Moment Of Forever

Willie Nelson Turns 75

Mark Williams
The Bulletin Music Editor

Willie Nelson is so impeccably grizzled that he has moved into a realm to which the phrase "elder statesman" scarcely begins to do justice. Ambling on stage a few days past his 75th birthday, his absurdly battered guitar slung around his neck, this icon looks not so much a performer as a living history lesson. He has been on the road, on and off, for well over 50 years, but his staging could not be more minimal. Surrounded by five utterly unobtrusive musicians, including his 78-year-old sister Bobbie Lee on piano, Nelson plants himself beneath a Texan state flag and fires out hits as if entertaining a saloon bar, pausing only to swap his weathered Stetson for a lurid red bandana.

Yet the visual clichés are misleading: Nelson has always been so much more than a country singer — ever since the 1970s, when he rejected the morose and sentimental hokum of Nashville in favor of experimenting with jazz, folk and blues. He also has a peerless back catalogue to draw upon, as exemplified by a dizzying early segue of self-penned material, including Faron Young's 'Hello Walls' and Patsy Cline's 'Crazy.' He is a consummate performer — wrapping his gruff, surprisingly tender vocal around standards such as Kris Kristofferson's 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' and his own 'Red Headed Stranger.' Yet his live show is no nostalgia fest: a new track, 'Now I Gotta Get Over You Again,' is pained and poignant; and he ends nowadays with 'Superman,' a song he wrote last year as a defiant retort to a doctor who recommended that he slow down; it is not advice that Willie Nelson looks likely to heed any day soon.

At three-quarters of a century, Nelson makes no effort to look or act youthful, yet he maintains an open spirit and a curiosity that many people lose by the time they finish high school. Whatever his physical condition may be, you sense no hardening of the mental arteries in him. By all accounts, he's warm, generous, progressive, and at peace with himself, handling his everyday adversity — drug busts, breakups, IRS troubles — with a philosophical shrug and a self-deprecating sense of humor. Without making a big, self-congratulatory noise about it, he lives life on his own terms. He smokes his weed, plays his music for adoring fans, shoots as many rounds of golf as he can manage, makes the occasional movie cameo, and hangs out with a wildly diverse group of friends — ranging from big daddy rapper Snoop Dogg to ex-president Jimmy Carter to legendary Texas Longhorns football coach Darrell Royal.

In 'Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,' Joe Nick Patoski's exhaustive new Nelson biography published by Little, Brown, Nelson's friend Bobby Arnold — a security guard who Willie impulsively entrusted to engineer sessions at his Pedernales recording studio — captures the essence of Willie's laidback magic. "I can't think of any time there wasn't any chemistry," Arnold says of Nelson's frequent vocal duets. "People would adjust to Willie. Willie didn't adjust."

That adjustment took many forms: a white-suited, immaculately groomed Julio Iglesias adjusted to a bearded, pony-tailed, blue-jean-clad Nelson when they united at Pedernales in 1983 to sing the lotharios-have-feelings-too anthem, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before." Ray Charles and others adjusted to Nelson's idiosyncratic sense of time, which leads him to lazily sing just slightly behind the beat. His various wives and lovers adjusted to his upfront resistance to anything resembling old-fashioned monogamy and domestic tranquility. And, most significantly, the hippies and rednecks of early '70s Austin adjusted to being in each other's presence, because both crowds found themselves drawn to Willie's maverick brand of roots music.

Willie spent the 1960s building an estimable reputation in Nashville as a songwriter but floundering as a recording artist under Music City's assembly-line approach. When he relocated to Austin in the early '70s, he let his hair down literally and metaphorically, and became forever linked with an "Outlaw Country" movement that continues to echo in contemporary alt-country. By achieving stardom without compromise at the age of 40, Nelson sealed his legend so firmly that nothing —” whether it was crooning with Iglesias or covering Kermit the Frog on "The Rainbow Connection" —” could destroy it.

Even though he rebelled against Nashville convention, in at least one important sense Nelson remains a product of the old ways he learned there. He cranks out albums with great haste, giving little thought to how each one might fit in the context of his career. If he feels like dedicating an an album to the songs of his friend Cindy Walker, or collaborating with Leon Russell, that's exactly what he does. Singers of the '50s and '60s tended to flood the market with product because they worried that they'd soon lose their audience and needed a short-term cash-in. Willie floods the market for the opposite reason: he's so confident that his core audience will never leave, he doesn't allow his creative urges to be slowed by supply-and-demand market considerations.

A few Nelson albums stand out in the crowded field: The seminal outlaw statement 'Shotgun Willie'; the acclaimed concept work 'Red Headed Stranger'; the risky, way-ahead-of-the-curve standards set 'Stardust'; and, more recently, the spacy, haunted 'Teatro'; but Willie's reluctance to edit himself makes his work, like that of Ray Charles, more impressive in a career-spanning setting than on individual albums. That's why Columbia Legacy's new 'One Hell of a Ride' is such a welcome compilation. A four-disc set beginning with a 1954 radio-station recording of "When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song" and ending with a 2007 live performance of the same tune, it enables you to hear a titanic American music figure morph from a Lefty Frizzell wannabe into a darkly observant songwriter and a wonderfully nasal singer so unmistakable that he became a genre unto himself.

Nelson's stature is demonstrated by his next project, an album with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, called 'Two Men With the Blues.' Marsalis, a jazz purist who publicly derided his brother Branford in 1985 for teaming with Sting, might seem like an unlikely musical partner for a grizzled old cowboy from Abbott, but he seems to recognize that Willie's sense of phrasing owes at least as much to jazz as country. Lauding Nelson for his innate integrity, Marsalis describes Nelson as part of "that last group of a certain breed of musicians."

It has been said of Willie's tiny hometown of Abbott — whose population peaked at 914 just before the Great Depression — that "it is against the law in Texas to mention Abbott without declaring that Willie Nelson is from Abbott." Likewise, it is against the law in Texas and elsewhere to mention country music without declaring that Willie Nelson is country music. The eldest among the 300 or so remaining townsfolk in Abbott reportedly remember seeing a young Willie Nelson walking to school, carrying his guitar. For most of his 75 years, Nelson has been carrying a guitar and a genre, schooling generations on how to tell a story with a song.

"One Hell of a Ride" — a project that was pushed along by Nelson's longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael — draws from a career that has seen more than 250 albums and 2,500 or more songs; clearly, Willie Nelson has an amazing work ethic. His sister Bobbie, in a call from her Austin home just before leaving on a European tour, talked about where he learned that work ethic. "We worked really hard, as little kids can do," Bobbie Nelson says. "Our grandparents worked really hard. We went to the cotton fields and the cornfields with them and did all those things with them."

The siblings were raised by their grandparents, Alfred and Nancy Nelson. Alfred was a blacksmith, Nancy a Depression-style working mom doing whatever she could to help the family bank balance — but they were both in music. "Whenever they finished their chores and we had supper in the evening, well, they would sit with a little lap light that we had — we didn't have electricity early on — and they would study the mail-order music they got." And while they were studying, "Willie and I would have to play dominoes or checkers or Old Maid cards and watch them study."

Alfred Nelson died when Bobbie was 9 and Willie was only six-and-a-half years ago; but before he passed on, he had the house electrified — and that simple act is probably why Willie and Bobbie are what they are all these years later. Alfred "got us a radio, a Philco. It was our teacher, actually," Bobbie said. "We could hear music from down at the border and we could hear the Grand Ole Opry. And we picked up radio stations in Dallas that played that beautiful big-band sound. We got an education in music listening to this radio."

You can hear aspects of that education throughout "One Hell Of A Ride." Especially evident are the Spanish influences that come through when Nelson picks his worn Martin guitar, Trigger; but the true wonder is being able to follow the evolution of Nelson's artistry, which begins with his guitar but quickly segues to his unique voice. It's not a classic country voice — but it is also the most expressive, and it works in perfect concert with the deep, clever lyrics and intricate musical phrasing of a Willie Nelson song. "As he has grown with his time and his age and his life, he also has been a student of knowledge," says Bobbie Nelson. "He's just deep and spiritual. His mind goes further than most people's minds."

No Willie Nelson discography would be complete, of course, without some of the songs he did with the Highwaymen — fellow outlaw country stars Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. The Highwaymen show up throughout the collection, in several of the classic unions of Nelson and Jennings, such as 'Good Hearted Woman' and 'Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys'; and Nelson's take on Kris Kristofferson's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night' is nothing less than a redneck Kama Sutra.

"I've only met Willie once, when he came to New York to do the David Letterman show," says box-set producer Al Quaglieri, who has been a producer with CBS and Sony for decades and pretty much specializes in remastered reissues of the label's classic catalog. "My real contact with Willie is via Mickey Raphael, who was kind enough to come to New York to help us complete and mix some bonus tracks for 'Stardust,' the 1999 reissue of the 1978 Nelson classic. 'One Hell of a Ride' is a result of the Sony-BMG merger," says Quaglieri via e-mail. "That union put the bulk of Nelson's catalog at the producer's disposal. The only real problem was choosing among the songs in Nelson's vast repertoire. Musically, with such a rich and substantial catalog, you're always going to leave out someone's favorite track and frustrate them — but I think this set tells a great story and there's nary a dull moment in it."

Despite Willie Nelson's pivotal role as a country songwriter in the '60s, his biggest success didn't come until he broke with country music traditions in the mid-'70s. When Nelson took the bandana from old-time country's neck and tied it around his head of long, stringy hair, his transformation into a country-rock outlaw was complete. In the years that followed, the restless renegade left a legacy of stylistic experimentation that made him impossible to categorize.

On his newly released "Moment of Forever," he expertly navigates a country and rock-strewn terrain that would prove too uneven for most artists. Country star and project co-producer Kenny Chesney's modern sensibilities leave their own footprints on the collection, but it's ultimately Nelson's singular thumbprint that unifies the disc, which is one of his freshest and most well-rounded in years. The opener, 'Over You Again,"' is a striking collision of old and new, revisiting Nelson's ever-present romantic unrest while framing his trademark vocal in atmospheric guitars that echo the spacious sound of Irish rockers U2.

The Kris Kristofferson-penned title cut — his strongest composition in many a year — is a hushed and moving ballad that philosophically contends that even a momentary connection can prove permanently meaningful. Like most of Willie's best work, the track respects, yet somehow transcends, country boundaries, as does 'Keep Me From Blowing Away,' which ranks alongside quintessential Willie numbers like 'Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.' Writer Paul Craft's words appropriately describe the state of an aging man who cannot avoid facing his own fragility, while Willie sings them like a long overdue prayer. The subject of mortality hits closer to home still on a version of Dave Matthews' 'Gravedigger,' which strolls past tombstones to affirm that people of all ages are equally vulnerable to the Grim Reaper.

'When I Was Young and Grandma Wasn't Old' not only takes a look at the continuum of time from the other side, but also recalls the relative innocence of olden days. That same duality of spirit and flesh is evident throughout the eclectic album, from the honky tonk drinking song 'Worry B Gone' to a lengthy, horn-fueled cover of Bob Dylan's gospel-rocker 'Gotta Serve Somebody.' Nelson may be too self-styled to stand for any particular thought or belief, and while that clouds the message, the musical scope and character found on 'Moment of Forever' make it a Willie record for the ages.

In his book, Patoski persuasively argues that Nelson defines Texans more than any person in his lifetime, but it seems more true to say that Nelson represents what we'd like to think Texans are. This state may have produced Karl Rove and George W. Bush — but we'd prefer to think of ourselves as opinionated but non-judgmental; filled with big ideas but not with big egos; informed by history but not chained to it; and fun-loving but not shallow — you know, just like Willie—¦

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