Crazy: The Demo Sessions (1994)

Well, my trip to DC with the Asheville School senior class derailed my blog, but it gave me time to read lengthy liner notes to this album and to The Early Years and One Hell of Ride (both of which had lengthy books included with the multiple CDs). I didn’t have time to get to the liner notes for the three-cd “The Ghost” set, but in the next few days I will digest and process these three sets of early recordings. So, in one sense, I took a week off from blogging, but I listened to Willie, read the liner notes, and took notes, which I will now begin to transcribe. I have also decided to spend one day on each CD (maybe two days for the 30-song cds in the Early Years set) from these early recordings sets. I want to do them justice.

The first set of songs on Crazy: The Demo Sessions are recorded solo with Willie’s voice and guitar. “Opportunity to Cry” makes my untenable top ten list of Willie recordings. Sounds like it was recorded in a closet, which it was. In 1961, Willie has established the theme of crying, and he will, from here on out, take every opportunity he can to cry. “Three Days” was released on my birthday, September 4th. These lyrics could be Buddhist scripture. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all contain sorrow, suffering, and tears. Time itself makes us blue. In fact, time is the blues, time is the fall. Willie yodels like Hank Williams, like Jimmie Rodgers, on this recording. The theme of time is prominent here. No matter how you look at time—past, present, future—it frustrates and beguiles. And yet, what frustrates us about time, its elusiveness, is what creates suspense, seduction. Without meter, there is no free verse, no syncopation, no swing. How can you swing if you have nothing to swing from? Time is a tease, a flirt, but we want to be teased and flirted with. Must listen to the 1989 KD Lang version of this song on her album Absolute Torch and Twang. In fact, I just previewed it on Amazon. I now remember listening to this album in college. I like Willie’s version better, but hers is worth checking out.

I love Jimmy Day’s bluesy steel on “Undo the Right.” Not sure what this song means. Is he saying that if you can’t apologize for what you’ve done wrong, then please erase my memory of the good times we had together? That is, undo all the good things you did so the good memories won’t haunt me (good memories can hurt worse than bad ones). I can hear Marcel saying this to Odette. Or David Wilcox. Why’d you have to do it so slowly, why’d you have to do it that way. Again, our desire to re-write history, 1984-style. Control memories.

Hank Cochran, on “What Do You Think of Her Now,” sings better harmony with Willie than almost anyone else I can think of. Why do we cheat? Why do we believe love will last forever? That people won’t change? Why do we believe lies? Why do we cheat and then get mad when someone cheats on us? What did we expect? I’m thinking of Travis’s “Reasons I Cheat.” This song gets at the theme of thinking in Willie’s songs. I could group his songs in these three categories: mind, time, and tears. Or, to make them all Ts, thinking, time, and tears.

The earliest known version of “I’ve Just Destroyed the World” I’m living in. I need to compare it to the one I love on Teatro. “Schools of love are taught by fate; we never learn till it’s too late.” These raw one-minute versions are so much better than the souped-up syrupy studio releases.

This version of “Permanently Lonely” ranks up there with “Opportunity to Cry,” and these may be the best versions of either song (perhaps because they are closest to the source, the conception of the emotion). “It’s time I learned that those who play with fire get burned.” But “schools of love are taught by fate” and “we never learn till it’s too late.” Don’t feel sorry for me. You’ll be sorry soon, you’ll see. “The future is not very pretty for your kind.” “We’ll be alright in a little while…but you’ll be permanently lonely.” Crying, time and crying about time. The liner notes say that this song showcases a chordal structure that is more complex than the traditional 3-chord song (whatever that means). But can you be permanently lonely any more than you can be permanently free, which would imply that you were never bound, which would mean you weren’t really free from anything, and to be free, you have to be free from something, you have to be running away from something. How can you be free at home? Both love and loneliness, by definition, cannot last forever, cannot be permanent, that’s the thing.

Willie is supposedly singing about a drunk at a bar, but he seems to be singing about himself in the third person. “Please don’t let my tears persuade you, I had hoped I wouldn’t cry, but lately teardrops seem to be a part of me.” Willie is a human teardrop, and yet Buddha never cries or gets the blues; it isn’t possible in Gupta literature either. Beatific tears. Paradoxes. Crying all the time about time.

“Darkness on the face of the Earth.” This may be Willie’s saddest album. He sounds like he means these sad songs. He has not reached his bodhisattva state of transcendence.

With track nine, “Things to Remember,” Willie shifts to a studio band. Like Proust, Willie keeps a list of things to remember and things to forget. As if we could choose. Memory has a mind of its own, and we often remember the things we don’t want to remember and forget the things we want to remember. “Why won’t my heart let me do it this way?” That may be the best question Willie ever asked or ever will ask? Why can’t we order and control time and compartmentalize love so it will be convenient, on our own terms, like surfing channels, yet we aren’t happy doing that either. There is never anything on, and even people like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton with unlimited access to beautiful women end up with trashy strippers and interns. Total freedom is totally unsatisfying. We don’t want what we want.

“A moment isn’t very long.” Yet we stretch it like taffy in our mind and replay it and make it last forever, like TIVO. “I forgot to remember that you’d gone.” But memory is forever. Except when it isn’t. “Maybe for a moment I could forget you.”

This version of “Crazy” is good, but not my favorite. I think the one on Storytellers is better, and some of the live versions in the crazy/funny/nightlife medleys are better.

This earliest version of “Local Memory” describes the “hardest working memory” in show business. Willie is the James Brown of memory. Willie could give Proust a run for his memory’s money. “Crazy for cryin’.” We are crazy and foolish to love at all, to believe love will last, and yet we keep doing it. In fact, we are crazy to live at all, to sing, to make art, to strive for order and form and permanence in a fleeting and fallen and suffering and transient world, and yet we do. We don’t seek to transcend and escape this world of suffering, we just keep on keeping on. And that’s crazy. Like the notion of pathologizing depression and melancholy. Maybe it is a sane response to a crazy world. Maybe the world is crazy, not us, and we’d be crazy to be okay and normal in a crazy world. It’s a Catch-22. What’s even crazier, though, is if we wouldn’t want it any other way. Do we really want the world not to be crazy? Is the craziness and chaos and randomness of the world actually more meaningful and purposeful and ordered than one we might construct along other lines that seem more ideal and rational but would actually be much worse (ala Brave New World)? “Piles up blues against the door to make sure sleep will come no more…turns out happiness again, then let’s loneliness back in.” Willie again personifies memory and loneliness and time. He makes it concrete. This “fateful memory” controls him, though “I pretend I’m happy and never even frown.”

“I Gotta Get Drunk” is an attempt to pretend he’s happy, and it is a happy, bouncy tune, but can we believe this attempt to anesthetize the failure of the festival (Walker Percy) will really work. Running and drinking and sleeping don’t work. You can’t escape the local memory.

“Something to Think About.” The drums and the steel on this song stand out. “Consider the dawn.” “Here’s something to think about: I’ll still be thinking of you.” Like “Permanently Lonely,” but this time he’s saying I’ll always love you, no matter what you do. In that one he concluded that she’d be sorry. In both cases, though, the idea is that she’ll come to her senses in time. The irony, of course, is that Willie never comes to his. He never takes his own advice. He thinks about it, it gives him pause, but then he hits the road again. The liner notes refer to Willie’s “live-in-the-studio vocal.” Willie always sounds live even when he’s canned. One-take authenticity like Japanese zen calligraphers or Charlie Parker solos.

“I’m Still There” to “cry again another night.” The “Memories keep comin’.” “This stubborn heart of mine keeps comin’ back for more.” Willie’s heart is the Rocky Balboa of hearts. A glutton for abuse. Memory beats him up relentlessly, but he won’t go down. Is this masochistic? I’ll still be thinking of you (forever) and still is still moving, even if time slips away, even if your love won’t last forever, even if it’s crazy and I’m foolish. Willie is the ultimate fool for love. He lives to cry. He lives to “cry again another night.” Don’t we all.

Funny, I rank “Save Your Tears” up with “Permanently Lonely” and “Opportunity to Cry” because they have equally spare backgrounds. I clearly have a bias toward stark, spare, raw recordings. I guess I want pure, raw, distilled vocals. “Save Your Tears” isn’t listed on the liner notes or on the CD. Tears, tears, tears. Could be the saddest song in Willie’s oeuvre. Save your tears for those who are living, implying that he has died because she left, so no use crying for him. Ouch. You killed me, that’s all. No use crying. The understatement makes it even more over the top.

And then a bonus version of one of my favorite Willie songs, “Half a Man.” Could be the best version of this song. Steel, drum, piano, and bass compliment tastefully. I wish I had only half a heart, one eye, one arm, one leg so I would have less heartache, fewer tears. “You’ve made a man of me” becomes “the half a man that you’ve made of me.” The bonus version of “In Your Crowd” has great steel. “Though I stand outside, my heart’s within your crowd.” Jay Gatsby could be saying this about Daisy and Tom. And Willie has some of that new money, rural angst.

And now some notes from the liner notes. Notes on the liner notes. Liner notes notes. Footnotes within footnotes. “My demos were always better, I thought, than the records that came out,” Willie said.

These live, one-take studio tracks were found in 1994 on some tape that was just lying around. What a find! The liner notes writer describes Willie’s style as one part Sinatra, two parts Bob Wills, and three parts all Willie. Had no idea Sinatra was an influence, but it makes sense now. Along with Frizzell, Hank, Ernest Tubb, and Floyd. Willie grew up in the golden age of pop hits—1940s with Gershwin, Carmichael, and Mercer. He heard all the future standards before they were standards, when they were just normal current pop. They were in his musical DNA. Shotgun Willie was the first album to feature Willie’s standard road band. In 1954 he recorded “Lumberjack” and “No Place for Me” (need to find these). These were his first recordings. Sold them himself on the radio. “Crazy” is the most played song on juke boxes in history (patsy Cline’s version, of course). These demos give us a glimpse of Willie just before he hits Nashville and gets all gussied up with strings and back-up vocals and Chet Atkins’ Nashville sound. The Nashville Sound drowns out Willie’s soul. These 1961 versions are more like what emerges in 1975, 14 years later, on Red Headed Stranger. Willie never really changed; his producers and back ground changed. Steve Fishell writes the liner notes.

One last observation. Willie is Montaigne. Montaigne talks about his subject being himself, and himself naked, warts and all. And that’s what Willie’s songs give us. They hide nothing. Montaigne quotes Cicero in maintaining that “to philosophize is to learn to die.” He asserts that we must think about death all the time, face it daily, keep it ever before us. That “something to think about” is death, our finiteness, our limitedness, our inherent fallenness, our mortality, our distance from God. Are Willie’s songs not meditations on these ideas as well? Does Willie not also have the skeptical, binocular vision of Montaigne. And yet can Buddha be a skeptic? Can a skeptic smile beatifically? Aren’t skeptics inherently restless?