The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More

Pardon the aside, but…

An article by Byron Janis in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal states that “rubato” is a central element of Chopin’s music. The article says that rubato

“comes from the Italian word robare, to rob, but in music it means ‘give and take.’ If you steal a little time here, you’ve got to give it back. For example, in playing a melodic phrase, if you go forward in the first two bars, you must pull back in the next two so that the freedom you took does not break the rhythmical pulse.”

So it’s a way of stealing time, if you will. Chopin required the right hand to maintain a steady, classical feel, which allowed the right hand to “have its romance and play as freely as the left hand [would] allow.” Thus Chopin maintains the paradox of “disciplined freedom” in his music. Chopin used the Polish word “zal”—meaning “bittersweet melancholy”—to describe his music. Schumann described Chopin’s music as “cannons buried in flowers.” What a description! The author recommends Chopin’s Ballade in G-Minor and his Scherzo in C-sharp minor. Willie and Chopin might be kindred spirits with their melancholy rubato. Except that Chopin, like Keats, died young from TB. Like Willie, though, he invented, combined, and transformed musical genres.

Now back to the album of the day: disc 1 of The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More. I have already written extensively in previous blogs about the lyrics to many of these songs, so I will focus more on the style of these early recordings.

Willie opens with a bluesy 1959 version of “Night Life.” The understated backing of steel, piano, guitar, drums, and bass allows the vocals to stay front and center, though the musicians take turns filling all of Willie’s extended pauses with riffs of their own.

Willie follows this with another 1959 blues number: “Rainy Day Blues.” So the elder statesman of country music starts his career as a bluesman. And how common was it for country singers at this time to feature saxophones as prominently as he does in this track? Willie sounds more like Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles in this tune than Lefty Frizzell. And notice that he begins with “night” and “rain.” That melancholy blues sentiment will run through his music regardless of the genre or the band.

“Touch Me” from 1961 was a #7 country hit. “Touch me, so you’ll know how it feels when you lose.” So much of Willie’s music is about loss. Willie claims to be the “world’s bluest man.” “Someone who’s lost everything he can lose.” “Touch me, then you’ll know how you’d feel with the blues.” Is that why we listen to Willie? “Don’t forget me.” He has the blues, he’s lost everything, but he still wants to remain alive in her memory. Even being a figment in someone’s memory seems to mean something to Willie. It’s all about memories. What is most touching, the way we touch best, is in our minds, in our memories, according to Willie’s lyrics.

On track 4 Willie sings, “I want to be like I was before.” Don’t we all. We want to make time do our bidding. Willie pleads, “Don’t wake me till it’s over, when I won’t want you anymore.” He’s hoping to sleep through the blues. Hoping he can sleep “Till the blues get up and leave my bed.” Of course it won’t work, but still he sings. Some cheesy back-up vocals taint this track, but for the most part, these early Liberty recordings are much better than Chet Atkins’ Nashville Sound recordings that will follow (though not as good as the pre-Liberty demo sessions).

The back-up vocals kill me on this one. In general, though, these tracks from Willie’s first Liberty album, And Then I Wrote, are understated, spare, and closer to the real Willie than what follows. Notice Willie doesn’t have a regular set of back-up singers in his road band. It’s got to be so hard to sing back-up to such an unpredictable vocalist.

The back-up vocals kill this version of “Funny How Time Slips Away.” We need naked versions of all these songs, with the back-up vocals removed. The rest of the musicians are fine. The piano is especially tasteful in the spaces between words. I seem to be complaining, but I’d still love to get my hands on a copy of And Then I Wrote, which used on Amazon is running $100. I may need to look for vinyl. Or wait till someone has the sense to re-issue all of these early recordings in their complete original album format.

Again, the piano almost makes up for the back-up vocals on this version of “Crazy.” I’m noticing that Willie has a catch, a calculated country hiccup in his voice on some of these tracks. I haven’t heard that from him before or since. Maybe he outgrew it. Maybe it wasn’t him. But he tries it out at times on these recordings. The kind of vocal tricks George Jones does with his voice. Even at this early stage, Willie is stretching out the spaces between notes the way Clint Eastwood and Akira Kurisowa do with pauses in film.

Hunting for the lyrics to “The Part Where I Cry” on the internet, I find a video of Priscilla Ahn singing “Opportunity to Cry” live in Japan (or is it Seoul?). I prefer Willie’s version, but it is interesting to hear how she interprets his lyrics.

http://www.getalyric.com/mp3/lyrics/songs/willie_nelson-540/and_then_i_wrote-1750/the_part_where_i_cry-9915/

I have to quote these next lyrics in their entirety because this is another of Willie’s touchstone songs:

Life is a picture and I play the lead

But my biggest line was goodbye

Now my leading lady has walked out on me

And this is the part where I cry

I was great in the scene where she found someone new

You should have seen my look of surprise

And if you have just walked into the picture

This is the part where I cry

And after the picture is over

And it's judged for the part where she lied

The award of achievement that's given

Will be mine for the part where I cried

Of course, it is all about crying, but this song also has that Shakespearean notion that “all the world’s a stage,” and Willie is just playing a part, a tragic party. As with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, though, sometimes it is hard to tell whether Willie is a tragedian or a comedian. How should we take him? Does he know (or care)? How can we ever know? Do we laugh or cry? Sometimes, it seems, he deliberately misleads. He tells us to cry with his words, but the tone of his voice or the tempo of his band makes us laugh or dance. It’s as if he creates semantic spaces within his content and his tone the same way he does with his tempo, if that is even possible. This and “Wake When It’s Over” are my favorites so far on this disc. That wry sense of humor is so Willie. “You should have seen my look of surprise.” As if he were really acting. He’s trying to play it off. He tries to laugh, but we know the emotion was real. This tension between comedy and tragedy is everywhere in Willie’s music, on both the mundane and the cosmic level, in every particular incident and in the largest universal ideas. The question remains: can we take his tears seriously? Can we believe them? Or are they crocodile tears?

Lonely, lonely, lonely on “Mr. Record Man,” and yet the do-wop back-up vocals, the playful piano, and the sis-boom-ba drums make me want to two-step to his tears. Two-Stepping to My Tears could be the title of many of Willie’s songs.

On “Three Days” Willie yodels like Hank and Jimmie. Time→Memory/Mind→Tears, and the cycle of life starts over again like Groundhog Day. I’ll stop complaining about the back-up vocals, but how can I take these Buddhist sentiments seriously with this choir of angels in the background?

“One Step Beyond” is new to me. “I’m just one step before losing you, and I’m just one step ahead of the blues.” “It will hurt me so much to see you go…And though I still love you as before, I’m just one step beyond caring any more.” “Your surprised that I can feel this way.” Willie seems to singing from the point of view of the faithful, stand-by-your-man wife who has had enough and won’t stand for it any more. Willie’s a ventriloquist for loneliness; he can throw his voice into the mouth of either party, as he does later on Phases and Stages (one side is from the husband’s point of view; the other is from the wife’s). He claims he’s outrun the blues, but we don’t believe him. He isn’t safe in the past or the future. Neither gives true respite from the present, as much as we want them to. Gatsby and Marcel learn this the hard way.

Willie’s vocals are as good as they get on “Undo the Right.” If we could just remove the drums and back-up vocals. I don’t care, though, I’m giving this 5 stars for his vocals and the guitar work.

It just struck me that one of the reasons I like Willie’s music so much is that the vocals and the lyrics are always primary and clear. He articulates and enunciates so carefully and deliberately. Each note, each syllable gets its due (and then some). It reminds me of the Council of Trent and how the Catholic Church worried that the words of scripture were being lost in the homophony, the harmony, and the instrumental ornamentation. Willie never lets that happen. He treats his lyrics like scripture. The words always matter. I like that. So much of rock and pop is throwaway lyrics. No one knows what they’re saying and no one cares. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a mood and something to dance to. The lyrics are often laughable if read on their own. Willie’s stand up to further scrutiny, I believe.

“Darkness on the Face of the Earth” may be the most egregious example of devastatingly sad lyrics accompanied by a two-stepping choir of angels. Willie’s vocals save the day, but the cognitive dissonance in my head remains. How are we to make emotional sense of this?

“Where My House Lives” is another one of Willie’s personified house songs. It goes with “Home Motel, “Lonely Little Mansion,” and “On the Road.” It begs the question, though, how can a house live alone? Home, by definition, is the opposite of alone. Yet Willie’s house “holds too many memories since she’s gone.” But how can a house hold any memories until someone leaves? Memories can’t exist when you have the real thing. And yet Willie seems to struggle with which he values more: the memories or the people themselves.

“How long is forever…this time” may be the most brilliant blending of sound and sense I have yet to encounter in Willie’s music. It ranks up there with the best of Alexander Pope’s poetic pyro-technics. He pauses so long between “forever” and “this time” that the listener has to ask themselves, “How long can he possibly pause in a 2:28 song?” The answer is, an almost unbearably long time. Willie fits forever into 2:28. That’s hard to do. I think I’ll stop half-way through and finish tomorrow.