The Essential Willie Nelson (2003)

I listened to these two discs and 40 tracks spanning Willie’s entire career on 2/17 and 2/18 while traveling to Concord, New Hampshire to visit St. Paul’s School. I didn’t bring my laptop, so I just took notes so I could write my blog when I returned.

Last night while watching Asheville School’s production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, I heard the line “Love looks not with eyes but with mind.” Or something like that. That’s Willie. Very Puck-ish and Bottom-like. Bottom-less. Bully Bottom. Trippy and confused with love and time and memory. And yet, as with Willie’s music, it is always ultimately a comedy, never a tragedy. Like Gupta-literature. So earnest and yet so hard to take seriously. You know a grin is coming.

The thought also struck me as I was reading the dozens of tributes to Willie written by fellow musicians on the occasion of his 70th birthday (found in the liner notes) that you may not like Willie Nelson, but every musician you like likes Willie Nelson. You like Nora Jones but hate Willie Nelson? Well, Nora Jones loves Willie Nelson. You could play this game with anyone. I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find any musician who doesn’t like Willie Nelson. Dave Matthews. Ray Charles. People you love love Willie, so shouldn’t there be some kind of commutative property of music appreciation whereby you would love what the people you love love?

Most of the songs on both discs I have already listened to on the original albums and commented on them in earlier blogs. A few come from Willie’s early singles and Liberty albums which are very expensive even if you try to get them used on Amazon ($75 and up). These would include albums such as And Then I Wrote; The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs; and Good Times. Much of this early Liberty material appears on a compilation album I just ordered and will comment upon when it arrives. The only other songs I don’t have already are from the Willie and Family Live album (recorded in April 1978), from The Electric Horseman Original Soundtrack (also $75 used on Amazon), from Julio Iglesias’s 1100 Bel Air Place (for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”), from A Horse Called Music, and duets with Bono and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

Thematically, “Good Times” (from 1968) establishes Willie’s lifelong Proustian obsession with time and memory. “Here I sit with a drink and a memory…so classify these as good times.” Doesn’t that define all of Proust and all of Willie? A drink and a memory. And sitting around trying to classify memories? The imposition of the mind upon time. What the mind does to time. Minding time. If you don’t mind, time doesn’t matter. If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the mind. Or, if you’ve got the time, I’ve got the mind.

Today I am listening to Willie’s 1961 version of “Night Life” but also his 2009 album Willie and the Wheel. 1961-2009. That’s almost 50 years. What’s amazing is how consistent his voice and phrasing have been over 50 years.

Ray Charles comments on the liner notes about how Willie is more himself than any other person, more fully himself. And yet he is chameleon-like. How can a chameleon be itself? And yet that is exactly the paradox of Willie.

“Funny How Time Slips Away” may be my favorite Willie song, and this early version from And Then I Wrote, despite the cheesy background vocals, has some phrasing that is edgier than his more recent versions. Willie doesn’t record a straight song and then play with it when he gets bored. He is already experimenting with his phrasing on the very first recording. Sometimes later versions become straighter and more predictable. In some ways, I like this version best.

Looking over this survey of 40 songs, I notice that time or mind or love or memory is mentioned in almost every title. I can’t, however, understand the inclusion of “Heartbreak Hotel.” How is that one of his 40 best?

It would be interesting to compare the 1974 Texas Opry House recordings of the family live with these 1978 versions of the same songs. I’m dying to get my hands on a copy of The Electric Horseman soundtrack, but I’ll need to find it cheaper than $75. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” exemplifies Willie’s Proustian focus on idealized love from the past (also like Dante and Petrarch and Fitzgerald). He loves the girls he loved before more than the ones he’s with now because they are perfect in his memory like the lovers on Keats’ Grecian Urn. “Nothing I Can Do About it Now” strikes the idea of not being able to undo the wrong (if you can’t undo the wrong, undo the right), not being able to change the past. Memories have a mind of their own and they come and go as they please. Not only can’t we control the present and the future, we can’t control the past and how and when it revisits and haunts us. On one hand, there’s nothing Willie can do about it now, but his whole career has been based upon thinking about why he can’t do anything about it, which indicates the one thing you can do about the past is think about it, welcome it into your mind, open the door, have a drink, and bask in it. Invite the memories in, let them sit down, and have a chat, a dialog. Interact and cultivate a relationship with your memories. “Regret is just a memory to me now.” “I could cry for the time I’ve wasted, but that’s a waste of time and tears,” and yet Willie has done just that, spent 50 years crying over lost time.

“One Time Too Many” has obvious connections to this theme of time. “It’s all in the past, and I won’t make the same mistake twice.” Really? “Once is enough, it’s one time too many?” Willie’s career has been about making the same mistakes over and over and over again. “Stay A Little Longer” gives that sense of trying to stretch time to make it last longer. Could you stay up longer than all night? Could you extend these intense moments and make them last? Willie sings of “Old worn out memories” in “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” and their “slow moving dreams.” And then Willie sings (in 1997) on U2’s “Slow Dancing.” Willie’s voice is strong, accompanied by Mickey Raphael. Another classic example of the musicians you like (like U2) liking Willie. Willie has the power to slow down even a super group like U2.

On the liner notes, Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards says Willie represents “the best of what America is all about.” Toby Keith and Bernie Taupin think his face belongs on Mt. Rushmore with the presidents. Rodney Crowell calls him Texas’s answer to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, “earthy and ethereal at the same time.” How can that be, earthy and ethereal at the same time? And yet there it is. “Equal parts Buddha, William Blake, Gene Autry and Billy the Kid.” “Willie is everyone’s brother,” writes Billy Joe Shaver. Willie Nelson “should be a pope,” says B.B. King. Ray Charles calls him authentic, real, genuine, no airs, no put-ons, what you see is what you get. “He’s always the same. He doesn’t change on you.” Maybe Willie has become time itself, eternal. Maybe that’s what Buddha meant. You transcend time and change. He is utterly himself and nobody at the same time. John Fogerty says he “sounds like nobody but himself.” Like Beethoven. Kid Rock says he’s a man with three hands, two playing guitar and one giving the finger to the music establishment (with a smile on his face). Don Was refers to the “Dalai Lama of Texas” image of Willie, but says he’s more like a poker-playing, whiskey drinking, gun-toting Buddha. A combination of John Wayne and Buddha. A Buddhist cowboy. Bono says he transcends the mundane by observing it.