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Friday, March 14, 2008
Thoughts on Willie’s concert
Caught Willie Nelson and the Family’s show last night at the Coliseum — here’s a Trib slide show if you want to see who was there, on stage and in the crowd — and it just reinforced what a pro the guy is.
He and the band took the stage about 9 p.m. and from the opening chords of “Whiskey River” to the finale of “I Saw the Light,” which ended the second encore, they cranked out 37 songs in a non-stop hour and 40 minutes. Not bad for a 74-year-old and a band with several players not too much younger.
Willie talks as much as he sings these days, but that’s really not a problem: He’s known not for a melodic voice, but his jazz-like phrasing, where he stretches a word or phrase before or past a beat. I always think of jazz great Billie Holiday, whose vocal quality wasn’t much to speak of (at least later in her career), but who could transform the most mundane of songs through emotion and phrasing.
Thursday’s concert reminded me what a master of the three-minute song Nelson the songwriter is — no long story ballads that I recall, but songs that lent themselves to instrumental solos and breaks — and what a smart show playlist he creates, a skill honed by hundreds of Vegas gigs, arena concerts and a couple of generations spent in honky-tonks. Nelson’s recent, popular duet with Toby Keith, “Beer For My Horses,” was the third song in the set with two new Nelson songs introduced at about the 10-song mark, followed by two more new ones in the concert’s final third.
Nelson also didn’t program hits in a strict chronology, but clustered them for emotional resonance, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” followed by a couple of songs from his Stardust album, “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” next to “Good-Hearted Woman.”
Great stuff, great show, though probably old-school to a younger generation raised on eye candy like concert video and pyrotechnics. Give Nashville’s current kings and queens 30 years and see what endures from their careers …
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