Red Headed Stranger

This evening I read a SF Chronicle review of a Willie Nelson concert . He is playing 5 shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, Sunday through Thursday night (perhaps I will venture there tomorrow night, though maybe it is sold-out).

I was impressed that the 73 year-old Willie Nelson, according to the article, has been performing 250 shows per year (that’s more than Bob Dylan) the last few years. He sleeps and hangs-out in his tour bus, not in hotels. He walks out of his bus, in a black Texas barbecue T-shirt, and goes onstage. He does not use set lists. His act is called “Willie Nelson and Family” because his sister plays piano with him. “Nelson has had four wives, but only one drummer…” (As an aside, his new album apparently contains a version of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” an S&P-esque work par excellence, in my opinion.)


















I have really enjoyed the fraction of Willie’s recordings I have heard, the songwriting, singing, and guitar playing. I enjoyed his album with Waylon Jennings, and their version of Jennings’ “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

According to a Wikipedia article, the song “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” (of which we saw part of a video clip on YouTube) was written and recorded over 20 years ago by Ned Sublette, a musicologist/songwriter. This song includes the lines “What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?" and "Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out.” Willie Nelson released it in 2006 shortly after the film Brokeback Mountain.

During the filmcredits for Brokeback Mountain, as I recall, Willie Nelson sings Bob Dylan’s “He Was A Friend of Mine.” This song certainly has aspects of a cowboy song, “A thousand miles from home / And he never harmed no one.” I found the appropriation of this song for the film somewhat strange, but then thought “why not?”














From what I have read (e.g. an excellent New Yorker profile by Adam Gopnik, October, 2002), Willie Nelson really seems to live the migratory life of a musical cowboy. His guitar is named “Trigger” after Roy Rogers' horse. I love that old beat nylon string guitar of his. There is something completely casual about Willie Nelson, an ultimate cool, perhaps a hard-won, road-worn wisdom, lots of cannabis, and an ear for great songs to cover and compose, and grace to perform. He says, in the SF Chronicle article, "Not many things that work for me work for everybody. There's a whole lot of people out there who shouldn't go by what I do."