Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger Review

Take a poll of your friends. Ask them the following question: “What kind of music do you like?” Chances are that a majority of them will answer something along the lines of, “I dunno, a bit of everything... Except country.” Well, that's their loss, and probably yours too. I'll be the first person to admit that when it comes to my FM dial, the local country music station and its insipid southern tinged pop has been blacklisted. But in all reality, the stuff that takes up the airwaves is about as country as The Eagles. Not very. But there's a reason why Garth Brooks has sold more than 120 million albums. When it's good, it's damn good. Maybe this stems from my affinity for hard drinkin' tunes by bigger than life personalities, but when it comes to me and country music, its “Outlaw” era reigns supreme. Flying in defiance of the colored patent leather boots and rhinestone glamor of the mainstream, the outlaw country movement was a back to basics roots movement that embraced the Americana folk sound of legends like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, while updating it with a healthy dose of Honky Tonk. Today, some of its biggest stars are only known by younger audiences for their eventual commercial cash grabs, like Hank Williams Jr. and his “rowdy friends' on Monday Night Football or Waylon Jennings and his narrator role in the Dukes of Hazzard, and not for their decades of consistent song-craft. Willie Nelson gets thrown in with them too for being the go to cameo in any movie that has a scene with a bong in its script. But before he was showing up blazed on Larry King Live and touring in a bio-fuel bus, he was a country icon, releasing a stretch of albums in the 70's that are classic pieces of America. The best of these is his 1975 album Red Headed Stranger.

The Red Headed Stranger is simple and bare. Following the story of a preacher man that kills his cheating wife and her lover, ol' Willie spins the tale with a laid back nonchalance that just seems to ooze out of him, his aching chords and somber melodies encapsulating the futility and pain of his character's situation, as if he himself was recounting it to you over a couple drinks at an old, dusty, run down bar on the edge of a town that no one even remembers the name of, but it's there, and you're there, and he's stuck in the same rut telling you his life story. The concept itself isn't important as a whole to why this is a classic though. Each song stands on its own as a testament to love, loss, and the dreary happenings that always seem to follow the most broken of broken souls. Sometimes it takes the wail of a well worn old telecaster strumming away some trusty old chords or the crying of minor key harmonica being played from the gut to get across just how someone truly feels, and those moments are in abundance throughout Willie Nelson's opus....full text Willie Nelson's classic Red Headed Stranger, despite some over-giddy reviews, was not the first country album that was conceived and executed as a whole work of art, rather than just a random string of songs. It isn't even Nelson's best album. But there's no question that Red Headed Stranger holds a unique place in American popular music. It was an unexpected popular hit that secured Nelson's career and created a bona fide myth-a shadowy Joseph Campbell-meets-Sam Peckinpah slug-ya-in-the-gut-and-seep-into-your-subconscious kind of myth. Now, a quarter century after its original release, Columbia/Legacy has reissued Red Headed Stranger in a 25th anniversary edition that includes updated (and decent) liner notes, extra photos, and bonus tracks, including Nelson's renditions of tunes by Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and some cowboy named J.S. Bach. They're fine tunes, all, but totally irrelevant to the Red Headed Stranger tale.

Nelson's story begins "in the year of '01." Somehow having the action set in the 20th century—if just barely—made the story seem more real. It's helpful to consider the social context in which the album was conceived. 1975 was the year South Vietnam fell to the Viet Cong, and one year after Evil King Richard was driven from power. The country, whether or not we realized it then, was in need of honest reassurance that despite our violent heritage, despite the blood on our collective souls, there was a kernel of nobility somewhere inside us-some chance, however dim, of redemption.

In response, some Americans turned to mindless flag-waving, anticipating the unbridled deluge of patriotic malarkey in the name of the Bicentennial the next year. Others turned to mindless ass-shaking at the dawn of the disco era. And more than a few found strange solace in the disturbing tale of the Red Headed Stranger, a tale sung by a pot-smoking nonconformist, years older than most rock & roll idols (who were beginning to irritate like the pampered millionaires they really were), but willing to fight his own musical establishment for the freedom to do what he wanted. Nelson set his Stranger story in the Old West, a mythological setting Americans can relate to, familiar yet foreboding. But the protagonist is no jovial John Wayne. A mysterious character known only as The Preacher, a man who has been cuckolded by his wife, Nelson's Stranger is more the silent, angst-ridden, Clint Eastwood type. "And he cried like a baby," Nelson tells us right off. "And he screamed like a panther in the middle of the night."...full text When Teddy Roosevelt claimed loneliness is a quintessential ingredient of our national character, he hit the psychic bull's-eye, ringing up images of pragmatic pioneers, existential outlaws and a long line of heroes who dreamt of the purity of their youth even as they drew their guns to eliminate it. "There are no second acts in American lives," someone once said, and a cursory glance at our gods -- the cowboy/desperado, the gangster/detective, the movie star/rock & roller -- whose lifestyles generally suggest either early and unnatural death or obsolescence, easily reinforces such a statement. To the quiet American, violence, like the perpetual but unreal motion of life on the road, seems to serve as solicitous coin in the realm of the solitary survivor, some kind of necessary stop-gap and occupation while a man waits in the sanctified state of loneliness for something to happen, someone to come along or return, his vague search to end.

From Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to Dirty Harry Callahan, the mythic American hero is a man, almost always womanless, who has somehow been trapped in that curious nether world between comic innocence and tragic experience; unable or unwilling to make a choice, he can at best (or worst) embrace either adjective, neither noun. He has known happiness once, lost it, and now nothing will help. for the sentimental there is Christianity, the "official" solace, itself an uncanny mixture of loneliness and death, its hero a lost and forsaken son slain only to rise again with the promise of a glorious but distant new childhood in exchange for a worn out, hopeless past. It is small wonder that most Americans worship no god except their own lost innocence, have had, in fact, to rely on popular literature, films and music to provide plausible and workable archetypal "religion," that is more Jungian and Freudian.

Original album advertising art.
Click image for larger view.

Veteran country singer/songwriter Willie Nelson knows all of this -- and much more. His Red Headed Stranger is extraordinarily ambitious, cool, tightly controlled. A phonographic Western movie which brilliantly evokes the mythopoeic imagery of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shane and the works of John Ford, the album traces the life of a Montana cowboy who finds his true love with another man, kills both of them and later another woman, then drifts through Denver dance halls into old age, forever unable to cut his early loss but managing in the final years of his life a moving, believable and not unwarranted synthesis of all he has missed. The narrative may not sound especially promising or unusual -- like most fables, it is, after all, the same old story: "That is its point -- but in Nelson's hands, its hard-won simplicity calls forth the same complex and profound metaphysical responses as those brought about by the matter-of-fact awesomeness of the Rocky Mountains. Hemingway, who perfected an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases, used to say that the full power of his composition was accessible only between the lines; and Nelson, on this LP, ties precise, evocative lyrics to not quite remembered, never really forgotten folk melodies to creat a similar effect, haunting yet utterly unsentimental. That he did not write much of the material makes his accomplishment no less singular.

Red Headed Stranger, not unlike Dylan's much underrated Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, is concerned with great universals; its heroic songs, somewhat reminiscent in mood of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and the magnificent instrumental anthems (particularly "Final Theme") of the latter album, seem both vulnerable and inevitable, strapped to the lifeline, equally suitable for weddings or funerals. "It was a time of the Preacher," Stranger begins, and with this life-and-death invocation, the once Edenic West becomes a land populated by fallen innocents ("My eyes filled with tears and I must have aged ten years/ I couldn't believe it was true") who deal out Biblical revenge ("Now the lesson is over and the killin's begun") less in anger than in a state of agonized confusion:
Don't cross him, don't boss him
He's wild in his sorrow
Ridin' and hidin' his pain
Don't fight him, don't spite him
Just wait till tomorrow
Maybe he'll ride on again.

When the killing comes, it is quick, hypnotic and terrible in its finality ("And they smiled at each other as he walked through the door/ And they died with their smiles on their faces"), the belligerent bullets almost an afterthought, transient, symptomatic explosions in a field of loneliness ("He bought her a drink and gave her some money/ He just didn't seem to care/... He shot her so quickly they had no time to warn her"). The stranger has reached the penultimate point in his journey, but with omniscient irony the century rolls on:
It was the time of the preacher
In the year of '01
And just when you think it's all over
It's only begun.

On side two, cyclic catharsis begins, its inception again ironic. The wanderer enters a tavern, is drawn to a woman, but this time the lovers dance "with their smiles on their faces." "Can I sleep in your arms tonight, lady?" the cowboy asks, adding "I assure you I'll do you no harm." Life's verities seem ambiguous ("It's the same old song -- it's right and it's wrong/ And livin' is just something I do") as the hero ages. Stranger ends with an image reminiscent of the final tableau of Bergman's Wild Strawberries: Time, memory and expectations have magically fused, transitory people have somehow become luminous legends, happiness has been found.
And in the shade of an oak down by the river
Sat an old man and a boy
Settin' sails, spinnin' tales and fishin' for whales
With a lady they both enjoy.

I can't remember when a record has taken such a hold on me.

- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 8/28/75.

Bonus Reviews!

This might be called a concept album, or even a message album. Frankly, we haven't figured it out yet. But it's Willie Nelson, and it's listenable, and it includes some old favorites. He begins with his "Time of the Preacher," then segues into an old Eddy Arnold/Walty Fowler tune, back to the "Preacher," a medley of the title song and "Blue Rock Montana," then a Fred Rose favorite, then back to the "Red Headed Stranger," back to the "Preacher," a religious instrumental, a song called "Denver," a couple old instrumentals including a waltz and "Down Yonder," then the Hank Cochran song written for Jeannie Seeley, and an old T. Texas Tyler tune. Now it's all good, but we lost the continuity somewhere....full text When Teddy Roosevelt claimed loneliness is a quintessential ingredient of our national character, he hit the psychic bull's-eye, ringing up images of pragmatic pioneers, existential outlaws and a long line of heroes who dreamt of the purity of their youth even as they drew their guns to eliminate it. "There are no second acts in American lives," someone once said, and a cursory glance at our gods -- the cowboy/desperado, the gangster/detective, the movie star/rock & roller -- whose lifestyles generally suggest either early and unnatural death or obsolescence, easily reinforces such a statement. To the quiet American, violence, like the perpetual but unreal motion of life on the road, seems to serve as solicitous coin in the realm of the solitary survivor, some kind of necessary stop-gap and occupation while a man waits in the sanctified state of loneliness for something to happen, someone to come along or return, his vague search to end.

From Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to Dirty Harry Callahan, the mythic American hero is a man, almost always womanless, who has somehow been trapped in that curious nether world between comic innocence and tragic experience; unable or unwilling to make a choice, he can at best (or worst) embrace either adjective, neither noun. He has known happiness once, lost it, and now nothing will help. for the sentimental there is Christianity, the "official" solace, itself an uncanny mixture of loneliness and death, its hero a lost and forsaken son slain only to rise again with the promise of a glorious but distant new childhood in exchange for a worn out, hopeless past. It is small wonder that most Americans worship no god except their own lost innocence, have had, in fact, to rely on popular literature, films and music to provide plausible and workable archetypal "religion," that is more Jungian and Freudian.

Original album advertising art.
Click image for larger view.

Veteran country singer/songwriter Willie Nelson knows all of this -- and much more. His Red Headed Stranger is extraordinarily ambitious, cool, tightly controlled. A phonographic Western movie which brilliantly evokes the mythopoeic imagery of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shane and the works of John Ford, the album traces the life of a Montana cowboy who finds his true love with another man, kills both of them and later another woman, then drifts through Denver dance halls into old age, forever unable to cut his early loss but managing in the final years of his life a moving, believable and not unwarranted synthesis of all he has missed. The narrative may not sound especially promising or unusual -- like most fables, it is, after all, the same old story: "That is its point -- but in Nelson's hands, its hard-won simplicity calls forth the same complex and profound metaphysical responses as those brought about by the matter-of-fact awesomeness of the Rocky Mountains. Hemingway, who perfected an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases, used to say that the full power of his composition was accessible only between the lines; and Nelson, on this LP, ties precise, evocative lyrics to not quite remembered, never really forgotten folk melodies to creat a similar effect, haunting yet utterly unsentimental. That he did not write much of the material makes his accomplishment no less singular.

Red Headed Stranger, not unlike Dylan's much underrated Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, is concerned with great universals; its heroic songs, somewhat reminiscent in mood of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and the magnificent instrumental anthems (particularly "Final Theme") of the latter album, seem both vulnerable and inevitable, strapped to the lifeline, equally suitable for weddings or funerals. "It was a time of the Preacher," Stranger begins, and with this life-and-death invocation, the once Edenic West becomes a land populated by fallen innocents ("My eyes filled with tears and I must have aged ten years/ I couldn't believe it was true") who deal out Biblical revenge ("Now the lesson is over and the killin's begun") less in anger than in a state of agonized confusion:
Don't cross him, don't boss him
He's wild in his sorrow
Ridin' and hidin' his pain
Don't fight him, don't spite him
Just wait till tomorrow
Maybe he'll ride on again.

When the killing comes, it is quick, hypnotic and terrible in its finality ("And they smiled at each other as he walked through the door/ And they died with their smiles on their faces"), the belligerent bullets almost an afterthought, transient, symptomatic explosions in a field of loneliness ("He bought her a drink and gave her some money/ He just didn't seem to care/... He shot her so quickly they had no time to warn her"). The stranger has reached the penultimate point in his journey, but with omniscient irony the century rolls on:
It was the time of the preacher
In the year of '01
And just when you think it's all over
It's only begun.

On side two, cyclic catharsis begins, its inception again ironic. The wanderer enters a tavern, is drawn to a woman, but this time the lovers dance "with their smiles on their faces." "Can I sleep in your arms tonight, lady?" the cowboy asks, adding "I assure you I'll do you no harm." Life's verities seem ambiguous ("It's the same old song -- it's right and it's wrong/ And livin' is just something I do") as the hero ages. Stranger ends with an image reminiscent of the final tableau of Bergman's Wild Strawberries: Time, memory and expectations have magically fused, transitory people have somehow become luminous legends, happiness has been found.
And in the shade of an oak down by the river
Sat an old man and a boy
Settin' sails, spinnin' tales and fishin' for whales
With a lady they both enjoy.

I can't remember when a record has taken such a hold on me.

- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 8/28/75.

Bonus Reviews!

This might be called a concept album, or even a message album. Frankly, we haven't figured it out yet. But it's Willie Nelson, and it's listenable, and it includes some old favorites. He begins with his "Time of the Preacher," then segues into an old Eddy Arnold/Walty Fowler tune, back to the "Preacher," a medley of the title song and "Blue Rock Montana," then a Fred Rose favorite, then back to the "Red Headed Stranger," back to the "Preacher," a religious instrumental, a song called "Denver," a couple old instrumentals including a waltz and "Down Yonder," then the Hank Cochran song written for Jeannie Seeley, and an old T. Texas Tyler tune. Now it's all good, but we lost the continuity somewhere....full text