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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Jennings, who later this year will record a back-to-the-roots Honky Tonk Heroes II album for Jamail and Justice, also contributes a jagged version of “I Never Cared for You” to Twisted Willie. The fourth Highwayman, Kris Kristofferson, lives in Hawaii now and keeps the musical component of his career alive with an approach that emphasizes his visibility as a move actor, his appeal to a largely female audience, and roots in folk rock rather than country. Jamail got him to fly over to Los Angeles for a session with another Lollapalooza headliner, singer Kelly Deal of the Breeders, now with a band called Solid State. The song was “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” a Kristofferson favorite, but he walked in to find Deal singing atonally to the accompaniment of the slowed and amplified sound of a sewing machine. She had told Jamail that she was entranced with the rhythm. Descriptions of the hypnotic percussion track vary wildly, but to my ear it sounds like an approach of savage tribesmen beating on sticks.
Jamail describes the scene: “Kris took one look at us and thought, ‘These people are completely out of their minds.’ But he’s a pro. He listened enough to lay down a harmonica track and sing a little piece for the end, then walked out. Then he immediately called Willie. I know he did, because the next day Willie calls me. ‘All right. Tell me about the sewing machine.’”
AS WILLIE NELSON BREWS COFFEE AND LOOKS ON SMILING, Jamail tells this story on a foggy October day in the saloon of an Old West movie set of Austin—part of the Pedernales playground that Willie salvaged from his battle with the Internal Revenue Service (it also includes a golf course and recording studio). Today Jamail is wearing dark blue glasses. He tells another tale of a session with a San Francisco punk band called Steel Pole Bathtub. Jamail suggested a dark ballad called “The Ghost” that Willie wrote in the early sixties. “They start out like they usually do and I say, ‘Wait, wait. You better slow that down. If you play that thing like punk rock, we’re gonna have a fifteen-second song.’”
Willie laughs and says, “Don’t take long to tell a good story.”
For a photo shoot, the honoree of all this youthful attention is decked out in his Red Headed Stranger garb—chaps, boots, and bandanna. He’s also entertaining some of the touring musicians who appear on Jamail’s record. A member of Tenderloin nervously asks him to autograph a dollar bill for a friend. On a stool next to me is Eddie Spaghetti, the lead singer of the Supersuckers. He has a cap, an earring, a stubble growth of beard, and a friendly round face. My 22-year-old stepdaughter, who is my primary guide to the alternative rock scene, has told me with a laugh that he is a heartthrob: “I’ve got a friend who wants to marry him. She says, ‘I want my name to be Megan Spaghetti.’” The Supersuckers recorded their version of “Bloody Mary Morning” in Austin’s Arlyn studio, and Willie contributed a cameo guitar solo, impressing the youths with his ability to play that fast. I ask Spaghetti when he connected with Willie’s music, and he says it was after high school, when the band was chasing gigs and learning the ropes in Arizona. He smiles and grips an imaginary steering wheel: “It’s road music. Put that in and just groove.”
The one I really want to meet is the Reverend Horton Heat. His real name is Jim Heath, and he grew up in Dallas, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi; he dropped out of college in Austin, then surfaced in Dallas’ Deep Ellum warehouse scene in the mid-eighties. My stepdaughter has been telling me for years that his music is rockabilly as much as anything. She also mentioned one night, “He plays the guitar with, uh, his penis.”
“Jesus! Doesn’t that hurt?”
This is not the kind of conversation we’re used to having. “I don’t know,” she said, blushing. “I mean, he’s wearing jeans.” (In fact, the musician grinds the neck of his guitar with his pelvis, producing a psychedelic sound.)
The Reverend Horton Heat is in his mid-thirties with slicked-back blond hair, long sideburns, and a toothy, wolfish grin. For my money, despite the merits and guaranteed hype of the Johnny Cash and L7 productions, the only Texan in Jamail’s alternative lineup delivers the album’s blow-away success. Heat’s baritone voice may not have great range, but with a driving guitar solo and brief vocal duet with Willie—the only one on the record—he shows that the career-spawning country and western classic “Hello Walls” is a great rock and roll song. One more time, it deserves to be a number one hit. “Since it swings, I thought we could make it swing a little harder,” says the Dallas rocker. Heat leans against the movie set’s likeness of an outhouse, smoking a cigarette. “The outlaw business is a cliché now,” he reflects, “but for a guy to get kicked around as hard as Willie was in Nashville and then come back and make it all happen here—Texas individualism is what it is. That guy’s the king.”
The youths drive off in the fog, and I linger awhile with Willie. In March sixteen alternative rock bands and all four Highwaymen are going to celebrate their strange record with a wild concert at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. The rockers are already promoting the album in their road shows. I ask Willie if he was familiar with the musicians Jamail brought to his royalty statements. “I heard the names,” he replies carefully. “I was surprised that there was that much knowledge among younger bands of my old songs. Some of the cuts they picked up on are really obscure.”
By commercial measure Willie’s career has been in decline for several years. His last number one record was “Nothing I Can Do About It Now” in 1989. After investing heavily in his 1993 album Across the Borderline and his sixtieth birthday celebration the same year, Columbia, his longtime record label, let his contract lapse. At 62 the singer finds himself shopping for labels and recording for an unevenly distributed independent like Justice, and mainstream country and western radio is deaf to his music; according to Jamail’s market research, Willie’s records get airplay mostly on roots rock stations and on country stations in towns of fewer than 200,000.
Yet it would be hard to find an artist with less concern. He goes on pleasing and replenishing his audience with his road shows, making the records he wants to make, and finding someone who’s eager to bring them out. All the rest is just gravy. His credo: “Fortunately, we are not in control.” In L.A. renowned producer Don Was is working with Jamaican musicians on another record drawn entirely from his material—reggae cum Willie. As for the adulation of these punk and grunge rockers, who knows? The embrace of alternative rock might propel him to a big commercial comeback, as it did Johnny Cash. But whatever happens, he can’t help but love Twisted Willie. He has been a great songwriter, but he has also been a superb interpreter. With all respect for the original context, Willie has imparted his own twist on the work of Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Bob Wills, and Ira Gershwin. Interpretation is how music goes on living.
I tell him about watching the Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil play his buzzing guitar accompaniment to “The Time of the Preacher” during the Seattle session, and Willie flashes a smile of great pleasure. “Did you hear what Johnny said about Kim’s using the chorus?” Willie asks. I shake my head. “Cash called me up and said he had asked Kim that night, ‘What’s the purpose of the guitar chorus?’ ‘The purpose,’ Kim said, ‘is to destroy the melody.’ Cash said, ‘Fantastic. Now I understand.’”
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