Willie Nelson, Fourth of July 2007, Fort Worth, TX
Willie Nelson in Lukenbach:
“His show was transcendent. That’s a highfalutin word that I would almost never use, but I honestly felt as if I were taking a trip back in time to another era, through Willie’s guitar and voice and the artful piano plunking of his “little sister, Bobbie” (who is actually two years older than he is). Her playing was rowdy and hymnlike at the same time.
Willie played until at least 2 in the morning, then closed the show by shaking hands with the drunken two-steppers stumbling in front of the stage. He capped the night with a wave, a humble smile, a sparkle in his eye and this farewell: “Be careful driving home. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and we know most of them personally.”
www.NewYorkTimes.com
by JOE SAMUEL STARNES
THE Fourth of July does not conjure the hallowed ratification of the Declaration of Independence for me. Rather, it’s the apex of summer, a splendidly long day savored with friends, family and fireworks amid smoke wafting from a barbecue, cold beer and even colder watermelons.
In most years since 1973, he has been host to Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic, an all-day outdoor music festival most always held somewhere in Texas. The first one, a sort of countrified Woodstock, was held in Dripping Springs, about 25 miles west of Austin. (This year’s picnic, however, will take place far from the Lone Star State, at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash.; Willie’s musical guests will include Drive-By Truckers, Son Volt and the Old 97’s.)
I have seen Willie in concert a dozen times, including at a couple of Independence Day picnics, but that first time still resonates with me like the vibrato on Trigger, his time-worn guitar.
It was on the trampled grass of a cow pasture in Luckenbach, Tex., on July 4, 1998, the 25th anniversary of his first Fourth of July Picnic. Luckenbach, little more than a flashing-caution-light crossroads settled down in the Pedernales River Valley like an old fly-covered Hereford taking a nap, was both the inspiration for and the title of his 1977 hit with Waylon Jennings that gave us the timeless line: “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys.”
I was with a group of about a dozen Willie fans who had chipped in to rent a bus for the four-hour trip from Houston. That summer was of the usual Texas kind: temperatures cooking up to near triple digits each day for weeks on end. Baseball caps and straw cowboy hats, sunglasses and sunscreen at the ready, we arrived before noon and staked out a spot in the field beneath the relentless sun. We also carried plenty of towels and blankets, as a nap or two would be required to get through the day’s rituals of guitar picking, beer swilling and barbecue eating.
There were more than 30 acts — Robert Earl Keen and Ray Wylie Hubbard and Billy Joe Shaver included — and Willie took the stage throughout the day to pick and sing with some of them even though his set wasn’t scheduled till the end of the night.
Each time he appeared, Willie tossed bandannas, cowboy hats and the occasional sombrero into the swirl of college kids, aging hippies, faux cowboys and the honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth locals who swayed and sweated to the music and gulped cold, cold beer all the while.
By late afternoon, the crowd in that Luckenbach cow pasture had grown to a roiling mass of about 10,000 people fanned out across the field, almost all of them soaked in sweat and many beginning to baste noticeably. A vendors’ area under shade trees provided some relief, as well as locally brewed Shiner Bock and roasted turkey legs and barbecue sandwiches. The pleasant whiff of charcoal smoke eddied throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
Later, as night deepened and the weather got cooler, the scent of burning weed — not quite what you’d call crabgrass — suffused the air. And, finally, round about midnight, Willie arrived onstage for the final set of the picnic and, accompanied by Emmylou Harris, mixed new songs with his old reliables like “Night Life,” “Crazy” and “Hello Walls.”
I’ll admit that I was about spent after a full day of beer, barbecue and sun, but at least I was still awake, which is more than I can say for a lot of the people who tried to go the distance. And those familiar first chords of his traditional opening song, “Whiskey River,” shook my tired mind awake.
By late afternoon, the crowd in that Luckenbach cow pasture had grown to a roiling mass of about 10,000 people fanned out across the field, almost all of them soaked in sweat and many beginning to baste noticeably. A vendors’ area under shade trees provided some relief, as well as locally brewed Shiner Bock and roasted turkey legs and barbecue sandwiches. The pleasant whiff of charcoal smoke eddied throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Later, as night deepened and the weather got cooler, the scent of burning weed — not quite what you’d call crabgrass — suffused the air.
And, finally, round about midnight, Willie arrived onstage for the final set of the picnic and, accompanied by Emmylou Harris, mixed new songs with his old reliables like “Night Life,” “Crazy” and “Hello Walls.” I’ll admit that I was about spent after a full day of beer, barbecue and sun, but at least I was still awake, which is more than I can say for a lot of the people who tried to go the distance. And those familiar first chords of his traditional opening song, “Whiskey River,” shook my tired mind awake.
His show was transcendent. That’s a highfalutin word that I would almost never use, but I honestly felt as if I were taking a trip back in time to another era, through Willie’s guitar and voice and the artful piano plunking of his “little sister, Bobbie” (who is actually two years older than he is). Her playing was rowdy and hymnlike at the same time, and made me imagine a swinging-door cowboy saloon in the 1800s where everyone carried Colt .45 revolvers. Willie played until at least 2 in the morning, then closed the show by shaking hands with the drunken two-steppers stumbling in front of the stage. He capped the night with a wave, a humble smile, a sparkle in his eye and this farewell: “Be careful driving home. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and we know most of them personally.”
Willie, who started the picnics the year he turned 40, turned 74 in April. But he continues to tour even as legends from his era like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings have passed on, his cavalcade of rust-brown tour buses still crisscrossing the country. Unlike so many of those depicted on the cold bronze plaques in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville (Willie was inducted 14 years ago), Willie can still be seen, live and in the flesh, still picking, still singing, still cruising on down the road.
To read entire article:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/travel/escapes/29rituals.html
