The late San Diego musician and music journalist Buddy Blue (Bernard Seigal), in writing about Dean Martin, admitted that he’d always kind of looked down on Dean in his younger years. He’d dismissed Dino has an easy listening gadfly, and disliked him mostly because his uncles liked Dean so much.
It was only as he himself got into his late 30s that he sat down and actively listened to a Dean Martin recording. Buddy found himself utterly pulled into how imbued with emotion the crooner’s singing was. And as a musician himself, Buddy realized that what sounded so unforced and casual was in fact the product of an epic artistic discipline and vision.
Which is by way of explaining my own blind spot toward Willie Nelson. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve paid Willie much attention at all. Growing up, I had zero interest in country – it was only in writing about the blues that I came at country sideways. And that largely a product of Peter Guralnick’s outstanding three-part oral history of American popular music, including 1979's “Lost Highway.”
And even after giving country a chance, I still wasn’t a fan of Willie. His whole “Willie Nelson and Family” thing, with the devoted fans and constant touring, was a bit too akin to the Grateful Dead for my taste. Plus his voice left me unimpressed - thin and reedy, nothing at all like the bass of Johnny Cash or even the rich baritones of Conway Twitty, Charley Pride or George Jones.
But when I actually sat down, and with open ears (and mind and heart), simply listened to Willie’s music?
It’s always a bit embarrassing to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that I was deeply wrong about anything.
And with Willie Nelson, the evidence is indeed irrefutable.
He can sing it all – his beloved country, of course. But he’s also recorded straight-ahead blues (“Milk Cow Blues,” 2000; “Two Men With the Blues,” 2008), several collections of standards (“Stardust,” 1978; “What a Wonderful World,” 1988; “American Classic,” 2009; “My Way,” 2018), and even tackled reggae on “Countryman” (recorded in 1995 but not released until 2005).
And then there was the brilliant tribute to Ray Charles he did with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pop singer Norah Jones in 2011, “Here We Go Again.”
Which is when I finally opened my ears to Willie.
Here is Willie, along with his longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, sitting in with Marsalis’ New Orleans-oriented jazz quintet running through a set of songs associated with Brother Ray.
It’s not strictly country, nor is it entirely jazz. It’s not even much constrained into Charles’ own R&B style. Instead, it’s a wide-ranging encapsulation of 20th century American popular musics. Nelson’s comfortable interplay with Marsalis and his instrumentalists is as relaxed and confident as anything Sinatra ever did - and far more stylistically broad. His ability to meet Jones in a neutral comfort zone and create something new is startling.
After doing a deep dive into Willie’s oeuvre, the realization I’ve come to is that, in many ways Willie Nelson is as influential an American musical artist as Sinatra or Ella.
I’d even argue that Willie has largely filled the role that Elvis had previously played before his untimely death.
Like post-Sun Records Elvis or 1990s NASCAR, Willie has largely appealed to a demographic that seems foreign to many of those in the media: Rural, working-class whites.
Not that Willie hasn’t always had his champions among music critics – but he never held sway over the music press the way, say, Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles or Michael Jackson did. Heck, Johnny Cash was nearly always held up as the face of country music, not Willie.
Consider:
He started off as a songwriter - penning Patsy Cline’s 1961 smash hit, “Crazy.”
That same year, he also saw Faron Young turn his song “Hello Walls” into a hit, while Ray Price recorded “Night Life.” Two years later, Roy Orbison had a hit with Nelson’s Christmas song, “Pretty Paper.” And the next year, Joe Hinton scored a major R&B hit with “Funny (How Time Slips Away).”
For a time, Nelson was best-known as a hit songwriter - even while cutting his own versions of songs others had made hits.
Still, by 1965, he was a performing member of the Grand Ole Opry.
But in 1971, he left Nashville and moved to Texas - and began his outside-the-box approach to country music that would soon give birth to “Outlaw Country,” including his first post-Nashville hit, “Bloody Mary Morning” in 1974.
The next year, he filmed the pilot episode of “Austin City Limits” for PBS and went on tour to promote the show.
In 1976, he first teamed up with Waylon Jennings - touring and recording as Waylon & Willie, the duo selling the first platinum album (sales of 1 million copies) in country music, and combining on the iconic single “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
In the late 1970s, like Sinatra and Elvis, he began starring in motion pictures - “Honeysuckle Rose” established him as a bona fide actor.
In 1985, he joined with Jennings, Cash and Kris Kristofferson to found The Highwaymen - one of the greatest of all supergroups.
And he recorded hit duets with everyone from Ray Charles to Julia Iglesias.
Willie has been such an ubiquitous presence that he’s almost become invisible.
And yet, in his 90th year, he’s still touring - they just added a second date for him later this month at San Diego’s famed Humphrey’s By the Bay concert venue after the first show immediately sold out.
He gets my vote as greatest living American singer.
Which brings us back to his voice.
Yes, it is thin and lacks the rich overtones of, say, Iglesias or Charles.
And yet, listening to Nelson sing covers of other writers’ songs makes clear that his interpretive skills are impeccable. This becomes particularly true on ballads, where his ability to convey emotional depth through that voice is startling.
There is a vulnerability in his singing, a sense of emotional exposure that this imperfect voice of his provides that allows him to plumb the depths of the human heart that more physically perfect vocal cords would cover up with their gorgeous tones.
Seeing Aaron Judge break the Yankees and American League single season home run records this week brings me back to one of only two times I’ve seen the Yankees play in person so far. The first time I was young, a pre-schooler probably. We were back visiting my dad’s family in Baltimore, and my grandfather took a group of us cousins and uncles to an Orioles-Yankees game at old Memorial Stadium. I don’t remember much except that a couple fights broke out between the Orioles fans and some Yankee fans who had made the trip south. Baltimore was a tough, working-class town even then, and the locals were having none of the New Yorkers’ guff.
In 1998, San Diego State managed to get the Yankees - who were opening the season in Anaheim, just up the freeway - to play their final preseason warmup against the Aztecs at the newly minted Tony Gwynn Stadium on campus.
I was writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune’s website then, SignOn San Diego, and was assigned to cover the game as the Yankees were going to start former Japanese star Hideki Irabu - who had snubbed the hometown Padres following a trade from the Mariners the previous year and demanded a trade to the Yankees. It was assumed the San Diego fans would be fairly hostile toward the big-time star who had rejected their team and town - and so pretty much all the local media was there for a college baseball game. Add in the traveling New York media that follows the Yankees everywhere, and you had what was certainly the largest media circus ever at Tony Gwynn Stadium.
Irabu pitched the first couple of innings, and was booed unmercifully by the sell-out crowd every time he touched the ball. It being a preseason warmup for the Yankees, he was pulled after a couple innings. Since it was an exhibition against a college team, the Yankees didn’t even wait for the game to end before holding a news conference in a pavilion out front of the stadium. The San Diego media was peppering Irabu with questions about how did he feel getting booed, did he regret not playing in San Diego, etc., while the New York media was shouting questions about whether he was ready for the season. Irabu and his Japanese translator were struggling to answer one question before dealing with the next 15 being hurled their way.
A couple minutes after the news conference had already started, one of the local TV stations showed up late to the party. The cameraman was trying to force his way to the front of the scrum so he could shoot video of Irabu being interviewed, but those of us who had already staked out our spots were not inclined to make it easy on him. The cameraman made some comment about the print types not needing to be in the front - and us ink-stained wretches made some rather pointed comments about “broadcast journalist” being an oxymoron.
Then the cameraman accidentally whacked a reporter in the back of the head - hard - with the boom mic mounted beneath the camera. Turned out it was the New York Post beat writer.
The New York tabloids are not known for their gentle demeanor (this is the same paper, after all, that once gave us the classic headline, “Headless body in topless bar”). The Post reporter turned to the San Diego cameraman and chewed him out in a splendidly profane Brooklyn accent - questioned his parentage, his manhood, his very place in the universe. The cameraman - a bit taken aback at this kind of verbal assault on the West Coast - turned to his fellow San Diego media looking for support.
“Hey - we’re just print reporters, what do we know?” one of my colleagues replied.
Unfortunately, after that nasty exchange, the Yankees publicity rep ended the interview early, and hustled Irabu back to the locker room.
I headed back into the stadium to catch the rest of the game, which the Yankees ended up winning 12-3. After the game was over, I finally made my way down to the Aztecs locker room looking for Aztecs coach Jim Dietz to get some comments on how his players had measured up against a top-shelf Major League team. I hadn’t realized that the Aztecs had turned the larger home locker room over to the Yankees for this game as a courtesy, so when I stuck my head into Dietz’s office, I saw Yankees manager Joe Torre sitting at Dietz’s desk. I must have looked confused, because he asked if he could help. I told him I was looking for Coach Dietz for post-game comments, and Torre pointed down a corridor.
I headed down that corridor, which went past the showers.
Alone in the showers was Yankees coach Don Zimmer - a large, wrinkled bear of a man wearing nothing but a nice lather of Irish Spring.
I must have had a very different look on my face than what I sported in Torre’s office, because as I came past the shower into the player’s locker area, Derek Jeter - finishing tying his shoes as he prepared to walk out to the bus taking the team up to Anaheim - looked up at me, looked back toward the shower and his naked coach, looked at me again, and smiled slowly, before laughing.
“You can’t unsee that!” he said, still laughing as he slung his bag over his shoulder and headed toward the bus.
He was right.
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So dough have tickets for Willis?