Willie Nelson grinned amiably -- all of Willie's expressions rise from amiability -- at the suggestion that, as the 800-pound gorilla of country music, he can sing anything he wants.
"Well, I am country," he said. "Always have been, always will be. Country is what I write, what I sing, what I think I do." He grinned again. "But I do like to sing other kinds of songs."
And so in any given concert, Willie with his Family Band will offer rock and roll ("Whiskey River"), hard country ("The Party's Over"), blues ("City of New Orleans"), ballads ("To All the Girls I've Loved Before"), ethnic folk ("Seven Spanish Angels"), maybe a classical instrumental ("Bach Minuet in G") if the mood strikes him, and of course "Blue Skies," "Georgia on My Mind," and other pop standards, including -- you can count on it -- "Stardust."
" `Stardust' is probably the greatest song -- well, `Stardust' and `Moonlight in Vermont' are the two greatest songs -- that I think were ever written," Willie said.
"This is the same guy that says, `I'm country,' but I also know what is really beautiful and what's good and what's difficult. `Moonlight in Vermont' is a difficult melody, it's a difficult lyric. Your regular ordinary run-of-the-mill picker don't jump out there and start playing `Moonlight in Vermont' like he might `Fraulein,' you know."
For the moment, Willie was only talking about music, over cups of coffee in his suite at the L'Ermitage in Beverly Hills. He had come to Los Angeles in T-shirt and jeans to dangle before distributors rough cuts of another in a series of movies -- this one featuring, among others, Morgan Fairchild -- in which Willie has basically played himself.
A month ago, in a studio he owns in the rustic Texas hill country, he and his pal Merle Haggard finished a duet album -- "I like to sing duets" -- for release next month.
This week, Willie picked up the tour again, 100 dates (including "Farm-Aid II," in Austin, July 4) carrying into August, where from Maine to San Diego he sings the songs he likes and the songs he writes and the standards that he grew up loving. Next Wednesday, Willie will be 53 years old, living beyond the need for image, dabbling in music and film and vinyl, an eclectic cowboy recording his autobiography one day at a time.
Its title song is his own "On the Road Again," and you can see the lyric coming again to his mind when he says, "People say, well, how long are you gonna be out on the road, and it's really hard for me to say, because I feel like I've always been out. I travel around, and I play music. That's what I do."
This is Willie's silver anniversary on the road. It was in 1961 that he left Texas for Nashville and his first music job, playing bass for Ray Price. Pretty soon he was writing songs and selling them to Price ("Night Life"), Faron Young ("Hello Walls") and Patsy Cline ("Crazy").
Those songs were country, and then again they weren't, quite. Willie built into their country framework a little of the sophisticated '40s styling that he so admired; "Night Life" was to "Fraulein" as a buggy was to a buckboard.
"There's a lot of people in Nashville that didn't think I was country when I went there, and maybe still don't," he said.
As a singer, Willie scored in Nashville with "Touch Me," but it was not until after he moved to Austin in 1972 that the gorilla began to stir. He tapped into the "progressive country" scene already underway in Austin, and later cultivated, principally with Waylon Jennings, the "outlaw" image that, in its appeal to studio executives, propelled Willie and Waylon into the recording mainstream.
Willie survived the image, moved beyond it, on the strength of musicianship and personal chemistry. Seldom is so compelling a face matched exactly by the voice.
A person's voice, when it is recorded and played back, does not sound the same to him, and it is a curious thing when the voice is Willie Nelson's. Is he the only one who doesn't know what he sounds like?
"I know now," he said. "I didn't; I thought I sounded different for a long time, and I couldn't get used to it. I've accepted it because I don't dislike it. It sounds probably higher than I would like it to sound."
Right now, the voice is about 70 or 80 songs ahead. The album by Willie and Haggard, due out next month, features the work of a young songwriter, David Lynn Jones, who wrote the lead song on Willie's new "Promiseland" album.
There are another "40 or 50 sides in the can" after a different session including Nelson and Haggard and a long-time but underpublicized Texas musician named Freddy Powers.
"I'm definitely going to do something with them," said Willie. "They're all the same kind of stuff we were talking about, '40s stuff."
And there is also Willie the singer re-interpreting Willie the early songwriter.
"I've re-recorded a lot of those songs with my band," he said. "I'm just kind of waiting for a slot to put them out. I've had so much product out there over the last few years that I don't want to flood the market.
"The only way to know if you're getting overexposed or not is if people quit coming to see you. So far, the crowds have been pretty good."
dang, pretty cool!
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