Full Nelson

It just goes to show how easily Willie Nelson slips among his roles. In the past he has been, among other things, a countrypolitan sophisticate, an outlaw redneck, a Texas patriot, a rural folk hero, a left-of-center rabble rouser, and a middle-of-the-road snoozer. Now a pair of new releases divide these sides into opposing extremes, almost as if to highlight the contradictions. On the left, Justice Records has Twisted Willie, a collection of weird versions of Willie Nelson songs performed by noted nonconformists from Johnny Cash to Jello Biafra. The title is meant both as a concept statement and as a wink of praise. On the right, Columbia/Legacy is offering the official retirement memento, a three-CD retrospective of Willie's glory days at the label. Ponderously titled Revolutions of Time . . . the Journey 1975-1993, it dutifully covers all the hits and at least one track from each album during Nelson's Columbia period. (A third album, Rhino's 60-song Willie Nelson: A Classic and Unreleased Collection, might have resolved the dialectic presented by these records, but legal complications pulled it from the market before almost anyone had a chance to hear it -- including me.)

In their separate ways, both albums seek to honor Willie Nelson as an "American Legend," a term taken to a logical extreme in Emmylou Harris's prominently displayed quote in the booklet to Revolutions of Time: "If America had one voice, it would be Willie's." It's a preposterous claim, of course (who could truly fill it? Elvis? Louis Armstrong? Richard Nixon?), and yet for anyone who knows the outline of Nelson's amazing career, it will almost ring true. It works partly because Nelson's many guises fit Harris's "E pluribus unum" sentiment, partly because he has always loved patriotic trappings without a hint of jingoism (flag T-shirts and big Fourth of July parties for one and all). But there's also something undefinable about his persona -- you might even say something missing -- that makes the equation so apt. The rest of the world has pretty clear opinions about what it means to be American, but for those of us who have always lived here, the adjective is at once enormously powerful and utterly amorphous. Defining it would be like defining rock and roll, family values, the spirit of Christmas. It's precisely that slippery quality that makes it the only fitting descriptive for the original Slick Willie, an artist who, as ex-Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic puts it in the Twisted Willie liner notes, "transcends genre and generation."

It's a quality whose origins go back to 1959, when a 26-year-old Willie Nelson released his first singles on Pappy Daily's D Records. From almost the very first, no stylistic label quite fit him. Of course, it was only natural that an artist born near Fort Worth at the start of the Great Depression should admire both Ernest Tubb and Frank Sinatra -- after all, he grew up when Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were the kings of Western swing. But Nelson took the usual panoply of influences farther than anyone before him: his jazz phrasing barely fit with the standard oompah beats; his half-spoken, reserved tone was autumnal, melancholic; his simple country melodies drifted off into sophisticated languor.

Many country fans thought his music wasn't even country, but Nelson tried long and hard to prove otherwise. Over the next 10 years he relocated to Nashville, moved to a larger independent label, Liberty, and then to a major one, RCA, and wrote big hits for other country artists -- "Hello Walls" for Faron Young, "Crazy" for Patsy Cline, "Funny How Time Slips Away" for Billy Walker. For all that, neither his record labels nor the mainstream country audience accepted his exquisitely ruminative style for what it was -- an original, personal, supremely adaptive country-pop fusion -- and he was never given the creative control or commercial support he craved.

In the early '70s, he responded by growing his hair long, leaving Nashville for Austin, stripping down his sound to folk-country essentials (with a few rock flourishes), and becoming the original Country Outlaw. His new style wasn't a rejection of his original approach, just a way to broaden it, deepen it, bring it up to cultural speed. When Columbia picked him up in 1975, he immediately hit big with a critical and commercial smash, Red Headed Stranger, an album that kicks off Revolutions of Time with two classic cuts, "Time of the Preacher" and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." From there on, his career was defined by two major events: he arrived as one of the biggest country stars in America, and his songwriting muse, after serving him so well through his dark days, suddenly left.

Revolutions of Time meticulously demonstrates how he dealt with the latter: tribute albums; albums of pop standards; live albums; conceptual cover albums; hodgepodge albums of old hits, made-to-order material and an occasional new song; and, of course, duet albums -- there's a whole CD worth of cuts from those. Even though this material is almost all casually performed, it's a testimony to his diligence that he produced so much of it. And it's a testimony to his talent that the best of it is perhaps his best ever. His 1978 version of "Georgia on My Mind" ranks with Ray Charles's 1960 tour de force (and, for that matter, with Mildred Bailey's sweet and sexy version from 1931). The same goes for '81's "Always on My Mind," which can be compared to versions by Elvis and the Pet Shop Boys. I could go on.

In the end, however, less is more. As anyone subjected to Light Rock radio in an office surely knows, Nelson regularly suffers gaping lapses of taste, and these punctuate the collection like pockmarks -- "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" with Julio Iglesias is only the most infamous crater. Worse, the heavy-handed schmaltz and casual drivel are symptomatic of Nelson's constant impermanence; even if you program only the best cuts, his various guises quickly cancel one another out and he "transcends genre and generation" right into the vapors. Although his performances were more grounded in his Columbia period than ever before, he put his faith in serendipity from one project to the next. That caused him to turn a pop-music principle on its head: from Red Headed Stranger's cyclical folk tale on, he always sounded most natural when making a concept album. If "Georgia" is a world-class gem, it shines most beautifully in the dimmed-light context of his greatest album, 1978's Stardust. If his numbers with Ray Price, Hank Snow, and the great twanger Webb Pierce sound homey, you should hear how enjoyably they stretch out their visit together for 10 or 11 album cuts at a time.

To be sure, the concept album has to have a good idea to start with, and it has to have Willie. For the most part, Twisted Willie lacks both. It starts off promising, with Johnny Cash laying into "Time of the Preacher" with his famous deadpan style and Soundgarden lead guitarist Kim Thayil pumping it up with metal sturm und drang and a screeching break (Krist Novoselic, Alice in Chains drummer Sean Kinney, and Johnny Cash's 12-string-toting son, John Carter Cash, play back-up for extra mythic effect). But on the very next cut, L7's version of "Three Days," things start to slip. I like everything these smart, gutsy women have ever done, including this, but they were obviously still fishing for a good arrangement up through the final take, and background vocalist Waylon Jennings is just waiting for the chance to do his number (which he dutifully butchers).

The rest of the first half grooves on by pleasantly enough -- Willie himself juices up the Supersuckers' "Bloody Mary Morning" with his one-string guitar break; the Presidents of the United States of America contribute the shortest and maybe best cut with a brand new set of lyrics to "Devil in a Sleeping Bag." But almost everyone reduces Nelson's material to a rock-and-roll rave-up, as if he were a simple R&B journeyman and not one of the most subtle musical craftsmen of this or any era. The second half doesn't even sustain the rave-up. Still, I'd rather hear Twisted Willie than the Columbia box set -- if for no other reason than because it rocks, and because the very contribution of artists like Kim Deal and Novoselic and Tenderloin show that Nelson's contradictory, evanescent version of America has reached into deeper corners than he may have ever known. That's a way better gift than a gold watch.