Leave me if you need to

Willie Nelson's music is still helping us cope

You had to notice his hands. They looked old but moved young. Willie Nelson’s vocal chords are now just echoes of their glory. His back is hunched. His gait looks painful. But his hands still glide across his battered guitar, Trigger, exactly as they are supposed to do. He nails every lick.

My wife and I took our teenagers on an 8-hour roundtrip to see Willie Nelson this week in Virginia Beach. It was a moral imperative. Willie’s curtain could fall any time, and we are down to the lick log as parents.

Willie was the lullaby soundtrack in our house, the background noise on evening car trips, and the accompaniment to late-night wine on the porch. Our eldest is heading to college this month and seeing Willie play just had to be the punctuation on her childhood.

Since the kids got old enough to sit through a show, we’ve tried to make a Willie trip happen, but as in so many long-distance relationships, either we were too busy, or he was too sick, or too far away. We just never got together, though we never stopped loving him.

We were fearful this time, too. Willie got under the weather in June and missed some shows. When you see him, you get it. The end is near – of his performing at least.

But man, can he still perform. There is still defiance in his rendition of “Whiskey River.” He still chills preemptive heartbreak in “Angels Flying Too Close to The Ground.” And when he did the chorus echo of “on my mind…on my mind” in “Georgia,” he not only convinced me he still had “it,” he transported me back to the reason my kids know about him at all.

When I was nine or so years old, bedtime was non-negotiable, but sleep was unenforceable. Whether rebellion or circadian incongruity was to blame, I spent hours staring at the mop-stomped ceiling texture in my bedroom and paced my insomnia with an 8-track tape of the 1978 Stardust album. A distinct break from the outlaw country that made him famous, Stardust was Willie’s collection of covers of favorite American standards at a pedestrian pace, from “Moonlight in Vermont” to “Sunny Side of the Street” to “Georgia (On My Mind).” By the end of program number four – all 8-track tapes had four programs of equal length, like vinyl records had two sides – I would give up the ghost.

Three decades later when our newborn daughter proved to be recalcitrant every damn night, after walking the floor for hours, singing the “Tennessee Waltz” and “My Old Kentucky Home” until I was hoarse, I tried Stardust in desperation. Willie worked, at least better than everything else. Two years later our son arrived, and he got the red-headed stranger from the jump.

As they grew up, they stopped requiring Stardust – and the similar melancholy songs we added to the playlist like “Last Thing I Needed,” “City of New Orleans,” and “Always On My Mind” – but they still asked for it on nights when sadness had to be overcome. Willie, or at least the most empathetic side of his art, was basically our kids’ third parent - so he needed to be part of the goodbye before my daughter flies the nest.

The breadth of Willie’s career blows my kids away. Their 81-year-old grandad tells them he was gaga about Patsy Cline as a college freshman until she tragically died. Her signature tune, “Crazy,” was written in 1959 by none other than a young DJ named Willie Hugh Nelson. Seeing an artist who had an epic achievement in the ‘50s perform live in ‘25 is only possible with this one dude.

As youngsters visiting family, the kids saw the licensing deals Willie had in Texas restaurants and they learned about his cooking grease recycling company when I gave a speech at a bio-fuels conference. My son marveled at how “Willie really has a lot of businesses.” I explained that such entrepreneurship was necessary because Willie failed to pay his taxes for a long time and had a lot of catching up to do. I hated to trash their hero but why not slip in a life lesson with the fandom? At the concert, the now-teenage kids saw the endless loop of video ads for “Willie’s Reserve” – a line of gourmet marijuana – and “Willie’s Remedy” – a THC-laced beverage. You can call that irony “Willie’s Revenge.”

Willie sang “Crazy” on stage for us, and he did it with his own son Lukas, picking a guitar next to him. This whole Outlaw Tour concept is possible for a nonagenarian because he has his son to pick him up when he’s down. Lukas says he pursued music because it took his dad away from home and getting good at playing and singing was a way to get close.

We know Willie fretted about being an absent parent because he told us, in the lyrics of 1974’s “Bloody Mary Morning,” which he now sings with Lukas in every show. Their generational bond was obvious, and real, and made us cherish our own. At the end, Lukas is on stage stealing back what show biz took and the whole house shares in his justice.

Willie closed his set with a handful of songs explicitly about mortality: “Last Leaf,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “I Saw The Light” and of course the rollicking “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.” He knows he is close to finishing the coda and this tour is about that truth.

But in Row S of Section 202, the parents who are about to move a kid out heard the truth we needed earlier in the show, in “Angel:”

“Fly on, fly on, past the speed of sound. I'd rather see you up. Than see you down. Leave me if you need to. I will still remember. Angel flying too close to the ground”

Cheers, Willie. And thanks.