Willie Nelson – Milk Cow Blues
From its three years of incubation in Austin through its belated release on Island, this project has carried the generic tag of “Willie Nelson’s blues album.” The description is accurate as far as it goes. Yet ultimately it is no more helpful in mapping the sophisticated swing of this musical terrain than it would be to dub 1993’s Don Was-produced Across The Borderline Nelson’s “pop album,” or to single out any of its hundreds of predecessors as his “country album.”
Marketing is marketing and music is music, and where the latter is concerned, Willie Nelson makes albums beyond category. This is one of the better ones, though not as transcendently great is it could have been, if marketing hadn’t interfered with the music. Justifying the major-label promotion meant backloading the project with an assortment of guest stars, from perennials such as B.B. King and Dr. John to younger revivalists such as Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Susan Tedeschi. Though such a strategy revived the career of Carlos Santana, it isn’t likely to pay the same commercial dividends for Willie, since fans of the high-octane Lang and Shepherd aren’t likely to succumb to the Django-esque strum of a 67-year-old geezer.
Even so, it’s a tribute to Nelson’s Zen Mastery of the music that none of the intrusions seriously distract from the project’s organic unity, while a few of the interlopers even enhance the finished product. It’s also a tribute to the grooves cut by the backing band, the unsung heroes of the album: guitarist (and co-producer) Derek O’Brien, keyboardist Riley Osbourn, and the limber rhythm section of bassist Jon Blondell and drummer George Rains.
O’Brien has long been the most valuable player in the Antone’s stable, while Rains has been transcending musical boundaries from his San Francisco days with Mother Earth and Boz Scaggs through his association with Doug Sahm (whose similarly bluesy Juke Box Music Rains produced). Riding shotgun with Nelson is longtime harmonica sideman Mickey Raphael, who retains his characteristic chirp rather than affecting the more raucous sound of the urban blues harp.
The common ground for Nelson and band is their conviction that the blues is more a matter of feeling than a rigidity of form. Fact is, Nelson has rarely made an album without a pronounced undercurrent of blues. Phases And Stages, the 1974 song cycle that to these ears remains his best, could as justifiably be tagged his blues album, while some of the understatedly bittersweet highlights of Milk Cow Blues — particularly “Wake Me When It’s Over” and “Lonely Street” — could have fit as easily on that album as this one.
Instead of a stylistic departure, the project finds Nelson tapping into one of his deepest musical wellsprings, a tributary that extends from Jimmie Rodgers through Hank Williams and Bob Wills (whose version of “Milk Cow Blues” inspired Nelson’s title cut). For such artists, as for more contemporary kindred spirits from Ray Charles to Charlie Rich, blues and country aren’t separate streams but a single source.
Of the album’s generous sampling of 15 cuts, a third are from Nelson’s songbook of the 1950s and early ’60s. Among the obscurities, “Rainy Day Blues” benefits from a surprisingly soulful duet vocal by Jonny Lang, whose voice sounds weathered beyond his years and whose guitar avoids the hormonal overdrive of his own jams. Francine Reed, most familiar as Lyle Lovett’s Large Band diva, helps redeem yet another version of “Funny How Time Slips Away”, complementing Nelson’s behind-the-beat phrasing, with pianist Osbourn sounding more like Floyd Cramer than Otis Spann.
At the other extreme, Susan Tedeschi adds little to the equally overdone “Crazy”, beyond the novelty value of a blues artist tackling a pop hit by a country queen. And Nelson sounds so much fresher than B.B. King on King’s signature song, “The Thrill Is Gone”, that the guest appearance serves mainly to distinguish a vocal that could have been phoned in from one that reflects the inspiration of the moment. Similarly, Keb’ Mo’s coda to “Outskirts Of Town” sounds tacked-on, extraneous.
With the majority of the material dating from almost half a century ago, the most intuitively evocative of these performances rank with Nelson’s timeless best. Two of the atmospheric standouts are “Black Night” and “Fool’s Paradise”, songs associated with Charles Brown and Mose Allison, respectively, renewed through the collaboration of Nelson with Dr. John. Whether or not the latter cut his piano tracks after the basic sessions, his accompaniment has an effortless quality that matches Nelson’s, adding a trademark style without seeming to compete for the spotlight. The jazziness of the interplay inspires Nelson to stretch himself vocally, to take the sort of interpretive chances that he doesn’t within the comfort of his own band.
A pair of electrifying performances push him even further. “Kansas City” (is this Willie Nelson’s rock ‘n’ roll album?) benefits from the high-voltage jolt of Jimmie Vaughan’s guitar, as Nelson trades verses with Tedeschi. The album-closing climax of “Texas Flood” pays almost nine-minutes of tribute to both Nelson’s native state and Vaughan’s brother, with Kenny Wayne Shepherd supplying a tornado of Stevie licks in homage. The track fades away while the playing is still going strong.
No matter how far afield the music takes him, Willie sounds very much at home, his conversational phrasing seemingly incapable of artifice, his guitar providing the same sort of punctuation to these tracks that it has on his country classics. For Nelson, it’s all just music, this vast expanse of American song that he has somehow claimed as his own. Not that Willie is likely to let national boundaries stop him, if that reggae album he’s been threatening as long as this blues project ever sees release. As Jah knows, the troubadour who opens every concert with “Whiskey River” is really a ganja man at heart.