Who'll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1991)

“Who’ll buy my memories of things that used to be?” Who will believe them? Who will pay for them? Time is money, and Willie has made a living singing about time. The CD case says that these songs were all recorded at Pedernales in Spicewood, Texas with just Willie and his acoustic guitar. This is as naked as Willie gets, and this may be my favorite album. I’ll need to compare it closely with Crazy: The Demo Sessions. This collection has twice as many songs, though, so it has an advantage. I’ll need to do some research to find out when and how all of these were recorded.

“It Should Be Easier Now,” but it isn’t. The healing hands of time don’t always heal. His heart keeps hanging around, like that local memory. Memory could be defined as time in your mind. Time confined in your mind.

“Love that has stood the test of time.” “Gone are the times when I would walk with you and hold your hand.” “Will You Remember when you held mine.” “Now when you kiss another’s lips, will you remember mine?” And why does it matter to me whether you will or you won’t? The memory, the time in my mind, seems more important than the person.

“I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone.” I don’t believe time. I don’t believe you are in the past and not in the present. I can’t, don’t, won’t believe you aren’t in my future. I refuse to accept the limitations of time.

No need to say much about “Yesterday’s Wine” since I already covered it in an early post, but I think this version may be better than the one on the album. “Aging with time.” Isn’t that redundant? Isn’t that what aging is? The passage of time? Willie, like Proust and Stendhal, writes about love as it relates to time and mind. And perhaps love is simply the nexus, the crossroads, of time and mind. Love is what our mind does to time. It tries to defeat time. And poetry and music do the same thing. Every sonnet and every 2 ½-minute song is an attempt to chip away at the edifice of time.

“It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” Again, I commented on this song in an earlier post, but again, this version is superior.

“I pray that you will not forget your country boy.” Willie’s great hope, his greatest desire, like Beowulf’s, is to be remembered. He is greedy for memories.

“I’ve been feelin’ a little bad because I’ve been feelin’ a little better without you.” Feeling bad because you feel better may be the definition of the blues, of honky tonk, and of the artist’s temperament in general. “It’s a little like rain, but a lot like a sunny day.” Feeling happy when it rains. Sweet and sour. Hurts so good. “My love is that sound that you hear in your mind.” Are memories sounds, smells, senses, imprinted, biochemically, in the synaptic web of our brain, the net of our memories, a net designed to capture and store time? A stored vibration? Is that what love is? The word made flesh? Flesh turned into a word, a sound?

“Permanently Lonely” is one of my all-time favorite Willie songs. I prefer the version on Crazy: The Demo Tapes, but this is a close second. Again, the irony of Willie singing about always and permanence, a man on his third or fourth wife, a man always on the road, always on the run. Living in a home motel. A man for whom a motel, a bus, is home. Yet here he states that the woman who left him will be permanently lonely while he will be “alright in a little while.” In just a little bit of time. “The future is not very pretty for your kind. For your kind will always be running.” Hmm. The pot calling the kettle black? This song, written early in his career about someone else, I presume, may be the most ironic of all, as it describes Willie later in life perfectly. And yet he isn’t lonely thinking about all the broken hearts he left behind. It is he who has been alright “in a little while” while they deal with permanent loneliness. It is they who are now singing “Ain’t it funny, how time slips away.”

“Time rolls on like a river, and, oh, there’s just so much to do.” It’s so hard to live within a finite amount of time. So limiting. Like it is so hard to sing within a finite meter.

“I’m a lonely little mansion for sale.” Furnished with everything but love. All he has are torn pictures, faded memories. Love is being in synch with time; loneliness is when it moves on without you. When it gives you the slip. When it slips away.

“A short time is better than no time.” “Summer of Roses” and “December Day” I covered previously. Again, I like these versions better.

“Pretend I never happened, and erase me from your mind.” As if you could wipe the hard drive clean so easily. “All the places must be better than the ones I leave behind.” “If you ever think about me, if I ever cross your mind. Just pretend I never happened. And erase me from your mind. You will not want to remember a love as cold as mine.” Really? That’s exactly what we can’t do. What we must do. “I don’t suppose you’ll be unhappy. You’ll find ways to spend your time.” But that’s exactly it. We can’t. We spend the time we have lamenting the time we’ve lost.

“Slow down old world.” We want to slow time down, but we can’t. “I live too fast.” “I once was a fool for the women, now I’m just a fool, that’s all.” I think these songs work for me, I believe them, because Willie really lived them. These songs were closest to the act of creation. Written in real time as the events were occurring, or shortly thereafter. The spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.

“Opportunity to Cry” is my favorite Willie Nelson song. “Watching the sunrise on the other side of town.” Waiting and being let down. “You gave your word, now I return it to you, with this suggestion as to what you can do. Just exchange the words I love you for goodbye while I take this opportunity to cry.” You said you’d love me forever, you said you’d transcend time, help me transcend my mortal condition, eliminate the possibility of loneliness, and then time slipped away just like that.

I now see “I’m Falling in Love Again” in the larger context of the concept album Phases and Stages. The woman’s point of view on the first side of the LP. The surrounding songs on the album add luster to this gem.

“If You Could Only See what’s going through my mind.” If you could only see time, see transitions, see minds. See the past and future all at once in an eternal present, as God sees it. “And if you could see our love directing time.” Love telescopes time, absorbs it, bends it, like gravity. Loneliness is a type of spiritual gravity that curves time. And in the best of Willie’s songs we do see what is going through his mind, and it helps us understand what’s going through our own.

“You told me you’d love me forever, but the one in your arms is not me.” And if that’s love, “I’d rather you didn’t love me.” It isn’t funny how time slips away in this case. True love wouldn’t let go of time so easily. These 25 little songs, ranging from 1:32-3:51, like the sonnet sequences of Shakespeare, Petrarch, George Meredith,

“What can you do to me now” that I am safely outside of time, immune, numb, safely out of the fray?
Don’t let her get the best of me. Don’t let me start feeling lonely. I need help defending against the ravages of love, time, and mind. These songs are about protecting ourselves, hopping back up and dusting ourselves off after a tumble with time. That didn’t hurt. I can take it.

“Remember the good times. They’re smaller in number and easier to recall. Don’t spend too much time on the bad times. Their staggering number will be heavy as lead on your mind. And don’t waste a moment unhappy, invaluable moments gone with the leakage of time as we leave on our own separate journeys moving west with the sun to a place very deep in our minds.” Time and mind is everywhere in this compact little 1:32 song. So much time folded, layered into this lyric. If Proust was a neuroscientist, so is Willie. The journey deep into our mind as we wrestle with time. It is always a fight, a tussle, with time. But we escape into our mind. We can defeat time by sorting out and filing away and organizing the past, compartmentalizing it, and choosing which parts matter, which parts to recall. In this way we edit our own memoirs and escape from the bad parts by living with the parts in our mind we choose to keep around. We spend time with the times, the local memories, we choose to associate with. We can choose our memories like our friends. We can friend and de-friend them. Or can we? Is it that easy? There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. But is it so?

Just “Wake Me When It’s Over.” I’ll just sleep through the hard parts. Drink through the hard parts, run from the hard parts. Get high through the low parts. Fast forward through the long boring parts which make up most of life. TIVO life. Fastforward through the ravages, the pain, the challenges of time. Is that really what we want? Or do the commercials add something to life?

These songs sure hang together. “Home Motel” says it all. The home motel on lost love avenue. Like the lonely little mansion. A symbol for a mind in shambles.

I was teaching a group of 11th graders about Wordsworth’s 1798 preface to Lyrical Ballads, his revolutionary manifesto about poetry. Like Willie, Wordsworth wrote about outcasts, outlaws, beggars. Like Johnny Cash, the man in black. And he wrote in the vernacular, the common tongue. And he elevated lyric poetry the way Lennon and McCartney elevated the 2 ½-minute song.

If you own only one Willie Nelson album, it should be either Crazy: The Demo Sessions or this one. You get more for your money with this. It’s all here. The Bhagavad-Gita of Willie’s oeuvre. The holy of holies.