Discover: Willie Nelson

By late 1977, the outlaw movement, headed up by Willie and Waylon, had not only roared into Nashville shooting up the place, but also shot to the top of the country charts, with Wanted! The Outlaws being the first country album to sell a million copies. But once outlaws are hailed as heroes, setting up as the new establishment, what's left to rebel against? In the case of Willie, he rebelled against... his own rough-hewn persona with Stardust, an endearing and sterling set culled from the pages of the Great American Songbook. Tin Pan Alley chestnuts, jazz standards and frothy pop were all channeled through Willie's voice to great effect, even if record executives thought it was a terrible idea certain to scotch the Outlaws' sales momentum. With a delivery that once sounded odd and erratic — but now seems preternatural in hindsight — it established Nelson as his generation's great song interpreter and Stardust rose to be a stratospheric success, going platinum some 18 times over.

Music critics are a notoriously lazy bunch. Take the critical shorthand that accompanies Willie Nelson's stark and trailblazing Red Headed Stranger. Often referred to as both the first "Outlaw Country" album and the first conceptual country album, in reality, it's neither. For the former claim, Willie's riding partner Waylon Jennings beat him to the punch with 1973's Honky Tonk Heroes. As for the latter, hell, it's not even Willie's first concept... album (see the he said/she said of 1974's Phases and Stages, 1971's cosmic-tinged Yesterday's Wine, or even the gimmicky country fair fare of 1968's Texas in My Soul).



Even shorn of such hyperbole, Red Headed Stranger remains a classic, not just for country music but singer-songwriters the world over who always seek to strip things to essentials. His first album recorded for Columbia (after two classic and genre-expanding albums Shotgun Willie and Phases for Atlantic — not to mention an early career toiling in the country-politan salt mines of RCA and Liberty), Willie made a risky gambit right out of the gate. Rather than embellish his already polished songcraft or put down more of the fine soulful country songs he had steadily been releasing throughout the decade, Willie took his crack touring band (consisting of sister Bobbie Nelson, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, bassist Bee Spears and others) to an out-of-the-way studio in Garland, Texas and stripped everything to the bone. Entwining a skeletal tale about a murderous preacher around a minor song from the Acuff-Rose songbook ("Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"), Willie then juxtaposed it with gentle instrumental waltzes like "Bandera" and "Just As I Am" to make a haunting and subtle song cycle that remains a touchstone to this day.

Not to be confused with the live album that appeared at the end of the decade, this 1971 studio album was no doubt a bittersweet one for Willie. With its cover photo of the man alongside his wife, family, friends and cronies around a campfire on his property in Ridgetop, some 25 miles outside of Nashville, it captures the communal vibe that Willie had nurtured there, at least until his home burned... down in 1970, prompting a return to the Texas Hill Country. Sure there are countrypolitan strings that threaten to derail the entire affair, but Willie's ear leads him to a strong take on Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" as well as James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." And his own pen remains sharp on the uptempo "I'm a Memory" and the defiant ballad "What Can You Do to Me Now."

"Do you know why you're here?" With that question begins one of history's strangest country records, especially when Willie's answer comes: "There's great confusion on earth…and the voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest and I have been selected as the most likely candidate." Buyers were confused by Yesterday's Wine as well, a mystical record on birth and mortality cloaked in a roughneck country sleeve. Yes, Willie's voice is imperfect... on his first concept album, and more mystical than the others that followed, Phases & Stages or Redheaded Stranger. But some of his gentlest songs come to the fore here, be they the lilting waltz medley of "These Are Difficult Times/Remember the Good Times" or the melancholic "December Day." Even the celebratory title cut feels repentant while "Me and Paul" is one of his finest odes to friendship.

In 2006, Willie Nelson and writer friend Turk Pipkin published The Tao of Willie, a cheeky yet spiritually-minded tome about Willie Nelson's own peculiar way through this world. Tao, or as it's often gets translated in the West, "the Way," is not really a religion but rather a way of regarding the world. So consider Willie's unheralded 1972 album The Willie Way an early exegesis of the man's philosophy, taking the well-worn... tropes of country music's loss and pain and infusing them with meditations on memory. The walkout of opener "You Let Me a Long Time Ago" twists and dilates time as does "Undo the Right." Elsewhere, Willie sings that "my past and my present are one and the same and the future holds nothing for me." The future though, held plenty for the man, as by the next year, his career was about to take off.

One glance at this gaudy cover photo of Willie Nelson and you'd think he'd already rebelled against the strictures of Nashville: leather jacket, bug-eyed goggles, bellbottoms, chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Yes, this oft-overlooked RCA album was released between Willie's retirement from Music Row, his relocation to the more mellow climes of Austin, Texas, and his revival as a long-haired hippie outlaw. Depicted as a rock star, this album is instead a composed, carefully... gradated album of mostly acoustic country-folk numbers, from future hit "Good Hearted Woman" to the mellow travelogue of "London." The title track is a hidden gem of the man's hefty songbook though, a plain sung break-up number where the pain looms larger than the explanation.

Recorded at Atlantic Recording Studios in 1973 in between the country-funk of Shotgun Willie and the more conceptual boot-scoot of Phases & Stages, but not released until after the success of Redheaded Stranger, The Troublemaker marks Willie's first foray into tackling a songbook, presaging efforts like To Lefty From Willie and Stardust. For this, he dusts off the old family hymnal for an album's worth of gospel. But don't think that Willie... is gonna adhere to a certain perspective though, as the title track makes clear. Foregrounded is the jazzy interplay of his band rather than the solemn message of the Lord. Be it James Clayton Day's steel guitar licks on "Uncloudy Day," the quick shuffle of "There is a Fountain" and the harmonizing of Sammi Smith and Doug Sahm on "Where the Soul Never Dies" not to mention the man's own licks on the freewheeling "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," Willie and Family come first on this album.

At the height of the Outlaw Country movement, both Willie and Waylon acknowledged their deep roots and debts to their forebears. Waylon sang, "It don't matter who's in Austin/ Bob Wills is still the King" to the hippie rednecks at Armadillo World Headquarters while Willie went one further and cut To Lefty From Willie in 1977. It was an album-length ode to guitarist Lefty Frizzell, the Texan honky-tonker who had passed away... from an alcoholism-powered stroke just two years before. Frizzell was no doubt an icon to Nelson, a prolific songwriter who also sang his own words, conveying well-deep emotions on standards like "Long Black Veil" and "Look What Thoughts Will Do." A fine songwriter himself, on this album Nelson proved himself an adept interpreter as well, finding nuance and pathos in every turn of phrase, be it the nostalgia of "Mom and Dad's Waltz" or reflective "I Never Go Around Mirrors."

The conventional line on Willie Nelson's career is that he was handcuffed by the prevailing wisdom of Nashville's country music factory at the time, leading him to retire rather than have has music turned into countrypolitan candy. And that his serious vision only became when he relocated to Austin, grew a ginger beard and released albums on Atlantic and Columbia. But as this peculiar set makes clear, the outlaw was already in... Willie's music, it was just buried under studio fluff. So in 2009, in much the same manner that Sir Paul McCartney did in varnishing off Phil Spector's lacquer from Let it Be for Let it Be…Naked, we were presented with uh…Naked Willie. Gone are the backing vocals, the taffeta strings, the horse-breaking layers of overdubs. With longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael helping, the two took these polished RCA sides and stripped them down. Some diamonds in the rough include his take on "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "The Party's Over," proving that the outlaw hid here all along.