Teatro (1998)

I resisted buying this album for years. I kept previewing it at Barnes and Noble and Amazon, but the background seemed hokey. I didn’t give it a chance. I am amazed at how wrong my initial judgment can be. It makes me wonder, What else am I wrong about? Many of these are old tunes re-recorded, slowed down, spare, with an aged vocal. This album is so Willie. So un-commercial. "Everywhere I go," a new tune in 1998," is as haunting as anything in Willie's repertoire. The Latin background, the echoing drums, and the jumpy harmonica were all a bit off-putting at first, but they seem just right to me now. Of course, having Emmylou Harris on back-up vocals helps. "Darkness on the Face of the Earth," from 1961, has a driving dance beat. It may be the most depressing up-beat dance tune every written. It provides that surprising juxtaposition that Willie is famous for. I guess that's what upbeat blues is. Sad songs you can dance to. Like sweet and sour chicken. "My Own Peculiar Way," from 1964, puts an up-tempo dance groove to a touching love song. It seems to be both slow and fast at the same time. Willie's songs sound like Escher drawings look. You think you're moving, but you aren't. Or you think your standing still, but you're moving. Willie is famous for singing behind the beat. In Patoski's bio someone talks about how dancers would end up with a foot in the air if they were trying to dance to Willie's music. I'll be listening to this album today and seeing what it has to say about New Year's day 2010.

We drove to Spartanburg to visit friends from college, and over the course of the trip down and back, I was able to listen to the album three times in its entirety. On the ride down, my wife said it made her car sick. Willie’s voice wobbling behind the beat, disorienting, causing vertigo, disrupting the balance in her inner ear. She and my son Jack plugged into their own I-Pods on the way back to avoid the second and third playings. I read the first half of Patoski’s Willie Nelson: An Epic Life yesterday. It took Willie 77 years to live his life up to this point, it could have taken Patoski ten years to document this life in book form, and it takes me two days to read it. That is what I call condensation, distillation. Strong stuff. Time. In Search of Lost Time. Remembrance of Things Past. Willie and Proust have a few things in common. “Three Days” Willie hates: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Time is original sin, death. Maybe that’s why Willie sings behind the beat, and Emmylou Harris sings behind him, and behind her? Behind time itself? Nostalgia. Memory. Love. Death. Proust and Willie. “Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.” Yet Willie flirts with it, messes with it, dares it, flaunts it, courts it, lives in it, on it, over it. He’s a preposition, a relationship. He pauses so long during some of these songs you think he may not come back. I can picture musicians leaving the stage to take a break during one of his pauses. Like John Cage, like Thelonius Monk, he plays the silences, the spaces between notes. For someone who lived so hard and fast, he sings so slow. It takes so long, as if he is stretching time, making it last, like Proust’s six volumes. So serious, and yet he’s singing “I’ve Just Destroyed the World I’m Living In” to a two-step or a cha-cha beat. Like dancing a polka to Amazing Grace, but maybe we should, if it’s truly amazing. Is he mocking the seriousness of his own lyrics? Mocking death and time? Death Be Not Proud. John Donne. Is he celebrating the death of death? Redemption? Peculiar music. Weird, Chet Atkins called it. People said he couldn’t sing. He sounded funny. Funny how time slips away. There’s time again. I like the sequence from “I’ve Just Destroyed…” to “Somebody Pick Up the Pieces.” Songs of total loss, total destruction, the end of the rope, the oh no, and yet two-step, cha-cha. The kids I teach, 10th and 11th graders, don’t listen to entire songs anymore. Their attention spans can’t even span 2 ½ minutes. They listen for 30 seconds and then move on. I wonder if I-tunes will start selling 30 seconds of songs (maybe they already do: ring tones?). But I worry that they lose the artist’s vision, the artist’s sequencing of songs when listeners get to decide when songs come in the sequence. There is something to submitting to the author’s vision. Maybe the web and hypertexts defeat this patriarchal power of authors, creators. And yet are we truly free when we refuse to submit to this power? I honestly don’t know what he means by “Home Motel,” but I know he is juxtaposing the familiar and the strange. So Willie’s a Russian Formalist. I was just reading in Dirda’s book about the Russian Formalists’ mandate that art make the familiar strange, defamiliarize it, estrange it. Willie is at home on the road and he is lost at home. He embraces “On the Road Again” and “Family Bible” at the same time. He embodies both fully at the same time without contradiction (as Johnny Cash did). He loves both; he is open to both simultaneously. His openness and tolerance for both makes him unique. G.K. Chesterton writes about this, too. Willie is both plain and peculiar, both simple and complex at the same time. He gets accused of being too plain, prosaic and boring, and too complicated and subtle. How can both be true? Like a complex wine or beer, he has body, depth; his voice sounded old when he was in his 20s. How did he do that? Like Dylan, yet without taking himself so seriously. Malcom Gladwell writes about the five elements of taste in “What the Dog Saw.” Ketchup hits all five (sweet, sour, meat, bitter, and one other). I wonder what the sonic equivalent is, but I bet Willie hits all of them: humor, sincerity, sadness, dance, jazz… Coltrane improvised off “My Favorite Things for 27 minutes, and I aim to improvise off the improviser himself for 365 days. He is the melody, the canvas. Meta-improvisation when you improvise off Coltrane or Nelson or Monk. The harmonica on Teatro sounds like an accordion That’s where I get the latin or klezmir feel. Willie is unafraid to risk singing badly. Unafraid of risking sentimentality, like Dickens, like Fitzgerald. He writes and sings so close to the bone. I can’t recommend this album highly enough. It is definitely in my current top ten.