Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Later he would endorse almost anything: ‘Willie jeans’, the Gap, Old Whiskey River Bourbon, adverts with Waylon Jennings for Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza and, finally, the inevitable commercial for an accountancy firm. It wasn’t just the money that was important in these matters, though it was obviously welcome. The deals were initially designed to illustrate publicly that Nelson was still in business – that he wasn’t destitute or hiding away, but was out there doing what he had always done and was, in Mark Rothbaum’s phrase, ‘corporately attractive’.

  Nonetheless, it opened him up to a certain amount of criticism and ridicule. One of fellow Texan Bill Hicks’s comic routines at the time centred on his detestation of musicians who advertise products. ‘You do a commercial, you’re off the artistic roll call for ever, and that goes for everyone . . . except Willie Nelson. Twenty-four million dollar tax bill, Willie was a little looser than the rest of us. I just avert my eyes when he sings about tacos, you know what I mean? Is he finished yet? No? Oh, poor Willie. Poor fucking Willie. Oh God, let’s pass the hat. Get him off the Taco Bell commercial! We gotta save Willie!’ Nelson was having none of it.

  Willie Nelson: Hey, don’t even start on me about selling out. I’ve heard it all before and my dues are paid – in full.11

  There was a more serious impact on his routine. In late 1991, he signed a contract to perform throughout the spring and summer of the following year in Branson, Missouri, a pretty resort in the Ozark mountains. The deal had the merits of a steadier, guaranteed pay cheque which was easier for the IRS to keep tabs on, as well as fewer travel and booking costs. Branson had started with one venue in 1983 and had ballooned. Now, with two dozen theatres almost exclusively devoted to country music acts, it had become a gold mine.

  It was a down-home theme park, a place where acts came when they were sick of the road: they would buy a theatre, plaster their own name on it, and come and play extended residencies for long periods throughout the year then go away and count their money. Big touring acts such as Kenny Rogers, Loretta Lynn and Glen Campbell would pop in, but some of the regular acts were of a lower calibre: Shoji Tabuchi, for example, the Japanese violinist who incorporated a little country fiddling into his schmaltzy, Vegas-style routine.

  How the idea of dropping anchor in such a place was conceived and agreed upon by Nelson is hard to fathom; perhaps his hands were tied. Branson – more specifically the Ozark Theater – was to be his home and primary work place for the next six months, during which he was supposed to play 144 shows with Merle Haggard also on the bill. ‘It will be nice to sit in one spot for a while,’ he said beforehand, presumably through clenched teeth and with his fingers crossed behind his back.12

  Predictably, it soon became a trial. Branson was only a small town, with a population of 4,000, and it was utterly consumed by its new industry. An estimated four million people passed through each year, and acts were expected to be accessible to the public. Although Nelson was always happy to sign as many autographs as he could directly after a show, he did not relish living in a goldfish bowl.

  Paul English: Branson was very, very hard. It was like doing time. Willie and I stayed in a hotel that was on the same parking lot as the theatre. When you got off from work there was a big crowd there – you [couldn’t] go to a restaurant or something like that. We had to buy food and keep it in the little mini-suite in the hotel. We had a microwave and a very small refrigerator, and we had to keep cereal and everything and just made the best of it. It was like doing time.

  Nelson arrived in May, and every Sunday he and English would play golf together. One day they played 45 holes and then performed a concert in the evening. There was not much else to do. It felt like premature retirement, a slow, living death. The audiences wanted more than just a singer: they wanted someone to crack jokes and show off, an ‘entertainer’ in the most vacuous sense of the word. For all his penchant for Vegas, he was not programmed for cabaret. He cut and run less than halfway into the contracted engagement, and a second Branson season planned for 1993 was quickly and quietly abandoned with the explanation – directly contradicting his earlier statement – that ‘he didn’t like being in one place for a long time’.13

  In later years when he performed ‘Me And Paul’ in concert Nelson would substitute Branson for Nashville when he sang the line ‘I guess Nashville was the roughest.’ He was relieved to get out of there. It had been no fun, but it was another one of those tests of fortitude and mutual loyalty that brought everyone closer together.

  Paul English: We worked five or six nights a week. Most people would put their band on salary, right? And the crew. Well, Willie didn’t do that. We all got paid just like we were on the road. For every show. We made more per show than the other musicians did per week. The driver got paid every day, and he drove about fifty yards forwards and then backed up fifty yards. That’s how you keep people together for 35 years.

  He came up for air and toured from July through to the end of October with the Family Band, relishing the feel of the tarmac beneath the wheels on the bus. Along the way he proclaimed his support for independent Presidential candidate Ross Perot (although Bill Clinton was a nice guy too, apparently, and he performed at his inaugural concert the following year) and ducked out for a few weeks in August for a series of shows with the Highwaymen.

  On 1 November, the day after the tour ended with two shows in Austin, he played a free concert on the steps of the State Capitol to raise funds for a restoration programme for the building. The Nashville Network dropped some coins in the box and filmed the show, capturing a flawless piece of work and a rare opportunity to see him perform solo. As those dark eyes looked out from the steps onto the sea of people below him, then gazed over their heads to scan Congress Avenue and the Austin skyline stretching beyond, Nelson probably didn’t linger on the thought that it was almost exactly two years to the day since the IRS had shown up on his doorstep, just thirty miles away from where he now stood. Everything in the past was dead and gone. He was shook up, cleansed by the fires of adversity and ready to take his talent seriously again.

  I’VE BEEN OUT HERE SO LONG

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about promotion.

  It’s an ugly word. He doesn’t care about it at all. He does things backwards: most artists will only tour in order to promote a new album, but he releases a record simply to remind people he’s still out there on the road. If a new song isn’t up to scratch it won’t make it into the set list of his show. Very few do.

  ‘It’s hard to put new stuff in there,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘If I start putting new stuff in there just to promote a new record, to me that’s just not a good enough reason. Just because a record came out doesn’t matter to me.’

  He is playing a show tonight. It will closely resemble most of the shows he has played for the past twenty years. He will play precisely no songs from his latest record. Few people in the audience will really care.

  He smiles. He is getting to the point.

  ‘Really, I like the old stuff better,’ he says. ‘It’s already proven itself to be good for me. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s great.’

  Perhaps it’s a long, slow revenge on the record companies that messed him around for years. ‘Oh, the record company really doesn’t realise where I’m at or where I am or what I’m doing,’ he says all at once.

  The voice is slow and completely devoid of any unpleasant emotions. He wears a look on his face which strongly suggests he hasn’t even thought about doing anything other than exactly what he wanted for quite some time. He flicks ash onto the table, and it rolls towards the cardboard No Smoking sign.

  ‘It’s not their fault and it’s not my fault,’ he continues. ‘I could guarantee you that I could go the rest of life and not play a song from my latest album and nobody there would know. They don’t check on me that much. It’s not like I’m a new artist where they’re there every night to see what I’m playing. I’m not really dependent on what my la
st record did. I’ve been out here so long . . .’

  He trails off and looks around, reminding himself of where he is. He comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter. It’s a hotel. There is a show to play later. He is ‘out here’.

  ‘I’ve been out here longer than they have,’ he says finally. ‘That’s just a fact.’

  Nobody argues.

  13. 1993–1998

  STANDING BACKSTAGE AT Bob Dylan’s thirtieth anniversary concert in Madison Square Garden on 16 October 1992, waiting to perform Dylan’s ‘What Was It You Wanted?’, Nelson watched Sinead O’Connor wilt beneath a violent, ugly tide of hostility. Two weeks earlier the Irish singer had torn up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live with the words ‘Fight The Real Enemy’, and now the torrent of boos and catcalls from the crowd swept her off stage in the embrace of Kris Kristofferson before she had even started to sing. Nelson gave her a couple of minutes to compose herself and then gently enquired, ‘Now, you’re still going to come and sing with me tomorrow, aren’t you?’

  The following day O’Connor duly ducked into Power Station studio in New York and recorded an apt version of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s quivering duet ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Nelson for his new album, Across The Borderline. The context of the recording was significant, for it was partly Dylan’s rejuvenation as an artist which charted a navigable course for Nelson to follow through the 90s.

  Also in attendance at Madison Square Garden that night were two men who had steered Dylan out of the murky waters of the mid-80s and helped him dream up a meaningful future: Don Was and Daniel Lanois. Creatively, Dylan had made his return to the land of the living in 1989 with Oh Mercy, which had been dragged out of him by U2 and Peter Gabriel producer Lanois; the follow-up, Under The Red Sky, was produced by Was, bass player with professional eccentrics Was (Not Was) and a man increasingly in demand as a producer.

  With his manager Mark Rothbaum doing the groundwork, Nelson hooked up first with Was and then Lanois in the 90s, and their participation similarly revitalised his own slumbering muse, coaxing and cajoling some of his very best music out of him. In between, he returned to Texas and cut a self-produced album with his family and friends that was so personal, so honest and stark in the face of everything he had gone through in the past few years that it’s a wonder he ever released it at all. At the end of the decade he could reflect upon three wildly diverse albums whose quality and consistency were unmatched by anything he had recorded since the early 70s. In doing so, he was able to trace a line back to 1992 and the making of Across The Borderline with Don Was.

  ‘Don’t Give Up’ was an unusual choice of song for Nelson, but far from randomly selected. From the start, Was was firmly in control of the vision for the album and determined to impose a clear identity and focus upon it. Throughout the recording process he placed Nelson’s talents in the hands of crack musicians and – in general – let them loose on tremendous songs. It was the same trick he had pulled off a few years earlier with Bonnie Raitt’s Nick Of Time album. As Nelson admitted, the producer’s long reach gave him the freedom to simply concentrate on the emotions of the songs and, more importantly, on his singing, while Was booked the sessions, drilled the musicians and hand-picked the songs.

  Willie Nelson: Don brought the songs to the studio, and there were several of them that I said, ‘Well, that’s a great song but that’s not me.’ ‘Don’t Give Up’ was one. But the more I listened to those songs, the more I said, ‘Yeah. There is an infectious something there.’1

  Was had chosen songs that subtly toyed with perceptions of Nelson as he neared his sixtieth birthday, conjuring up a mood that veered between elegiac and defiant: when he softly sings ‘you paid the price to come so far’ on the title cut, it is almost unbearably moving in light of his own troubles. On Dylan’s ‘What Was It You Wanted?’ he conjures up the edgy, paranoid contempt of a man who spends his time constantly surrounded by people who are looking for something from him, whether it be a member of his family, his clique or the IRS. Small wonder he initially rejected the idea of singing it, but he digs deep and finally unearths a steely, slightly scary new voice to express the sentiment.

  The personal resonance of ‘Don’t Give Up’ is ultimately self-explanatory; Willie Dixon’s classic jazz-blues ‘I Love The Life I Live’ is a wry reflection on the ups and down of an easy-come-easy-go attitude to money. On Lyle Lovett’s ‘Farther Down The Line’ Nelson plays the amused old sage who has loved and lost a thousand times, passing on his sympathetic advice to a younger cowboy whose heart keeps being painfully unsaddled.

  His own ‘Still Is Still Moving To Me’ is a Zen update of ‘On The Road Again’, a less equivocal, more philosophical exploration of the body’s vibrations and his constant need for motion: ‘I swim like a fish in the sea all the time/ But if that’s what it takes to be free I don’t mind.’ Even Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’, which Simon had first offered to him back in 1986 and which Nelson wasn’t keen on initially, held a deeper, more personal meaning than he realised.

  Paul Simon: [Willie] thought it was about Elvis, whereas it’s about losing a love, and healing. But I didn’t want to say it to him: ‘You’ve lost a son.’ Willie finally did get the song as he sang it in the studio, exulting that ‘this is a great fucking song. There’s a lot more here than “let’s go to Graceland”.’2

  This combined effect created by these song choices was both powerful and deliberate: to create a myth-like Nelson, at once outlaw, preacher, sage and above all survivor. But without being in any way burdened by a concept, Across The Borderline also read as a modern day parable of the American dream, opening with a reading of Paul Simon’s hymn to the immigrant, ‘American Tune’, a song which on paper seems singularly unsuited for Nelson but is, in actuality, one on which he simply shines. ‘Across The Borderline’ was a beautiful, cautionary serenade to the plight of Mexican immigrants and indeed anyone trapped or stymied by their circumstances. ‘Don’t Give Up’ is a hymn to all blue-collar workers, John Hiatt’s ‘Most Unoriginal Sin’ relocates the story of Adam and Eve to an archetypal saloon bar, while ‘Heartland’ is an elegy to a way of life that was dying.

  ‘Heartland’ was credited as a co-write between Nelson and Dylan, but it was not quite as dramatic as that sounds. Dylan had given Was a cassette of a hummed melody with the word ‘heartland’ sung at intervals, and Nelson had taken it away and finished it. It is an explicit if clumsy war cry on behalf of the farmers: ‘The bankers are taking my home and my land away/ My American dream/ Fell apart at the seams.’ Dylan came in to the studio to sing his part.

  Willie Nelson: It’s one of those surreal things that happen in your life. One of those times when you say, ‘Well, God, that just happened didn’t it?’ You still can’t believe Bob Dylan was just sitting over there and he was just singing and now he’s left. He wasn’t there long. He came in and did his part and left.3

  The album was studded with such cameos: Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Mose Allison, David Crosby, O’Connor, but they were used unobtrusively. Indeed, the much touted ‘duet’ concept – which had recently become a cliché, used by everyone from Sinatra to Ray Charles with great commercial success – instinctively put some people off, but it was a misreading of the record. Only three of the songs were truly duets, and it was far from being a bitty, gratuitous album. Despite the fact that it was created piecemeal – a song here; a song there – throughout 1992, the record flowed.

  The majority of the work was done at the Power Station in the autumn, but as always there was a Texan angle: four of the songs were recorded at Pedernales with the Family Band and Johnny Gimble, while a further two were cut in Los Angeles. The achingly lovely title song, written by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Jim Dickinson, had been the first track recorded, cut in Dublin while the Highwaymen were on their European tour in April, the stage band and Kris Kristofferson lending support.

  The principal studio band in New York consisted of several Highwaymen �
�� including Mickey Raphael – and assorted session players, and they achieved a tasteful and energetic mix of understated acoustic textures. Above all, Nelson’s voice was used to brilliant effect, in many ways illustrating how little he exerted himself on stage, too often skating through his songs on autopilot. It was not, however, a record that heralded the return of Nelson the songwriter, although there were suggestions that he had tried.

  Willie Nelson: Sometimes I get guilty because I haven’t written in a while, and I’ll make myself sit down and write something. But usually it’s not that great because it’s forced. The best stuff I write comes whenever I least expect it.4

  Aside from ‘Still Is Still Moving To Me’ and the Dylan collaboration, the only other new song was the simple ‘Valentine’, written for his son Lukas and only just avoiding pure schmaltz. However, the album reaffirmed his peerless talents as an interpreter of both songs and emotions. More than that, Across The Borderline indicated that the man still cared about his craft, and remains one of his most enjoyable records. It received a whole host of great reviews and sold 400,000 copies within three weeks of its release in March 1993, climbing to No. 75 on the pop charts, his best showing for almost a decade. There is no question that the IRS publicity had put him back in the spotlight and the record benefited from that, but it was also a recognition of the quality of the work. He was back on the map.

  It was shaping up to be a landmark year. He turned sixty at the end of April and threw a musical birthday bash in Austin. The Big Six-O was filmed over two days and featured a cast to die for: B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt doing ‘Night Life’, Ray Charles on ‘A Song For You’ and ‘Seven Spanish Angels’, Bob Dylan joining Nelson on ‘Pancho And Lefty’, Waylon Jennings on ‘Good Hearted Woman’. Paul Simon and Emmylou Harris were also there, as were a good representation of the Nelson clan, from Lana, the eldest at forty, to Micah, the youngest at three, who at one point grabbed the purse of a woman in the crowd. ‘That’s how we’re paying off the IRS,’ smiled his mother.