Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  He has become an elder statesman: part cartoon character, part eternal rebellious schoolboy, part mystic. He is beyond cool and above hip, although he intersects with those concepts now and then. In the last five years in particular, a confluence of factors have draped a kind of culturally relevant patina over Nelson and his work. Teatro was embraced by a younger audience and, according to him at least, the girls at the shows ‘have been getting younger and prettier’, although that may just be a mirage brought on by age.

  Another member of the band was heard to comment excitably in 2003 that ‘It’s like 1975 all over again.’ Not quite. He isn’t selling anywhere near as many records, for a start. He may still be playing 150 shows a year and is almost universally loved, but with his scattergun approach to record making, no radio play and his refusal to really promote a new record where it counts – on stage – he is never likely to return to the kind of commercial peak he enjoyed in the 70s. And after all, you can’t re-invent the wheel.

  He followed up Teatro with a couple of genre records, both occupying territory he’d been edging towards for some time. Night And Day in 1999 was a sprightly instrumental album, heavy on the Django, and it denoted a final shift away from the voice as his primary tool of expression. He had always loved the guitar over anything else, and those listening to his shows could now plainly hear that his interest in it was taking precedence over his singing: even at his age, his voice could still be a beautifully expressive instrument in the studio, but on stage it was harder to cut through and increasingly he raced through the lyrics in order to reel off a volley of those improvised, bouncing, clambering guitar runs that so defined him. He has become bored with the parameters of vocal melody. An instrumental album was a logical step.

  Merle Haggard: He’s mastered his singing more than his guitar. It’s a lot harder for him to play guitar than it is for him to sing. He has reached that plateau with his singing, as long as his body is able to do it he’s got it figured out. The guitar is a greater challenge for him.

  Milk Cow Blues in 2000 was an equally predictable move, a foray into the blues, but less successful. He had recorded the basic tracks in the mid-90s with the house band from Antones, the famous Austin blues club, and then added cameos from the likes of B.B. King, Dr John and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and in all it sounded a little stale and disjointed. However, his audiences weren’t coming to hear him play songs from his new records, but to participate in something akin to living history. Johnny Cash was undergoing an even more momentous reinvention. Having been dropped by Columbia years ago and hitting the skids in his career, Cash had suddenly become the coolest name to drop in all the right places thanks to his brilliant and stark series of American Recordings records made with Rick Rubin, which absolutely resurrected him as a giant of music in the late 90s and into the noughties.

  Nelson was enjoying a low-voltage, off-Broadway version of the same treatment. A quirk of record industry shuffling after Milk Cow Blues had resulted in him being signed to Lost Highway Records following the Universal Music Group’s takeover of Island and several other record companies. It gave him an added edge: the label was home to artists such as Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams, the kind of hip names who combined raw country with bluesy rock and who naturally viewed Nelson as a pioneer.

  The likes of Uncle Tupelo, Gillian Welch, Lambchop, Smog, Adams and Williams were inadvertently spearheading the retrograde alt.country movement, which had skipped the slick vapidity of the Garth Brooks generation and headed back to the sounds of Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, then further back to Nelson, Haggard, Cash and Gram Parsons, and back even further still to Hank Williams, bluegrass, Appalachian and folk, for their musical inspiration. The Mantera compilation Beyond Nashville became a switched-on shorthand guide to the riches of the past and the glories of the present. If you screwed your eyes up tightly enough it was almost a cyclical return to the forces which enveloped Austin in the early 70s, except now Nelson was Lefty Frizzel, the benchmark of old-time authenticity, and someone else was busy fighting all those old battles that never really went away and were never really won.

  He was in a good place, and a series of unconnected landmark appearances and events underscored his status as a national icon for young and old. He turned up at the thirtieth anniversary of Woodstock in the summer of 1999, opening up on Sunday morning after the previous night’s headliner Limp Bizkit had left all the karma and feng shui in a mess. Nelson invited a select group of small farmers into the VIP area, sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and generally seduced and soothed everyone within earshot. In 2000 he appeared in The Simpsons, a sure sign of immortality; there was a Lifetime Achievement Grammy the same year, and an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001. He led the choir after the bombing of the World Trade Center on 11 September with ‘America The Beautiful’ and somewhat controversially, used the atrocity as a platform to lobby for a reintroduction of farmers’ subsidies, usually only enforced during wartime. ‘Well it’s wartime again, let’s bring it up,’ he argued.

  There was a degree of mythologisation, even canonisation, going on, and he played his part. To celebrate his 69th birthday, hardly a traditional landmark, he threw a party at the Ryman in Nashville on 14 April 2002. Alongside the usual suspects like Ray Price, Emmylou Harris and Keith Richards; Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, R&B singer Brian McKnight, Norah Jones, Ryan Adams and Matchbox 20 also came along for the ride. The line-up betrayed the fact that the concert, called ‘Willie Nelson and Friends: Stars and Guitars’, was really a launch party for his new Lost Highway album, The Great Divide, and the night was an uneasy mix of voices, the sounds of Bon Jovi playing ‘Always On My Mind’ and Adams and Nelson stumbling through ‘The Harder They Come’ rubbing up against Nelson’s sublime duets with Harris on ‘Til I Gain Control Again’ and Price on ‘Night Life’. It was all good fun nonetheless and heartwarming recognition from a whole generation of younger artists, something he had never really experienced before. Nelson had always been feted across musical boundaries by his own peer group – hence the appearances of Dylan, Simon, Raitt, Crosby and Kristofferson on Across The Borderline – but he had not always been taken entirely seriously as an influence upon future generations, partly because of some of the artistic missteps he’d taken in the 80s. Such en masse admiration from his musical children was long overdue.

  Ryan Adams: He kind of did his own thing, and that makes me think I can kind of do my own thing. Immediately, we’re like fifty per cent more cool than we were three hours ago.4

  He enjoyed the experience so much he repeated the birthday concert concept in the following two years: in 2003 at the Beacon Theatre in New York and in 2004 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. The New York show celebrating his seventieth birthday was a genuine and justified event, but even then it fell prey to bafflingly wayward quality control. For instance, Wyclef Jean performing ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ over a soporific reggae beat was a tribute to nothing but sheer misguidedness. Nelson grinned beatifically throughout but only really found the heart and soul of the night in a version of ‘A Song For You’ with Ray Charles and Leon Russell.

  The milestone was celebrated elsewhere. Predictably, Nelson covered all angles. He turned up to be honoured by the Senate in Washington just before the big day, but on 30 April itself, the night of his seventieth birthday, he could be found out on the road, playing another joint, in this case the Horseshoe Casino in Bossier City, Louisiana. It was a beautifully illustrative example of a life that has stretched like a skin over the whole expanse of the North American continent, book-ended by the most powerful people in the land at one end and the rank and file at the other. Both doffed their caps, but on the night he chose to be with his own kind.

  It was also an opportune time for some reflection and reappraisal of his music. Most of his classic records were reissued on compact disc, and a 41 song career-spanning retrospective, The Essential Willie Nelson, sailed to No. 1 in the country album charts. He had both the distant pa
st and the immediate present wrapped up: Sugar Hill Records released his Nashville demos from 1961–1966, including the earliest versions of ‘Crazy’, ‘Three Days’ and ‘I’ve Just Destroyed The World’, while he won a Grammy for his rather slick duet with Lee Ann Womack on ‘Mendocino County Line’ – he’d shot the video on horseback on Congress Avenue in Austin and had closed the street for the best part of the day, the equivalent of shutting down The Mall in London. No one else could have got away with it.

  Even more improbably, in June 2003 he was back at the top of the country music singles charts for the first time since 1989. He had cut a duet of ‘Beer For My Horses’ for Toby Keith’s hugely successful album Unleashed. Keith was an ex-footballer and swaggered across the rickety line between devout patriot and knee-jerk redneck. His considered response to the 9/11 bombings was expressed in a song called ‘Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)’, which contained the line: ‘You’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A/ ’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass it’s the American way.’ Keith seemed an unlikely bedfellow for Nelson, but the two were friends and ‘Beer For My Horses’ was an absolute smash, hitting No. 1 for four weeks in June and staying in the charts for 25 weeks. It later won four CMA awards and crept into Nelson’s live set. All of this said more about Keith’s huge commercial pull than it did about Nelson’s, but he wasn’t complaining. He had come from the Nashville system and he knew the value of a hit single. Besides, he loved the title.

  To date, Nelson has written two truly great songs since the onset of the new Millennium, which is probably two more than we have any right to expect. Each provided the title of his two Lost Highway albums, The Great Divide and It Always Will Be, and each was the best thing on them by a considerable distance.

  The timing of The Great Divide, released in early 2002, in theory couldn’t have been better. He was on a sympathetic label and with the prevailing winds in his favour it was a perfect opportunity to release something iconic, spare and authentic, a bone-dry country classic, something in the line of Cash’s dark, stripped back, almost Gothic American Recordings. Instead, Nelson seemed to be chasing the dollars and was happy to let his new friends run the show. The Great Divide was in essence a pale retread of the formula that had resurrected the fortunes of Santana in 1999, helping them sell 11 million records with their Supernatural album. The records shared the same producer in Matt Serletic, the same central guest in Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20, and the same glutinous, promiscuous spread of duets from all corners of the contemporary landscape, cynically designed to rope in buyers from every demographic.

  Thomas had befriended Nelson after attending a number of his shows and had subsequently written three songs for the record. Serletic had worked with Celine Dion and Aerosmith and was the kind of producer who couldn’t let the listener forget for one minute that a record is indeed being ‘produced’. The Great Divide was really his baby. He co-wrote some of the songs, chose the duet partners, and displayed an utter misunderstanding of the rhythms, nuances and elasticity of Nelson’s music.

  All but five of the tracks were duets and as a rule they jettisoned emotion for schlock. Nelson was singing the kinds of songs that somehow took five people to write and which creaked under the weight of their own self-importance. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s regular lyricist, weighed in with overwrought lyrics on ‘This Face’, a horribly self-referential rehash of a sentiment that Nelson had effortlessly and eloquently expressed forty years earlier in one of his greatest songs, ‘The Face Of A Fighter’. On the awful ‘Last Stand In Open Country’ he was up against rap-metal flash-in-the-pan Kid Rock, although he may not even have known it at the time he was singing the song. Nelson had recorded most of his parts by early 2001, but the album took another year to come out, by which time he had little idea what kind of record he was putting his name to.

  Willie Nelson: I’m not sure what to call it – maybe a ‘way out there’ production. He wants to get folks like Kid Rock, ’N Sync, Sheryl Crow and Rob Thomas to come in and do harmony and background vocals. I don’t know what all they’re going to put on there – strings, horns . . . I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else!5

  It was a depressing statement. After his positive experiences with Lanois and Was, on The Great Divide Nelson was finally and firmly let down by his producer. He sounded uncomfortable, at sea, overpowered by the gratuitous cacophony surrounding him. In truth, he was just another guest on his own album, and Serletic played with his voice as he would a new toy.

  There were precisely three good performances on the record: a knowing, beautifully stripped-down version of the psychedelic classic ‘(I Just Dropped In) To See What Condition My Condition Was In’ and the pleasantly reflective ‘Recollection Phoenix’ both escaped virtually unscathed. And somewhere buried within Serletic’s self-satisfied mess was the mesmerising title track, where Nelson somehow shakes off the attentions of the echoing drums and overkill on display everywhere else and quietly commands attention with a brooding, virtuoso performance. ‘The Great Divide’ is a classic, musically a sequel to ‘I Never Cared For You’, with its Spanish-style minor chords and stark, lovelorn atmosphere. Even lyrically, its use of the elements gone somehow awry – ‘Summer sun/ No prettier than summer rain’ – seems to hark back to its mother song from almost forty years before. It is a complex, dark lyric about a love affair that can never be fulfilled and yet can never be cut loose, and it is the sound of an artist who has not yet given up on his muse, and furthermore has not yet quite surrendered his will to positivity. The title track alone, however, was not enough to rescue the fortunes of The Great Divide, which didn’t quite emulate Supernatural’s 11 million sales. It sold under 400,000 copies and was not reviewed favourably.

  His other recent landmark composition, ‘It Always Will Be’, is a much gentler, more philosophical take on the nature of love. ‘There are some things I think about/ And every time I do they break my heart,’ he sings, and the listener can conjure up Myrle, or Connie, or Billy, or the IRS. Like all his best songs, it is personal and universal all at once. Merle Haggard considers the song as being ‘as great as anything he’s ever written’, and he is not alone.

  Johnny Bush: ‘It Always Will Be’ is so good that I study it. I don’t know yet if he’s singing about a woman, a wife, or maybe one of his children. I haven’t figured it out yet. It doesn’t matter, it’s the feeling and the emotion.

  In fact, Nelson says the song was written about a love affair, but he doesn’t specify who or when. ‘There was nothing that could be done about it, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that it was a very sad situation,’ he says softly. ‘The song is about that. One particular thing: “Sometimes I think that love/ Is somewhere living on an island all alone.” Sometimes I think that.’ It is the opening and standout track on an album which is more unified than its predecessor, although again Nelson was less than fully involved in the recording process. The basic tracks were recorded under producer James Stroud’s supervision in Nashville and then vocals were added at Pedernales. However, it utilises a much more low-key, sympathetic modern country sound than its predecessor, and although it again features a handful of duets, the artists and the songs are well chosen: a pair of jazzy ballads with Lucinda Williams and Norah Jones, and a bluesy affair with his daughter Paula, the latter the latest instalment in an ongoing process to make his records a little more family orientated.

  Having spent so long playing and recording with his other ‘family’, he now seemed to recognise that almost all of his children were involved in music in some way, and so endeavoured to involve them in his own music: Lana is the on-tour mother hen and almost constant companion alongside sister Bobbie, documenting his tours for his website, adding photos and diaries. Connie’s daughters Paula and Amy are both musically inclined: Paula and her band supported Nelson a few times in the early 2000s, and she and Amy were both present when Nelson made his first proper ‘family’ album, The Rainbow Connection, recorded in ear
ly December 2000. It was a real home-cooked affair. David Zettner had installed some computerised, digital recording equipment in Nelson’s studio at his Western town and Nelson’s grandson-in-law, Matt Hubbard, came along to help out. Hubbard had played with Paula in her band and later married Lana’s daughter Martha. Paula was also there, as were Susie and Amy, and in three days they cut an album. Zettner has since calculated that it cost $16.50 to make.

  Amy wrote and sang two tracks on The Rainbow Connection, while the title song came from the 1979 film The Muppet Movie, thus making Nelson perhaps the only performer ever to cover songs made famous by Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Hank Williams and Kermit the Frog in a single live show. Amy had been trying to get him to do the song since she was a little girl twenty years ago, and he had finally relented. In the end The Rainbow Connection was a family album with a twist, ending with a cover of Mickey Newbury’s ‘Thirty-Third Of August’ which concluded: ‘Though the demons dance and sing their songs within my fevered brain/ Not all my God-like thoughts, Lord, are defiled.’ Sweet dreams, indeed.

  Three years later on It Always Will Be, Nelson duetted with Paula on the song ‘Be That As It May’, a tough, bluesy number that she had also written. It meant a huge amount to her.

  Connie Nelson: I knew he had heard the song before, but I called Willie and said, ‘Listen, I swear to you I’m not trying to get you to do it because it’s our daughter, but I just really think you should listen to that song again because I can hear you doing it.’ Next thing I knew, Paula was calling me a couple of days later: ‘Oh my God, oh my God, Dad’s going to do my song! And he’s got me singing it with him!’ Which I didn’t ask him to do. So he did listen to it again. It was fabulous.