Thanks, Budrock, for sharing this review from your great collection.
American Statesman
by: John T. Davis
There is a bit of doggerel that contends that boys are composed in the main of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. And by the same token, girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.
And a Willie Nelson concert at the Austin Opera House? Like the one he played Tuesday night? That’s a bit more problematic. There are the lights and the smoke and the whiskey, of course. But there is also the fleeting sight of a cowboy hat arching through the spotlight as Nelson backhands it into the audience. And that exhilarating moment to “Nightlife” when the lights go blue and the band hits everything is sight… And the breathless anticlimax of the second verse of “Bloody Mary Morning” after the long instrumental rave up… And the sight of the four – count ’em – four guitarists in the band (Nelson, Jody Payne, Grady Martin and Bobby Rambo) pulling off one solo after another… And the heartbreaking incongruity of Willie singing the upbeat lyrics of “Blue Skies” in the most heart-breakingly sad cadences imaginable.
Tuesday night was a bit of an anomaly in the history of Nelson’s annual Christmas shows. With a guest list of more than 500, most of them movie people from the Left Coast (Nelson is working on “The Songwriter” here in town, the audience was uncommonly subdued; in fact, for the first half of the three-hour show, they acted like they’d been sedated. Nelson couldn’t have cared less. He was playing for himself as much as the audience. After being pinned under the unblinking eye of the camera for weeks, he bolted for the stage like a resistance fighter breaking for the frontier and freedom.
The crowd really didn’t come alive until Kris Kristofferson and David Allen Coe came out to join Wilie in one of the most improbable harmonies ever to issue from the Opera House stage. Then Kristofferson’s band joined Nelson’s on stage and all of a sudden there were seven guitarists, two bass players and three piano players all vying for space.
It was a show that demanded some relief pitchers. Nelson did 34 songs, did an off-stage breath and then came back sporting a Santa Clause cap and hollered, “Now it’s time to get down and get serious!” before playing and eight-song encore. That got ’em on their feet.
There was enough music to sate any Willie Nelson fan, although he did not play anything from “Tougher Than Leather” or (except for the obligatory “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”, from “Red Headed Stranger” or his new album, “Without a Song”. No matter. No one felt the lack of Nelson singing, “Always on My Mind” in a pool of pastels and shadows or listening to the holiday medley of “Jingle Bells”, “Santa Clause is Coming to Town”, and “Pretty Paper”, or hearing him duet with Kristofferson on “Me and Bobby McGee”, or… But here we go again.