It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963 [Disc 2]

12/22/2010

All of the songs on this disc can also be found on the two-disc compilation titled Willie Nelson: The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings (Plus More). The mixing or re-mixing is probably different, but I would have to do a more careful side-by-side listen to see which is better. Both compilations come with excellent liner notes, but it is a bit confusing because the roughly 60 songs are sequenced in a very different order in each collection. Someday I’ll have to sit down and compare the liner notes and try to discern the rhyme or reason for the way the two compilations have arranged essentially the same material. I’m also not sure why the Pamper Recordings, that only seem to be on Crazy: The Demo Sessions, don’t appear on either of these collections. Perhaps they couldn’t get the permissions, or perhaps their status as demos set them apart from these other “official” recordings. Someday the ultimate Willie Box Set will be released on ITUNES like the Beatles catalog, but to much less fanfare, and it will be MUCH bigger. It took Willie 15 albums just to get warmed up and figure out who the heck he was.

See my blogs on The Early Years for more details on these recordings, but I’ll just hit a few highlights this time through. I did finally read through the extensive liner notes (a book, really) from It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’, and the Bear Family seems to group their comments by recording sessions and dates.

I’m also working my way through Graeme Thomson’s Willie Nelson: The Outlaw, so I’ll open with a quotation he attributes to Willie:

“I had to stop thinking that I had a home” (page 8).

For Willie, from the very beginning, every part seems to be “the part where I cry.” In fact, life is the part where we cry. A Buddhist view. “Touch me and you’ll know how you’d feel with the blues.” Yet you can’t touch Willie. He won’t let you. To touch the untouchable. To touch the essence of loss and emptiness. Like touching a black hole. Maybe the “Record Man” can touch what can’t be touched in any other way. Is that what art and radio does for all of us? Fills the empty air between lost souls? In “Go Away,” Willie pushes away the very thing he longs for in “Mr. Record Man.” Barking to get out, barking to get in. “I feel much better when you’re gone.” I feel much better when I feel bad. When I’m with you, I miss missing you. Now there’s a song Willie should sing. “I Miss Missing You.” “The Waiting Time” produces all the art there ever was. The hurting time, the parting time. The arting time. Art fills the mundane parts of life, which are about 90% of the time, like the dark matter in the universe. Only 10% is visible matter. “Where My House Lives” describes Willie’s sentiments quoted at the start of this blog: “I had to stop thinking that I had a home.” So he started singing about home instead. You sing about what you can’t think about. Is that what art does? It allows you to do something with the things you can’t think about? “Country Willie” gets at the rural/urban tension, the town and gown. “How Long is Forever” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” may be Willie’s defining songs. Willie’s touchstones, his madeleines. “Three Days” are the three parts where Willie cries, at the beginning, middle, and end. I guess I am just connecting the dots between his songs. Weaving together his albums like panels into a larger quilt. He has so many albums, that it is hard (even, perhaps especially, for him, I suspect) to see the forest for the trees. Willie doesn’t yodel very often, but he does a little Hank Williams on this recording. He sounds like he’s trying to sound like someone else, which he rarely does. The irony of syrupy doo-wop singers crooning in the background of a song called “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” strikes me anew upon this listen. Are these supposed to be the heavenly choir of angels singing as he dies of a heartbreak? George Jones’s voice was hoppy enough to cut through this syrup (like a double IPA) and still sound sad, but Willie’s not sad enough. “One Step Beyond” stands out this time. Not sure why. “Just one step beyond caring anymore.” One step beyond the blues. One step ahead of suffering. Can we really outrun pain? Willie isn’t really a Buddhist, though, because he doesn’t want to escape this life to escape suffering, he just wants to outrun it, stay one step ahead, so he can still enjoy the thrill of the chase. Like his first wife throwing pots at his head. “Undo the Right” is a Manichean, yin-yang kind of song. Country music is about finding the pain, finding the catch in the throat, in the note, that will perfectly reflect, embody the physical pain. Same with the blues. Towards the end of “Undo the Right” you hear Willie searching for that inflection, that phrasing that will somehow be more honest, more true. “Crazy” is track 13 on this disc. A bit ironic since it has been the luckiest song Willie ever wrote. The background singers cheapen the song, but Willie’s phrasing still intrigues on this classic recording. It’s crazy to try to love in a fleeting, ephemeral world. Crazy to put down roots, crazy to long for something lasting. Like running up the down escalator. Why do we do it? This string of recordings—Crazy, Funny, Hello Walls—is on a half dozen compilations. The liner notes indicate that Willie recorded his most famous stretch of songs in a short burst of creativity which emerged from a uniquely poignant, painful time in his life. And he has spent the next 50 or so years re-working and re-interpreting this same material. The way the monsters in Monsters, Inc. lived off the canned screams of children, Willie has bottled some pain from 1960 and made it last for 50 years, like a batch of yeast for friendship bread past down through the generations. Willie hits the word “time” with a wah-wah pedal in his voice: tie-ai-ime. Then he personifies everything, the pathetic fallacy that all of nature feels his pain. This only happens when life hits us so intensely, so for Willie it was 1960 or so. It seems sappy and sentimental to folks who aren’t in the throes of it, and yet we buy it up and listen to it on lonely drives in the car across the desolate plains of our empty lives. Okay, that’s spreading it a bit thick, but I know what I mean. “Wake Me When It’s Over” begs to be re-mixed without the back-up vocals. To desire to sleep through the pain of life is to desire to sleep through life itself. Life is the pain. Life without pain is not life. It is Brave New World, not Hamlet or Keats, who are banned in utopia. Soma is the only way to avoid pain, which is what marijuana is to Willie, I guess. Then we have a string of duets with Willie’s second wife, Shirley Collie, the only person who could ever truly sing harmony with Willie. I’ve listened to pretty much everything he’s ever recorded multiple times, so I feel pretty confident in asserting that no one has ever been able to follow Willie’s phrasing step for step. All duet partners end up singing polyphonically with Willie, an interesting but distinct vocal line weaving in and out of Willie’s, but not a true homophonic duet. She may be the only person who could ever play Garfunkel to Willie’s Simon. But like Simon, Willie had to ditch his Garfunkel and move on. “Our Chain of Love” cannot last long indeed. I’d like to hear Willie try “Is This My Destiny” again. “The grave would be escape for me from this my destiny.” “Willingly” gets at Willie’s will. The role of free will in the face of fate. Does it matter what we will if time slips away regardless? I like how the Bear Family puts all four duets with Shirley Collie next to each other. These are unique recordings in Willie’s oeuvre, and they deserve special attention. He doesn’t sing like this anywhere else. I’m not sure he ever really tries to sing with someone else the way he tries to sing with Shirley. “There Goes a Man” shows Willie’s ability to empathize, to detach from himself and see the other side, to see “both sides now.” It’s a maddening, paralyzing, Hamlet-like empathy. It’s Keats’ negative capability. “There’s Gonna Be Love” raises the question, is Willie Martin or Candide? Maybe both. Maybe we are all both. Maybe that’s the human condition, that we can’t pick one or the other, yet we perpetually yearn to do so. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street to Say Goodbye” is “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “How Long is Forever This Time” all wrapped into one. The guitar work on this second version of “How long is Forever” stands out. And Willie holds the space after “forever” for what seems like forever. This song could be a textbook for how Willie works. How he uses his phrasing to build tension. He doesn’t break meter, but he bends it almost to the breaking point. And listeners break a sweat feeling that he just might break it this time. It takes a certain skill, a certain discipline to appreciate Willie’s vocals on these recordings. Despite the dreadful setting, he’s doing interesting things with his phrasing at every turn. “Take My Word” could be an up-tempo crowd pleaser today if Willie wanted to dust it off and breath some new life into it. Willie stretches the spaces in “The Last Letter” to the last possible moment. I’m a sucker for this soulful, bluesy rendition of “Home Motel.” This could be another funky crowd-pleaser with the right band behind it. Version two of “Take My Word” blows the other out of the water speed-wise. Could be one of Willie’s fastest tunes. Begs to be re-done.

So maybe each time I listen to the same recordings and try to capture them, it’s like a photograph of the same object at a different time of day, in different weather. You see something different each time. Or like different takes of the same song. Some are better than others. Maybe it’s good to take several stabs. Stabs seems especially apt. Stabs at the right word to pin down the feeling, because words can never truly pin down feelings like butterflies behind glass. Each word is an essay, an attempt.

And maybe non-fiction is writing with training wheels. Or a coloring book. You have the content, the outline, so all you have to do is fill it in, color it. But the pressure of pure invention from a blank page, which is too overwhelming for all but the poet or novelist, is somewhat lessened for the historian or nonfiction writer. There is still room for creativity and invention, the same way Willie can be creative and inventive while interpreting other people’s songs just as easily as he can with his own. But it doesn’t have to be written from the same place of desperation.