Pancho and Lefty (1983)—take 2

7/21/2010

Re-listened to this on the drive to Detroit yesterday and again today in the hotel room before the International Fragile X conference. I commented on every song in my January blog, but this time I notice this line: “Lefty, he can’t sing the blues all day like he used to.” I wonder why Lefty can’t sing the blues anymore. What can make you so blue that you can’t even sing the blues? What can put you beyond the blues? I’m intrigued by the notion of police, federales, letting a criminal go “out of kindness.” What kind of sympathy or empathy is this? It’s almost a Les Mis moment. A moment of grace. They could have had him any day, but they let him go. This fits with Willie’s general attitude toward judgment (“Beer For My Horses” excepted). No fault, no blame. An outlaw is outside the law. He requires grace and mercy. I’ll be re-listening to “The Troublemaker” soon. What is it about outlaws and troublemakers that gets closer to the truth, closer to being fully human? Could it be their awareness of their own need of grace? Like the prodigal son? The transition from the adventurous “Pancho and Lefty” to “It’s My Lazy Day” is a startling one. I don’t think Pancho and Lefty ever took anything easy. Hag wants to go fishing, but he sings, “I got to thinkin’ it over,” and it turns out he is too lazy to fish. But even at his laziest, he has to think things over. In “My Mary” Hag is “dreamin’ those dreams again.” Hag is “dreamin’ of the hours [he] spent with Mary.” He is alone spending time with the past, spending time with memories. These are Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” In a way, you can experience them more deeply afterward, in tranquility, than you can live in person. And thus you can experience them more intensely in art. So the role of the artist is to capture emotion, distill it, frame it, so we can walk around it and see it whole, fully faceted. The artist does what our brains do at night, de-frag our thoughts. This is why we can practice a piano piece all day and never get it right, but when we wake up the next morning we can play it perfectly. Our brains work on it all night, cleaning out all the insignificant info from the day and clarifying the important, deeper connections which we can now see in fuller relief. “Half a Man” reminds me that many animals can let half of their brain sleep while the other stays awake. Maybe this is what Willie desires. A reptilian brain. Cry with one eye and sleep with the other. We could function more consistently this way without the vicissitudes of emotions slowing us down. But then again lizards don’t sing the blues and we’d have no country music and no Willie Nelson. The interesting implication of this song is that love dehumanizes us. It makes us less human. Destroys us. If “the low is always lower than the high” and the reasons to quit keep getting bigger each day, how come they don’t ever “outnumber all the reasons why”? “No Reason to Quit” suggests an answer. Willie has “no reason for livin’ right. And there’s no other way to forget.” So we’re back to memory again. He can change and sober up, but he can’t forget. “Still Water Runs the Deepest” suggests that Willie is the upright, dependable spouse who has been “done wrong.” The unwitting victim. The cheated upon, not the cheater. So he’s leaving. “Too long we’ve been together.” Not sure how this song relates to “Still is Still Moving.” “My Life’s Been a Pleasure” takes the direct opposite view. “You’ve proved your love is true…and I’ll still love you as I did in yesterday.” What evidence bears this out? Since when does our love today ever match our love from yesterday? Words like “still” and “always” are fraught with problems as so many of Willie’s songs have shown. In “All the Soft Places to Fall” Hag and Willie sing about how “These memories are fun to recall.” It’s safer to recall all these rowdy outlaw memories of “rocks and brambles” within the safe confines of a secure home life with clean sheets and a “safe place to fall.” Then Willie ends this album with three Willie standards: “Opportunity to Cry,” “Half a Man,” and “My Own Peculiar Way.” This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but I applaud the idea of a trippy, jazzy version. This version of “My Own Peculiar Way” may be the only five-star song on this album. It may even be my favorite version of this song. Certainly one of the most interesting. Willie again asserting that he will “always” love her, but in his own peculiar way, which is in his mind. She will always be on his mind. Don’t let anyone say that he has “ever been untrue.” Willie has never been untrue. Not sure what kind of definition of truth this is, but there is a sense in which this statement is true, in the same way that Willie sings in time, in a certain sense of time, a quantum, Willie-sense of time.