Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s Willie Nelson
To Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, L7, and other top college rock stars, he’s more than a red-headed stranger. He’s a genuine influence—one worth celebrating on a new tribute album that proves it’s better to be interpreted than to fade away.
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The drummer seems like a rock star from central casting, but the guitarists are nothing like what I expect. Kim Thayil is the lead guitarist for Soundgarden, a definitive Seattle grunge band that, like many others, enjoyed its first success on a local independent label called Sub-Pop. A dark-skinned young man with lively eyes and black hair and beard, Thayil grew up in Chicago, and his mother was born in India. Struggling with the material, Thayil unplugs his guitar, carries it into the control room, puts on headphones, inserts a CD of The Red Headed Stranger, and with periodic nods and murmurs of revelation, plays along to “The Time of the Preacher,” and finally gets a fair hang of Willie’s flamencolike style. Then he goes back, plugs in, doctors the sound by stepping on an effects box called a chorus, which he has set at full volume, and with yeeks, shrieks, and whongs, turns Willie’s distinctive guitar break into an aural likeness of a train wreck. Everyone agrees it’s getting a whole lot closer.
I am transfixed by Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic. I’ve read that the defunct Seattle band may have been the most innovative and influential rock group since the Beatles, but the Nirvana lyric that sticks in my mind is “I wish I could eat your cancer.” I am preconditioned by the heroin-addiction and shotgun-suicide lore of bandleader Kurt Cobain, and by a fleeting brush in New York last year with Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love—to my taste, the only thing worse than being around her is hearing her sing. But when Novoselic walked into the studio, if not for the guitar case I would have pegged him for an insurance adjuster. He’s tall and skinny, his thinning black hair is cut short and conservatively, and he wears a white shirt and a blue blazer. During a break he samples some fruit provided by the studio and tells me that he grew up in a small Washington coastal town, the son of Croatian immigrants—a welder-machinist and a beautician. “When Danny Bland asked me if I’d do this, I said, ‘Are you kidding? In a second. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash? Those guys are heroes of mine.’”
“You really listened to Willie?” I respond skeptically. “Bought his records?”
“Oh, yeah. The Red Headed Stranger was the first one I ever heard. Lotta class, lotta taste. Great songwriting. And Johnny Cash—he recorded ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ What an incredible song! We were always into these little hot-spot scenes—Minneapolis; Athens, Georgia; Austin, Texas. We listened to a lot of Texas bands. big Boys, Butthole Surfers, the Dicks. If you look at our home video where Kurt gets smashed in the face by a security guard, that was in Dallas. We always had a great time in Texas.” Novoselic says this with an air of such fundamental sweetness that I stare at him and think: Jimmy Stewart. After I thank him for the chat, he lifts his hand and replies, “Sure. Thanks for letting me eat my banana.”
Well into the evening, Johnny Cash comes into the studio with his red-bearded son, John Carter Cash, who will contribute an acoustic guitar track. “Hey, Krist,” Thaymil murmurs to Novoselic as they prepare to meet him. “You know the thing about the nerves? It’s here.” Cash is dressed in his signature black, and his hair looks stiff and tangled, like he just got out of bed. He is disarming and unassuming; he makes a complete circuit of the now-crowded studio, introducing himself to everyone—“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”—as if any of us might fail to recognize him. This is a face firebombed with experience and character. When the tics start working, you fear he might be having a stroke.
Cash is an old hand at crossover connections with youth; his American Recordings was a career-reviving smash hit with the alternative rock crowd in 1994, and he has recorded with U2. But unlike Nirvana’s Novoselic, Cash was unfamiliar with “The Time of the Preacher,” when Jamail proposed recording it. “I met Willie in about ’56 at a disc jockey’s convention in Nashville,” Cash recalls. “Songwriters came there to meet artists who might record their songs. I’ve always been impressed with him as a musician, but what stuck with me was his writing. We never worked together until the Highwaymen scene came along. I never was that close to Willie.” In the control room he listens to a squalling backup track the Seattle all-stars recorded in rehearsal. “That’s terrific,” he says with a smile, on hearing Kim Thayil’s strange guitar riffs, and they go to work.
Though Cash needs a lyric sheet, he has a sure feel for the torment that drives the song. He records with the grunge rockers for about two hours. “Aw, they had it together before I came in,” he apologizes at one point. Jamail throbs with kinetic energy. “If we get to the point where we don’t recognize the song,” he tells them, “then we accomplished what we set out to do.” But with Cash’s voice and respect for the material, in fact there is little chance of that, and the younger musicians also exercise some restraint. The result is a fusion of a haunting love ballad and the murky and brooding guitar chords that imbue the Seattle sound. And it works. “What we came up with was pretty straight-ahead,” Novoselic tells me afterward. “Randall wanted to do something really weird, but we didn’t have much time. And we didn’t want to embarrass Johnny Cash.”
JAMAIL WAS DOING WELL IN HIS TALENT SEARCH before the Cash session, but after that, recording a cut on Twisted Willie becomes a prestige gig. For ascending Seattle-area bands such as Gas Huffer (“I Gotta Get Drunk”) and the Presidents of the United States of America (“Devil in a Sleepin’ Bag”), the album stages them as peers of heavyweights. But even punk rock has its graybeards, and for them the exposure is an authoritative growl from the lair, lest the audience forget. Jamail solicits theatrical contributions from X, best known for the 1980 punk album Los Angeles, and from Jello Biafra, onetime lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, triumphant defendant in a landmark obscenity case, and a surprisingly strong vote-getter in a San Francisco mayoral race. To Willie purists, X on “Home Motel” and Biafra on “Still Is Still Moving to Me” may verge on heresy, but for a producer and president of an obscure independent like Justice Records, both tracks are enormous coups.
Several groups attack Nelson’s material with loud, fond, comic irreverence. Tenderloin, a Kansas band, sets the standard here with “Shotgun Willie.” His lyric “Can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say” is twisted into “Can’t drink a beer if you ain’t got no refrigerator.” But star Seattle singers Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees and Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains balance the uproar with quiet, earnest, almost doleful takes on “She’s Not for You” and “I’ve Seen All This World I Care to See.” The album’s inventive, Beatles-like swing for the fences comes from L7, known as L.A. bad girls and Lollapalooza rivals of Courtney Love. They flabbergasted Jamail when they told him they wanted to revive “Three Days,” an all-but-forgotten love lament that Faron Young recorded before any of them were born. Then they went to a Waylon Jennings concert in Los Angeles with one of their roadies, who is such a fan of the Plainview native that the Waylon song and credo “Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean” is tattooed on his arm. Backstage the gruff Nashville outlaw allowed as how the girls were “real sweet,” inspiring a knowing guffaw from his son, whose nickname is Shooter. And the youth told his dad that he’d be crazy not to contribute a guitar solo and backup vocal tracks to L7’s paean to Willie.
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