Phases and Stages (1974)—take 2

7/3/2010

Phases and Stages (1974)—take 2

I listened to this in bed Saturday morning. My son Willie got sick in the night, so we brought him into our room for the night. He woke up and read books while I listened to the eleven tracks from the original album and re-read the extensive liner notes included with this deluxe edition of The Complete Atlantic Recordings. I’m reminded that Willie turned 40 in 1973, just as I turned 40 in 2010. This album is almost as old as I am now, and Willie is almost 80. “Walkin’” contains some of my favorite Willie Nelson lines. “After carefully considering the whole situation, and I stand with my back to the wall…” Willie is the most careful cowboy who ever lived. And as painfully honest as he is in his songs, he admits here that “I’ve been lyin’ to me all along.” Love will do that to you. It’s another “She’s Gone” song, another walkin’ away song, another “On the Road Again” song. Don’t run, don’t hide, don’t apologize, just walk calmly away if you can in a very reasonable manner. “Pretend I Never Happened” features Willie’s theme of defeating memories by erasing them, by denying them. “Erase me from your mind. You will not want to remember any love as cold as mine.” Willie is a manager of memories. What I’m also noticing, though, is that for Willie, love is all in the head. If you erase the memories of love from your head, you’re fine. But for most people, love resides in the heart, and it cannot so easily be erased by simply wiping the hard drive of the mind clean. So much residue remains. It’s in the blood, and how do you erase blood, erase emotions? Even if you could erase them, how would you even find them all, where would you locate them? Johnny Gimble’s fiddle on “Sister’s Coming Home” and elsewhere on these three albums rivals (and sometimes outshines) Willie’s vocals. In “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again,” Willie asks the eternally unanswerable questions about love. “I may be makin’ mistakes again, but if I lose or win, how will I know?” How can we ever know where we stand with love? It’s the very same question Proust wrestles with for 6 volumes. I am reading volume 5, which contains sections called “The Fugitive” and the “The Captive.” Love seems to hold us hostage, and not the other way around. It calls the shots. It leaves us asking questions, which is why so many of Willie’s songs have that questioning, introspective tone. And the questions are usually about why she left. This whole album is about leaving. In “Bloody Mary Morning” “She left me without warning” and now “Forgetting her [is] the nature of my flight.” In “No Love Around” she taped a note to the door, a “Dear Willie” note. She is gone and love is gone. “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” is the quintessential “She’s Gone” song. Willie can’t believe it. “What did I do that was so wrong?” “There’s just too many unanswered questions.” There always is. So many of his songs are about mistakes, about what went wrong, and about how to deal with the consequences. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way…you’re supposed to know that I love you, but it don’t matter anyway if I can’t be there to control you.” Control is something we want but cannot have in love. Control is the opposite of love, and yet we desire it almost as much (or more) than love itself. Proust writes, “We love only what we do not fully possess” (133). In other words, we love only what we cannot fully control, so if we got what we thought we desired, complete control, we would lose love. “Heaven and Hell” fits with the questioning nature of this album. How will I know if it’s heaven or hell? How can I tell? Love feels like both. I have written about “Pick Up the Tempo” elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that it delves into the paradoxical nature of time. I like the fiddle on track 12, an alternate take of “Washing the Dishes.” Mickey’s harmonica spices up track 13, an alternate take of “Sister’s Coming Home.” The otherwise detailed liner notes don’t say who is on fiddle on these alternate takes, but I’m guessing it’s Gimble again. I was also struck last night, reading Moby Dick, the “Cetology” chapter, that Melville thought his massive novel, some say the Greatest of the Great American Novels, was just a draft of a draft. He said it would never be complete, could never be complete. The same holds true for Proust. The last 2 volumes weren’t completed till after his death, though he raced against time to complete them. Nothing true can be said clearly about God, and nothing clear can be truly. Anything that pretended to be complete could not be true love because it would not be free enough, expansive enough. Love eludes closure, abhors satisfaction, like those maddeningly unresolved scales in Chinese opera. Men and women desire each other because they desire a return to wholeness, to unity, just as they desire a return to God, to find rest for their restlessness. In the same way, music, like Stravinsky’s, builds tension and never resolves it, teasing, torturing our ears. Our ears want satisfaction, closure, resolution. Willie withholds it as well by singing behind the beat. Syncopation is coming down on the up beat. In a way we crave surprise, we crave not getting what we crave. We are satisfied by dissatisfaction. When Willie slows down the tempo of “Pick Up the Tempo” on the alternate take (track 20), my mind and ears are inexplicably pleased.