Music for Grownups: Full Nelson
Have You Listened to Willie Nelson Lately?
By: Richard Gehr | Source: AARP.org | Date Posted: April 2008
Richard Gehr is a veteran music critic based in New York City.
The good news is that the constantly touring Texas troubadour sounds pretty much the same as ever. Nelson's voice is probably the most exquisitely comfortable delivery system for lyrics ever created: always changing course, always remaining the same over the course of more than 300 albums and a few thousand shows. The bad news...well, there really doesn't seem to be any.
If you haven't listened to Willie Nelson lately, this would be a timely moment to make his reacquaintance. And that’s not only because he celebrates his 75th birthday on April 29. This month sees the release of "One Hell of a Ride," a four-CD career retrospective. Also due this month is the publication of "Willie Nelson: An Epic Life," an astonishingly detailed, 576-page biography written by Joe Nick Patoski, a fellow Texan and long-time chronicler of Willie's world.
Earlier this year, Nelson released "Moment of Forever," yet another solid notch on his country-music pistol, and, in June, the jazz-oriented Blue Note label will release "Two Men With the Blues,” a live album documenting Nelson's 2007 Great American Songbook sessions with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. A quick glance at his tour schedule reveals that Nelson will be celebrating his birthday with a gig in Copenhagen, Denmark—and that he has at least 60 more shows booked through the end of summer.
On the road again, indeed.
Nelson's life is a story of constant movement. Born in 1933 to a teenaged couple in Abbott, Texas, he famously bucked the Nashville establishment by returning to his home state for good in 1965 after composing his first classic tunes, "Crazy," "Nite Life," and "Funny How Time Slips Away." These appeared among country-politan classics, such as the hauntingly beautiful "Hello Walls," "Mr. Record Man," and "One in a Row."
But “home” is a relative term for a man so much more comfortable on the road that there were times he slept on his tour bus even when ostensibly back at the ranch. For Nelson, the road was always both problem and solution. Divorced three times, due largely to the temptations of groupies? Go back on the road. Children dropping out of school and acquiring drug habits because Dad's never around? Go back on the road. Learn, as Nelson did in 1991, that the Internal Revenue Service would like you to pay them $16.7 million right now? There was only one solution: "He figured he could play every club he knew on the right side of I-35 from Laredo all the way to Canada," wrote Patoski, "then turn around and head south, playing at the clubs on the other side of the highway for the rest of his life."
As fascinating a study of Zen-like repose amid passively generated chaos as it is, Nelson's ultimate story lies in his music. You can hear it in his mahogany voice no less than in the flurries of swinging notes played on Nelson's shell-shocked Gibson guitar, Trigger, an instrument as worn and sturdy as its owner. And it's in the unique mixture of hillbilly music, Western swing, gypsy jazz, outlaw country, Great American Songbook material, countless duets, and “Whiskey River”-esque road tunes he's been playing for six decades that’s all nicely distilled into "One Hell of a Ride."
In fact, if you haven't listened to Willie Nelson lately, what have you been waiting for?
If you haven't listened to Willie Nelson lately, this would be a timely moment to make his reacquaintance. And that’s not only because he celebrates his 75th birthday on April 29. This month sees the release of "One Hell of a Ride," a four-CD career retrospective. Also due this month is the publication of "Willie Nelson: An Epic Life," an astonishingly detailed, 576-page biography written by Joe Nick Patoski, a fellow Texan and long-time chronicler of Willie's world.
Earlier this year, Nelson released "Moment of Forever," yet another solid notch on his country-music pistol, and, in June, the jazz-oriented Blue Note label will release "Two Men With the Blues,” a live album documenting Nelson's 2007 Great American Songbook sessions with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. A quick glance at his tour schedule reveals that Nelson will be celebrating his birthday with a gig in Copenhagen, Denmark—and that he has at least 60 more shows booked through the end of summer.
On the road again, indeed.
Nelson's life is a story of constant movement. Born in 1933 to a teenaged couple in Abbott, Texas, he famously bucked the Nashville establishment by returning to his home state for good in 1965 after composing his first classic tunes, "Crazy," "Nite Life," and "Funny How Time Slips Away." These appeared among country-politan classics, such as the hauntingly beautiful "Hello Walls," "Mr. Record Man," and "One in a Row."
But “home” is a relative term for a man so much more comfortable on the road that there were times he slept on his tour bus even when ostensibly back at the ranch. For Nelson, the road was always both problem and solution. Divorced three times, due largely to the temptations of groupies? Go back on the road. Children dropping out of school and acquiring drug habits because Dad's never around? Go back on the road. Learn, as Nelson did in 1991, that the Internal Revenue Service would like you to pay them $16.7 million right now? There was only one solution: "He figured he could play every club he knew on the right side of I-35 from Laredo all the way to Canada," wrote Patoski, "then turn around and head south, playing at the clubs on the other side of the highway for the rest of his life."
As fascinating a study of Zen-like repose amid passively generated chaos as it is, Nelson's ultimate story lies in his music. You can hear it in his mahogany voice no less than in the flurries of swinging notes played on Nelson's shell-shocked Gibson guitar, Trigger, an instrument as worn and sturdy as its owner. And it's in the unique mixture of hillbilly music, Western swing, gypsy jazz, outlaw country, Great American Songbook material, countless duets, and “Whiskey River”-esque road tunes he's been playing for six decades that’s all nicely distilled into "One Hell of a Ride."
In fact, if you haven't listened to Willie Nelson lately, what have you been waiting for?
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