A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 3) (1995)

Disc 3 opens up with the remaining tracks from the “Sugar Moon” album. It strikes me as awkward that four songs from “Sugar Moon” end disc 2 and then the remaining six tracks open disc 3. I could have sworn it was Johnny Gimble on fiddle, but the liner notes say it is Jimmy Belken. I think this is Merle Haggard’s band who recorded in Willie’s Pedernales studio and Willie just dropped in and recorded some impromptu jazz and pop standards. I can’t believe they never released this album. Floyd Tillman’s bouncy “I’ll Take What I Can Get” is another version of Stephen Stills’ “If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, Love the One You’re With.” It fits with Willie’s Taoist, Hakuna Matata philosophy. On “If It’s Wrong to Love You” Willie sings, “If it’s wrong to love you, wrong I’ll always be.” There’s that word “always” again. Willie pledging eternal faithfulness in the face of unrequited love. Willie needs to record more with horns. “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque” is an old Louis Armstrong song, and it strikes me that Willie and Louis have a lot in common. “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “make believe it came from you.” Another example of Willie using his mind to create this platonic ideal of love that transcends time and memory. “Till the End of the World” and “I’ll Keep on Loving You” continue this paradoxical theme of always and forever. The crux of honky tonk tunes is the tension between the desire for eternal love and the reality of the fickleness of the human heart. The twin desires of freedom and commitment. These last two songs are what I would call promise songs. I’ll-love-you-forever songs. So many of Willie’s other songs give the lie to these songs, but he can’t help singing them even though he sees right through them. He is able to believe and disbelieve simultaneously. I said it in the last blog, but this is one of Willie’s very best albums; right up there with “Stardust.” He needs to do an album like this with Wynton Marsalis. Tracks 7-10 can be found on “Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes.” The next ten tracks (11-20) are Willie singing Hank Williams tunes with Jimmy Day (who played with Hank) on steel guitar. Willie claims he did the songs in the same key and tempo as Hank. He even tries to sing right on the beat like Hank. Johnny Gimble joins in on fiddle, and many of these songs were recorded in one take. “A House is Not a Home” fits in with Willie’s house songs. “A house with love is not a home.” Is love without a house a home? Is a bus with love on the road a home? “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” seems to be a metaphor for the human heart: it just can’t be filled no matter how much love is poured into it. There seems to be a break, a crack in the human heart, the human condition, which does not allow us to be satisfied. As Augustine writes, “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.” “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do”? Why don’t you love me “always.” Why doesn’t love last? Why does love change, fade, cool? Why is the human heart so fickle? Why is love so funny like that? Why does it always slip away? Why does our reach for love always exceed our grasp? This is the puzzle of every country song. The puzzle of Proust and Gatsby. It strikes me, too, that being on the road is a kind of discipline. Playing the same songs every night 200+ days a year takes incredible commitment and discipline that few possess. Should we call it the discipline of freedom? “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” gives us that word “never” again. Superlatives abound in honky tonk tunes. Promises about never and always. My love will never fade; it will last for always and forever. Promises, promises, promises that turn to lies, lies, lies. Thus the ubiquity of cheatin’ songs. “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” may be my favorite track in this set of Hank Williams songs. Johnny Gimble shines on fiddle. “Why Should We Try Anymore” gets at the notion of living a lie, a half-hearted love. “The vows that we made are only to break…The kisses we steal we know are not real.” And yet we kiss all the same, as if they were real. “False love like ours fades with the flowers.” And what loves doesn’t? What is true love? “Our story’s so old…on the past let’s close the door, and smile don’t regret, but live and forget, there’s no use to try anymore.” Close the door on the past? That would erase every Willie Nelson song, which is based on opening the door to the past. Just listened to a Radio Lab podcast about memory, and they mentioned a study where people took a drug to erase, or defang, painful memories. Imagine if Willie had taken this drug and removed the pain from all his old memories. Would he be happier? He certainly wouldn’t have much to write about. The guy who wrote “Proust was a Neuroscientist” was interviewed, and he mentioned how we re-live and re-create our memories every time we remember, and thus the memories get less and less accurate each time we re-member. So the more you think about the past, the more it becomes about you and the less it is about the past. So your memory literally re-writes the past. The ultimate 1984 propaganda machine. Maybe love is propaganda. Maybe time and memory, too. And yet what beautiful and powerful propaganda.