Nashville was the Roughest (disc 6)

The full orchestra returns with a vengeance for the session on November 24th, 1970, but Harlan Howard’s “Yours Love” (track 1) works for me for some reason.  I’d like to hear Willie do this in 2011.  It could be a great concert closer. Willie’s own rousing gospel number “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus” (track 2) stands out among these late 1960s, early 1970s recordings.  Kienzle calls Willie’s rendition of Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” (track 3) “grossly overblown.”  This line redeems the song for me: “What a fool I was to think I could get by with only these few teardrops that I’ve cried.  I should have known the worst was yet to come and that crying time for me had just begun.”  That’s pure Willie.  Kienzle calls Willie’s take on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (track 4) an “excessively orchestrated mess.”  On both recordings, Willie just seems to be trying too hard to sing in an operatic style that doesn’t play to his vocal strengths.      

A month later his house in Ridgetop burned to the ground, and it isn’t till the spring of 1971 that he realizes he has another LP due for RCA (his 12th).  Willie records material for three LPs at these May 1971 sessions: “Yesterday’s Wine,” “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture,” and “The Willie Way.”  The Bear Family presents the songs from “Yesterday’s Wine” in the order in which they appear on the album (not the order in which they were recorded) on disc 7, but the rest of the recordings from these sessions are presented in chronological order on disc 6.  Charlie McCoy’s harmonica makes an appearance on these recordings.  I’ve reviewed most of these songs previously on my blogs for these three albums, but suffice it to say these are some of Willie’s best recordings to date.  This version of “Wake Me When It’s Over” (track 7) is one of my favorite Willie recordings.  Only Willie can be so funky and so slow at the same time.  Most people have to go fast to be funky, but Willie can find the funk in the slowest of songs.  Willie seems to have found the perfect backing band for these recordings.  It’s a string of five-star recordings, including a stellar new version of “Rainy Day Blues” (Track 9).  Willie is clearly coming into his own here, but RCA ironically chooses this time to sever ties with Willie just before he breaks out with Phases and Stages, Shotgun Willie, and Red-Headed Stranger.   “Stay Away From Lonely Places” (track 13) is one of the best tracks on this disc.  This original version of “Good Hearted Woman” (track 14) isn’t as good as the famous (though staged) duet with Waylon, but it is interesting to hear it in its pre-famous form.  The harmonica stands out on this recording and seems to symbolize the important seachange in Willie’s music at this time.  Kienzle calls “My Kind of Girl” (track 16) “rather flat,” but “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me” (track 17) has some significant fizz.  “One Step Beyond” (track 19) reminds me of “Wake Me When It’s Over.”  Slow and soothingly funky (if that’s possible, gentle funk).  The unissued “I Want a Girl” (track 20) contains the surprising line “I want a girl whose heart has been broken.”  These versions of “Country Willie” (track 21)  and “You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago” (track 22) are solid but unremarkable.  “London” (track 23) is a very unusual song in Willie’s repertoire.  “Rest your lungs, tomorrow’s on it’s way.” Track 24 is a more adventurous version of “A Moment Isn’t Very Long.”  The last four songs on this disc come from an April 27th, 1972 session with just Willie, Dan Spears (Bass) and Paul English (drums).  These are almost as raw as the Pamper demos, but with a bit of a funky rhythm with the drums and bass: “Who’ll Buy My Memories” (track 25),
“No Love Around” (track 26), “Come on Home” (track 27), and  “Mountain Dew” (track 28).  These last four tracks are worth the price of the entire box set.  Not sure you can find them anywhere else.  I wish Willie recorded more with just Paul and Bee.  

Nashville was the Roughest (disc 5)

This disc continues with the November 1969 sessions that led to Willie’s “Both Sides Now” LP.  Willie does a competent interpretation of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” (track 1), but it doesn’t have Willie’s unique vocal stamp upon it.  “I Gotta Get Drunk” (track 2) sounds like Hank Williams.  The song becomes more interesting when you read Willie’s autobiography and find out that Willie stole the line from one of his friends.  The November 13^th session has a tight band: just Willie (guitar), Day (steel), Zettner (bass), and Billy English (drums).  “Wabash Cannonball” (track 3) showcases more of Willie’s burgeoning guitar virtuosity.  Eddie Dean’s “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart)” (track 4) features Day’s weeping steel and a look at Willie’s perpetually divided and wandering heart.  Willie asks, “What good is love to a heart who can’t be free?”  In other words, is love freedom, or the very opposite of freedom?  Put another way, what is the relationship between love and freedom?  This question drives all of Willie’s music.  Hank Cochran’s “Who Do I Know in Dallas” (track 5) seems to be describing Willie’s life.  “I can’t spend the night without someone.  The lonelies would drive me insane.  So who do I know in Dallas, that will make me be happy I came?”  The irony of the freedom-loving outlaw who needs a woman in every city to help him combat loneliness.  He flees loneliness, but it follows him around.  Joni Mitchell may be the only singer-songwriter as quirky as Willie, so it is fitting that Willie covers her song “Both Sides Now” and names an album after it.  Her album “Blue” from 1970 is one of my all-time favorites.  “Both Sides Now” (track 6) gets at the duality inherent in all of Willie’s music.  “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…I really don’t know clouds at all.”  The man who sings of love for fifty years (and through four wives) admits at the outset of his career, “I really don’t know love at all.”  The blind leading the blind.  In “It Could Be Said That Way” (track 7), Willie asks, “What’s the point in making leaving any harder than a leaving ought to be?”  Which raises the question, how hard should leaving be?  In Shirley Nelson’s “Once More with Feeling” (track 8), Willie begs, “Hold me close.  Don’t let this feeling go away.”  This small band from these November 1969 sessions may be one of the best settings for Willie’s music.

We then jump ahead to three sessions in June 1970 to record the “Laying My Burdens Down” LP.  It’s another small band but a different slate of musicians (except for Grady Martin).  Willie sings that her memory is “Following Me Around” (track 9) so he will “never be alone.”  Her memory “has finally found a home.”  More of the theme of memory having a mind of its own.  A host of horns mars “Following Me Around” and a host of strings mars “Minstrel Man” (track 10).  Willie sings, “Nobody wants to hear your songs of love.”  Not sure why “Where Do You Stand” (track 11) has crowd noise at the beginning.  The chorus and strings are a bit much.  I have discussed the irony of “It’s time for commitments” coming from an outlaw and a perpetually rolling stone.  A rolling stone misses the moss.  “Missing the Moss” could be the title of Willie’s life.  In “When We Live Again” (track 11), Willie seems to be espousing reincarnation: “Let’s not lose the days…let’s plan to love when we live again.”  We don’t have to lose time.  We can always get it back in another life.  I’m a sucker for the funky “If You Could See What’s Going Through My Mind” (track 13), another of Willie’s mind songs.  Everything would be okay if only people could read my mind, could know how good all my intentions were.  “Happiness Lives Next Door” (track 14) didn’t make the final cut for the album, but I actually think it is one of the better recordings from these sessions (minus the ooh-ah chorus).  “I’ve Seen That Look on Me (A Thousand Times Before)” (track 15) shows Willie’s ability to see things from both sides, his negative capability.  His capacity for sympathy and empathy is part of his attraction.  Track 16 is a funkier version of “I Don’t Feel Anything.”  I actually think Willie could have success with a funky, R & B backing.  “Laying My Burdens Down” (track 17) is one of my favorite Willie songs, and one I wish he would perform live in concert.  I’m convinced it could be a crowd pleaser.  The gospel chorus actually works on this one.  Can’t think of a thing to say about “How Long Have You Been There” (track 18), but “Senses” (track 19) turns a nice phrase: “It’s over, but I don’t have the sense to let you go.”  Then we jump to three November 1970 sessions to record the “Willie Nelson and Family” LP.   Rich Kienzle shreds this album in the liner notes.  He calls it “one of his worst RCA albums” and “grossly overproduced” (page 40).  Kienzle also calls James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” a “wussy pop-folk ballad” (40).  The irony of the lyrics of “What Can You Do to Me Now?” (track 21) and the syrupy setting makes me wonder if the whole thing isn’t just a joke.  In other words, how much worse can you produce me?  How much worse can you butcher my songs with your Nashville Sound?  Cindy Walker’s “The Loser’s Song” doesn’t fit Willie’s style; sounds more like a Johnny Cash song.  Willie could make “Fire and Rain” (track 23) interesting, but he just sings it like JT, which makes you wonder, why bother?  “I Can Cry Again” (track 24) shows that Willie can still cry with the best of them.  Willie tries to soar with an operatic voice in these recordings, but his voice works better with quiet understatement.  For some reason, “I’m a Memory” (track 25) works for me, even with the excessive production.  “That’s Why I Love Her So” (track 26) leaves me cold, but the naked version of “If You Could Only See What’s Going Through My Mind” (track 27) is one of the best 3-4 tracks on this disc.  The naked version of “The Loser’s Song” (track 28) is also much stronger than the more fully produced version.  The Bear Family packs most of three albums on this one disc, so you do get your money’s worth with close to three albums per disc on eight discs, so almost 24 album’s worth of music in one box set, complete with all of the alternate takes and naked versions (minus the overdubs).                

Nashville was the Roughest (disc 4)

Disc four continues the August 9th, 1967 singles’ session.  In “Someday You’ll Call My Name” (track 1) Willie sings of “someday,” looking to the future when the lover who has spurned him will find herself alone.  For Willie, it seems, every day is someday.  His window always faces south.  “Wild Memories” (track 2) describes memory as a place where Willie journeys, where he can “ride wild memories through miles of time, leap over broken dreams.”  The Wild West of memory.  Riding our own mind, trying to break it in like a wild horse before it breaks us.

For some reason this disc jumps over the August 10th and 11th sessions where Willie recorded the tracks for his “Texas in My Soul” LP and moves on to the December 12th, 1967 session where Willie recorded the tracks for his 1968 “Good Times” LP.  This session features Willie’s sparest setting yet, with just Atkins, Martin, Day, and Huskey.  This may be the best version of Willie’s “December Day” (track 3).  And this line struck me today: “as my memories race back to love’s eager beginning, reluctant to play with the thoughts of the ending, the ending that won’t go away.”  Willie’s mind playing with time, trying to manipulate the ending.  He does the same thing with “Pages” (track 4), tearing out chapters and memories and “past[ing] in some new ones far better and true.”  “I screamed at your memory and nobody heard.  But your memory’s determined…it desperately clings to the floor of my mind and fights for its place in the pages of time.”  Again, memory is like the wild west, where you have bar fights and shoot outs.  You have to give Chet Atkins credit for trying something as spare as “Little Things” (track 5).  Willie at his sparest, sincerest, tenderest.  Atkins filled out the “Good Times” album with earlier cuts from 1965 and 1966.  Then we jump to a March 27th, 1968 session with Atkins, Martin, and Huskey.  Willie starts with “Good Times” (track 6).  We have “wild memories” and “good times.”  The power is in the classification.  Willie classifies these as “good times.”  His mind decides how to take and interpret time, but he can’t change the fact that “She’s Still Gone” (track 7).  In “Sweet Memories” (track 8), Willie shows that memories can be both wild and sweet, and maybe he’s suggesting that the wilder they are, the harder to tame, the sweeter they are.  And vice versa.  We then jump to a July 8, 1968 singles’ session with strings.  “Johnny One Time” (track 9) is a less funny version of “Funny How Time Slips Away.”  Then a very dark and haunting version of “Jimmy’s Road” (track 10).  The antithesis of “Bring Me Sunshine” (track 11).  You almost wonder how the same singer could record these two songs in the same session.  Only an emotional chameleon could be capable of such sudden swings.  Next we have the November 5th, 1968 session that led to 1969’s “My Own Peculiar Way” LP, complete with strings, trumpets, and everything else the Nashville Sound could conjure.  In “I Just Don’t Understand” (track 13), Willie laments his lover’s outlook: “Life is short and sweet; break all the hearts you can…it’s all a game to you.” But he responds wryly: “Do you mind too much if I don’t understand.” His mind wanders in “I Let My Mind Wander” (track 12), but then he laments that “My memories outlived my better judgement” in “I Just Dropped By” (track 14).  Willie sings, “these things were on my mind.”  An up-tempo version of “The Local Memory” (track 15) seems inappropriately cheery.  “Natural to Be Gone” (track 16) sounds like a Beatles or a Jim Croce song.  Another tip of the hat to the hippie folk anthems of the era.  The philosophy seems to be that of reincarnation.  Leaving, suffering, pain are all natural.  In “Love Has a Mind of Its Own” (track 17), Willie sings, “I’d love to forget every time that you’ve kissed me.  I’d love to forget that you’re gone.”  But Willie’s mind wanders and he can’t control it.  In fact, if love has a mind of its own, then it isn’t Willie’s mind; it’s love’s mind.  “I’ll Walk Alone” (track 18) may be my favorite on this disc so far.  A gently rocking number where Willie swings despite the strings.  Don Baird’s “It Will Come to Pass” (track 19) deals with the turning earth, the seasons, and the passage of time.  An alternate take of “My Own Peculiar Way” (track 20) (I think they used an earlier version on the album).  Not sure I’ve ever heard Willie’s “The Message” (track 21) before.  His mind keeps moving “faster than [his] pen can write.”  Willie’s mind is the fastest thing about him.  Fast living and fast thinking (but slow singing).  Maybe he overcompensates by singing in such a measured, controlled manner.  Merle Travis’s “That’s All” sounds like Willie’s attempt to imitate Sly and the Family Stone.  “Any Old Arms Won’t Do” (track 23) is one of the better tracks from this session.  Next we have far superior versions of “Johnny One Time” and “Jimmy’s Road” (minus the overubs).  The naked “Bring Me Sunshine” (track 26) also outshines the souped-up version (which ironically became Willie’s biggest hit for RCA).  This is one of the songs that Mickey Raphael stripped for the album “Naked,” but I’m wondering how different his stripped version is from this version minus the overdubs.  Willie doesn’t return to the studio till the following November to record his “Both Sides Now” LP.  Willie has just his road band for “Bloody Mary Morning,” “Pins and needles (In My Heart),” and “Everybody’s Talkin’.”  “Bloody Mary” (or “Merry,” as it originally appeared) features some smart guitar work at the end, early signs of Willie’s virtuosity.  I’m actually a sucker for “Pins and Needles” and “Everybody’s Talkin.’”                      

Nashville was the Roughest (disc 3)

For some reason disc three jumps ahead to a November 28, 1966 studio session with Felton Jarvis in the production booth.  Not sure why the Bear Family skipped past the July 9th live recording at Panther Hall in Fort Worth (which shows up on a later disc).

These November 1966 recordings ended up on Willie’s 1967 “Make Way for Willie Nelson” album, which I have not been able to find on CD yet, so this will be my virgin listen.  I did just got a used LP in the mail yesterday, but I don’t own a record player, so the Bear Family has saved the day once again.  The small band and spare backing (Jimmy Day on steel; Johnny Bush on drums) makes for one of Willie’s best early albums.  Surprisingly, it contains no Willie originals.  He did record his “Something to Think About,” but it didn’t make the final cut for the album.  “Have I Stayed Away Too Long” (Frank Loesser), “Some Other World” (Floyd Tillman), “If It’s Wrong to Love You,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” “You made Me Live, Love, and Die” (Floyd Tillman), and “Born to Lose” round out the November 28th session of standard lonesome honky tonk numbers.  Jimmy Day’s steel on Tillman’s “You made Me Live, Love, and Die” may be the saddest thing he’s done (I mean that in a good way).  These tracks help me appreciate Willie’s debt to Floyd Tillman and Hank Williams.  Willie sings these songs competently, but you can tell he is singing someone else’s songs in someone else’s style.  Willie hasn’t found his own style yet, and you can’t blame it on the Nashville Sound because these recordings are raw, and Jimmy Day’s steel is as good as it gets.  On November 29th, Chet Atkins takes the helm with an equally spare backing.  They start with “What Now My Love” and move into “Lovin’ Lies,” with these great lines:  “Lovin’ lies that I believed, and now how I grieve.  You didn’t mean it from the start, and you told me lovin’ lies and broke my heart.”  Leon Payne’s “Teach Me to Forget” is another “she’s gone” song.  Another song about forgetting.  Willie begs her to “stay and teach me to forget.”  This, of course, is exactly what she can’t do.  But it is the lesson we all long for.  Maybe it is the lesson of Willie’s music, of reincarnation.  In “Tender Years” (track 10) Willie sings, “So, if I can’t be your first love, then I’ll wait and be your last.  I’ll be somewhere in the future to help you forget the past.”  Willie as time traveler, moving forward and back in time trying to outsmart love.  Love and art seem to require time, meter, structure, commitment, and yet Willie, like the Wiley Coyote, flirts with the structures of time to have his love and escape it, too.  To lose his love and keep it, too.  Next Willie sings of Hank’s loveless “Mansion on the Hill” (track 11).  Willie needs to do a whole album of these house songs.  Not surprisingly, the best cut from this session is the one that didn’t make the album, Willie’s own “Something to Think About” (track 12).  Willie thinking about love; it’s always on his mind.  “The dawn of your lonely years, when youth and beauty are gone, and you can no longer have any sweetheart that you choose.  Here’s something to think about, I’ll still be thinking of you.”  Two cuts from earlier recordings (June 8th, 1966) made the “Make Way for Willie” album as well: “One in a Row” and “Make a Way for a Better Man.”  All in all, this is one of Willie’s strongest, most consistent albums from the 1960s.

Next we jump to February 22nd, 1967.  Grady joins the group on guitar, but so do the back-up singers.  Red Lane’s “Blackjack County Chain” (track 13) doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson song, but it got released as a single.  In Willie’s own “Don’t Say Love or Nothing” (track 14), he sings,  “Don’t say love or nothing for awhile.  Yesterday is still too fresh now on my mind, perhaps my heart will learn to show its face in time.”  Yesterday haunts all of Willie’s songs.  “You Ought to Hear Me Cry” (track 15) is another of Willie’s crying songs.  “If I talk loud and laugh loud, you ain’t heard it all.  You ought to hear me cry.”  “I go home to a home where love’s almost gone…Then I sit down in a corner and I turn on the tears.”  The cryin’ cowboy.  Another neat album could be all of Willie’s best crying songs.  Maybe Buddha records could release it with Willie grinning on the cover.  Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men said these exact words in season 2: “I Don’t Feel Anything” (track 16).  Willie continues, “You look the same as always.  Time’s been good to you.  But I must confess, time has done a few things for me, too.”  Willie and time.  Time and tears.  The theme is everywhere in his music.  The healing hands of time.  Not sure why this cut wasn’t released, but the liner notes say that this session was “designed strictly to record singles” (page 27).

On June 13th and 14th, 1967 Willie records the songs for the all-Willie LP “The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs.” “Please Hold Me Tighter” (track 17) contains one of my favorite Willie lines: “Please hold me tighter; I still remember, and I can’t love again until her memory’s gone.”  The strings seem more tasteful on this recording.  Not sure why.  The credits list a cello, a viola, and a host of violins.  “I’ll Stay Around” (track 18) may be my favorite recording on this entire disc.  As tender as Willie gets.  “I’ll just hang around till it’s over and hope that it never ends.”  Willie is either haunted by a local memory, or he is the one haunting someone else.  He’s like Gatsby outside Daisy’s house.  This reminds me of the lines cited earlier: “I’ll be somewhere in the future to help you forget the past.”  You can’t repeat the past?  Why of course you can, Old Sport.  “A Moment Isn’t Very Long” (track 19) contains these apt lines: “Yesterday as I talked to a friend in town, I forgot to remember that you’d gone…Last night, as I danced with a stranger, and she held her cheek close to my own, for a moment I almost forgot you, but a moment isn’t very long…Every now and then I get a chance to smile, but those every now and thens just last a little while.”  Time always moves too fast or too slow for Willie.  So he haunts it like “The Ghost” (track 20).  “The ghost of our old love goes away.”  Love and time have this ghost-like quality in Willie’s music.  Moving back and forth through walls and houses and wives and years.  Restless and never fully there, always elusive, fleeting, distant.  In “No Tomorrow in Sight” (track 21), Willie sings, “I hope we can salvage a few memories to carry us through the long night…the clock striking midnight, yesterday’s gone, and there’s no tomorrow in sight.”  Tomorrow and yesterday are like ghosts; you can’t see them or hold them.  They won’t hold still, yet Willie is always hunting them, lying in wait, searching the usual haunts.  This version of “There Goes a Man” (track 22) makes me think Willie should do an album with Yo-Yo Ma.  Just Willie, Trigger, and Yo-Yo Ma’s cello.  In “Go Away” (track 23), Willie sings,  “You only make things worse by hangin’ around,” yet earlier Willie himself was hanging around: “I’ll just hang around till it’s over and hope that it never ends.”  So hanging around and not hanging are equally ineffective.  A watched pot never boils, and love’s skittish when it’s stalked.  It scares easily.  Our hearts are easily spooked.  In “Once Alone” (track 24), Willie sings, “Before our chance for happiness is gone, don’t you think we should try it once alone?...It’s not your fault, and neither is it mine.  It seems we’re just victims of the times.”  No-fault love and divorce.  We are poor players on a stage, puppets, victims of chance and fate and time.  If we are victims, what crime is time guilty of?  Of existing?  Time is a crime?  A crying shame?  The crime of time.  Time: a crime.  Time is the scene of the crime.  A very deterministic, fatalistic, Hindu notion.  “The End of Understanding” (track 25), “To Make a Long Story Short (She’s Gone)” (track 26), and “Suffer in Silence” (track 27) round out the June 14th session, notable for the tasteful strings and the Willie originals.  We then jump to an August 9th session geared toward singles.  Rich Kienzle calls this recording of “Truth Number One” (track 28) “ridiculous.”  It does sound more like a 1960s hippie folk anthem.  When Willie sings, “The answer my friend,” I was half expecting to hear “is blowing in the wind.”    “When I Don’t Have You” (track 29) was not released, but it contains interesting lines like this: “with loneliness ablaze in my brain.”  “Loneliness Ablaze” could be the title of Willie’s early years.  The beautiful blaze of loneliness.  It’s a rough, quirky, odd song, but interesting.  Gives off heat.  The embers of love.  Smoldering.  Willie’s songs are like small fires we huddle around to face the night.  They provide a small but real bit of comfort and reassurance.    

Nashville was the Roughest (disc 2)

The strings are back on August 2nd, 1965 for “Did I Ever Love You,” but this disc provides both the Nashville Sound versions (overdubbed on August 17th) and the naked, non-overdubbed versions. In “And So Will You My Love,” Willie sings, “Nothing lasts forever except forever and you, my love.”  The liner notes don’t make clear where these first four recordings ended up album-wise, but tracks 5-16 (in a slightly different order) are from December 15th and 16th sessions and end up on “Country Favorites: Willie Nelson Style”.  “Fraulein” (track 5) is pleasantly devoid of strings and back-up singers.  Wade Ray’s fiddle and the rest of the Texas Troubadours provide a much better backing for Willie than Chet Atkins’ earlier settings.  I’ve reviewed the tracks from this album in a previous blog--“I Love You Because,” “I’d Trade All of My Tomorrows,” “Making Believe,” “Home in San Antone,” “Don’t You Ever Get Tired (of Hurting Me),” “Columbus Stockade Blues,” “Seasons of My Hearts,” “Heartaches By the Number,” “Go on Home,” “My Window Faces South,” and “San Antonio Rose”—but I appreciate more fully today, after a year of listening to Willie non-stop, the tight band behind Willie on this LP.  Wade Ray’s fiddle blisters through “Home in San Antone.”  Willie does his best George Jones imitation on track ten: “Don’t You Ever Get Tired (of Hurting Me).”  Buddy Charleton’s steel weeps with Willie on this classic tear jerker.  This version of “Columbus Stockade Blues” doesn’t seem as strong as the three Liberty versions with Shirley Collie.  The spare “Seasons of My Heart” (track 12) may be my favorite thus far on this disc.  Just Willie, steel, piano, snare, and bass.  “Go On Home”  (track 14) is another bleak, moody heartbreaker.  In March 1966, Willie returned to the studio with Felton Jarvis at the helm.  The Nashville Sound is back with a vengeance on “I’m Still Not Over You.”  The only other place I can find Willie recording this song is on his duet album with Ray Price, “Run That By Me One More Time,” and the version on that album is much stronger.  “Today I made a point to go somewhere I knew you’d be.  I had to know if you still had the same effect on me.  And the moment I saw you there I knew, no matter what I do, I’m still not over you.”   This reminds me of one of my favorite country lines (from a late 1980’s Randy Travis album): “Is it still over?  Are we still through?  My phone still ain’t ringin’, so I assume it still ain’t you.”  Willie continues, “I can’t explain why seeing you affects my sanity, but when I see you I become a strange and different me.”  Not sure why Willie re-recorded “San Antonio Rose” and “Columbus Stockade Blues” in March 1966.  Sounds like the Beach Boys with a rock and roll beat and trumpets.  Willie returns to the studio in June 1966, and this disc gives us both the over-dubbed and the naked versions of these singles, two of which became Willie’s biggest RCA singles to date: “One in a Row” (reaching #18) and “The Party’s Over” (peaking at #24).  “A Wonderful Yesterday” (track 21) contains some of my favorite Willie lines: “Today’s gonna make a wonderful yesterday…today we have made a thousand and one memories that we can recall when today is a sweet used-to-be.”  This disc ends with eight naked versions of songs (tracks 25-32) that are far superior to the sweetened versions that appear earlier on the disc.  The semi-naked, partially-clothed versions of “The Party’s Over” and “One in a Row” lack the strings but still have the background singers, so they aren’t actually as different as I had hoped they would be.  Nevertheless, these first two discs have proven that that this collection is worth the steep price.                        

Nashville was the Roughest (disc 1)

My Christmas present to myself was the Bear Family’s mammoth eight-cd Willie box set “Nashville was the Roughest,” which chronicles Willie’s eight years and 44 sessions with RCA (1964-1972) along with his two sessions (and seven songs) with Monument in 1964.  The question remains, will the Bear Family tackle Willie’s Atlantic Years (1973-1974) or his Columbia years (1975-1993)?  I guess the Complete Atlantic Recordings box set covers 1973-1974, but I’d love to see the Bear Family tackle the Columbia years.  I think the four-cd box set “One Hell of a Ride” attempts to cover the Columbia years, but it only scratches the surface.

It’s amazing that after a year of listening to Willie Nelson daily, I am still finding new stuff.  Some of the tracks on the first disc of “Nashville was the Roughest” I have never heard before.  I have all of these early RCA records, but this disc contains unreleased versions, many of which lack the syrupy overdubbed choruses and strings.  The first seven tracks come from Willie’s brief stint with Monument.  Add “King of a Lonely Castle” to the long list of Willie’s house songs.  And they are always lonely houses, mansions, castles, homes.  To make a long story short, and to sum up all of Willie’s life and music, and all of these blogs: “she’s gone.”  She being a lover (representing peace, contentment, fulfillment), and she being time.  Time and contentment are always eluding us.  The only way for this predicament to resolve itself would be for time to stop, which is what art tries to do: stop time and give us that God-like perspective.  Songs do that because we can play them again and again.  They are always there to satisfy when life cannot.  Art doesn’t change the way life and people do.  So “she” is always literal and figurative.  In this first track, the queen of Willie’s castle is gone.  The background is hilariously over-the-top, but Willie’s vocals remain interesting, straining at the edges of meter Sinatra-like even in 1964.  The trumpets in “(There’ll Be) Someone Waiting for You” are too much, but Willie slows down phrases and bends notes and measures in pleasing ways.  All seven songs recorded for Monument are Willie originals, and this one is another she-left-me-but-I’ll-wait-patiently-in-case-she-ever-returns songs.  Willie as the ever-faithful one, longing, pining, hoping his love will come to her senses and realize what she’s left behind.  “To Make a Long Story Short” (track three) features a harmonica for the first time in Willie’s career, and this sound will come to define his music.  “I Never Cared for You” and the next three songs come from the second Monument session (July 26, 1964) which includes a much smaller band: just guitar, drums, bass, and sax.  “You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago” (track 5) is as spare as his early Pamper demo recordings.  People leave us even when they are with us.  They aren’t with us when they’re with us.  This is why it is so hard to be satisfied.  People can never truly be with us enough to satisfy all of our longings.  Yet the desire for such complete oneness remains and is the driving impetus for most art.  The desire drives us to try to create in art what we can’t find in life.  “I Feel That Old Feeling” (track 6) has the same spare, raw demo quality.  That old feeling, “the voice of discontentment,” the wanderlust, haunts Willie like an old memory.  Willie can feel this old feeling comin’ on like a cold.  This second version of “King of a Lonely Castle” (track 7) removes all of the strings and back-up vocals but leaves the absurd bugle.  Nevertheless, it is one of the best examples of Willie’s pure vocals from this era.  These previously un-released Monument tracks alone are worth the price of the box set.  With track 8 we switch to RCA and Chet Atkins (November 12, 1964).  Not the best version of Willie’s “Pretty Paper.”  The ooh-ah chorus distracts.  Ditto for “What a Merry Christmas this Could Be,” though Willie still manages to flirt dangerously with the meter, and Pete Drake’s steel adds some legit heartache.  “Healing Hands of Time” (track 10) and “Talk to Me” (track 11) suffer the same fate at the hands of the ooh-ah chorus.  You won’t hear Willie singing the German “Whiskey Walzer” (track 12) anywhere else (December 3, 1964).  On “Little Darling” (track 13) Willie overdubs German vocals to the backing of “Pretty Paper” from track 8.  The heartache seems to translate well into German.  I wonder what the Germans thought.  I guess the Bear Family liked it.  This version of “Permanently Lonely” (January 12, 1965) can’t compare to the Pamper demo version, but Willie’s vocals, Pete Drake’s steel, and Pig Robbins’ piano remain interesting.  The January 12, 1965 version of “Healing Hands of Time” (track 15) may be worse that the one on track 10 with even more of the Anita Kerr Singers and a “full-blown string section.”   Somehow “Ashamed” works better for me.  While the strings and chorus still annoy, they seem more fitting.  Can’t explain why.  These cuts appeared on Willie’s 1968 album “Good Times.”  Willie seems more comfortable.  In “She’s Not For You” (track 17), Willie sings about a woman who promises to be true.  He warns a friend to avoid her because “sometimes she lies,” and time slips away, and forever doesn’t last as long as you think it will.  He ends with this great line I’ve somehow missed on previous listenings: “Just leave her here, I’m used to feeling blue.”  Jumping ahead to April 7, 1965, Willie has a much sparer back-up group of electric guitar, steel, bass, and drums.  This version of “Are You Sure” is as good as Willie gets.  A treasure.  The cheesy snaps on this version of “Night Life” (track 19) seem out of place, but this is Willie the way he was meant to be recorded: naked.  One annoying feature of the Bear Family discography is that they don’t indicate which album(s) each track eventually appeared on.  I appreciate that they list the recordings by studio session and in chronological order, but you have to go back through the lengthy liner notes to track down which albums the songs appeared on.  I guess when I have all of the albums loaded in ITUNES I’ll be able to tell fairly quickly.  These versions of “Mr. Record Man” (track 20) and “Healing Hands of Time” (track 21) from the pared down April 7th session surpass anything else Willie did at this time.  Even the liner notes don’t make clear which album these spare tracks ended up on.  This raw version of “Funny How Time Slips Away” (track 22) comes from the April 8th session as does “My Own Peculiar Way” (track 23), “One Day at a Time” (24), “It Should Be Easier Now” (25), and “Darkness On the Face of the Earth” (26).  “Buddy” (27), “Hello Walls” (28), “So Much to Do” (29), and “Within Your Crowd” come from the April 9th session and round out “the album,” according to the Bear Family, but they don’t say which one.  So often the sappy Nashville Sound gets blamed for ruining Willie’s songs, but even these perfectly spare recordings didn’t sell in 1965, so it seems fair to say that listeners just weren’t ready for Willie in any setting in 1965.  “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” has a dance-like beat that seems inappropriate for the dark content, but it foreshadows Willie’s flamenco versions on “Teatro.”  In the liner notes Rich Kienzle dismisses Pete Drake’s talking steel on “Hello Walls.”  One disc down, seven to go.  A great way to spend my last week of vacation.  A disc of Willie a day keeps the heartache at bay.                    

The Hungry Years (1976/1991)

January 1st and 2nd, 2011

It seems appropriate to start this new year by listening to Willie Nelson’s forgotten (and thus hard-to-find) 1976 album “The Hungry Years.”  In the title cut (a Neil Sedaka tune), Willie laments the fading of his early years, and, ironically, this album of forgetting has itself been forgotten, so the years are doubly forgotten.  This album was recorded in 1976, but not released until 1991, around the time of the IRS Tapes.  The personnel include Willie’s family band along with Johnny Gimble on fiddle and Rex Ludwick helping out on drums.   The original recording was made in Louisiana in 1976, but overdubs were made in 1989 and 1991.

If poetry is the “synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits,” then Willie’s music is the synthesis of years and tears, time and emotion.  His music is feelings organized in time.  In other words, measured feelings.  Put another way, "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth).

This album is one of Willie’s most Proustian, as it dwells on time and mind.  You have “Hungry Years,” memories that won’t die, “Time Changes Everything,” and “Carefree Moments.”  It confirms that Willie is the hardest thinking honky tonk singer in show business.

In the title number, Willie seems to regret all the fame and fortune.  He misses the hungry years, the “lovely long ago.”  He misses what they lost along the way.  How could he have been so blind?  He misses the past.  Like Proust, he is in search of lost time.  “The things that we were after were much better from afar.”  And now they have “everything and nothing, too… it wasn’t worth the price we had to pay…let’s go back to yesterday.”  This raises the question, why do we always seem to miss the detours of time?  The two roads diverging in the yellow wood?  “Detour” (track two) makes concrete the abstract detours of “The Hungry Years.”  “I should have read that detour sign.”  Even with our ability to do abstract reasoning, we seem incapable of reading the detour signs in life.  “I’m Ragged but I’m Right” is a lively George Jones romp.  “I’m a rambler, and I’m a gambler, and I lead every life.”  That’s Willie, leading every life, having it both ways.  Living in the past and giving no thought for it.  Caring and not caring, staying and going, standing still and moving.  In “It Wouldn’t Be the Same (Without You),” Willie ponders how he could start his life over, how he could re-wind, re-do, re-mix, or overdub his past, but it wouldn’t be the same.  The past both matters and doesn’t matter.  He moves on and leaves it in the dust, burning bridges as if it doesn’t matter, yet he dwells on it and laments it as if it does.  In the recording studio, Willie likes to do things in one take, no re-dos.  And yet so many of these one-take recordings are of songs that long to re-do or recover the past.  Willie doesn’t want to re-do a song in the studio, but “Your Memory Won’t Die,” so he is forced to re-do the past in his mind.  His mind is not like a studio that he can control.  We can’t TIVO the past; we can’t fast-forward or re-wind.  Gimble’s fiddle makes this song a five-star recording.  In “Your Memory Won’t Die” (one of only two Willie Nelson-penned songs on this album), Willie claims he’s “feelin’ kinda free” but he’d rather “feel your arms around me.”  He wants to be held and let go at the same time, bound and free, captive and fugitive.  Mickey Raphael’s harmonica makes this song about memories memorable.  Emmylou Harris accompanies on “When I Stop Dreaming.”  Willie claims, “You can’t teach a heart to forget,” and yet this is exactly what carefree people try to do.  Let bygones be bygones.  Except when they won’t get gone and stay gone.  This is another version of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”  A serious version of “Funny How Time Slips Away.”  Willie vows to love forever, but he’s had four wives.  “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is the serious version, and “Funny How Time Slips Away” is the sarcastic version.  In “If That’s the Fashion,” Willie says he can’t hold with those who brag about cheating.  “I vowed in my heart to be true, dear, when God made us one; you took the same vow, and shamed those who cheated for fun.  Now you see no glamour in love that is faithful and true, and if that’s the fashion, it’s the kind of love that I never knew.”  Willie doesn’t hold with time slipping away, with disavowing timeless vows.  Neil Sedaka’s “Solitaire” is about a lonely man who lost his love through indifference.  Solitaire is another name for freedom. Carefree is another name for lonely.  How can Willie care so much about everyone and be so carefree?  This is the paradox of Willie Nelson.  This version of “Milk Cow Blues” (track nine) has a rousing piano solo by sister Bobbie and one by Mickey Raphael (or T.J. Clay) on harmonica.  Willie hits his falsetto in this recording more than almost any other time I can recall.  “Linda” is another pleasant song to relieve the heaviness of tracks four through eight.  Gimble’s fiddle shines.  Willie lives in a dream world of love even though “Linda doesn’t know I exist.”  Another example of mind over matter.  Love is always cerebral, always filtered through mind, Platonic and ideal.  “The Last Thing on My Mind” (track eleven) is another “Always On My Mind” song.  It’s “a lesson too late for the learning, made of sand.”  “I should have loved you better.  I didn’t mean to be unkind.  You know that was the last thing on my mind.”  “You have reason aplenty for goin’.  This I know…Please don’t go.”  Willie regrets that he didn’t love her better.  His love was perfect in his mind.  In his autobiography he talks about how it is easier to say things in a song than in real life.  But why is that?  Why are artists famous if saying things in art is easier than saying them in real life?  Artists say what we can’t say for ourselves and what they can’t say for themselves.  So they speak for everyone and no one.  “She is Gone” (track twelve) is the only other Willie Nelson original on this album.  A classic “my woman left me” song.  With harmonica and fiddle to accentuate the pain.  Willie revisits this song in “Spirit.”  It is one of his saddest and most meditative songs.  This version of Rodney Crowell’s “Till I Gain Control Again” (track thirteen) confirms that this album makes my untenable top ten list.  In “Time Changes Everything” (track fourteen) Willie sings of the healing hands of time.  Time remixes itself, overdubs itself?  “There was a time when I thought of no other.  We sang our own love’s refrain.  Our hearts beat as one as we had our fun, but time changes everything.  And when you left me my poor heart was broken, and our romance seemed all in vain, but the dark clouds are gone, and there’s blue skies again ‘cause time changes everything.”  In other words, ain’t it funny how time slips away?  “You can change the name of an old song, rearrange it and make it swing. I thought nothing could stop me from loving you, but time changes everything.  So goodbye, good luck, may god bless you. I can’t say I won’t love again.  You go your way, and I’ll go mine ‘cause time changes everything.”  But does it really?  For Gatsby?  For Proust?  Juxtapose this to the final song on the album, “Carefree Moments.”  “Just for a few carefree moments, I lost the one I loved.”  Willie wants to be forgiven for being carefree.  He knows he’s to blame, and he’s so ashamed.  He always is.  And is it really just a few carefree moments or is it a whole carefree way of life?  Doesn’t reincarnation make everything carefree, because you always get a do-over?  Which is also interesting because Willie never does a re-do in the studio, but he loves the notion of reincarnation, so he wants an infinite number of re-dos in life.  This reminds me that there are no tears in Gupta era Hindu literature.  Because of reincarnation, there is never any reason to cry.  So how does Willie manage to care so much that he cries, yet remain so blissfully carefree that he can maintain his beatific, Buddhist smile?  This is the puzzle, the paradox, the enigma, the allure of Willie’s music.