The Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah to add another wildcard to the unlikely unit, who presumably painted the town as red as it had ever been before, if not redder.
“I hadn’t got a clue how Willie knew I was in jail in Taos,” the ‘New Hollywood’ icon recalled. “At the time, I couldn’t imagine how Willie Nelson even knew who I was.” His bemusement didn’t end there, though, with Hopper flitting between whether or not it was a ruse by the police to lure him to his death, or whether the entire thing was a figment of his imagination.
“I freaked fucking out,” he surmised. “Willie Nelson? Come on, man, who do you think you’re kidding? You’re gonna lure me out and yell ‘jailbreak’ and blow my ass away! But I thought, ‘Hey, be cool, you are, after all, hallucinating all of this.'”
There’s only one person in the industry that could have possibly happened to, and while it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime moment for everyone else, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Hopper in the slightest.
