There were more celebrations. In September, Nelson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame at the CMA awards in Nashville, introduced by Johnny Cash with a heartfelt tribute. As he stood on the stage, he gently mocked his old contrary stances towards awards. ‘If you think I’m going to come up here and accept this award when all these guys are just as deserving as I am – you’re damn right I am!’
At precisely the same time as he was being immortalised by his peers, however, he was being evicted from his musical home of eighteen years. His deal with Columbia expired in September and the somewhat half-hearted negotiations foundered primarily on the label’s desire to remove Nelson’s creative control. They were off-loading many of their older acts: country music had become an enormous industry again, in part thanks to the mass popularity of rap and grunge, which alienated many mainstream listeners and drove them towards the unthreatening sounds of new country, dominated by Garth Brooks and a succession of other fresh-faced young men with enormous hats and very small microphones.
The era of Shania Twain, Faith Hill and Lonestar was just around the corner, in which the line between bad pop-rock and bad pop-country would become almost non-existent. Nelson, thank the Lord, was no part of that. Instead, despite the obvious success of his latest album, he was regarded as a piece of living history, and even then he was doing better than most. Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings were all struggling to find a comfortable place.
Columbia had been an unhappy hunting ground for a while. All the old faces had changed, and when the sales began to dry up in the mid-80s the label started exerting more control over Nelson’s product. He had recorded several records which they had refused to release: Sugar Moon, a set of Western swing classics recorded with Merle Haggard’s band, the Strangers; Willie Sings Hank Williams, a truly brilliant record which reunited him with Jimmy Day and reaffirmed the link between one country pioneer and another on classics like ‘Move It On Over’ and rather more obscure gems such as ‘Why Should We Try Anymore’.
‘I love that album, I really do,’ Nelson later said,5 and so he should – both records finally showed up on the mammoth Classic And Unreleased box-set in 1997. Moonlight Becomes You, a standards album recorded some years previously and only released after he’d left Columbia, was also turned down. His problems with the label gave the lie to the frequently quoted misapprehension that he had ‘creative control’. It was an issue which could still fire up the old Nelson ire, over thirty years after he had first thrown in his lot with the money men at the record labels.
Willie Nelson: You want to fight that same battle again with the same prick that you popped before, but [only] if you really want to go through that again. Sometimes I do, because I know he’s out there. And it’s gratifying to pick those fights. In the first place, I know I’m right. If I don’t think I’m right I shouldn’t be there. It’s gotten to the point where I just think it’s funny. You either have to laugh or you kill somebody. Even when they tell you you have artistic control, you don’t. Unless you see it in big letters in your contract: THIS MAN HAS COMPLETE ARTISTIC CONTROL, then you don’t have it.6
In truth, Nelson missed a golden opportunity with the considered success of Across The Borderline. He slipped straight back into the same old bad habits. ‘I read one place that the new album is like hearing about a friend waking up from a coma,’ he said. ‘To me it didn’t seem that way. I’d still been working.’7 It was a comment which dismayed, illustrating as it did his failure to distinguish between run-of-the-mill product and genuinely fine work. What he should have done – and it wouldn’t even have crossed his mind – was give the Family Band a holiday, set up with a vibrant new five-piece group and tour Across The Borderline alongside a new, rejuvenated selection of his classic songs, then follow it up with a record of new original songs. It would have been a mouth-watering prospect and could have taken him onto new levels, both commercially and particularly creatively. He did throw a few of the songs into the achingly predictable live set with the Family Band, but that was the extent of his concession to change.
Instead, the follow-up to Across The Borderline was a standard Nelson release, Moonlight Becomes You, put out by the independent Justice Records, run by his long-time friend Randall Jamail. It had been recorded years earlier with his old Houston pal Paul Buskirk, and was another slant on the Nelson-sings-Tin-Pan-Alley angle. It was far from being a bad record, but it lacked pizzazz or any element of surprise and failed to capitalise on the attention Across The Borderline had generated. For the next two years he was back on the wheel, bouncing between record companies, touring with the same sextet and the same old songs, releasing too many albums which slipped between the tracks: The Healing Hands Of Time, for example, where he performed a mixture of standards and six of his own oft-recorded classics with a slushy 63-piece orchestra slowing and sweetening each and every song. Even if they hadn’t, everyone got the feeling they had heard it all before.
On one level, it almost beggars belief that Nelson had never been busted for drugs, especially when one considers how openly he smoked it and endorsed its benefits. On the other hand, he was particularly well protected, in Texas particularly, and friendships and alliances built over the years generally ensured he was not targeted. Back in the 70s he would travel around the state with a stack of albums in his back seat, handing them out to traffic cops who might have expressed an interest in how fast he was travelling, how much he’d been drinking or what precisely he had been smoking. It usually worked.
Times had changed somewhat, but it still came as a shock and an indignity when he was arrested on the morning of 10 May 1994, on the I-35 at Hewitt, about ten miles south of Waco, right in the middle of his home turf. He had been playing poker with his old sparring partner Zeke Varnon in Hillsboro all night and had decided to pull over on his way back to Austin when the weather turned foggy. Police discovered him at 9 a.m. lying fast asleep in the back of his grey Mercedes, and upon closer inspection they also discovered the roach of a joint in the ashtray and rolling papers on the dashboard. Nelson was then arrested, at which point he indicated there was more marijuana under the floor mat in the front passenger seat. He was taken to McLennan County Jail and charged with possession of less than two ounces of pot, and released on a $500 bond.
David Zettner: Next day, I was over there at the golf course and here comes Willie, the cop, the judge and the lawyers, all playing golf. I asked him afterwards: ‘How’s everything going?’ ‘Oh, cool,’ he says. ‘Nothing to it.’
At a pre-trial hearing on 1 March 1995, Nelson’s lawyers pushed to get the charge dropped on the basis that the two police officers had conducted an illegal search. They also highlighted inconsistencies in their testimonies and audio gaps in the police videotape recordings. Matters seemed somehow to be panning out in Nelson’s favour: one of the policemen who had arrested him, Sergeant Michael Cooper, had already been dismissed from duty. The defence team even called the sheriff of McLennan County, Jack Harwell, as a character witness for Nelson. ‘I’ve known Mr Nelson since the early 50s,’ said the sheriff. ‘Anything Mr Nelson told me I’d believe. I’d go to the bank with it.’
Soon after, the county judge ruled the policemen’s evidence inadmissible on the grounds that there was insufficient cause for a search of the car, and threw the case out of court. Nelson – who was facing six months probation, revocation of his driver’s licence and mandatory drug testing – announced that he had not accepted a plea bargain on principle because his rights had been violated. Nobody, of course, was denying that Nelson had been in possession of the marijuana, it was just that, well, someone somewhere hadn’t been reading the script closely enough.
Willie Nelson: It was a small community cop. I don’t know what he was trying to prove, I think he was just one of those zero-tolerance type guys. Most of the law enforcement people that I know, and know real well, think that it was kind of overreacting, especially since it was a misdemeanour. A tick
et or a fine is normally satisfactory.8
Soon after the end of his legal adventure he was back on the road with the Highwaymen, promoting the last instalment of their decade-long adventure, The Road Goes On Forever, which proved to be an inauspicious title. This time Don Was took care of production duties and pulled the best performance out of them yet, wisely keeping their unison singing down to a bare minimum – those voices never did blend – and instead focusing on one solo performance apiece and elsewhere letting them trade lines. They toured the States through June 1994 and in November visited Australia, New Zealand, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore, a far-flung jaunt which was to prove their swansong. ‘I guess it’s pretty well done for,’ said Waylon Jennings. ‘We’re not going to do it any more. I don’t intend to. Too many people got involved.’9
Nelson and Cash discussed the possibilities of a reunion in 1999 but it came to nothing. Jennings was in serious ill health by that point. The Highwaymen had only succeeded in staying together so long through sheer force of will and mutual affection. Musically, it had been a struggle. In truth, all of them were so bull-headed and set in their ways that the project had been beset by compromises and small disappointments all along the way, from song choices to musicians to business.
Jessi Colter: They found it challenging with just one band, [but] they found a way to do it. Even with opposing managers and this and that, the brotherhood was strong.
Nelson returned from the tour of the Eastern hemisphere, put in a quick stint filming the vacuous Gone Fishin’ with Danny Glover and Joe Pesci, and then headed straight for California in mid-December, playing some unrehearsed and slightly shambolic acoustic shows with Leon Russell at the Coach House. While out West, he spent three days recording at Ocean Way studios with Don Was, who had broached the so-bad-it’s-good idea of taping some of Nelson’s songs in a reggae style. It was a conceit which Nelson was reluctant to embrace; he had very little knowledge of the form and what he had heard didn’t convince or convert him. Nonetheless, he relented. The album had all the hallmarks of a novelty project.
Mickey Raphael: I think he likes Jimmy Cliff, he likes Toots [Hibbert]. For a while I’d bring him stuff and we’d go through different phases. Willie listens to everything. I’d bring him everything under the sun, anything but country music, unless I found a great writer. Somebody said, ‘Well, we can do your tunes with a reggae vibe,’ so that’s kind of how the project evolved.
Was chose twenty Nelson originals for consideration which were then boiled down to around ten. They had already cut a reggae version of ‘Undo The Right’ in Los Angeles earlier in the year with a studio band and Raphael on harmonica. He paid for it himself as he was currently between labels. Was suggested they play the tape of ‘Undo The Right’ for his friend, the head of Island Records Chris Blackwell, the man who had been instrumental in exposing Bob Marley – and in the process reggae in general – to white, mainstream rock audiences in the early 70s. The pair visited Blackwell at his home in Jamaica to determine whether he would be interested in signing Nelson to the label. He was, but it was not really the reggae version of ‘Undo The Right’ that convinced him. Blackwell knew his reggae inside out and was unlikely to have been bowled over by the performance, which was on the formulaic side. ‘We went out and did it with Don Was originally,’ recalls Mickey Raphael, ‘but the players weren’t true Jamaican reggae guys. [They were] studio players trying to play in that way.’ Nelson continued to record reggae versions of his songs in Los Angeles throughout 1996 and 1997 and continually mentioned the project in the press, but Island seemed increasingly reluctant to release it. The album, called Countryman, finally slipped out in the summer of 2005, and was not a successful meeting of cultures.
The music that had really seduced Chris Blackwell was much more traditional. While in Jamaica, Nelson had also played the Island boss a completed version of a self-produced album he had recently made in Pedernales: it was called Spirit, and it was mesmerising. The record had grown out of a long period of re-examination, both personally and musically. He had recently published Willie Nelson: The Lyrics 1957–1994 and overseen the release of his Classic And Unreleased box-set, and both projects involved trawling through hours and hours of old music. As a result, he was more than usually aware of all the dusty corners of his back catalogue, as well as the quality of much of it. He was being reminded of awkward concepts like ‘personal standards’, ‘history’ and ‘legacy’. He was looking to measure up to himself.
The process of rediscovering his muse began in the spring of 1995, when he’d ‘accidentally’ recorded an album with his old 60s band the Offenders: Jimmy Day, Johnny Bush and David Zettner. On one level it was simply a few old friends revisiting the glory days, but it also signified a symbolic blowing away of the cobwebs.
David Zettner: That was one of the funniest things we ever did. Jimmy Day had set it up. Jimmy wanted to record a steel guitar [album] and so we got all the musicians. Then I said, ‘We’ll get Baby John up here, Johnny Bush, he can really have fun on all those old tunes.’ So we got Johnny up there. I guess we’d done about two things, waiting on a piano player, and here comes Willie walking in unannounced. He just looked around and said, ‘My God, the old band’s here, man!’ I saw that little light go off in his head. All of a sudden, him and Jimmy were back there [chatting], and after that little discussion it was a Willie album. We had to practise a couple of them to remember how to do them. God we had fun. Jimmy came to me and said, ‘Is this still my album?’ and Willie said, ‘How much do you want for it?’ Jimmy Day said, ‘Ummm, err, I’ve gotta pay off the car and . . .’ He paid Jimmy a lot of money and said, ‘We’ll just call this The Offenders.’ He bought the rights and everything and Jimmy was very happy.
Those sessions, which went on to provide material for the albums Me And The Drummer and Can’t Get The Hell Out Of Texas, had been engineered by Joe Gracey. They led almost directly to the Spirit album, which couldn’t have been more diametrically different in tone but which also had its genesis in the past. Four of the songs on the album had been written in the late 70s: ‘I Guess I’ve Come To Live Here In Your Eyes’ was recorded for the Honeysuckle Rose soundtrack, while ‘Your Memory Won’t Die In My Grave’ had been cut in Bolugusa in 1976 and ended up on The Hungry Years. ‘She Is Gone’ was on the same album and ‘I’m Not Trying To Forget You’ was also recorded for Columbia. The rest of the material, however, heralded a long-overdue return to sustained, quality songwriting, written in a six-month burst in 1995.
Joe Gracey: I got a call from him saying he wanted to do some song demos. I went up there and set up a mic for his vocals and a mic for ‘Trigger’. No amp. We didn’t talk about it, we just did it, as usual. I put a little two-track DAT tape in the mastering machine and pointed at him to start singing and he did, and at the end of the day he realised it was really a record. He had just published a book of all of his early songs and he was dusting some of those off and then he had some new stuff he had written and pretty soon he had Gimble and Sister and [Jody Payne] in there to play along with him on stuff and we were making a record. I was sweating bullets, because when you record directly to two-track masters, you have no way to correct a mistake or revise a bad mix. It is all right there and all live to tape and you better get it right. I assure you, I didn’t want to have to go out there and ask him to do it all over again because I forgot to turn something up, or on.
Spirit was as dry and spare as anything he had ever done. ‘Barren,’ he called it: no bass, no drums, no electric guitar, no fat or expendable notes or nuances. No rhythm. It was the sound of a dustbowl string quartet playing Tex-Mex chamber music, and it reflected upon a period of concomitant aridness in his spiritual life. Nelson’s much-repeated mantra that he discards any negative songs was given short shrift here, giving some credence to Neil Reshen’s claim that ‘Willie only writes when he’s sad. Most of the great songs that he wrote were when he was miserable.’ The album is the sound of a 62-year-old looking back at hi
s life and facing up to certain indisputable facts and creeping doubts; the new songs simply couldn’t have been written by a younger man.
Much of the time the listener feels he is eavesdropping as Nelson recounts conversations he has had with God following the emotional upheavals of the last few years: ‘Too Sick To Pray’ makes his apologies for his absence and urges his maker to ‘think of the family, Lord’; ‘I Thought About You, Lord’ is a wide ranging meditation on the the way he lives his life and the way he loves. The record is book-ended by the desolate instrumental ‘Matador’, conjuring up an ominous image of one man facing a powerful and dangerous opponent: for the matador it is merely the bull. For Nelson it is life itself.
Spirit is a quiet masterpiece, and again prompted comparisons with Red Headed Stranger, which Nelson himself positively encouraged. In an interview just before he made Spirit he gave a clue as to why he was still somewhat obsessed with his 1975 classic, and in doing so he touched on one of the most important and revealing strands of his own survival instinct.
Willie Nelson: To me, on that album, the ending isn’t a happy ending. It was just an ending. Even though he had gotten away with those things, he had to live with them. No matter what you [do] you don’t get away with it, because you know what you did. Is there life after that? Can you still go on after you’ve done something as horrible as that? The answer is always that you can, if you can forgive yourself. That’s the big one. We all fall and we try to get up. That’s life.10
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