Willie Nelson (56 page)

“He reminds me of ET,” Joe Gracey said of Willie, invoking Ernest Tubb. “They have the same work ethic and they just get out there and play.” Willie also followed ET’s lead in his desire to help others out once he was in a position to do so. Gracey observed the respect and deference Willie showed to Ray Price when they recorded the Grammy-nominated
Run That by Me One More Time
album. “Willie assumed the role of session leader, but they’d work it out together.” There was little planning or preproduction, and a whole lot of “Let’s try this” and “Remember this one?” That project took all of two days.

Gracey was working the audio console years before at Pedernales Studio for the recording of
Spirit,
the 1996 album that marked a dramatic shift in the live sound of Willie Nelson and Family.

The Family Band was on a tour break while Willie and Bobbie were going to do an acoustic brother-and-sister show at the Greer Garson Theatre in Santa Fe. Jody Payne joined the bill when he called Willie and told him about a new downsized guitar he’d gotten. “How ’bout if I go with you?” he proposed. Jody climbed aboard Honeysuckle Rose in Columbus, Ohio, and played the new instrument all the way to Santa Fe. “It was really, really a different thing for me,” Jody said.

After the performance in Santa Fe, the three of them went back to Austin, where Willie summoned Joe Gracey so the three, along with fiddler Johnny Gimble, could record. “We played all that afternoon,” remembered Jody. “I left the next morning.”

“Willie totally controlled the whole record,” Joe Gracey said. “He loves to record and he hates turning it into a chore. He’s not into splicing and dicing. When it came time for sequencing
Spirit,
he turned it all over to me and said, ‘Finish it.’ He didn’t review the mixes every day. He sent me to master the tapes in Nashville. Willie likes me because (a) I love voices, and (b) I mix them loud.”

Willie liked the atmosphere of
Spirit
so much he decided to downsize the Family Band on their next run on the road as well, taking only Bobbie, Jody, and Mickey as his band, with Paul coming along to collect the money. But after being drowned out by a loud crowd at Tramp’s in New York, Willie suggested expanding the quartet. “Let’s get Paul some drums,” he said, still wanting to keep the groove spare. Paul called his brother Billy to come back on the road as drum tech.

“I had been setting up a full kit for Paul prior to that,” Billy English said. “The tour to promote
Spirit
was eighteen shows, and after nine shows, Paul called while I was producing a CD on a friend up in Colorado Springs and said Willie wanted me and Bee to come out for the last part of this tour.” But Willie gave Billy specific orders: “Get rid of the timbals and all the loud, heavy percussion and go to the subtle stuff—triangles, wind chimes, salt shakers, things like that. We’re going to have just one snare drum, not a kit.” Paul wasn’t too happy with the simple setup at first, but the more shows they played, the more he embraced the tamped-down ambience.

The Willie Nelson wall of sound was now infused with subtlety. For the first time in years, Willie’s voice and guitar were front and center. Bobbie’s piano was as distinctive a complement to Willie’s voice and guitar as Mickey’s harmonica. “It was totally different from what we had with the two drummers and two bass players,” Jody said. “That was a rompin’, stompin’ band, don’t get me wrong. This was the same amount of energy, only not overpowering.”

Willie wanted the lighting the same way, dropping the lighting truck driver and lighting crew, leaving only Budrock the lighting director to do the job. The road caravan dropped to three buses and one tractor-trailer.

Later, Willie added jazz guitarist Jackie King in the wake of Grady Martin’s death in 2001, much to the displeasure of the regular band. “Willie asked him to come out and play two songs,” complained Mickey Raphael. “He never left. Willie liked his playing, but every song he’d play all over it.” It didn’t help that Jackie thought of himself as a virtuoso and insisted on bringing along his wife on tour. The band cheered when Willie informed them Jackie was leaving. In Jackie’s absence, Willie’s guitar led the way again.

B
Y
now, it had become obvious there were two kinds of albums—Mark albums and Willie albums. Mark albums were projects put together by Mark Rothbaum as a means of maintaining a high profile for Willie and keeping his career fresh. Willie and Rob Thomas, Willie and Ryan Adams, Willie produced by James Stroud in Nashville, Willie with Wynton Marsalis’s jazz band—those were Mark albums.

The strategy frequently worked. Willie’s collaboration with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his quintet showed the upside of taking creative risks. Mark initiated negotiations with Wynton Marsalis and his people (Mark’s history with Miles Davis opened doors in the jazz community), and four nights were booked in the Allen Room at Lincoln Center in New York, where Willie spent two days rehearsing before performing with the tapes rolling. It did not hurt that Willie’s jazz sense had been informed by New Orleans jazz as well as Django Reinhardt’s gypsy swing. Not only was Willie in musical sync with Louis Armstrong, Wynton’s primary influence, he comported himself much like Armstrong did, appealing to audiences far more diverse than the music scene he emerged from and serving as an ambassador of good vibes as well as good music. Satchmo and Willie were American originals who made music that sounded like comfort food.

Sometimes, though, the strategy didn’t work.
The Great Divide,
released in 2002, was in the tradition of Carlos Santana’s
Supernatural,
using the same producer, Matt Serletic, and bringing in the same guest vocalist, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, whose masculine, emotive voice returned Santana to the charts with the single “Smooth.” Thomas’s self-penned collaboration with Willie, “Maria (Shut Up and Kiss Me),” did not repeat Santana’s hit-single success (maybe it was the disco whistle in the background), but it did get Willie airplay on some noncountry radio stations and legitimized Willie with a certain segment of a younger generation previously unfamiliar with his work. “He’s the America we would like to get back to,” Rob Thomas said of Willie, as if he’d gone away.

The rest of that album was a strange brew, matching Willie with redneck hip-hopper Kid Rock on “Last Stand in the Open Country,” one of the first protest songs against urban sprawl, with L.A. pop-rocker Sheryl Crow on “Be There for You,” with Texas pop-country singer Lee Ann Womack on “Mendocino County Line,” with the bluesy singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt on “You Remain,” and with rhythm and blues smoothie Brian McKnight on the ballad “Don’t Fade Away.” The album achieved the intended effect of winning converts, although among the faithful the project did little more than affirm Willie’s willingness to try anything.

Songbird,
another Mark album, which Willie made with alt-country rocker Ryan Adams and his band the Cardinals, released in 2006, was a critical and commercial dud despite Willie’s inspired cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” One fan in Salt Lake City mailed his copy of the CD to Willie’s fan club, accompanied by a note that read, “Tell that producer not to set foot in Utah.”

Milk Cow Blues,
a blues album released in 2000, was a Willie-Mark hybrid. Willie and his nephew Freddy Fletcher came up with the idea, putting together a backing ensemble that largely consisted of the house band at Antone’s nightclub in Austin, including guitarists Derek O’Brien and Jimmie Vaughan, bassist Jon Blondell, keyboardist Riley Osbourn, and drummer George Rains. Mark’s role was rounding up blues superstars to join Willie in duets—B. B. King on “Night Life” and “The Thrill Is Gone,” Francine Reed on “Milk Cow Blues” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Keb’ Mo’ on “Outskirts of Town,” Jonny Lang on “Rainy Day Blues” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” Susan Tedeschi on “Crazy” and “Kansas City,” Kenny Wayne Shepherd on “Texas Flood,” and Doctor John on “Fool’s Paradise” and “Black Night.”

The 2005 reggae album
Countryman,
another Willie album produced by Don Was, was inspired by Willie’s and Jamaican Rastas’ shared appreciation of marijuana and reggae’s backbeat. Ten years in the making, the album featured two Jimmy Cliff classics, “The Harder They Come” and “Sitting in Limbo,” and a handful of Willie’s 1960s vintage weepers such as “One in a Row,” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth,” “Undo the Right,” and “I’ve Just Destroyed the World” (written with Ray Price), with Jamaican-style beats and sound effects such as stretching out the steel guitar with reverb. The project matched Willie with another unexpectedly compatible duet partner in Toots Hibbert, the soulful lead singer of Toots and the Maytals, who joined him for a reading of Johnny Cash’s “I’m a Worried Man.”

His 2006 tribute to songwriter Cindy Walker, produced by his old friend Fred Foster, was one of Willie’s most heartfelt recordings ever, songwriter to songwriter. Cindy was born in Mart, twenty miles southeast of Willie’s hometown of Abbott fifteen years before he was. She was successfully composing songs as a teenager (“Casa de Mañana,” the theme song for Billy Rose’s lavish supper club in Fort Worth in 1936) before going to California, where she was discovered by Bing Crosby, who did her song “Lone Star Trail.” She went on to write hits like “In the Misty Moonlight,” covered by Dean Martin, “Blue Canadian Rockies,” covered by Gene Autry, “You Don’t Know Me,” cowritten and covered by Eddy Arnold and covered by Ray Charles, “Distant Drums,” covered by Jim Reeves, and “Dream Baby,” made famous by Roy Orbison.

Cindy wrote prolifically for Bob Wills, including such hits as “You’re from Texas,” “What Makes Bob Holler,” “Cherokee Maiden,” “When You Leave Amarillo,” “Bubbles in My Beer,” and all thirty-nine tunes for the eight films Wills did for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s. A spinster whose love for Wills was said to be unrequited (although she did coauthor “Sugar Moon” with Bob), Cindy lived most of her adult life with her mother in the Texas town of Mexia.

“Willie and I had talked about an album of Cindy Walker songs years ago because he respected her writing so much,” Fred Foster said of the “Swingin’ Cowgirl from Texas,” regarded as country’s finest female composer. “It never got done. Other things got in the way. One day Cindy called. She said she had a song she wanted to get to Willie Nelson. She sent it to me and I sent it to Willie. He said to hold the song; let’s do a whole album of her songs. She liked to have fainted when I told her that he wanted her to send a bunch of songs. She sent sixty-two songs.” Willie and Fred winnowed them down to thirteen songs for the album.

For
You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker,
Fred recorded instrumental tracks with a scratch vocalist focusing on the interplay between fiddler Johnny Gimble and steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, who both had deep histories with Willie. Willie came in and did vocals, once with forty-six close personal friends with him in the control room.

Cindy liked what she heard. “I’ve had many fine recordings. But Willie’s are the only ones I’ve believed,” she told Fred.

A week after the album was released, in March 2006, Cindy Walker died at the age of eighty-seven.

D
AYS
after three commercial jets were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing more than three thousand people, a group of entertainers gathered in a studio for a somber, emotionally charged performance and fund-raising telethon broadcast nationally as “America: A Tribute to Heroes.” The studio setting was stark. There were no announcers, voice-overs, crawlers at the bottom of the screen identifying the performers, no audience. The players simply played, letting their music speak for them.

Bruce Springsteen opened the program with a spiritual benediction, “My City of Ruins.” Billy Joel did “New York State of Mind.” Dave Matthews sang a plaintive “Everyday.” Tom Petty played a defiant “Won’t Back Down.” Alicia Keys intoned “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” Neil Young did John Lennon’s “Imagine.” U2 performed “Walk On.” Paul Simon reprised “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Celine Dion achieved a serviceable impression of Kate Smith on “God Bless America.” Hip-hop giant Wyclef Jean covered Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sang a wrenching version of “The Long Road.” But it was Willie who led the gathering in the closing number, “America the Beautiful.” He was the voice, and the face, of the nation.

He was still country at heart. Willie had returned to the country Top 10 singles chart in 2002 for the first time in twelve years by singing a duet with Toby Keith on “Whiskey for My Men, Beer for My Horses,” a nostalgic Old West story about chasing down bad guys that held the number one position on the
Billboard
country chart for six weeks. Toby, a young heartthrob from Oklahoma, sold Willie on the collaboration by telling him the song title. Toby Keith followed up the single with a patriotic song supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”; Willie followed with the quiet recording of an antiwar hymn he wrote on Christmas Day 2003 “after watching three hours of bombs on Christmas Day.” Willie told his friend Frank Oakley he didn’t write “What Happened to Peace on Earth?” as a Democrat or Republican but as a Christian. The recording was released quietly as a free download on the Internet rather than on a mainstream record label. He was wary of being “Dixie-Chicked” for his antiwar stance. Several months earlier, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the multiplatinum Texas country act the Dixie Chicks had been blacklisted from country radio playlists after lead singer Natalie Maines from Lubbock told an audience in London, “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Despite their opposing politics, Toby and Willie’s mutual admiration was genuine. Toby recorded a hilarious tribute song called “Weed with Willie” in which he swore he’d never smoke Willie’s potent pot again. “Beer for My Horses” began an extended professional relationship with Toby’s producer James Stroud.

Stroud produced the 2004 album
It Will Always Be,
a Mark album that was the kind of classic Nashville assembly-line production Willie had so famously rejected thirty years before. The music tracks were laid down in Nashville with studio musicians based there. He did the vocal tracks back at Pedernales, just like he had recorded with Fred Foster. “I had a lot of faith in James and the Nashville musicians,” Willie said. “Whether I could add the feel or not without the musicians, that was a challenge. I think maybe next time we’ll try it the other way, just to see if there’s a difference. But I thought James got the best musicians possible to do this album and help me put together what I think are some good songs.”