Willie Nelson's 90th Birthday Celebration (CBS-TV, filmed April 29 and 30, 2023; aired December 17, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 17) my husband Charles and I watched a CBS-TV special called Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration – even though Willie Nelson was born April 29, 1933 and this show was filmed at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl April 29 (Nelson’s actual 90th birthday) and 30, 2023. The show was a pretty typical tribute program, consisting of lots of musical performances by artists with some sort of tenuous connection with Willie Nelson as well as some with quite direct connections – including his sons Lukas and Micah. There were also a few guest MC’s with no discernible connection with music – Helen Mirren, Owen Wilson (who seemed to be there only because he and Willie Nelson are both Texans), Jennfer Garner, Woody Harrelson and Ethan Hawke. Though it was ostensibly a celebration of Nelson the performer and the human, most (though not all) of the songs performed were by Willie Nelson himself. It still irks me that a previous Willie Nelson tribute telecast, though ostensibly linked to his winning the Library of Congress Gershwin Award for his songwriting, was filled with songs Nelson recorded but didn’t write. The show opened with singer Billy Strings doing a quite good version of a Nelson oldie, “Whiskey River,” and playing some virtuosic solo passages on acoustic guitar. Then Norah Jones and Alison Russell did a song called “Seven Spanish Angels” that wasn’t actually a Willie Nelson composition – it was written by Troy Seals and Eddie Setser, and Nelson recorded it as a duet with Ray Charles – though it could have been, with its mood of bittersweet longing. The African-American Russell totally outsang the half-white, half-[East] Indian Jones (she’s the daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar) on the song, but it was still a great performance. Then Helen Mirren introduced Beck, who sang “Hands on the Wheel” – the final song from Nelson’s ground-breaking album Red-Headed Stranger (1975) – with just his voice and guitar (no turntables and only one microphone!), and I couldn’t help but recall the story from Ken Burns’s mega-documentary on country music as to how this album got released. Willie Nelson recorded it in an independent studio in Austin, Texas and sent the tape to Columbia Records as his first album under a new contract with them. Billy Sherrill, head of Columbia’s country division, hated the album and his first thought was to refuse to release it. Then he figured, “On second thought, I’ll release it anyway, it will bomb, and then this guy will do what we tell him to do.” So Columbia released Red-Headed Stranger, it became an enormous hit and landed Nelson on the cover of Time magazine, and Willie Nelson went right on recording albums his way and making a lot of money for both himself and Columbia.

The next singer was Sheryl Crow, doing “Crazy” – the song Nelson wrote in the early 1960’s and placed with Patsy Cline – and though Crow’s version didn’t come close to those of either Nelson or Cline, she still acquitted herself professionally and came up with a quite respectable version. The next artist was Chris Stapleton, who sang “You Were Always on My Mind.” After him came modern-day African-American blues artist Gary Clark, Jr., who was introduced by Owen Wilson with the information that he was going to play the song “Texas Flood” as a tribute to both Willie Nelson and his friend and fellow Texan Stevie Ray Vaughan. Actually it turns out “Texas Flood” was an original by Black bluesman Larry Davis and his arranger, Joseph Scott, first recorded in 1958 on the Duke label (one of the few Black-oriented independent companies actually owned by an African-American, Bobby Robinson). Stevie Ray Vaughan first heard it when fellow Austin white blues singer Angela Strehli played him Davis’s record, and Vaughan chose it as the title song of his first album in 1983. Then Jennifer Garner introduced The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks – who self-sabotaged their own career when they gave an interview during the George W. Bush Presidency and announced that Bush’s policies had made them embarrassed to be Texans. Later they amended their name to eliminate the supposedly racist term “Dixie” -– though they left in the sexist “Chicks” – and on this show they did one of Nelson’s greatest songs, “Bloody Mary Morning,” in a hell-bent-for-leather version that lacked the plaintive quality of Nelson’s original but certainly showed off The Chicks’ instrumental chops. Later Rosanne Cash, daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, came out and did a song by Kris Kristofferson called “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).” Kristofferson himself came out as a guest artist and the two turned the final chorus into a duet and even kissed each other on the lips at the end. This song isn’t by Willie Nelson but it had a circuitous connection to him: it was featured by “The Highwaymen,” an all-star country supergroup featuring Nelson, Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings that made three albums in the 1970’s and 1980’s and did some joint tours. Alas, Nelson and Kristofferson are the only ones still alive! Then Miranda Lambert came out in a red tasseled jacket and sang “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” a rather odd choice – there are quite a few items from Willie Nelson’s songbook that would have been better showcases for her, but she sang with her usual blend of authority and confidence.

Then came an odd performance of “Georgia on My Mind” – of course written by Hoagy Carmichael, not Willie Nelson, but part of Nelson’s legend because it was the biggest hit from the three albums he recorded of 1930’s and 1940’s standards in the late 1970’s – featuring Jamie Johnson (who’d also performed it at the Library of Congress tribute; I’d damned him as mediocre but he came off much better now, perhaps thanks to the illustrious help he got), Warren Hayes and the legendary Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the M.G.’s on piano. Then came two of the most haunting songs of the night, Dave Matthews singing “Funny How Time Slips Away” and Willie’s son Lukas Nelson doing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” both with just their own acoustic guitars as accompaniment. After that Woody Harrelson came out to introduce Willie Nelson himself for some quite odd song choices: a duet with Sheryl Crow on the 1940’s hit “Far Away Places,” a duet with rapper Snoop Dogg on “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” (the show’s script had been full of joking references to Nelson’s famously conspicuous cannabis consumption, and this song united two of the most famous potheads of all time – though for someone who’s best known as a rapper, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Snoop Dogg could carry a tune), a strong duet with George Strait on “Sing One with Willie” (apparently Strait wrote this song in the hopes that he would someday get to sing one with Willie for real, which he did here), another Nelson-Strait duet on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” duets with Keith Richards on “We Had It All” and “Forever Wind” – during which Richards joked that he was “surrounded by Nelsons” since Willie’s sons Lukas and Micah were both prominently featured in the band, and a final medley with the full cast joining in on “On the Road Again,” far from one of my favorite Willie Nelson songs but an inevitable way to close the show. Actually the last song was “Happy Birthday,” not a Willie Nelson song either but a welcome inclusion, especially since it’s in the public domain at last.

One thing that amused me about the show was how much retro gear Willie Nelson had on stage; in addition to famous-name amplifiers like Marshall and Fender, his equipment also included low-end brands like Magnotone and Homestead. The Homestead amp was pink and we got enough glimpses of the back of it to see that it was all-tube; no transistors for Willie Nelson! Overall Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration was a welcome tribute, though it still irks me that neither here nor at the Library of Congress celebration were any songs performed from what I consider Willie Nelson’s finest album: Phases and Stages (1974), a stunning concept album about a breakup with one side told from the woman’s point of view and one side told from the man’s. Alas, Nelson finished this album and sent it in to Atlantic for release just when the label was shutting down its country division, so it didn’t get the promotion it deserved; instead he signed with Columbia, released Red-Headed Stranger (another country concept album and almost at the level of Phases and Stages), and that became Willie Nelson’s star-making album and the cornerstone of his career.