These November 1966 recordings ended up on Willie’s 1967 “Make Way for Willie Nelson” album, which I have not been able to find on CD yet, so this will be my virgin listen. I did just got a used LP in the mail yesterday, but I don’t own a record player, so the Bear Family has saved the day once again. The small band and spare backing (Jimmy Day on steel; Johnny Bush on drums) makes for one of Willie’s best early albums. Surprisingly, it contains no Willie originals. He did record his “Something to Think About,” but it didn’t make the final cut for the album. “Have I Stayed Away Too Long” (Frank Loesser), “Some Other World” (Floyd Tillman), “If It’s Wrong to Love You,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” “You made Me Live, Love, and Die” (Floyd Tillman), and “Born to Lose” round out the November 28th session of standard lonesome honky tonk numbers. Jimmy Day’s steel on Tillman’s “You made Me Live, Love, and Die” may be the saddest thing he’s done (I mean that in a good way). These tracks help me appreciate Willie’s debt to Floyd Tillman and Hank Williams. Willie sings these songs competently, but you can tell he is singing someone else’s songs in someone else’s style. Willie hasn’t found his own style yet, and you can’t blame it on the Nashville Sound because these recordings are raw, and Jimmy Day’s steel is as good as it gets. On November 29th, Chet Atkins takes the helm with an equally spare backing. They start with “What Now My Love” and move into “Lovin’ Lies,” with these great lines: “Lovin’ lies that I believed, and now how I grieve. You didn’t mean it from the start, and you told me lovin’ lies and broke my heart.” Leon Payne’s “Teach Me to Forget” is another “she’s gone” song. Another song about forgetting. Willie begs her to “stay and teach me to forget.” This, of course, is exactly what she can’t do. But it is the lesson we all long for. Maybe it is the lesson of Willie’s music, of reincarnation. In “Tender Years” (track 10) Willie sings, “So, if I can’t be your first love, then I’ll wait and be your last. I’ll be somewhere in the future to help you forget the past.” Willie as time traveler, moving forward and back in time trying to outsmart love. Love and art seem to require time, meter, structure, commitment, and yet Willie, like the Wiley Coyote, flirts with the structures of time to have his love and escape it, too. To lose his love and keep it, too. Next Willie sings of Hank’s loveless “Mansion on the Hill” (track 11). Willie needs to do a whole album of these house songs. Not surprisingly, the best cut from this session is the one that didn’t make the album, Willie’s own “Something to Think About” (track 12). Willie thinking about love; it’s always on his mind. “The dawn of your lonely years, when youth and beauty are gone, and you can no longer have any sweetheart that you choose. Here’s something to think about, I’ll still be thinking of you.” Two cuts from earlier recordings (June 8th, 1966) made the “Make Way for Willie” album as well: “One in a Row” and “Make a Way for a Better Man.” All in all, this is one of Willie’s strongest, most consistent albums from the 1960s.
Next we jump to February 22nd, 1967. Grady joins the group on guitar, but so do the back-up singers. Red Lane’s “Blackjack County Chain” (track 13) doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson song, but it got released as a single. In Willie’s own “Don’t Say Love or Nothing” (track 14), he sings, “Don’t say love or nothing for awhile. Yesterday is still too fresh now on my mind, perhaps my heart will learn to show its face in time.” Yesterday haunts all of Willie’s songs. “You Ought to Hear Me Cry” (track 15) is another of Willie’s crying songs. “If I talk loud and laugh loud, you ain’t heard it all. You ought to hear me cry.” “I go home to a home where love’s almost gone…Then I sit down in a corner and I turn on the tears.” The cryin’ cowboy. Another neat album could be all of Willie’s best crying songs. Maybe Buddha records could release it with Willie grinning on the cover. Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men said these exact words in season 2: “I Don’t Feel Anything” (track 16). Willie continues, “You look the same as always. Time’s been good to you. But I must confess, time has done a few things for me, too.” Willie and time. Time and tears. The theme is everywhere in his music. The healing hands of time. Not sure why this cut wasn’t released, but the liner notes say that this session was “designed strictly to record singles” (page 27).
On June 13th and 14th, 1967 Willie records the songs for the all-Willie LP “The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs.” “Please Hold Me Tighter” (track 17) contains one of my favorite Willie lines: “Please hold me tighter; I still remember, and I can’t love again until her memory’s gone.” The strings seem more tasteful on this recording. Not sure why. The credits list a cello, a viola, and a host of violins. “I’ll Stay Around” (track 18) may be my favorite recording on this entire disc. As tender as Willie gets. “I’ll just hang around till it’s over and hope that it never ends.” Willie is either haunted by a local memory, or he is the one haunting someone else. He’s like Gatsby outside Daisy’s house. This reminds me of the lines cited earlier: “I’ll be somewhere in the future to help you forget the past.” You can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can, Old Sport. “A Moment Isn’t Very Long” (track 19) contains these apt lines: “Yesterday as I talked to a friend in town, I forgot to remember that you’d gone…Last night, as I danced with a stranger, and she held her cheek close to my own, for a moment I almost forgot you, but a moment isn’t very long…Every now and then I get a chance to smile, but those every now and thens just last a little while.” Time always moves too fast or too slow for Willie. So he haunts it like “The Ghost” (track 20). “The ghost of our old love goes away.” Love and time have this ghost-like quality in Willie’s music. Moving back and forth through walls and houses and wives and years. Restless and never fully there, always elusive, fleeting, distant. In “No Tomorrow in Sight” (track 21), Willie sings, “I hope we can salvage a few memories to carry us through the long night…the clock striking midnight, yesterday’s gone, and there’s no tomorrow in sight.” Tomorrow and yesterday are like ghosts; you can’t see them or hold them. They won’t hold still, yet Willie is always hunting them, lying in wait, searching the usual haunts. This version of “There Goes a Man” (track 22) makes me think Willie should do an album with Yo-Yo Ma. Just Willie, Trigger, and Yo-Yo Ma’s cello. In “Go Away” (track 23), Willie sings, “You only make things worse by hangin’ around,” yet earlier Willie himself was hanging around: “I’ll just hang around till it’s over and hope that it never ends.” So hanging around and not hanging are equally ineffective. A watched pot never boils, and love’s skittish when it’s stalked. It scares easily. Our hearts are easily spooked. In “Once Alone” (track 24), Willie sings, “Before our chance for happiness is gone, don’t you think we should try it once alone?...It’s not your fault, and neither is it mine. It seems we’re just victims of the times.” No-fault love and divorce. We are poor players on a stage, puppets, victims of chance and fate and time. If we are victims, what crime is time guilty of? Of existing? Time is a crime? A crying shame? The crime of time. Time: a crime. Time is the scene of the crime. A very deterministic, fatalistic, Hindu notion. “The End of Understanding” (track 25), “To Make a Long Story Short (She’s Gone)” (track 26), and “Suffer in Silence” (track 27) round out the June 14th session, notable for the tasteful strings and the Willie originals. We then jump to an August 9th session geared toward singles. Rich Kienzle calls this recording of “Truth Number One” (track 28) “ridiculous.” It does sound more like a 1960s hippie folk anthem. When Willie sings, “The answer my friend,” I was half expecting to hear “is blowing in the wind.” “When I Don’t Have You” (track 29) was not released, but it contains interesting lines like this: “with loneliness ablaze in my brain.” “Loneliness Ablaze” could be the title of Willie’s early years. The beautiful blaze of loneliness. It’s a rough, quirky, odd song, but interesting. Gives off heat. The embers of love. Smoldering. Willie’s songs are like small fires we huddle around to face the night. They provide a small but real bit of comfort and reassurance.
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