Honeysuckle Rose premiered at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles in July 1980 and received mixed notices. Although it wasn’t a commercial success, Nelson came out of it rather well. ‘Its only clear focus is the redoubtable Willie Nelson,’ wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. ‘He commands attention absolutely whenever he appears on screen. In Mr Nelson’s performance, and in his singing turns, the film achieves a precision in sharp contrast to the vagueness that afflicts it otherwise.’8 Then again, the Washington Post called him ‘faintly preposterous’. There is certainly a thin line between an economical actor and one that resembles a tree, and Nelson sometimes crossed it. He certainly had presence and charisma, but he was not always convincing working with dialogue and exuded little in the way of warmth. But he was competent enough for it to lead to other films, which took up much of his time in the early- to mid-80s, some better than others: Thief, Coming Out Of The Ice, Barbarosa and Songwriter, perhaps his most successful film. He would generally either play a musician or a cowboy. He understood both. He was playing himself.
Sydney Pollack: The great thing about Willie is he’s so fucking comfortable in his own skin. He had a kind of simple straightforward way of behaving, and an authenticity that I always found awesome. I wouldn’t say he’ll be playing Hamlet, but as long as he stays close to himself he’s terrific. He’s not trained as an actor, but what he has is a sense of truth that’s essential to any kind of good acting. That comes from his life. There’s not a phoney bone in his body. He’s absolutely what he is and who he is. He’s not trying to make an impression or impress or anything like that. He’s the genuine article.
The process of making films, and in particular Honeysuckle Rose, pushed him towards the long process of writing again. The Electric Horseman soundtrack featured ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’, a self-explanatory and rather downbeat reflection on the trials and attractions of men who live the transient life, which was written by Sharon Vaughn and became a sizeable hit for Nelson in 1979. Most of the soundtrack to Honeysuckle Rose featured live performances of old classics, recorded on location – including the Broken Spoke in Austin – on the Encarton mobile studio, and though the sound quality was dire the performances were often superb, excepting the contributions of the two lead actresses. But Pollack was adamant that there should be some new material for the film as well.
Sydney Pollack: I said, ‘Willie, you gotta write something for this thing.’ I used to get the Warner Brothers jet, and he’d get on the bloody thing and I’d have to stop him and his guys from smoking because the pilots were getting stoned! It was dangerous. The pilots kept coming back saying, ‘Hey, you can’t do this.’ Anyway, I went down there to pick him up and he got on the plane and he starts scribbling shit on the back of this airline ticket envelope with a pencil. And then he said, ‘How about this?’ He read me the lyrics to ‘On The Road Again’ and I thought it was the worst song I had ever heard. [Intones without emotion]: ‘On the road again I just can’t wait to, er, be on the road again, um, the life I love is making music with my friends, um, I can’t wait to get on the road again. On the road again I can’t wait to, em, get on the road again . . .’ And I said, ‘Holy Shit! We’re in trouble!’ But then he turned it into this ball-breaking song that was a huge hit.
That ‘On The Road Again’ was a country No. 1 and a Top 20 pop hit in waiting was blindingly obvious upon its release in the summer of 1980. It is more than an anthem, it is a manifesto, simple enough to be learned by a toddler in a plastic cowboy hat. In many ways it shared territory with ‘Night Life’ and other early, great Nelson songs in its utter simplicity, economy and clarity of purpose. As Pollack suggests, without music it amounts to little more than a very primitive, almost banal statement of pure, obvious fact – ‘The life I love is making music with my friends’ – shot through with an enticing whiff of romanticism – ‘Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway’ – but the rumbling joy of the melody and the playing lifts it sky-high. And in any case, why say more? The one really interesting choice of lyric in the song is found in the line: ‘Insisting that the world keeps turning our way.’ Not ‘hoping’ or ‘asking’ or ‘praying’. Insisting. A powerful and significant choice of word from a man who had fashioned the world into a shape he could recognise.
The other new song on the album soundtrack, ‘Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground’, was more complex and profoundly beautiful. It had been written in 1976 and kept aside for one reason or another, and was as elusive as it was heartfelt: Nelson says it is an ode to Connie in one of their many times of difficulties, although she doesn’t appear to agree; Pollack claims it is a farewell to one of his underworld pals. ‘It was about a guy that got hurt that he liked particularly a lot in the Hell’s Angels, and that’s what the angel was,’ he says. There’s also a compelling suggestion that it is about his mother: ‘I knew one day/ You’d fly away/ For love’s the greatest healer to be found/ So leave me if you need to/ I will still remember.’ It is about all these things and more; like many of his great songs, it sings of love without possession and has a universal resonance.
The other intervention of fate which resulted in a resurgence in his songwriting was a major health scare in August 1981, when he suffered a collapsed lung while swimming in Hawaii, where he was spending the summer at his holiday home. Nelson still owns the property on Laulea Place in Spreckelsville, between the towns of Kahului and Pa’ia on the small Hawaiian island of Maui. Over the years the house became first his primary base outside of Austin, and then his main home away from the road.
Following the accident he was taken into emergency care and spent over a week in hospital, and although no surgery was required a chest tube was inserted to drain the lung. He cancelled dates and took the whole of September and October off to recuperate in Hawaii and Colorado. He rested, cut his hair and shaved his beard, and generally took a good look at himself. He used the rare time away from the helter-skelter to finally write a full album, the first since Phases And Stages to be almost entirely self-written and a conscious return to the narrative, cycle-of-song that characterised that album and particularly Red Headed Stranger. His brush with illness resulted in a sombre reflection of mortality, mythology, faith, karma and reincarnation.
The idea for Tougher Than Leather took seed with the title song, a lovely rolling country ballad which told the story of an old gunslinger in the even older West who kills a young rival and is then haunted by the memory of the dead man’s girlfriend, symbolised by the talismanic image of the ‘rose’ which appears throughout the record. Over the rest of the album, the gunslinger dies and is reborn as an urban cowboy in modern-day San Antonio, where he is imprisoned and then executed for a robbery and murder he didn’t commit. ‘Was it something I did, Lord, a lifetime ago/ Am I just repaying a debt that I owe?’ He had written the songs in late 1981 but the album didn’t come out until over a year later, in March 1983. It was regarded by many as a mere pale retread of Red Headed Stranger, with its stripped down instrumentation, its downbeat feel, its recurring musical themes and morally inquisitive narrative. Even the painted cover and the cartoon-strip depictions inside – lovingly drawn by David Zettner – were echoes. And it’s true it did invite comparisons, but in many ways it is a deeper and darker record than Nelson’s acclaimed breakthrough, the only real chink of light coming on ‘A Little Old-Fashioned Karma’, where he explains his spiritual beliefs in typically low-key fashion by singing, ‘If you wanna dance you gotta pay the band.’
The narrative was a little confusing without repeated listens or explanatory notes, and it failed to really grab the public imagination. Partly this was because it was a record whose mood sat oddly with the brashness of the early-80s: in 1983 other superstars like the Police, Prince, David Bowie and Michael Jackson were releasing slick, modish, landmark records such as Synchronicity, 1999, Let’s Dance and Thriller, and Nelson later felt that such a delicate, subdued record fell through the cracks and got trampled on. It was partly
his own fault. There was simply too much music out there, and much of it was his own. He was releasing a cascade of albums: three in 1982, five the following year, to the extent that Columbia were refusing to release some of his recordings on the basis that they were overworked and couldn’t fit them into their release schedule.
He was both over-exposed and in direct competition with himself, and his suite of new songs suffered by comparison. At the same time as Tougher Than Leather was making small waves – the album reached No. 39 and its single, ‘A Little Old-Fashioned Karma’, went to No. 10 in the country charts – his duet with Merle Haggard on Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho And Lefty’ was hitting No. 1 in the country charts.
‘Pancho And Lefty’ had been recorded by Emmylou Harris on her 1977 album Luxury Liner, which is where Nelson had first heard it. Like almost anyone with a functioning pair of ears, he fell in love with the song on first listen and transcribed the maze of words by hand. A few hours later the song had been cut, becoming the title track on the duet album he was recording with Merle Haggard. The record was produced by renowned Nashville songwriter, musician and producer Chips Moman, who had worked with everyone from Wilson Pickett and Dusty Springfield to Neil Diamond and Elvis Presley.
Merle Haggard: My bus was there parked at the studio, and I’d been up for more than a day. I wasn’t doing any kind of speed or anything, I was just up on adrenalin. I’d been asleep not more than forty minutes [when] I got that terrible feeling when someone wakes you up and you feel like your head’s in a barrel or something. Well, Willie woke me up! And only for Willie would I have got up. He said, ‘Hey, I think I’ve found the kinda song we need for the title song for this album.’ Willie spent about three hours taking that thing down off Emmylou’s record. It was hard to make out the words. There was not any manufactured piece of paper big enough to hold all these words, and he’d written it out in pencil on this old, ripped open paper bag. I said, ‘My God, that’s good. I’ll have to learn it’. He said, ‘Well, the band’s nearly got their part, they’re in there right now. By the time they get theirs you’ll have your part!’ I said, ‘Go ahead and record it and I’ll put my part on in the morning. I’m out of it.’ He said, ‘No, you need to be on the ground for this one, it’s going to be great.’ He literally dragged me out of there and we went in the studio, and I didn’t know the song at all, I’d never heard it before in my life, and we made that record you guys hear right there. I got one pass at it. One pass. The next morning I said, ‘Hey, I’d sure like to do my part over,’ and Willie said, ‘Oh hell, they’ve mixed it. It’s all closed up. It’s great.’ I didn’t even get to hear my part back until the record came out! Willie has a rule. If you get him [in the studio] on something that’s all you’re going to get. He ain’t going to go back and do it because he’s too busy.
‘Pancho And Lefty’ was a beautiful, mysterious song in any guise, and although Haggard has expressed a few misgivings about Moman’s rather clinical production, it was a memorable single and has since become a highlight of Nelson’s live set. But it was something of an exception to the rule. Nelson’s career had so swiftly ascended into the stratosphere that things like ‘Pancho And Lefty’ and Tougher Than Leather sat oddly with the bulk of much of his own current output, drowned out by the rather less subtle sounds of the rest of his music. Much of the music he was making had travelled so far from Red Headed Stranger that many people could not make the connection back: they identified him instead with the lushness of Stardust. They may not even have known – or cared – whether he was a songwriter or not. As the more involved, considered songs and albums found favour amongst his long-term fans who appreciated that they contained the core essence of Nelson’s art, he was busy playing to the galleries with a series of albums and songs which consolidated and indeed boosted his status as a pop performer and a showbiz icon, but did little for his long-term reputation. With hindsight, he was sowing the seeds for his own downfall.
He had recently released the Always On My Mind album, which reached No. 2 on the charts in the summer of 1982. It was his most blatantly commercial record ever, containing versions of such classic songs as ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’. It was recorded without the Family Band and given a glossy, contemporary production sheen by Chips Moman and his band of studio musicians, which included songwriter and guitar player Johnny Christopher. He managed to find some flicker of a heartbeat in the rather saccharine but seductive title cut, but it was both a song and performance which dealt with emotions in big, bright primary colours, with none of the finely etched light and shade of his best work. Despite – or more likely because of that – the song had given him a No. 5 single on the pop charts, his biggest ever single success. Apparently he wasn’t even aware that Elvis Presley had recorded it ten years earlier.
Merle Haggard: No one else could have done ‘Always On My Mind’ following Elvis. I turned that song down. We were in the studio and [the song’s co-writer] Johnny Christopher jumped up because he didn’t like the song we were recording at that moment. He was very rude, actually. He jumped up in the middle of the session and said, ‘Man, I got a better fucking song than this in my pocket!’ I don’t know if he’d taken anything but he had a lot of nerve. All the musicians’ faces went red, they didn’t know what was going to happen – we might kill Johnny! He’d interrupted our take, jumped up and killed our record. He suggested ‘Always On My Mind’ and the room went quiet, and I said, ‘God, didn’t Elvis have a big hit with that?’ I didn’t even consider it because Elvis had got it, but Willie was standing behind me, and he said, ‘I’ll cut it.’ I turned around and looked at Will and I said, ‘My God, you could. You could have a fucking hit on this.’ And lo and behold, of course he did.
Nelson’s mainstream, pop-balladeer’s reading of ‘Always On My Mind’ won a Grammy in 1983, while the album went platinum. Later the same year he went back into the studio with Booker T. Jones to record Without A Song.If Tougher Than Leather had flirted with being an imitation of former glories, then Without A Song dived in with both feet. It was unapologetically Stardust Part II. One of the problems with Nelson having his own recording studio on hand constantly at Pedernales was the danger that some of the intensity and urgency could drift away from a project. Without A Song was recorded mostly at night, after many long golf and tennis days for him and producer Booker T. Jones, who along with the band was set up in the condos. There was a much more relaxed attitude than on Stardust and it took longer to cut. It was a pleasant record, comprising ten standards, but it somehow lacked the freshness and unity of Stardust. The strings were recorded in London, the horns in Hollywood, and the soul of the record was misplaced somewhere along the way.
Perhaps more significantly, Nelson’s duet with Spanish superstar Julio Iglesias on ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ was also recorded during the Without A Song sessions in mid-1983. It has often been said that Nelson will sing with anyone on almost anything, but he should have drawn the line at treacly, chauvinistic Euro-pop power ballads. The song marked the nadir of his career creatively and musically, and yet pushed him to even greater heights of celebrity, a sure signal that he was letting his standards drop to new depths. It was the type of record that would have Hank Williams twitching in his grave and Waylon Jennings – one would hope – reaching for his holster, the kind of over-produced slop that put anything Nelson had ever done in his RCA days in the shade. The difference here was that he was under no pressure to record the song, and indeed seemed genuinely pleased to do so. There were three options: either his critical faculties were failing him; he really couldn’t say ‘no’ to anyone; or he just wanted to hang out with his new friend Julio. It was probably a bit of each.
It had been Connie who had alerted him to Iglesias after she’d heard him singing on the radio while Nelson was playing in London in June 1982. He had liked his voice, thinking he was some unknown singer rather than a European superstar, and calle
d Mark Rothbaum, who arranged a meeting. They quickly agreed to work together, although unusually, the song wasn’t really discussed. ‘With Julio it was his singing that attracted me,’ Nelson later said. ‘But as a rule it is my feeling for the song itself that urges me to cut it.’9 Iglesias – the self proclaimed ‘love-aire’ – came down to Pedernales with his entourage and limousines, rubbing shoulders with the rough and ready Nelson crew, who arrived in golf carts.
Booker T. Jones: I remember being interrupted [during Without A Song] by a visit from Julio Iglesias to record ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ one night. That was a big deal. Willie pulled out all the stops for Julio: a big dinner and reception. I watched the recording from the control room. It was a pleasure to watch him work with another artist and producer, me being only a spectator.
Nelson cut his vocal in Austin with producer Albert Hammond, who had written the song for Sinatra; it is, in many ways, a ‘My Way’ for wannabe gigolos and ageing lounge lizards. The rest of the track was completed without him in Los Angeles, so he can’t really be held responsible for the sickliness of the finished product. The song was predictably and depressingly enormous, a No. 5 single in March 1984, and the sum total of perhaps two hours work in the studio on a summer’s night put the seal on his populist, showbiz status. It attracted a transient audience who would not stick around. It is still the song that many people who have little interest in Nelson’s music remember him by.
He continued making some distinctly odd career moves, diluting the true essence of what he did. The line in the sand denoting the crucial difference between elegant, heartfelt truth and syrupy sentimentality had been washed away. He could write and record the sublime ‘Forgiving You Was Easy’ in a day, proving that when he was being pushed he could come up with the goods. On the other hand, he also cut his version of the wretched ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’ during the same period, and this time there was no Julio to blame. What was he thinking? One obvious clue lay in his age. He was fifty-years-old, not an age where most artists are expected to be peaking. His commercial summit had arrived unusually late, between the ages of 42 and 52, while his creative prime, it could reasonably be argued, came at various stages between the ages of 26 and 42, a much more familiar time frame for an artist to blossom. The intensity and regularity of his talent had diminished and the soundness of his judgment was by no means infallible, but any notion that he was being seduced by the notion of being a pop star seems unlikely.
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