WILLIE NELSON

and being ‘On the Bus’…

Just home from work, drinking a Bud and listening to the album.

In 1975 I had turned 24 and bouncing back and forth between Key West, Colorado and Illinois. I was also bouncing between having a job and not having a job. It would be hard to pin down where we were living without a time machine and notepad. For a period, we were back living at Mama’s house on the lake. She had a record player downstairs and a stack of her albums ranging from Hank Williams to Perry Como. Hank got played often. Perry did not. Though I had little spending money I was lucky enough to pick up the album Willie Nelson just come out with titled, “The Red Headed Stranger”. Willie took a song written in 1953 by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz and built what some music savants have declared as the first ‘country-rock opera’. My copy got played until the grooves were nearly flattened and our grandmother, not a country music fan one bit, knew every word. The album is a storytelling masterpiece with some of the finest music ever laid down on vinyl. The band was tight with Willie’s sister Bobbie on piano, Paul English on drums, Jody Payne on guitar and others as times changed, folks died, new ones came along and his sons came to join him. I must confess along with the song’s words and Willie’s one-of-a-kind voice it was the harmonica player, Mickey Rapheal that knocked me out too. Having been a harp player myself for some years by then his style was a new path that I was ready to go down. I was rooted in the Chicago blues style with Paul Butterfield my north star. Mickey plays much more sparingly than most harp players do. Strategically, ethereally. In the song, “Can I Sleep In Your Arms” you practically need to put your ears touching the speaker to hear it all. On it his harp whispers. When he wails a note, it is like a shooting star but as if slowed down so you could follow it into the heavens never feeling like you’d barely experienced it. No. He takes you along. Listen to “Hands on the Wheel” and you will ride there.

Some albums become your favorites because you had the sheer luck to find them. Or do they find us … knowing how much we need them at that crossroads of our lives? This was the case for ‘Stranger’. I was in a young man’s wilderness of confusion. I had not found the muse that eventually came and took my hand. I was a rudderless boat on a sea that showed no horizon.

I played in some bands during this time. None that paid what I could eke out as the short order cook I became after answering a want ad. Over the next six or seven years I bought in to the life of kitchens. It was not the coveted profession it became. Not back then. Over the decades it took me far. Part of that journey brought me to a gala at ‘The Mansion on Turtle Creek’ in Dallas one hot July weekend. Dean Fearing was the chef of the place and the reason for its national reputation for his soulful Southwestern cuisine. Dean was (and remains) a gifted musician and a dear friend. He put together 4^th of July barbecues for several years back then which benefitted many charities. Big name chefs from all over America came, cooked and then when the feast over, partied hard.

An Angel, Dean, Johnny Reno on sax, me and my new pal, Mickey Raphael on stage in Dallas.

Dean also put together three days/nights of music as part of it all. He mixed the show’s line up with the band he co-founded with fellow Texan Robert Del Grande which they named, “The Barb Wires”. They generously invited me to play harp on a few of the tunes that we’d work on remotely to start and then in person the day before we went live. He additionally had some major musicians from around the country. The lineup varied over the years. Wynona, Jim Messina, Richie Furay and Rodney Crowell all played. And so did Mickey Raphael. It was a dream come true for me as Mickey let me jam with him, gave me some hand drawn charts on how I could up my game, gave me his old harmonica case, and took me on a tour of Willie’s tour bus! The haze and scent of Willie’s weed hung in the air.

Willie on his bus. And he’s still on the road!

The ‘Red Headed Stranger’ album affected and inspired me so much I wrote my own concept styled version inspired by it. Lord knows how much time I spent creating the lyrics and my characters as well as the imaginary place they lived in. I even drew a map like some old Twain novel or Harper Lee’s make believe town of Maycomb drawn for “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Years and miles later the papers that held my creation were drowned in the waters that filled our basement after a hurricane in Key West. The world need not mourn. ‘The Red Headed Stranger’ saved our asses for all time.

Listen to this song before you go.

I’ve loved music even longer than I’ve loved words. I think most of us have. We don’t need to learn anything to listen to music it could be reasoned. But you need to learn to listen. The world around us is filled with music. The susurrations of a breeze rustling trees, a city’s syncopated traffic, a lone saxophone player heard from an unseen window. These things could escape us if we didn’t open our minds to it. Walt Whitman opened portals to the sounds of the world in his poems. I started playing music with friends in bands around my hometown when I was about 19. But even long before that we sang in our home. It was me, our maternal grandmother, ‘Nana’ mother and my two sisters. The women and girls sang with open abandon. It eventually gave me the courage to join in. We had a stereo. It might have come from Sears. Mom had a stack of records that went from Hank Williams to Nat King Cole. Nana loved opera. We went to church most Sundays and sang at least four songs each service. We sang along with great energy, smiling at each other and our beloved Reverend Fletcher at especially loved passages. To grow up with music is to grow up with hope. To grow old with music is to not grow old in your heart.