It was Nelson who quietly commanded the sessions. In the studio, he works in a singular way: without necessarily explaining in words what he wants, and without troubling the musicians with anything so airy-fairy as a concept, he will guide the musicians through sheer serendipity, letting them discover what it is he is looking for in a song by the way he plays, the way he sings, the way he smiles and moves. If it’s not coming out the way he wants he might return to guitar and vocal, willing them to really listen. Rarely will he say – ‘do this, don’t do that’. It’s music-making based on trust and belief. That old ESP thing again.
Barry Beckett: In the studio, he lets it happen. If it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. He won’t force it. He works with people he respects and who respect him. Nobody is going to interrupt him, not only because it’s Willie, but just because of what is happening. Nobody is going to interrupt his train of thought.
The Family Band were nowhere to be seen on Phases And Stages, although there were some fine country musicians on hand: Johnny Gimble and his fiddle showed up, as did Fred Carter Jr, a superb Nashville guitarist, and steel player John Hughey. Wexler was certainly intrigued by the possibilities of cutting a country record with an R&B band, but – like many producers before and since – he also wasn’t entirely convinced that Nelson’s live band wasn’t a one-trick pony, and wondered whether they could cut the mustard in the studio. It was a rather interesting echo of the problems Nelson had encountered with RCA in the 60s, and there is evidence that he may not have been entirely happy with this scenario.
Willie Nelson: Jerry Wexler had a brainstorm that he wanted me to go to Muscle Shoals. Since he’d let me do the first one my way, I decided to let him do the second one his way.2
Although Wexler was simpatico and Nelson felt duty bound to listen to his ideas, he had not come this far to be pushed into tit-for-tat artistic compromises, however superb the final outcome. He wanted, indeed expected, to record with his band. Perhaps Waylon Jennings had been right after all. He returned to Nashville and listened to the final tapes of the album and thought he could do better himself. Instead of confronting Wexler directly with his thoughts, he went into Fred Carter’s studio in Nashville and tinkered with the master tapes.
Nick Hunter: Willie’s a great con man. He does it nicely, but he’s a con man. He and Fred came walking in one day to the [Atlantic] office and they decided they could cut a better version of Phases And Stages than Jerry did. So they went and did it. Rick Sanjek was involved, because they had to convince Rick it was a good idea. I remember going to New York with Rick and walking into Jerry’s office. The only thing I remember about Wexler’s office was that it was very long – at the very back wall by the door there was a couch, and I remember sitting on the couch figuring: when the shooting starts I probably wouldn’t get shot. Rick told them that they’d cut a better version of Phases And Stages than Jerry had. That didn’t sit very well. Of course [Jerry won].
Wexler, typically, remembers the incident slightly differently.
Jerry Wexler: I permitted the man in charge of our country music department – I’m not even going to mention his name [Rick Sanjek] – to mix the record, because he assured me it had to have a country mix, whatever the hell that was. So he sent me this mix: it was horrible. Horrible. We buried it. There’s no such thing as a country mix. So I just had Tom Dowd remix it, and that’s the record that came out. To my spec. To my satisfaction.
It was the last time – bar none – that Nelson would cede control; he would work many more times without his band or with a producer in the studio, but the final call would be his. However, there could be little complaint about the final product, released in May 1974. Despite the ‘Phases And Stages Theme’ which kept interrupting the flow of the record and became an escalating irritant, it was a magical piece of work and perhaps, as Wexler concedes, ‘his best. Sotto voce, but a lot of Willie’s people say that.’ ‘I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone’ is the emotional peak – the music is so lovely, so perfect and overwhelming that it takes a few listens to realise that Nelson isn’t singing his own sad farewell to his friend’s wife, but is instead singing as Paul English. It’s a brilliant insight into his art as a songwriter: not content merely to empathise with a friend’s grief, but instead to inhabit it, claim it as his own and use it to create a work of universal depth. When he explains that his songwriting is based on the belief that everybody thinks and feels the same basic things the world over, ‘I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone’ is Exhibit A. It is the sound of him singing from deep within another man’s soul.
Phases And Stages was a triumph, but the weight of expectation on the record was too heavy. Problems were brewing at the Nashville branch of Atlantic, which was already several thousands of dollars in the red, mainly due to start-up expenses and the fact that they had signed nobody of comparable calibre to Nelson. It was a stable with only one real thoroughbred, and although Phases And Stages would go on to sell around 400,000 copies, he wasn’t yet a big enough act to sustain an entire country music department. The re-recording of the classic ‘Bloody Mary Morning’ became a moderate country hit, but there was no Top 10 success or crossover single to make the leap to the mainstream.
The main problem, however, had been there from the beginning and was fundamentally insurmountable: the lack of enthusiasm and support for the Nashville operation from head office in New York. It was a crude sketch in imitation of what had afflicted Nelson at RCA, except this time it wasn’t simply a misunderstood artist, it was a whole misunderstood genre. Wexler claims he was the only staff member at Atlantic Records at any level – ‘administrator, boss, worker, toiler in the field’ – who had any interest in or feel for country music. This is a characteristic Wexler exaggeration, but only just. Everyone had their pet projects and – as the most recent – the country music offshoot quickly became the fall guy for the whole label. Everything that was failing commercially was dumped into the Nashville department, ensuring that there was no economic viability for the project. On 6 September 1974, only twenty months after it opened, the Nashville office was closed down and all staff laid off, including Nick Hunter. Initially, the idea was that Nelson was going to stay on the label and report to the New York executives.
Jerry Wexler: Lemme tell you what happened. My associates said, ‘We’re going to close the Nashville office because we’re in the red.’ I said they couldn’t do that, because they’ve got Willie Nelson and he’s going to be tremendous. If they insisted on closing it, I said we had to give Willie his release, because we couldn’t have a performer like Willie without a Nashville base. They said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I called up Willie and said, ‘I’m turning you loose.’ He understood and was very grateful. It was one of those egregious mistakes on the part of my associates.
Nelson was released with immediate effect from the remainder of his contract and became a free agent. It was a good time for him to be negotiating a deal. Phases And Stages had been well received. It was reviewed well in the New York Times, a sure sign of growing stature, and was selling well. At the same time, he was in the Top 20 country charts with an unlikely duet of ‘After The Fire Has Gone’ sung with Tracey Nelson, a fellow Atlantic artist who had been the lead singer with Mother Earth and who leaned more to the rock side. The duet had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Nashville producer Bob Johnston, who had cut Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde in Nashville in 1966, was in love with Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn’s current version of ‘After The Fire Is Gone’. He was producing Tracey Nelson and bumped into Nick Hunter one night outside the Exit Inn, slightly inebriated, and the idea for a duet came up. Even back in those days, Nelson would sing on just about anything. They threw Tracey’s vocal onto ‘Whiskey River’ for the B-side and that was that – a medium-sized hit single, as well as a Grammy nomination for Best Country Vocal Performance for 1974.
It was also in his favour that he had walked away from Atlantic with a valuable goodwill gesture in the form of the master
tapes for his two already completed albums, which he now owned and could bring to a new label: his gospel album The Troublemaker and a superb live album recorded on 29 and 30 June 1974 in Austin, called Willie Nelson Live At The Texas Opry House, both of which were virtually ready for the shelves when Atlantic shut down. The live record has never been released in its entirety, but it is a magnificent document of a band storming through instrumentals, gospel tunes, improvised snippets, Nelson originals, classic old songs, and covers of everything from Bob Wills’ ‘Take Me Back To Tulsa’ and Hank Williams’ ‘Jambalaya’ to Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’. It is the sound of a whole world of music being blown wide open and is still the template for the kind of show he puts on today. The sound of his mind.
One night early in 1975 Nelson and Connie were driving home from Steamboat Springs in Colorado, where Connie had a three-storey Swiss chalet as a holiday home. They had been on a skiing vacation, but now it was time for the familiar pre-album panic.
Connie Nelson: We were driving back, just the two of us, and Willie said, ‘You know, as soon as I get back I’ve got to go into the studio and do an album and I don’t have any idea what I’m doing! Not even one song, nothing. Help me think of some songs I could do.’ And so I got out a pad and a pen while he’s driving, and I said, ‘Why don’t you do the “Red Headed Stranger” song?’ He used to sing that song to the girls when they were getting ready to go to sleep at night, just as he had done to his [older] kids before. I said, ‘It’s a whole story right there, you can just fill in songs around it and it’s done.’ So we did. He would say songs like ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ that he wanted to do, and as he’s driving I’m writing, and he’s filling in the whole story of the ‘Red Headed Stranger’, this preacher, he’s telling it to me and I’m writing it all down. By the time we got to Texas it was pretty much done. He just put it on a tape recorder the way he had it, just with a guitar. Then he filled in the story, and then they just went in the studio and did it.
He had recently signed with Columbia, home of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and a whole host of other A-listers. Neil Reshen had many old contacts at the label from his days filing tax returns for its executives and from managing Miles Davis, and had called CBS President Bruce Lundvall in New York to see if he was interested in Nelson. He was, but Lundvall came up against stiff opposition from the Nashville office. Billy Sherill, the hugely successful staff producer and director of A&R at CBS in Nashville, didn’t think he would sell any records. It was the old story: ‘Great songs, but . . .’ However, Lundvall had loved ‘Bloody Mary Morning’ and wasn’t necessarily burdened with the baggage of Nelson’s perceived Nashville failures, and after some consideration he overruled Sherill and signed Nelson up. It was an interesting and significant reversal of the norm: the New York execs trumping the Nashville crowd, and one which ensured he would have the support of the head office when the crunch came. The deal was in the region of $40,000 per album initially (it was renegotiated for far greater sums in 1980 and 1983) plus Columbia agreed to buy the rights to The Troublemaker and the Live At The Opry House albums – both of which Nelson had been given gratis by Atlantic – for $17,000 each. It was a canny piece of business, but he was still a small fish in a very big pond, and Columbia’s welcome party for him at Toot Shors restaurant on New York’s 52nd Street was sparsely attended.
Nelson went away and nobody heard anything for a few weeks. Executives were slowly preparing to get the wheels in motion for the new record – locations, producers, songs – when Reshen called in mid-February to say the album was ready. ‘How could you have the finished album?’ asked Lundvall. ‘I’ve only just signed him. The ink on the contract isn’t even dry yet!’ The album – which took its inspiration from the title track, a children’s song that Nelson used to play on his radio shows and sing to his kids at bedtime – jumped hot from the page on the drive from Colorado and leapt into the studio in Dallas, taking three days in all: day one for playing, day two for any small overdubs, day three for mixing. Nelson would arrive in the afternoon, loosen up a bit then record through the night. It cost $5,000.
This time he was using his own band. The line-up had changed a little. Shortly after recording Shotgun Willie Jimmy Day had left the group. Instead of replacing him with another steel guitar player, Nelson had drafted in Mickey Raphael on the harmonica to add melody lines. Raphael was a 21-year-old middle-class son of Jewish immigrants who had been spotted by Darrell Royal and plucked out of Dallas into one of those little picking parties Royal was famed for. Raphael was really a fan of folk and rock – he knew next to nothing about country music, but Nelson invited him to sit in with the band and he has stayed ever since, his distinctive harmonica playing becoming one of the defining elements of the Family Band’s sound. Jody Payne, the husband of country singer Sammi Smith, also fell in with the band on the road and became the second guitar player in the line up, letting Nelson embark on more experimental forays with ‘Trigger’.
In the studio, the band were initially a little confused by what he wanted, and they charged in much as they would have on stage. Nelson stripped things down to just guitar and vocals and then added only the most necessary instrumentation, sketching in detail but keeping it finely drawn. It was the difference between a black and white etching and a full-blown watercolour.
Bee Spears: He’d been talking about doing the album, but he didn’t really explain in great detail what it was going to be. We got to the studio and he cut it all out of sequence. We’d be doing something and he’d just decide to play one of the little interludes or something – so it took about half the album [session] to figure out where it was going. Of course, we were excited about doing it because we got to play with Will on the record.
Red Headed Stranger has been called Nelson’s masterpiece; if so, it’s a masterpiece of narrative structure, cinematic imagery, spare atmospherics and an all-encompassing vision. It’s emphatically not a masterpiece of songwriting. In many ways, it is a lesson in how to make wonderful art from the most basic of material: the only truly great original song on the record is ‘Time Of The Preacher’, which appears three times in various incarnations. But if his glory years as a writer were largely to be behind him, the record secured his iconic status. The album’s mood and imagery was so persuasive and enduring that the only real comparison was with one of Sinatra’s classic themed Capitol albums from the 50s.
Through the extended story-in-song of a vengeful preacher who rides out in search of the man who has stolen his wife, eventually killing them both and a woman who tries to steal his horse, Nelson got to live out his own fantasy of the lone drifter – emotionally unreachable – cutting through the harshness of the old West on his trusty stallion, chasing down a terrible and inevitable fate. But there was more going on. In the elliptical verses, repeated themes and snatches of songs, he wove an almost biblical spell of a religious man going into the desert and confronting the true measure of his faith – can he live outside the confines of conventional human law but still stay on the side of right in the eyes of God? Can a man who gets away with murder and eventually finds peace with another lover still live with himself?
It is an examination of morality which would have been instantly recognisable to the likes of Paul English and the boys on Jacksonboro Highway twenty years earlier, and which contained Nelson’s core character traits. He sits inside the shifting moral landscape of the Red Headed Stranger comfortably – a man with a spiritual thirst, a loner, passionate lover, dispenser of justice, outlaw. Even the title of the album was an autobiographical conceit, while the man who hunts down his wife, shoots her dead, then sing a haunted ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ as he basks in her memory is not all that different in essence from the man who rolls from one town to another, cheats on his wife, and then sings heartbreaking songs about being abandoned and alone. As a cultural footnote, it’s also worth remembering that Texas folklore decreed that a man was entitled in law to kill his spouse i
f she committed adultery. It wasn’t actually true, but then the letter of the law wasn’t always strictly applied in these matters.
It is a ballad record, raw as an exit wound, bitty, scratchy, cutting in and out of songs and weaving through saloon bar instrumentals. It is the sound of Nelson putting his money where his mouth is: if people wanted him to be the figurehead of country roots music, then here it was in all its harsh beauty. It was the first studio record he had ever recorded in Texas. It possessed none of the raucous fervour of the Family Band on stage, and after the beautifully produced suite of superior songs that was Phases And Stages it sounded unbelievably spare. It could have been recorded on a front porch or around a campfire. That was the point. In truth, as both a record and a narrative it ran out of steam a little towards its conclusion, but Nelson knew exactly what he was doing: the single line of vocal harmony near the end of ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ is testament to how instinctively he pieced the record together.
He was determined to make the album he wanted, despite the inevitable expectations a new record company harboured. ‘He just did that album because that was what he wanted to do,’ says Paul English. ‘Not because it would sell or anything, that wasn’t what he was looking for.’ Once again, he was testing the loyalty of those around him. He had done it with Martha way back in the fighting years, he had done it with his band, he had done it with Atlantic, and now he was testing those who worked for him, and his new employers at CBS. Nick Hunter had started working with Neil Reshen when Nashville’s Atlantic operation fell apart, and he remembers a resolve within Nelson, a belief that this was the time to fully assert his desires.
Willie Nelson Page 19