July 4 - July 11, 1 9 9 6

Lots o' Willie

Nelson shows his waning stuff in his new material

by Franklin Soults

Only in such a mercenary yet xenophobic genre as country could the most nonconformist artists also be the most conservative. Take retro twang king Junior Brown singing about how proud he is that his baby listens to nothin' but Ernest Tubb. Or hip country rockers Son Volt pining for the soothing sounds of rural radio circa 1963. Or Alison Krauss, crossing over from bluegrass to mainstream country yet striving hard to stay true to her purist roots. Even when you admire the artist (as I do Krauss), it makes the very idea of "alternative country" feel like an oxymoron.

Leave it to original country outlaw Willie Nelson to lay out this conundrum in every confusing aspect imaginable. Since being dropped by Columbia Records in 1993 after two comfy decades, he has been reprising his vaunted role as a Nashville outsider and working as hard as any ambitious rebel a third his age. Not counting several retrospectives and the eyebrow-raising tribute album Twisted Willie (Justice), there have been three new albums with his picture on the cover released over the past six or eight months. Late last year he cut The Road Goes On Forever (Liberty) with the Highwaymen, his decade-old collaboration with fellow diehards Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings. Then in April, RCA released a gussied-up, 20th-anniversary edition of Outlaws, the out-of-print sampler that first codified the rebel fame of Willie and Waylon back in 1976. And now Nelson has just released Spirit, his debut on Island Records, a label that had never before signed a country artist.

Not that Spirit is exactly a country album. Self-produced at Nelson's home studio with only fiddle, piano, and acoustic guitar, this spare, gentle album meanders between upscale folk and rustic New Age. Nelson has been crossing stylistic boundaries like this since he injected late-night jazz into country music with the song "Nite Life" back in 1959, a feat that reached its epitome in the mid '70s with the smash success of Red Headed Stranger and Stardust (both on Columbia). In Nashville terms, Spirit is just as daring as those milestones; it's just not nearly as good. Touted as Nelson's first all-original collection in nine years, the album starts off with a pretty dose of Spanish guitar leading into a decent remake of his old song "She Is Gone." But new titles like "The Spirit of E9" give away Nelson's offhand approach to the term "original composition," and by the second Iberian instrumental on track six we've reached siesta time. Both Willie and his band are considerate enough not to rouse us for the remainder of the disc.

If Spirit suggests that Willie's outsider pose has become rote, the Outlaws reissue is a reminder of how fresh it once was. At the time, RCA was just looking to cash in on Columbia's success with Red Headed Stranger by taking some old Nelson tracks and a couple of new duets with Waylon Jennings and combining them with previously released material by label artists Waylon, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glasser. Amazingly, this quickie sampler became country music's very first platinum album, thereby snapping the industry's moribund fixation with crossover acts like Kenny Rogers and John Denver. It didn't bring the music back to the purer, traditional sound that today's country outsiders long for; instead, it offered another path into the future, one that borrowed from the innovations Southern rock was just then cooking up.

Part of the thrill, of course, was that no one knew where these new sounds would lead, and since all that's now history, RCA has tried to sweeten the pot with nine "lost" tracks (i.e., more previously released stuff) plus one brand new Waylon and Willie duet. Although Jessi Colter's Muscle Shoals style is ear-opening, most of the lost tracks just further stretch a project whose original seams plainly show. But the duet on Steve Earle's "Nowhere Road" is another story. It's so kick-ass it sounds as if it belonged on the Highwaymen album.

The Road Goes On Forever turns out to be one of country music's only keepers from 1995. Sure, sometimes it seems these four tone-deaf oldsters are trading verses so frequently because none of them could wheeze his way through a song alone. But producer Don Was helps out with ace selections (including another Steve Earle classic), and their instincts carry them the rest of the way. Boastful, cornball, as grizzled as last year's homemade beef jerky, they radiate a rare, shining compassion for their song subjects, whether these be waitresses, struggling couples, or geezers like themselves facing their fast encroaching mortality. Even the gratuitous hell-raiser "It Is What It Is" is saved by the self-depreciating chorus, "I am what I am 'cause I ain't what I used to be." Among other things, it's a lesson in change that today's hidebound country outsiders could well learn from.