Shepherd’s Bush Empire
by Tim Cumming
The Independent
April 7, 2005
Willie Nelson’s bus is an American legend. Playing more than 100 dates a year, the country musician probably spends more time on board than anywhere else. Given the number of years he’s spent on it, it’s perhaps inevitable that, on entering the bus, you get the sense that you are entering Willie’s world.
With its faint aroma of grass, darkened windows and mirrored doors, you feel as though you could be anywhere on earth and, though we’re travelling from the band’s hotel to the artist’s entrance at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the only indication of where we are comes from a distant siren and the occasional judder of brakes.
Willie Nelson’s bus is an American legend. Playing more than 100 dates a year, the country musician probably spends more time on board than anywhere else. Given the number of years he’s spent on it, it’s perhaps inevitable that, on entering the bus, you get the sense that you are entering Willie’s world.
With its faint aroma of grass, darkened windows and mirrored doors, you feel as though you could be anywhere on earth and, though we’re travelling from the band’s hotel to the artist’s entrance at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the only indication of where we are comes from a distant siren and the occasional judder of brakes.
After five decades in the business, there is no one who wears their “legend” status as gracefully as Nelson does. Dressed casually in a grey tracksuit, he seems to carry none of the nervous tension that might accompany the knowledge that in 20 minutes he will be leading his band onstage to play a two-hour set before an adoring, packed house. With his headband and long, tied-back hair, Nelson still looks like the original cosmic cowboy; his beard is pure white. He is big on eye contact and very accommodating.
Nelson is among the few surviving elders from country’s rebellious pantheon of artists who blazed a trail out of the saccharine stupefaction of 1960s Nashville and laid down the spirit of rugged individualism that has inspired the alt country/Americana revival of the past decade.
“They had their own individual style,” he says of a generation of which he is one of the few survivors. “When you heard Johnny Cash, you knew it was Johnny Cash. Same with Hank Williams, or Waylon [Jennings]. The guys who have their own sound are the ones who’ll always be hanging around, and we’ll always like their music.”
Over the decades, Willie has become an expert in the fine art of song-catching – virtually the whole of the American song book can be found rolling around in his oeuvre.
“When you hear a great song you know it,” he says simply, of his talent. “You can’t explain why they’re great, but you know they are and you want to sing them.”
He applies this spirit to his own compositions – the ambivalent romance of the title track from 2004’s It Will Always Be shows how, with a few words, he can speak volumes. “The shorter that you could make it and still get your point across, the better the chances of airplay,” he says, “so we writers were sort of taught to see what you could say in nine lines of verse or whatever, and that makes you concentrate on the lines you wanna use and put more thought into them. I’d sooner lose 30 mediocre verses and come up with three good ones. Good songs are timeless; you can do ’em today or a hundred years from now. They’re still good.”
His elongated, conversational phrasing tells you a lot about his famously around-the-beat vocal style. It’s so simple it’s almost see-through, but the more you listen the thicker it gets, and it’s not half as sentimental as it first sounds.
Born in Abbott, a small town on the plains of central Texas, in the depths of the Depression, and raised by his grandparents, Nelson’s life journey is the archetypal country ride through lucky stars, ill omens and fortunate catastrophes. A difficult career start meant that, by the end of the Sixties, Nelson had semi-detached himself from the music business to run a hog farm just outside Nashville. It was only when a fire sent his home, business and most of his belongings up in smoke that he returned to Texas and took his band on the road.
He soon discovered that the music Nashville had dismissed, Texans loved. He then bought some land outside Austin, and hit the local music scene. “There was a place called Armadillo World Headquarters,” he says, “and I was playing the real cowboy redneck places down there. I started hanging out at Armadillo – there was a lot of young people around and I knew some people who owned the place. They had a beer garden there, and I thought, listen, we can try out some Hank Williams here.
So I started playing there, and sure enough, they were big country fans. There were guys doing it already,” he adds, “like Gram Parsons and Commander Cody, but the traditional guys like me hadn’t started to hang out with that crowd yet.” There he teamed up with the likes of rocker Leon Russell. “We started realising these things can mix up good, and we really mixed it up, and proved that it can be done,” he says.
In 1975, with his country concept album, Red Headed Stranger, Nelson had his first million-selling LP and by the end of the 1970s he had been elevated to iconographic status, a national monument etched into the American fabric as firmly as the heads on Mount Rushmore.
There were numerous crossover hits through the 1980s but, by the decade’s end, country radio was tuning out the old guard for a shiny new breed. There were further severe setbacks in 1990, when the IRS raided his compound in Luck.
Yet Nelson managed to pick himself up and dust himself down. By 1993, he had paid off his debts, moved back into Luck and resumed an itinerary of touring, recording and golf. It’s a routine that has continued more or less uninterrupted to this day, and he is often wont to say when asked about retiring: “All I do is play music and golf. Which one do you want me to give up?”
His genius may be casually worn, but there’s a powerful sense of continuity about his music that ensures it never strays far from its sources. He has played the same guitar, and led the same band, for decades, and on stage at Shepherd’s Bush it’s clear why his band is one of the longest-serving and sweetly seasoned bands in the music business. Their subtle, mercurial sound summons up the spirit of classic songs with uncluttered playing that leaves plenty of room for Nelson’s incredible guitar playing and vocal phrasing.
It seems that Nelson will never tire of reconstructing and rephrasing his work in new and refreshing ways. “You wanna do it bad enough, you just go ahead and do it,” he says, when asked about his career’s legacy. “It’s not ever easy. There’s always someone saying you can’t. But you can. If you think it’s the right thing, you can do it.”
And what is the most important lesson a life in the music business has taught him? He considers for a moment. “Patience,” he says, and laughs. He tries to think of something else, but that’s about all there is. “Mainly patience,” he says, and laughs again.
Willie Nelson plays Shepherd’s Bush Empire tonight