Take a long, deep breath and inhale, little hippies—Willie Nelson turns 75 today. And the prank-playing, joke-telling, weed-smoking outlaw-hero cowboy-crooner of a million gigs and a billion more road miles (the craggy, well-worn face says it all), is doing just fine. Last Monday, in Amsterdam (natch!) Willie and Snoop Dog guested at each other's shows, and, not missing a beat, today he's planning to return and celebrate with a few close friends and family.

Fans, meanwhile, can rejoice with Joe Nick Patoski's biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, a swift but sprawling masterpiece detailing Willie's World as he went about the business of making country music cool again. Patoski—who has known and written about Willie for more than 35 years—takes the reader from Nelson's Depression-era upbringing to his impending fame to his infamous IRS battles and, ultimately, to his American hero status. Along the way, of course, it's been an enviable life of whiskey, women, and weed.

In the past, we've had whiffs of Willie, caught glimpses of the man as he essentially played himself in the movies Honeysuckle Rose and The Songwriter. He wrote an autobiography in 1988, he's penned countless print articles, and, most recently, published a mixed bunch of philosophical nuggets, The Tao of Willie. Through the years, plenty of excitable journalists have stepped aboard Willie's bus, with pen, paper, and recorder firmly in hand, only to emerge stupid, grinning, and stoned, the story and questions long forgotten. In a way, Patoski got on that bus in the 1970s and never got off.

Those were the early Gonzo days of rock star country icons, and a time when Willie found his new "twisted heritage" as a Texas hippie—a weedy blend of redneck and longhair. Patoski writes fondly about the days when you could rent an Austin apartment for $100, a six-pack of Texas Pride beer cost less than a dollar, an ounce of pot cost $10, and there was an abundance of LSD and peyote. And the weather was perfect.

The book is unauthorized, but Willie apparently likes what he's read. "I'll be honest with you," Patoski tells Radar. "You get to 72 and there a lot of personal observations, but told in third person, not first person." Patoski describes his time with Willie Nelson as almost religious. "You make contact with his eyes and the rest of the world falls away," he says, explaining the difficulty in maintaining a distance while writing the book. "Its easy to get swept up in the Willie Vortex, and when you get spit out you're not the same person. It's better to have an outside distance. It's the vortex. And it's seductive."

Patoski manages to reserve judgment ("He's the story. I'm the teller," he writes). After 35 years you would imagine there's some bias, some things he chooses not to tell, right? Not really. "I had to police myself to cram 75 years into a book, cut down from 900 pages. I had to move the story along. Some people are critical because I didn't get into the salacious parts enough. I don't know if he has false teeth or hemorrhoids." We'll just assume he does not, then, thanks.