ON THE ROAD AGAIN
McConnell, Frank
Commonweal: 532 Music ON THE ROAD AGAIN WILLIE NELSON'S SPREZZATURA I AM AT the Kentucky State Fair, August 1985. Willie Nelson is performing, and that alone is a kind of metaphor for his...
...But between those two versions of a basically simple tune will be encapsulated the kaleidoscope of American music which is Willie Nelson, from Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to anonymous spirituals to Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams and back again, all of it transformed and transfigured by a voice that may be one of the true marvels of twentieth-century song...
...easy as in demanding an expenditure of nervous energy that would leave most of us gasping for breath or gagging for a B2 shot...
...Michael Jackson's single sequined glove, Prince's purple pants, even Waylon's wide-brim leather hat are all trademarks because they are all appurtenances with or without which the performance could still go on...
...reminding us, in the process, that anyone who thinks that "sentimental" means "stupid" hasn't understood Shakespeare...
...Willie Nelson is performing, and that alone is a kind of metaphor for his special stature and his special persona: even at this date, and even at this stage of his legend, he will still show up in a packed auditorium redolent of corn dogs and draft beer as readily as in a room smelling of expensive grass and Beefeater martinis...
...Remember the concept of sprezzatura...
...I am not writing this to celebrate the genius of Willie Nelson (of course I really am, but the conventions of journalism say that I'm not supposed to): I am writing this, outside of parentheses, to observe the fact that Willie Nelson is not a country-western singer, and perhaps not even a "singer" in the conventional sense at all...
...Somewhere over the rainbow/Bluebirds fly," say Harold Aden's lyrics in an imperishable expression of longing...
...The feeling is a little like a Springsteen concert: you know there won't be any riots or bad craziness because you know that everybody here is here because they already cherish the performer...
...But, until the academics catch up to the intelligence of the performers — on auditorium stages, in cocktail lounges, and even at state fairs — it is comforting to know that, with Willie, the heritage, the legacy, and the spirit are in safe keeping...
...Nor is it Linda Rondstat or Toni Tennille, good as they are, but rather a reclamation and rediscovery of songs we thought we had already heard too often...
...Sam Goldwyn wanted to cut the song from The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland inserted it irrevocably into die American consciousness, and now Willie has canonized what Judy sanctified...
...Whiskey River" — flat-out, full-tilt country blues — is his opener...
...I said "God help him" once, and now I say it again, even more seriously...
...But it is Willie we came to see, and it is Willie who now, for an astonishingly long time, holds, prowls, and possesses the stage...
...And this is not accidental...
...FRANK McCONNELL Commonweal: 534...
...American popular music" — it is a curious phrase to use, since it implies such a rich and varied tradition, a tradition whose complexity and beauty academic musicologists are only just beginning to recognize...
...To hear him do "Stardust" is like the shock of actually seeing the features on that most common and most commonly ignored of American icons, the dollar bill: you are delighted to find out that, behind the banality of repetition, something was actually there all along...
...Total strangers smile and nod at one another as they sing along with Willie on "City of New Orleans" or "You Were Always on My Mind...
...But Willie Nelson wears a headband — or at least did originally — because his hair is long, because he does sweat when he performs, and because he does need to keep his hair out of his face...
...Willie, too...
...It could have been the apotheosis, the Magic Flute, of American song...
...But the public self, the invented self, is an image of generosity and enthusiastic support for "making music with my friends...
...The comparison to Billie Holiday, by the way, is carefully considered...
...Canonized" and "sanctified" belong as surely to the tradition of American song as they do to any other tradition of storytelling and mythmaking, just because all storytelling and mythmaking are, unless you want a serious quarrel, manifestations of the presence of the Lord...
...He can play Vegas as easily as Sinatra, but Louisville as well...
...Add to all this one more quality, or maybe just an extension of what I have been discussing: charity...
...Sprezzatura is what the Italians of the Renaissance called it: a kind of gracefulness, a kind of assurance that makes even fouling-up look like not-fouling-up...
...It is a very large, very public secret society...
...And then something magic happens: one of those things that makes working on stage better, richer, and more dangerous than any other kind of performance...
...The choice of words, maybe, bothers you...
...One assumes that the private man is prey to the same sillinesses and lapses of grace to which we are all, children of Adam, heir...
...Comes the magic moment...
...But, if they ever elect me God for a day, I would bring them both back to record, with Willie, Porgy and Bess...
...Louisville, August 1985...
...But to miss the beauty of absurd accidents in life is to experience the beginning of despair...
...Like Billie Holiday — the one singer to whom he can be seriously compared — Willie brings pristine intelligence to the cliche-ridden lyrics among which we live our lives...
...making everything look easy...
...Holiday and Monk are gone now...
...It was, to be sure, an absurd accident: Nelson might as well have missed the thrown headband and looked clumsy as to have caught it and looked for the moment godly...
...She was probably — is probably — the most moving jazz singer America will produce: not even Diana Ross, impersonating her in Lady Sings the Blues, could tarnish the beauty of her recorded legacy...
...it is not even the rather wonderful Bette Midler turning all of American song into the stuff of a standup comedy routine...
...Willie makes everything look — or sound — easy...
...The headband is both functional and symbolic, in other words...
...And like Willie, she is more an interpreter of other people's songs than a composer of strong lyrics herself...
...Well, as we used to say at Yale, tough...
...And we, his fans, know it...
...Back to Willie Nelson and'' Over the Rainbow...
...American popular music for Willie, in other words, is a glorious pretext for a community sing...
...There is nothing, apparently, that he won't do, from "My Mother's Eyes" to Duke Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore...
...Willie Nelson and Family" is the conventional billing for his tours, and his anthem, "On the Road Again," contains the very serious line, "The life I love is making music with my friends...
...This is not the, after all, rather boring Barbra Streisand exploring the simple ironies of "Happy Days Are Here Again...
...Willie on stage playing and singing...
...It is a song of hope and of infinite expectation...
...No, not a trademark, but a sacramental...
...Listen to him (on the Over the Rainbow album) perform that corniest of songs, "My Mother's Eyes": even the title is skin-crawlingly embarrassing...
...And when a need arises, he'll be on stage in Philly or Champaign...
...And is this not the central act of intelligence altogether...
...That is why, at his concerts, fans make a habit of throwing supplementary headbands, knotted handkerchiefs, onto the stage...
...Willie has made the headband virtually a trademark...
...But, by accepting the sentimentality of the music and lyrics, by making them a part of himself, Willie — not redeems — but rediscovers the song for himself and for us...
...The reason I am sharing this relatively trivial instant with you is that it is not, after all, trivial, but is in fact an image of the special genius of Willie Nelson...
...He, God help him, seems to have turned himself into a living repository of the tradition of American popular song...
...the audience throwing headbands onto the stage, and, in the middle of a solo, Willie stretches out his right arm and perfectly — perfectly — catches the thrown circle of cloth on his wrist and continues with his guitar playing while the crowd, of course, goes mad...
...And to say that is to say that whether he is doing "Whiskey River" or "Amazing Grace" his art is an art of reaffirmation in the most serious theological sense...
...And everything he does, he reinterprets...
...It will also be, some two-and-a-half hours later, his sign-off number...
...The audience loves him and he, at least in what Cardinal Newman would have called a notional sense, loves the audience right back...
...Like Billie Holiday and also like Thelonious Monk, Willie 4 October 1985: 533 frequently lags a half-beat or so behind the conventional rhythm of the songs he performs, creating effectively his own time, a reflective, meditative time in which we, as is he, are compelled to re-examine, actually listen to, even the most shopworn of harmonies...
...God help him, he is both an artist and a critic of his own art: in some ectoplasmic bar at the end of the universe, Willie and James Joyce will have a lot to talk about...
...His prodigious output — sometimes four albums a year — includes an amazing number of collaborations with other singers, famous and unknown...
...Think about — listen to — his version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," maybe one of the four or five songs that every American knows, note for note...
...but Willie deliberately flats the note on "birds" — as in "bluebirds fly" — injecting or infecting the song with the melancholy that is such an inevitable part of its own optimism...
...The sad sweetness of her voice — even if one did not know the terrible details of her life — transforms even the tawdriest of sentimental songs into the hopeful melancholy of which, after all, American popular music is made...
...Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter have performed man-and-womanfully in the first set...
...Easy as in casual...
...easy as in effortless...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
