In the Jailhouse Now (1982)

This 2000 re-mastered and re-issued CD features two hard-to-find LPs on one CD. This is a great find and a great bargain if you can get your hands on it. I wish someone would release all of Willie’s old LPs in this fashion so I could gobble them up two at a time in CD format. Till then, I’m left to watch the EBAY auctions for those hard-to-find LPs. I’ll start with his duet album with Webb Pierce, In the Jailhouse Now.

The liner notes state that this album was recorded on June 8 and 9, 1981 in Spicewood, Texas, engineered by Chips Moman. The band is basically the full family band minus Bobbie. In addition, Leon Russell, Johnny Gimble, and Chips Moman chip in. Jimmy Day is on steel. On paper, this is one of the best lineups for a Willie album. The album opens with “There Stands the Glass,” which fits nicely into Willie’s repertoire of songs that strive to deal with pain and loss by numbing it with booze. I’ve only heard the title track, “In the Jailhouse Now,” before on a previously-reviewed compilation, so I haven’t heard Willie sing with Webb much. It is always good to hear him sing with one of his mentors, as it gives one insight into Willie’s musical influences. When he sings, “I wonder if you think of me in my misery,” he hearkens back to the many songs where he is obsessed with what she’s thinking. Half the time he’s obsessing about his own thinking, the sound of his own mind, and yet the other half of the time he is thinking about what she’s thinking. Thinking about thinking. Willie was meta before meta was cool. He’s been post-modern since the 1950s. Thinking about thinking about thinking. Always on his own mind, always self-referential, always out-Hamleting Hamlet. The band and vocals are tight. Webb Pierce’s voice has a nice bite to it, like a complex pale ale. Any album featuring Johnny Gimble on fiddle is worth buying. Joe Werner’s “Wondering” is a repeat of the previous song, same song second verse. “I keep wondering, yes wondering, if you’re wondering too.” And the fiddle and steel wander in and out of Willie and Webb’s wondering. “Wondering, wondering who’s kissing you.” Could be Gatsby wondering about Tom and Daisy. Or Proust wondering about Odette. The title track, “In the Jailhouse Now,” is a fun romp of a song by Jimmie Rodgers. It fits with Willie’s on the road philosophy. Webb Pierce’s “You’re Not Mine Anymore” is another one of Willie’s “I hope you change your mind songs.” Another, I’ll be true forever and love you forever songs, just waiting for you to come to your senses and love me again. “Since the day you said we’re through I’ve been even more in love with you.” My love never changes in the face of your fickleness. It’s the flip side of “Funny How Time Slips Away.” You promise to love me forever, and then you don’t, so after you leave me, I promise that I will love you forever even after you have dumped me. Which is the bigger lie, the bigger illusion? Which is funnier? The lies we tell before love, in the heat of love, or after love? Or are they all equally laughable? Willie and Web co-wrote “Heebie Jeebie Blues.” “You got the right string but the wrong yo-yo” may be my favorite line in recent memory. Mickey’s harmonica makes a nice run on this track. “I gotta get on the move…something just keeps pullin’ me down the other way.” What is it that pulls Willie down the road, away from commitments and relationships? And how is this pull related to the blues? Webb Pierce’s “Slowly” is just a simple but touching country ballad, and Mickey and Willie and Jimmy Day shine on harmonica, vocals, and steel respectively. Webb and Cindy Walker’s “I Don’t Care” hits on Willie’s obsession with the past: “Yesterday’s gone, love me from now on, they treated me, forget about the past” [honestly, I couldn’t make these lyrics out and need to check them later]. Here Willie is willing to wipe the slate clean, forget the past, and focus exclusively on the Platonic ideal of the future, the only place a love can be perfect, the frozen past (that never really was) or the tantalizingly elusive future (that never will be). Billy Wallace’s “Back Street Affair” seems to suggest that Willie has been falsely judged for fooling around. His woman was fooling around first, so it’s okay for him to cheat. “We have each other now, that’s all that matters anyhow.” “The happiness then we hoped for” will someday come true, and it won’t be merely a backstreet affair, it won’t merely be a one-night stand, an on-the-road kind of relationship. Here Willie wants to have it both ways. The thrill of the cheating with the permanence of the legitimate relationship. In other words, someday our cheating won’t be cheating. Someday we won’t have to cheat. Won’t that be nice when that day comes, but it never does. Or if it does, then we end up cheating on each other. “If you should ever find that you don’t love me, darlin’”…“Let Me Be the First to Know.” If you change your mind, if you feel like cheating, let me know. But who does this? How can he expect such honesty in love? How can we expect people to tell us when they are about to lie, tell us the truth about their lies? So it’s okay to lie if you tell the truth about it? He spends so many songs promising love and then being disappointed with lies, and it seems love is built on a lie. And yet here he wants a lover who will promise to tell him when her love ceases. A strange promise indeed. Instead of promising to be faithful and true, just promise not to lie when your love inevitably fades. It seems to be rather a lowering of the stakes and expectations of love, and yet it is no less unrealistic. Another foolish seeking for perfect honesty and truth in a world of cheating. The ultimate irony that the singers and authors of cheating songs are always searching for perfect honesty. Webb’s “More and More” states, “more and more, I’m forgetting the past…day by day, I’m losing my blues, more and more I’m forgetting about you,” though “oh how I cried the day you said goodbye.” Willie ends with a classic “forgetting song.” I’ll forget about you, I’ll forget the past. The blues will fade in my rearview mirror. This stands in stark contrast to all the songs about how I’ll never forget. So which is? I’ll get over you or I’ll never get over you? Or can it be both? Can we have it both ways on the same album? Every 2 ½ minutes are different. All in all, one of Willie’s best bands singing simple cheatin’ songs with another country legend. May not quite make my untenable top ten, but it’s darn close and well worth buying.