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).