by John Wirt
www.2theadvocate.com
Harmonica player Mickey Raphael hitched his wagon to a rising star in 1973. Willie Nelson — despite having written such classics as Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” Ray Price’s “Night Life,” Rob Orbison’s “Pretty Paper” and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” — was but a regionally popular singer-songwriter playing Texas clubs in 1973. The RCA and Liberty records he’d made in the 1960s raised his profile but as the decade turned he still was little more than a cult figure.
Raphael, at the invitation of University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal, first performed with Nelson during a post-game jam at a Dallas hotel. Barely aware of Nelson, the young harmonica player nevertheless knew he was in the presence of a rare talent.
“When I heard him play, just sitting on the floor, I recognized a good song,” Raphael said. “He really impressed me. And he was a great guitar player. That kind of goes unnoticed, but he really is.”
After the jam, Nelson invited Raphael to sit in again some time. The next opportunity to join Nelson and his band came when the group played a benefit concert for a volunteer fire department in a high school gym just outside of Dallas.
“We went to a truck stop afterwards and during that conversation Willie said, ‘We’re going to New York in a couple of months. Why don’t you go with us?’ I said, ‘Great.’”
With the New York trip looming, Raphael watched for Nelson’s Texas dates, showed up and sat in some more.
“By the time we went to New York, I was playing with him pretty much fulltime,” Raphael said. “Or as fulltime as it could be. We were just playing weekends.”
A formal invitation to join the Nelson band never actually came.
“The joke is he never officially hired me, but he never asked me to leave either,” Raphael said.
Having quickly noticed Nelson’s uniqueness, Raphael also took note of the fervor demonstrated by the singer-songwriter’s fans in Texas.
“Some of them would go nuts,” he said. “So I said, ‘This guy must really have something.’ It didn’t take long to figure it out for myself and, having not been a fan of country music before, I fast became one.”
Nelson, disillusioned with the Nashville music system, had only recently returned to his native Texas.
Things started looking up almost immediately thanks to his 1973 album, Shotgun Willie. His popularity grew with 1974’s Phases and Stages. Recording star status followed in 1975 with The Red Headed Stranger, a bare-bones album that eschewed the slick Nashville Sound producers had slathered over Nelson’s ’60s recordings.
“The places we were playing got a lot bigger,” Raphael remembered. “The gigs came in. Instead of playing weekends we’d go out for a week or two. So there was a lot more work, but Willie didn’t care one way or the other. It was lucrative for him, but he wasn’t driven by that.”
Nelson’s star continued rising through the ’70s, spurred by hit duets with Waylon Jennings (“Good Hearted Woman” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”), more solo hits and 1978’s Stardust album. Consisting of great American standards, Stardust featured a massive hit, Nelson’s devastatingly spare rendition of Roy Acuff’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
Thirty-one years after Stardust, Nelson returned to standards with 2009’s American Classic. Guest stars Diana Krall and Norah Jones join him for duets of “If I Had You” and the Grammy nominated “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” respectively. Raphael performs for three American Classic songs and Joe Sample and Christian McBride add their jazz artistry.
Multiple Nelson recordings, both new and reissued, typically appear each year.
“He doesn’t realize that you gotta put out a record and work it,” Raphael explained. “It’s like, ‘Well, this record’s out. Let’s do another one.’ He’s not thinking like a marketing guy. He doesn’t care about any of that.”
Raphael produced another of Nelson’s 2009 releases, Naked Willie. Recorded from 1966 to 1970 for RCA, the album’s original recordings feature the strings- and backup singers-filled production style typical of the Nashville Sound.
Raphael, a long-time fan of these lesser-known recordings, got the idea of stripping the RCA recordings down to their vocal and small band essence. With Nelson and Sony Legacy Recordings’ blessings, the harmonica player-turned-producer removed the schmaltzy strings and chorus, revealing the songs in their unadorned beauty. A few hidden guitar solos from Nelson and Nashville studio ace Grady Martin surfaced, too.
“At that time, strings and background singers, that’s what was selling,” Raphael said. “And Willie didn’t have any say in the production. He was just the singer and the writer. I’m sure he felt lucky just to have a record deal. But I also know that he’d go in and cut a track with just the band and say, ‘Oh, this is great, I love it,’ and then come back the next week and hear it with all the strings and be disheartened.”
Raphael’s industriousness brought a thumbs up from Nelson, his fellow traveler for 37 years.
“Oh, yeah. And I’m proud of it because I really love those tunes. And if Willie were to record those tunes next week, this is what they would sound like, because he’s all about less is more, keeping things simple.”
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