Milk Cow Blues (2000)

Kokomo Arnold steals the show on “Milk Cow Blues.” “Sail on, pretty gal, sail on…You gonna keep right on sailin’ till you lose your happy home.” Willie should know. If you stay on the road, or the ocean, you can’t simultaneously stay home. Speaking of home, Mickey Raphael is obviously at home with the blues, which the harp was designed to play. The harmonica is the blues. It can’t not play the blues. The harmonica, the steel, is your home when you have the blues, which is a music that compensates for a lack of home, an absence of connection. The reason you have the blues is because you don’t feel at home.

Willie is not at home with the blues, but Dr. John is. “Black Night” is a hard core blues tune. The organ and guitar have a blues dialog in the middle of this song.

Francine Reed turns “Funny How Time Slips Away” into a gospel tune. I’m not sure if that makes any kind of sense, but I love her voice.

Not sure what “Nowhere’s a fool like me” means, but I like that Willie-penned lyric in “Rainy Day Blues.” The blues follows you around, like rainy weather, and you can’t out run it, so why try? He knows it’s as foolish to try to outrun the blues as it is to try to outrun time, but he keeps trying. Willie is both Buddha and the anti-Buddha. He knows he can’t escape the wheel of suffering, but he keeps trying anyway. Maybe he’s a bodhisattva, hanging around to show the rest of us the way. What the blues does is open up spaces, loneliness itself, for guitars and harmonicas and vocals to fill with moans and cries. It gives us the best opportunity to cry. The best medium for tears.

I’m becoming a connoisseur of “Crazy.” Versions of Willie’s “Crazy,” that is. Susan Tedeschi puts her mark on the song. I’m looking forward to listening to every known version of this song side by side. This one won’t be in my top three, but it bears further listening nonetheless. Willie’s voice is strong in 2000. I don’t know how because it seems like he recorded an album a week in 2000.

B.B. and Willie join forces on “The Thrill is Gone.” This lyric sound slike so many Willie has written. You left me and you’ll be sorry some day. The thrill is gone, the excitement of the past is fading. Fading further into the past each day. Fading with time. Time is slipping away, The thrill of life slips away in the wake of time. Do we try to maintain the thrill in our memories? I prefer this song straight up with B.B.

“Wake Me When It’s Over” is another example of Willie wanting to avoid the pain of loss by running, or numbing, or forgetting. Here he tries to sleep through the pain. But of course we can never sleep long enough to escape the blues. They will be there waiting for us when we wake up. Fat chance they would leave. Fat chance we could wait them out. Time and love and loss are not things we can sleep off like a hangover. The hang over of time is the human condition itself. As if you could sleep off original sin, sleep off the fall. This 1962 Willie-penned blues number may be my favorite so far on this album.

“I often think of the life I live.” There Willie goes thinkin’ again. A life of the mind. The unexamined life is not worth living. And yet a fool, by definition, examines life, and still refuses to change. In some way’s, “Fool’s Paradise” could be the title of every Willie Nelson song. Is it just denial? Is it Buddhism? To deny that suffering will always be with us and we cannot escape it, or cheat it, or out run it, or drown it, or numb it, or forget it? Is ignorance bliss? Or will fate catch us in the end? Karma?

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business” from 1922. A smooth, slow blues.

The “Night Life” ain’t no good life, but it sure sounds good with B.B. helping Willie “dreamin’ of old used to be’s.” Once again, Willie reworks his songs in another genre. He’s done traditional country, pop, Jazz, orchestra, and now blues. How many other ways can he do them?

Then he’s “just stealin’ back to old used to be’s” in “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” What a nice touch to have this line refer back to “dreamin’ of old used to be’s” in the previous song. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica works the blues with the piano and the guitar on this one. And the notion of trying to play it off like you’re “Sittin on top of the world” when you are really down in the dumps. Trying to keep up appearances, save face. It’s another saving face song. Savinbg face with a wry sense of humor. Chuckling at how time and love slip away. How fate and love laugh at us, mock us, wink at us.

Willie’s weeping again in “Lonely Street.” “Where broken dreams and memories meet.” He wants to “bury broken dreams” and find “forgetfulness,” like Keats. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica is the nightingale.

Great band, great duets, great songs. An album worth returning to often. Another album with a wholeness, a completeness, an aptness, a coherence, a concept, a mood, a theme of floods, tears, craziness, darkness, loneliness, and weeping harps, organs, guitars, pianos, and men.