 In recent years, Willie Nelson has revisited early tunes to determine how they would sound if original orchestration and vocalists were removed. |
At 76, Nelson has stripped bare his initial approach to music with “Naked Willie,” an RCA/Legacy recording that features 17 tracks from 1966 through 1970. The 2009 release follows last year’s career retrospective, “One Hell of a Ride,” which included 100 songs that encompassed his work on a dozen different record labels from 1954 through 2007.
The early 1960s were pivotal for Nelson, with three of his compositions hitting the country charts — “Hello Walls” (sung by Faron Young), “Funny How Time Slips Away” (Billy Walker) and “Crazy” (Patsy Cline). After two albums for the independent Liberty label in 1962-63, Nelson was signed by Chet Akins to RCA Victor, for which he recorded nearly a dozen albums, starting in 1965.
On Music City’s bustling production assembly line, Nelson’s RCA output was typical of the so-called “Nashville Sound”: good tunes but more often than not sweetened with lushly orchestrated arrangements and backing vocalists. This was business as usual, the way Nelson’s records always were produced, until his arrival at Columbia in 1975, when the terms “artist approval” and “final cut” were written into his contract for the first time.
In recent years, Nelson and his longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael have revisited early tunes, wondering what those RCA recordings would sound like if the original multi-track tapes were retrieved and laid bare, if the melodies and instrumentals were heard without all the excess backing.
Their collaborations went public this past March with the CD “Naked Willie.” Nelson’s vocals are the core, with guitars, piano, bass and drums mixed as they were originally heard in the studio. In other words, as Raphael has said, he “un-produced” the songs.
This new collection is a snapshot of songs written and performed by a then-aspiring young songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., from 1966 to 1970. The album provides an unfiltered glimpse of what Nelson originally had envisioned when he wrote the songs more than 50 years ago.
The majority of the songs originated as tracks on some of those RCA albums: 1967’s “The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs” (“The Ghost,” “The Party’s Over”); 1969’s “My Own Peculiar Way” (“I Just Dropped By,” “I Let My Mind Wander,” “The Local Memory”); 1970’s “Laying My Burdens Down” (“Where Do You Stand?” “When We Live Again,” “Laying My Burdens Down”); and 1971’s “Willie Nelson & Family” (“What Can You Do To Me Now?” “I’m A Memory” and his version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”). The other six songs range from the unpublished single “Bring Me Sunshine” to several tracks that stayed unissued in the Nelson archive for decades.
There are many chapters in Nelson’s life and times: his formative years in the 1950s as a U.S. serviceman, radio DJ and fledgling songwriter/recording artist in Texas and Washington State; his move to Nashville with his family in 1960; his RCA years from 1965 to 1972; his historic 18-year association with Columbia, starting with his self-produced “Red Headed Stranger” in 1975; and his adventures through the 1990s and 2000s.
Tickets to Willie Nelson’s 7 p.m. concert at the Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion in Gilford range from $25 to $64. The Whatnot will perform at 5:30 p.m. on the Second Stage. For more information, call the box office at 293-4700 or log onto meadowbrook.net.
