One Hell of a Ride (disc 2 of 4)

With the addition of this disc I have surpassed the 1,000-song mark and the 2-day mark on my nano. I can now drive to Maine and back (a 48-hour round trip) without repeating a song.

Willie sings on his 1971 RCA album The Willie Way, “Today might be the day that you walk away, but you left me a long, long time ago.” Again, it doesn’t matter what you do physically. What matters is when you left me on the inside. Willie is always giving precedence to internal actions. It’s all in the mind. Very Platonic. And yet, at other times, he revels in the nitty gritty of the concrete here and now. He seems to embody both Plato and Aristotle. The inductive and the deductive. “She’s Not For You,” from the album Willie Before His Time, was recorded in 1965, but all tracks on that album were previously released except for my favorite, “You Ought to Hear Me Cry.” I just received the 1977 LP in the mail, but will review it in its entirety in a future blog. For now, I can just say that this track fits right into Willie’s canon of crying. When he sings, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” he means you haven’t heard anyone cry like this. The crying outlaw. It’s so hard to reconcile all this crying with the John Wayne cowboy tough guy loner persona. And yet there it is. The problem with Willie Before His Time is that the liner notes of the LP don’t tell you where and when these tracks were previously released. I don’t recognize this spare version of “It Should Be Easier Now,” but it may be the best one I’ve heard to date. Just guitar, steel, and drums accompanying Willie’s vocal. Three tunes from Waylon and Willie, which I have already reviewed, follow. “Blackjack County Chain” may be the darkest tune in Willie’s repertoire. Too dark and harsh for the radio. And what can he possibly mean by the title of this album, Minstrel Man? I can see why that didn’t sell big. Sounds more like a Johnny Cash story song. “Johnny One Time” from the album Don’t You Ever Get Tired is another FHTSA (“Funny How Time Slips Away”) song. “Did he tell you that he’s known as Johnny One Time?” Of course not. He told you he’d love you forever. It’s what we all tell each other. And then time slips away. We are a race of Johnny One Times. Or so it would seem from listening to Willie’s early music. This fits with Willie’s obsession with time. We desire to transcend this limited, finite view, but we just can’t escape our mortal coils. And yet, he sings, “Bring Me Sunshine.” He alternates the darkest possible songs with the most Panglossian. He is both Martin and Candide. He is, somehow, Both Sides Now. “I Just Can’t Let You Go” appears to be a live version from 1965. Just guitar and drums with Willie’s voice. A song about strangling a woman so she can’t leave him. Ouch. “Death is a friend to you and I.” And yet the audience is hooting and hollering like it’s “Freebird.” That’s a bit disturbing. Makes you wonder how much people are listening to the lyrics, even though he enunciates them clearly and slowly. In this song, Willie is willing to kill to remember the past, and to maintain it in eternal perfection. Must we kill love to make it permanent? Must we murder to dissect? Is that the only way to make it last? Is what we really yearn for lovers frozen on a cold urn?

Then follows a string of songs from albums I’ve already reviewed. What makes this collection a good one, though, is that it provides one song from most major albums in chronological order, so you get a sense of Willie’s evolution as an artist, and then it gives you 2-3 songs from his greatest albums, like Stardust and Red Headed Stranger. This disc ends with “A Song for You” from Willie and Family Live in NV in 1978. Just guitar and vocals. A 5-star performance.