Willie Nelson: Me and the Drummer / Red Headed Stranger

On the title track to his latest studio recording, it’s number sixty-something, not counting sundry compilations, Me and the Drummer, Willie Nelson sings, “Never givin’ a choice / I had to march to that drummer in me.” Sure, it’s a notion that would be banal even if it weren’t so tired, but if there’s anybody who can meaningfully claim to have danced to his own beat, becoming both an icon and a national treasure in as offhand and idiosyncratic manner as one can imagine in the process, it’s Willie Nelson. Perhaps his genius isn’t as casual or eccentric as it appears at a distance, but you’d have a hard time proving it by the circumstances of Me and the Drummer, or the canonical Red Headed Stranger.

A few years back some long-time Texas friends, drummer/singer Johnny Bush, bassist David Zettner, fiddler Johnny Gimble, and pianist Floyd Domino, gathered to record an album with the late, great steel guitarist Jimmy Day (he passed away in January of 1999 at age 65, these proved to be his last full sessions). All of them had recorded with Nelson at one time or another, and Bush, Zettner, and Day had done time in his ‘60s band, The Offenders. Willie, so the story goes, dropped in one day to help out on a song or two, found he rather liked the setup, and stayed around for four days, long enough to record an album’s worth of songs. Thus, Me and the Drummer.

Backed by his old compadres, re-christened The Offenders for the occasion, Nelson dusts off a dozen songs from his formidable back catalog, mostly obscurities from the 1960s (only the lead-off title track is a new song, and it’s the only one not written by Willie, credit Bill McDavid). He followed a similar strategy of revisiting old songs on his last studio album, the Daniel Lanois produced Teatro, leaving him open to the charge of coasting, or worse, as he nears his seventieth birthday, but that would surely be missing the point. If he’s not written a “Night Life” or a “Yesterday’s Wine” lately, well, neither has anyone else, and few have a deep enough oeuvre to cherrypick all-but-forgottens that can stand with most folks’ best, though many no doubt wish they had the luxury. But the real justification, for those who need it, is in the pleasures of the performance.

And the pleasures of Me and the Drummer are the simple yet considerable, if old fashioned, pleasures of finely crafted songs lovingly played. The Offenders play each of these eleven tales of careless love and dreams broken (save for the title track and the swinging “Rainy Day Blues” they’re all heart songs) with the understated grace of wise old hands with absolutely nothing to prove to themselves or anyone else. Their laidback, seemingly effortless, virtuosity is the perfect compliment to Nelson’s songcraft and his intimate baritone. There just aren’t too many records made anymore this warm and generous and unpretentious. At least not enough of them.

Of course, Willie Nelson has been making them for a long time. Red Headed Stranger, just reissued by Columbia/Legacy as part of their “American Milestones” series, is so unassuming that Columbia’s executives thought they were listening to a rough cut demo when they first heard it in 1975. Surely it’s among the least likely multi-platinum sellers ever recorded, a song cycle of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption recorded in two days, with accompaniment so spare it’s barely there. The title cut is the album’s centerpiece, “Time Of The Preacher” supplies it’s recurring theme, and Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain” was Nelson’s first number one hit, but if anyone has ever written finer lines than Willie’s, “The bright lights of Denver are shining like diamonds / Like ten thousand jewels in the sky / And it’ s nobody’s business where your goin’ or where you come from / And you’re judged by the look in your eye,” I’ve never heard them.