Larry Schwartz
WILLIE Nelson has a special affection for Australia. He likens it to the Lone Star State. “You know, the Texans and Australians are very similar in a lot of ways,” he says. “There’s a lot of cowboys, a lot of free-thinking people over there. Independent-minded folks. And I felt right at home.”
Nelson, who tours here next month, says his interest in Australia was first fired by director Fred Schepisi, for whom he worked on the 1982 movie Barbarosa.
“I learned a lot about Australia from him. I wanted to go over there and check it out and, sure enough, everything that I had heard was true.”
What was it that he had heard exactly? “It’s a lot like Texas,” Nelson says in that trademark drawl.
For a while there, Nelson’s spare guitar sound, deadpan vocals and unique way with words were in danger of being overwhelmed by his troubles with the taxman. In the early 1990s, the US Internal Revenue Service hit him with a claim for back taxes to the tune of $16 million.
It would have been enough of a blow to wipe most musicians out for good, but Nelson simply picked up his guitar and released a stripped-back album – Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes – with the express intention of getting him back in the black (he bypassed the record companies
and sold it via a telemarketing campaign). “A past that’s sprinkled with the blues,” he sang on the title track. “A few old dreams that I can’t use/Who’ll buy my memories…”
These days, Nelson toys knowingly with his image as a musical outlaw. “I’m not sure if I would have been a lawyer or a bank robber,” he says with a dry laugh as he contemplates alternative careers. “One of the two.”
It’s a self-consciously throwaway line from a man whose anecdotes give little indication of the richness of the life he has led. Yet there’s no shortage of candor. If you care to ask, he’ll tell you about a sadness in his songs, the personal cost of a life in music.
“Ninety-nine per cent, or maybe 98 per cent,” he says, as though he’s done some kind of statistical analysis, “are usually songs about hard times, bad love affairs or just hard times in general. Because that’s really the way 90 per cent of my life has been.
“Mostly, the hard times are what you have to endure in order to stay out on the highway 200 days a year and do what’s necessary to operate a travelling band and keep families going, and it’s really hard.”
Now 66, William Hugh Nelson will tell you hard times are not just financial. But he’s endured that kind too. He sold the rights to his song Family Bible for just $US50; Night Life brought him $150.
These days he’s a big star, but getting there wasn’t easy. Too idiosyncratic to make it as a performer in Nashville, he hit his straps as a performer only after quitting the country music capital.
He is among the most respected of performers, an elder figure who has had a significant impact on younger musicians, a bridge between generations who has celebrated songwriters of yesteryear from Hoagy Carmichael to Irving Berlin.
“I had always instinctively felt there were no boundaries,” he says, “and that Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and Moonlight in Vermont were really appealing to all the same people, and it was just a matter of marketing that they come up with titles like pop, country, bluegrass, western, swing.
It’s all music.”
His own early work yielded hits for the likes of Patsy Cline, Ray Price and Faron Young. “Oh yeah, I always take credit for more than I ever did,” he says cheerily when asked about his influence. But let’s not forget this is a man who released a a series of concept country albums, including one
that featured a woman’s perspective of marital breakdown on one side of the LP, and the man’s on the other.
Four decades have passed since Nelson first journeyed to Nashville in a beat-up Buick. In early promotional pictures, he’s a non-descript, clean-cut kid. He’s better known in his latter incarnation, with lined features, gap-toothed grin, grey beard, reddish ponytails.
The change came after he left Nashville in the 1970s, frustrated with his solo career. Though he recorded more than 20 albums there in little more than a decade, Nelson’s best songs were associated with better-known performers. Session players were bemused by his style. He was no more
than a talented piece worker on country music’s most famous production line.
Dispirited with the failure to make an impact then, Nelson dropped out to farm pigs near Nashville. He moved to Austin in 1972 after a fire razed the farm house. It was the liberation he needed. Unfettered by industry expectations, he was finally able to record his songs, and others’, as he
saw fit.
“By moving to Texas,” he says. “I wound up doing what I wanted to do. There were a lot of kids around with long hair, liking country music. But they’d be afraid to come into a place where I played because there were a lot of redneck cowboys there who just might ask them to dance.
“It was a little tricky back there. So I feel that I joined in for a while and I let my hair grow and played over there at the places where they went.”
The commitment to craft remained throughout. Don Cusic, who edited a selection of his lyrics, has described him as “a conscious poet whose form is the country song”.
“It’s always really been difficult to write, for me,” Nelson says. “But when you need to pay the rent then it gets easier.”
He’s never been quite so prolific as in the week in the early 1960s in which he penned three of his best-known songs – Crazy, Funny How Time Slips Away and Night Life. “It just happened to be a good week,” he says, and laughs. “I was living in Pasadena, Texas, and working all the way across
Houston. It’s about an hour’s drive. I’d get off around midnight or 1am and I’d drive back. I did a lot of writing just going back and forth to work.”
Nelson doesn’t have to go too far in search of work these days. There’s no shortage of people keen to work with him. His 1993 album Across The Borderline features a song called Heartland, co-written by Bob Dylan, who had years earlier recorded his song Angel Flying Too Close To The
Ground.
It started out as a recording sent from Dylan, in which he hummed a melody. The only words from Dylan were an intermittent “American dream”.
“He sent word to me,” Nelson says of the collaboration. “He said, `Finish it’…”
He did, and a day after Nelson had performed in a Bob Dylan tribute concert in New York City, they went into the studio together. “He had never heard my lyrics, so he had no idea what he was getting ready to record,” says Nelson. “I’m sure if he hadn’t liked it he would have said so.” A lot
like Dylan, Nelson defies glib typecasting. His work reflects the diverse influences of radio he heard while growing up in Abbott, Texas, where he and his sister were raised by grandparents after their parents had divorced. “I heard a lot of Mexican music and a lot of bohemian music,” he says.
“Swing, gospel, jazz, blues, boogie.”
If you wanted to chart Nelson’s musical odyssey you could do a lot worse than to compare the lush, over-produced early 1960s recordings of Darkness On The Face Of The Earth, My Own Peculiar Way and I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye with the stark versions on the recent album, Teatro,
produced by Daniel Lanois with backing vocals from Emmylou Harris.”I was pleasantly surprised that it brought them all back,” says Nelson, “in a new dress, you know”.
His guitar playing – highlighted on spare acoustic albums such as Red-Headed Stranger or Spirit, as well as his latest release, an instrumental album called Night And Day – is partly inspired by the great gypsy player Django Reinhardt. “The phrasing pretty much follows the way that I sing,”
he explains.
Nelson’s songs have been described as “dangerously, seriously sad”, and he readily acknowledges the hurt in much of his work.
“I’ve gone through a few relationships along the way,” he says. “I don’t know, maybe they wouldn’t have lasted anyway. But you feel that maybe they would have if I had been one of those guys that was an eight-to-five job worker and didn’t play guitar and sing.
“If I had another way to go … I think of all those things. But you know, it doesn’t make a damn.” He laughs ruefully. “Things are the way they are.”
The Sunday Age, 16th of January 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 