Honeysuckle Rose (1980)

So my top ten list has become untenable. Like the amp in Spinal Tap, it has gone up to eleven. How can I keep Honeysuckle Rose out? With 26 live tracks featuring Willie’s road band in 1980, most notably Johnny Gimble on fiddle and Mickey Raphael on harmonica, this album has something for everyone. My wife even conceded that she kind of liked some of the rowdier tunes on this one, especially “Pick Up the Tempo.” If I was ranking Gimble’s and Raphael’s performances on Willie’s albums, this would be one of their best. These live versions of Willie’s classics rival his best earlier versions. The crowd adds a palpable sense of energy to this performance, and the band seems to feed off of this.

I’m noticing some patterns here. My top eleven list includes albums clustering around the late 1970s and the late 1990s. Red-Headed Stranger (1975), The Sound in Your Mind (1976), Stardust (1978), Honeysuckle Rose (1980), and then Spirit (1996), Storytellers (1998), Teatro (1998), Night and Day (1999), and Me and the Drummer (2000). Everything fits except Crazy: the Demo Sessions, Yesterday’s Wine, and Who’ll Buy My Memories. I wonder what it is about those half decades? Willie’s voice? His band? The producers?

Jonny Whiteside has written some of the best liner notes I have encountered thus far. He describes Willie’s “low-key rebellion” and his “benign Outlaw grit.” What kind of oxymorons are these? Paradox, sphinx, idiosyncrasy—these words all describe Willie. It seems fitting that an indiosyncratic musician would play with syncopation and what Whiteside describes as rubato, which the OED defines as tempo rubato, literally “robbed time.” Isn’t that what Willie is always singing about? Not only is he in search of lost time, he steals it when he finds it. It’s a bigger caper than Prometheus stealing fire; Willie tries to steal, rob, and plunder time itself. But he does it in the slyest, smoothtalkingest, roundaboutest way. To steal time you’d have to sneak up on it, which Willie always does. Whiteside claims that Willie’s quirky phrasing was developed to “stave off the boredom engendered by singing the same tunes night after night.” Later he describes Willie’s “benign, shamanistic honky-tonk philosophy.” He calls Willie’s persona a “studied non-image.” Could this be the Buddhist no-mind? Willie simultaneously embodies “corny old-fashioned values” and “starry-eyed cosmic truths.” Why is it that “Flawed beauty can be even more seductive than perfection”? Did Kenko say that or Whiteside about Willie? Who can tell? Whiteside calls Willie’s rubato a “sublime technique.” He defines it as “a fluctuation of speed within a musical phrase typically within a rhythmically steady accompaniment.” The rest of the world (and band) stands still, but still is still moving to Willie, so he keeps moving as he pleases. He “combines Code of the West ethics” (like “Beer for My Horses”) with a “freewheeling celestial spiritualism.” This version of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” could very well be my favorite. Same with this live version of Kristofferson’s “You Show Me Yours.” All in all, a definite ten (or eleven, as the case may be).

Night and Day (1999)

Willie’s only all-instrumental album. Just when you think he can’t find something new to do, he does. He’s back with his core road band: Johnny Gimble (fiddle), Jody Payne (guitar), Bobbie (piano), Mickey (harmonica), B. Spears (bass), Paul (drums), and Billy English (percussion). Willie produced this album at his Pedernales studio in Austin, Texas.

I’m home with my daughter Vivian playing chickenfoot (a dominos game), and she asks, “What kind of music is this?” I tell her it’s Willie Nelson, but what does that mean? That doesn’t clarify it at all. That could mean reggae, country, pop, rock, jazz, folk, gospel, and now classical. At times, this sounds more like chamber music than jazz or country.

Ray Benson, who writes the brief liner notes for this album, claims to have been listening to Willie for longer than anyone but Willie’s friend and roadie Poodie. Appropriately, there are black and white close-ups of all of the instruments on the inside of the album cover, and on the outside there is a color shot of Willie’s guitar, Trigger. Benson describes Trigger as a “Martin gut string electric acoustic guitar.” He describes the sound of Trigger as a “cross between Django Rhinehardt’s Gypsy jazz and a Mexican guitar sound, like Marty Robbins used in El Paso.” Benson says it sounds like something from a gypsy camp, or is it a Texas campfire?

I have been re-reading excerpts from Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness for my World Studies course, and it occurs to me that Willie and Kenko are kindred spirits. There might be even more to this Buddhist connection than I initially thought. Kenko writes of evanescence, impermanence, mutability, transience, fleetingness. He asks, How should one respond to this aspect of life? With despair, denial, self-indulgence? Willie has tried and sung about all of these approaches. Willie and Kenko are obsessed with the conundrum of time and the longing, the nostalgia, the “acute sense of the incompleteness of human experience” (Norton 2327). In fact, both go even further. They not only identify transience as the “source of beauty and sorrow,” but also as the “defining quality of life.” A few passages from Kenko illustrate this connection to Willie’s life and songs:

If a man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

If time didn’t slip away, always exceeding our grasp, what would we do? What would Willie have to sing about? For Kenko, “Impermanence became something of value. It framed life, and informed it with meaning” (2327). If time didn’t slip away, nothing would be poignant, the word that best describes Kenko’s prose and Willie’s music. We create art and stories to try to keep time from slipping away, to capture it, to give it a body, a shape, a beginning and an end so we can see it between covers or frames. And yet, as with very small particles, the light we shine upon it changes its nature. We think we have captured impermanence itself, but by freezing it, we have altered it. Unlike Beowulf (or Shakespeare, for that matter), Kenko thought living for glory and fame, trying to create art (sonnets) that would outlast time, defeat death (Donne), was foolish. Kenko embraced the transitoriness and made it a positive. Is it just flip-flopping positive and negative space, though? Can a lack of form become a kind of form? Can a lack of meaning become meaningful? How can impermanence become a value, a frame? This seems to suggest that you can play tennis with the net down and up at the same time. How can you have it both ways? Or are freedom and form somehow two sides of the same coin, we just can’t see it?

Elsewhere, Kenko writes:

In all things it is the beginnings and the ends that are interesting. Does love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other’s arms? The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house—such a man knows what love means.

I think Willie may be a reincarnation of Kenko. The above passage describes every one of Willie’s songs. Bewailing empty vows, spending long autumn nights alone, letting his thoughts wander, yearning for the past. Somehow this distance, this separation, brings us closer to love. Absence does, indeed, make the heart grow fonder. But why? Everything Willie ever sings tries to answer this question, or maybe it just asks it in different ways.

Gospel Favorites (1980)

Jumping way back to 1980, we have a gospel album produced by Willie and his sister Bobbie. Bobbie and Willie grew up playing in church, so it is interesting to hear them playing together by themselves, as they must have done as kids. This is the only album I know of where they do this, but it would be neat for him to record another acoustic album with just the two of them. Maybe for his 78th birthday when he is 78 and I’m guessing she would be 80?

I’m looking forward to comparing some of these tunes to versions on Yesterday’s Wine and other early albums. I still have a hard time believing Willie when he sings gospel. I think Johnny Cash really means it when he sings gospel, but I think Willie just lights up a J after the session (and I don’t mean Jesus). And yet, he is as comfortable with this genre as he is with Jazz, folk, pop, rock, reggae, soul, R & B, blues, and country. I haven’t heard a Willie bluegrass album yet, but he needs to do one.

I guess it’s Buddhist gospel music, if that’s possible, which it isn’t, but no one told Willie, so he did it anyway.

Countryman (2005)

Why did it take ten years to release this album? The songs were recorded in 1996 and 1997, but this album didn’t come out till 2005. Don Was produced this reggae album, which the back of the CD claims “merges the gospel and soul spirit found in both reggae and country.”

“Do You Mind Too Much If I Don’t Understand” has that wonderfully wry rhetorical questioning feel. Do you mind too much if I don’t understand why you left me and treated me like trash. The politeness is so surprising.

“How Long is Forever” this time? It’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” all over again. “And you’d be welcome here within my arms forever even if forever ends for me today.” Willie will take one moment of forever, one glimpse, one taste. It could be a heartbreaking song, but even with the twangy steel, the bouncy reggae beat makes it hard to be sad.

Johnny Cash’s “I’m a Worried Man” is better on the live acoustic Storytellers album. How can you be sad or worried while singing or listening to reggae? How can you be worried or sad while smoking dope? Or singing reggae while smoking dope (is there any other way)? These would seem to make you doubly unable to be blue.

“The Harder They Come” was reissued on the 2009 Lost Highway compilation (reviewed in an earlier blog). The driving train whistle harmonica and the female back-up chorus make this one memorable.

Willie’s vocals on “Something to Think About” are as strong and tender as ever, but I’m still not sure how I feel about mixing the bouncy reggae beat with the mournful steel guitar. Seems sacrilegious or disrespectful somehow. Making light of suffering, fiddling while Rome burns or the Titanic sinks.

Okay, so I have to admit my initial judgment was wrong. “Sitting in Limbo” works. I completely dismissed this album out of hand based on my first listen. It helps, though, knowing most of these songs already so I can appreciate the way these reggae versions play with the original. Willie, of course, is sitting in limbo outside of time. In the waiting room of hell. Where would Dante put old Willie?

Willie has done “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” in so many different ways on so many different albums with so many different bands and vocalists that even this reggae version becomes more interesting as it joins the evolving life of this 40 or 50 year-old song.

Producers come and go, but two things are constant: Willie’s vocals and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica.

“One in a Row” gets at the recurring theme of lies. Why do we believe them? Why do we prefer them to the truth? “One in a Row” seems to be the inverse of the forever songs.

The do-wop reggae back-up vocals on “I’ve Just Destroyed the World Today” seem wrong and blasphemous. I’m not sure how he wants us to take this. It is interesting and I respect his willingness to blend genres, but I wonder if it belittles the lyrics, as if they don’t really matter. Sort of like people in church caring more about the quality fo the music than the words.

Time figures prominently in almost all of these tunes. These versions will be especially interesting to hear side-by-side with the Crazy demo sessions and the various other versions.

Can you be disrespectful to your own songs? What other artists have stayed with their own songs so long? Others, like Billy Joel and Miles Davis and Paul Simon, move on and get into other things, and Willie does, too, in his way. But true to his home/road tension he moves on by redoing his original songs. He has it both ways—innovation and tradition.

Live and Kickin' (2003)

A Side: “On the road again, just can’t wait to get on that road again”

B Side: “Homeward bound, I wish I was…”

These are the flip sides of Willie’s life. The twin conflicting desires. The tides, the tugs, the forces pulling him this way and that, emotionally and musically. He seems to desire both the road and home with equal intensity. He seems to vacillate back and forth between these twin poles of longing. At times, he seems to merge the two and possess them simultaneously. Siddhartha-like, he transcends the home-motel distinction and he is on the road at home and at home on the road.

Forty albums in I can already tell that Willie’s complete works resemble Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman essentially wrote one book over and over again. It grew and evolved organically over time, staying the same and yet changing. Willie revisits the same old songs, but as we see on this live album, he can redo them country, folk, blues, jazz, rock, pop, and even reggae; he can redo them with new bands; he can redo them with new duet partners; he can redo them in new studios, with new producers; he can redo them live, or solo, or while eating Green Eggs and Ham. Willie is the Sam I Am of song.

On “Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You)” with Nora Jones Willie asserts, “I don’t want to get over you.” Except, of course, when I do. I do, but I don’t. I do AND I don’t. On one hand, Willie asks, Help me remember (I’m afraid I’ll forget). On the other hand, he asks, Help me forget. His voice sounds as fragile and as falling apart as I have ever heard it. In 2003 his voice may be at its most interesting. You could classify his voice like Bordeaux vintages. 2003 Willie versus 2009. The way his voice ages and mellows as if in oak casks, different features, new complexities, arise.

“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” live, in reggae-rap style, with Wyclef Jean, may be my new favorite Willie song. Number one out of 541 songs loaded onto my 8 gig Nano over the past 40 days. This may be the trippiest, spaciest, edgiest, grooviest thing Willie has done. And it works. It’s fun. Just when you think Willie can’t surprise you with where his voice is going, Thelonious Monk-like, he does. He always has somewhere new and surprising to go. That’s how he makes the same old songs interesting at age 77.

Singing and strumming with Clapton on “Nightlife” makes for a bluesy live version that won’t be my favorite, but one I’ll revisit with pleasure.

“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” with Shania Twain won’t ever displace the definitive version on Red-Headed Stranger, mainly because Shania pretty much sings the whole thing. Willie seems like he doesn’t want to interrupt her. It is sort of hard to cut in on a powerful voice like this, or even sing harmony with it. Not that anything Willie does could be called harmony. Harmony implies smoothness, and everything Willie does has rough edges.

I may have to recant what I wrote in an earlier blog about Willie doing Paul Simon songs. This duet ranks near the top of my all-time favorite Willie duets. Willie sings it straight-up Paul Simon style, but his voice wobbles and meanders in such interesting ways that he makes it new and fresh even as he stays true to the original. Simon seems into, too. He sounds as good as he did in the 1980s concert in Central Park.

“Beer For My Horses” is not as good as the studio version.

Diana Krall and Elvis Costello are interesting choices for “Crazy.” This version shows up on the 2009 compilation Lost Highway (see blog on 2/9). I can’t even guesstimate how many versions of this song Willie has recorded.

Willie closes out the show with ZZ Top (unremarkable), Shelby Lynne (very strong on Willie’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”; she’s got pipes, but I’m not sure Willie’s even on stage for this one; I didn’t hear him at all), Ray Charles and Leon Russell (Russell’s “A Song For You” is the perfect choice for Ray, who’s still got it good, his voice meandering and wobbling like Willie’s), John Mellencamp (weak vocals; no sign of Willie on this one), Kenny Chesney (strong; “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning” is one of my favorites; Chesney sings too pretty and smooth, but it’s a tasteful and respectful version; he sings nice and slow at Willie pace, which I think is now too slow for country radio; fans today don’t have the patience for Willie’s voice anymore; maybe that’s why I like Willie’s music so much now; in an ever speeding up world, Willie refuses to hurry; you can relax with him and Mr. Rogers, and that’s about it; everything else is just too busy; Pooh-like Willie resists busyness; he’s all slow and spare; slow enough for the steel to work its moody magic between lines), Ray Price (“Run That By Me One More Time” is just another version of “Funny How Time Slips Away”; “tell me how you’ll never cheat on me, tell me that you always will be true, dear”; come again, are you for real? Surely not. But humor me. Reassure me anyway. I’d rather believe a lie than know the truth), and Stephen Tyler (“One Time Too Many” may be just enough for Willie and for Proust; they can never have too much time, for remembering or forgetting). Mickey Raphael is Willie’s only road band member to join him on this live show, but he performs with his usual virtuosity. I liked this one a lot more than I thought I would. It surprises and gives pleasure (which are often the same thing). To do this at age 70 is something. Still trying new things, new combinations. Still open. Still is still moving, and still opening.

Milk Cow Blues (2000)

Kokomo Arnold steals the show on “Milk Cow Blues.” “Sail on, pretty gal, sail on…You gonna keep right on sailin’ till you lose your happy home.” Willie should know. If you stay on the road, or the ocean, you can’t simultaneously stay home. Speaking of home, Mickey Raphael is obviously at home with the blues, which the harp was designed to play. The harmonica is the blues. It can’t not play the blues. The harmonica, the steel, is your home when you have the blues, which is a music that compensates for a lack of home, an absence of connection. The reason you have the blues is because you don’t feel at home.

Willie is not at home with the blues, but Dr. John is. “Black Night” is a hard core blues tune. The organ and guitar have a blues dialog in the middle of this song.

Francine Reed turns “Funny How Time Slips Away” into a gospel tune. I’m not sure if that makes any kind of sense, but I love her voice.

Not sure what “Nowhere’s a fool like me” means, but I like that Willie-penned lyric in “Rainy Day Blues.” The blues follows you around, like rainy weather, and you can’t out run it, so why try? He knows it’s as foolish to try to outrun the blues as it is to try to outrun time, but he keeps trying. Willie is both Buddha and the anti-Buddha. He knows he can’t escape the wheel of suffering, but he keeps trying anyway. Maybe he’s a bodhisattva, hanging around to show the rest of us the way. What the blues does is open up spaces, loneliness itself, for guitars and harmonicas and vocals to fill with moans and cries. It gives us the best opportunity to cry. The best medium for tears.

I’m becoming a connoisseur of “Crazy.” Versions of Willie’s “Crazy,” that is. Susan Tedeschi puts her mark on the song. I’m looking forward to listening to every known version of this song side by side. This one won’t be in my top three, but it bears further listening nonetheless. Willie’s voice is strong in 2000. I don’t know how because it seems like he recorded an album a week in 2000.

B.B. and Willie join forces on “The Thrill is Gone.” This lyric sound slike so many Willie has written. You left me and you’ll be sorry some day. The thrill is gone, the excitement of the past is fading. Fading further into the past each day. Fading with time. Time is slipping away, The thrill of life slips away in the wake of time. Do we try to maintain the thrill in our memories? I prefer this song straight up with B.B.

“Wake Me When It’s Over” is another example of Willie wanting to avoid the pain of loss by running, or numbing, or forgetting. Here he tries to sleep through the pain. But of course we can never sleep long enough to escape the blues. They will be there waiting for us when we wake up. Fat chance they would leave. Fat chance we could wait them out. Time and love and loss are not things we can sleep off like a hangover. The hang over of time is the human condition itself. As if you could sleep off original sin, sleep off the fall. This 1962 Willie-penned blues number may be my favorite so far on this album.

“I often think of the life I live.” There Willie goes thinkin’ again. A life of the mind. The unexamined life is not worth living. And yet a fool, by definition, examines life, and still refuses to change. In some way’s, “Fool’s Paradise” could be the title of every Willie Nelson song. Is it just denial? Is it Buddhism? To deny that suffering will always be with us and we cannot escape it, or cheat it, or out run it, or drown it, or numb it, or forget it? Is ignorance bliss? Or will fate catch us in the end? Karma?

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business” from 1922. A smooth, slow blues.

The “Night Life” ain’t no good life, but it sure sounds good with B.B. helping Willie “dreamin’ of old used to be’s.” Once again, Willie reworks his songs in another genre. He’s done traditional country, pop, Jazz, orchestra, and now blues. How many other ways can he do them?

Then he’s “just stealin’ back to old used to be’s” in “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” What a nice touch to have this line refer back to “dreamin’ of old used to be’s” in the previous song. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica works the blues with the piano and the guitar on this one. And the notion of trying to play it off like you’re “Sittin on top of the world” when you are really down in the dumps. Trying to keep up appearances, save face. It’s another saving face song. Savinbg face with a wry sense of humor. Chuckling at how time and love slip away. How fate and love laugh at us, mock us, wink at us.

Willie’s weeping again in “Lonely Street.” “Where broken dreams and memories meet.” He wants to “bury broken dreams” and find “forgetfulness,” like Keats. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica is the nightingale.

Great band, great duets, great songs. An album worth returning to often. Another album with a wholeness, a completeness, an aptness, a coherence, a concept, a mood, a theme of floods, tears, craziness, darkness, loneliness, and weeping harps, organs, guitars, pianos, and men.

Lost Highway (2009)

At first I was disappointed to discover this was a compilation and not an album of new material. And then I was doubly disappointed because I couldn’t even tell what kind of compilation it was. It isn’t all duets, it isn’t all new tunes or old tunes. What ties these together? But then it hit me. For Willie, a new compilation, a new arrangement of tunes, can be just as original, just as surprising, just as pleasing as an album of new material. Why? Because Willie’s music is so diverse, so expansive, with genres, band members, instruments, and duet partners, that, to use a wine analogy, the pairings become as important as the songs themselves. Just as the quality of wine changes depending on the food it is paired with, so, too, apt pairings of Willie’s songs can bring out qualities in an entire album that are greater than the individual parts.

“Back To Earth” is new to me, and this is a powerful version.

“The Harder They Come” has a gospel back-up chorus unlike anything I’ve heard accompanying Willie before. I thought I didn’t like the reggae Countryman album, but if there are more songs like this, I’ll need to reassess my earlier judgment.

If Jefferson is the American Sphinx in politics, Willie is a musical sphinx. He rises like Jefferson, like Buddha, like Emerson, like genius, above contradiction. He seems to strike a tolerant pose in “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” which would likely upset Toby Keith and the “Beer For My Horses” crew (unless this song is tongue in cheek). And yet, he follows that song immediately with “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain,” which seems to strike a more homophobic stance toward queers (unless this song is tongue in cheek). How can you tell? What you can tell for certain, though, is that he Willie is delighting in deliberately baffling us with paradoxes when he boldly places them right next to each other.

The duets with Ray Price showcase Price’s vocals and make clear his influence on Willie’s own vocal style. It seems to be a collection of songs from the last ten years, mostly duets, mostly traditional country. The harmonica (must be Raphael), steel (Jimmy Day?), and fiddle (Johnny Gimble?) feature prominently on most tracks.

“Both Sides of Goodbye” from the Chip Moman Sessions (need to find this album) is one of Willie’s more credible heartbreak songs. “I’ve loved and been loved but not at the same time.” Ha! Gets at that sphinx-like, transcendental, paradoxical being two things simultaneously (on the road and home) that seems to sum up Willie’s shtick. The live version of “Crazy” with Diana Krall and Elvis Costello is not my favorite, but it is interesting and bears further listening.

All in all, this pairing of songs intrigued me and exceeded my expectations. I will return to it often. There are no duds. And though I will appreciate these songs further when I listen to them on their original albums (If I haven’t already), the combinations here release unique sparks that justify the compilation.