Free Spirit

After a dark and introspective release, Nelson turns his sights to reggae

by Mark Edmonds

Fox recently repeated an episode of its animated series, King of the Hill, where family patriarch Hank and son Bobby encounter Willie Nelson during a golf outing. The trio meet after Bobby slices a ball down the fairway and beans Nelson, nearly knocking him out. When Bobby finds him recuperating beneath the shade of a tarp connected to a trailer -- Nelson's home -- he's incredulous. "You live in a trailer?" he asks the longhaired legend in disbelief.

"That's right, Bobby," Nelson replies. "Since the IRS came in, I've lost everything. This trailer and my guitar are all I have left."

Well, almost. In the '90s, the now 64-year-old Nelson has tangled with more misfortune than most folks do in a lifetime. There were the much publicized pot busts, record-company squabbles, and a little 14-year-old problem with the IRS that cost him nearly $32 million by the time it was settled four years ago.

Throughout, Nelson, who plays Rhode Island's Warwick Musical Theatre July 27, has soldiered on, reinventing himself in the studio on some of the most interesting music of his career. Projects such as Across the Borderline, Just One Love, and a Stardust-style collection of contemporary standards dubbed Moonlight Becomes You have found him exploring old and new rhythms and song styles that embrace everything from Tex-Mex and country to '40s-era standards.

His darkly introspective Spirit disc (the first with Island Records) was a series of stark, introspective songs about desperation, lost and rekindled love, and hope. Recorded with limited personnel, few overdubs, and wholly acoustic, the disc in many ways recalled Red Headed Stranger, Nelson's mid-'70s recorded-on-a-shoestring breakthrough album, with its slow pacing and waltz-time tempos.

"It was a concept album that covers something like a 17-year period in my life," he says. "It runs from the beginning of some really sad times through to some acceptable, if not happy times. And even though it was a different kind of project, I was really happy with a lot of it."

Nelson started out in the late '50s, working saloons and honky tonks in Texas and in the West. He moved to Nashville in the early '60s, intent on becoming a songwriter. He played with Ray Price's band and found limited success when Patsy Cline and Faron Young made hits out of his "Crazy" and "Hello Walls."

Nashville never truly warmed to him so in 1970 he fled to Austin were his career soon flourished. His sold-out concerts were cultural events where hippies and cowboys united, while his records went gold and platinum throughout the remainder of the decade and into the '80s.

Recently, he turned his sights blues and reggae, uncharted territory for Nelson. "[The reggae album] started out as [producer] Don Was's idea," he says. "He thought that some of my songs might sound okay with a reggae rhythm. So we picked one out, went into the studio, and it sounded pretty good. Then, we flew down to Jamaica, played it for Island, and they thought it sounded pretty good, too. So we did a whole album. Most of them are my songs, but we also did a Johnny Cash song, and we did a couple of Jimmy Cliff songs ["Sittin' in Limbo" and "The Harder They Come"]."

On his still-untitled blues album due out in 1998, Nelson takes on several of the standards ("Black Night," "Fools Paradise," and "Kansas City") using backup help from Derek O'Brien on guitar, Riley Osborne on keyboards, John Blondell on the bass, and George Rains on drums. "In my opinion, they're some of the best blues guys in the world," he says.

Although radio has largely ignored him in recent years, Nelson's still a strong concert draw. "I like to think that our music has a sincerity to it," he muses. "Part of it, I guess, is we're all pretty good musicians and fair singers. But the material's the most important thing. I think we have some of the best songs ever written in our show. Thirty or 40 percent of them are mine, and the rest are songs like `Stardust,' `Whiskey River,' and Kris's [Kristofferson's] `If Lovin' You Was Easy.' I just think that that music itself is so well written and universally appealing that it just cuts across all the boundaries in the audience. People love it no matter who they are."

Willie Nelson plays the Warwick Musical Theatre, in Warwick, Rhode Island at 8 p.m. on Sunday, July 27. Tickets are $32.50 and $27.50. Call (401) 821-7300.