Podcast Interviewer (2:33)

Taking a Walk Jeffrey, welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast.

Jeffrey Himes (2:37)

Thank you.

Podcast Interviewer (2:39)

So I asked this question of everybody so it'd be fitting that I ask it of you, sir, if you could take a walk with somebody, living or dead, who would you take a walk with? And where would you take that walk with them? And I have a feeling I know the answer, but it's up to you.

Jeffrey Himes (2:56)

Well, let's just say I'd like to take a walk with Willie Nelson along Pedernales river near his home and just have a chance to get away from it all and talk about what it's like to write those songs and how he went about it.

Podcast Interviewer (3:13)

That would be great. Now, you have interviewed Willie before?

Jeffrey Himes (3:16)

Yeah, a couple times. Right. And the book is. You know, I use the material for my interviews. I use quotes from magazine, newspaper stories about him and his autobiographies. But it's basically trying to bring to life the music he recorded over his long, long career. And what does that. Why does that music endure? Why is it still captivate people all these years later?

Podcast Interviewer (3:45)

What was the interview process like with him? Was it. Do you feel like it was in a setting where you were able to get Willie, you know, nice and relaxed and warmed up before you started?

Jeffrey Himes (3:59)

Well, I have met him backstage a couple times, but the actual interviews were on the phone. And sometimes interviewing people on the phone, I found, can be sort of like a Catholic confessional where you don't see each other and somehow you feel it's easier to just say whatever and confess anything. So sometimes it works to your advantage to be on the phone. Yeah, I remember.

Podcast Interviewer (4:26)

I'm sure you remember the late radio personality Don Imus. Imus. In his later years of doing a show, he did certainly many interviews in the studio, but he did a ton of them over the phone. And I think that was his feeling. The fact that you. You're getting more out of them because, you know, some of those inhibitions are kind of scraped away because it's a phone call.

Jeffrey Himes (4:53)

Right. I think that's true. That's counterintuitive. But I think it works out that way.

Podcast Interviewer (4:58)

Yeah. I didn't understand it at first, but then I began to. And then when you said it, it reminded me of that. So do you remember the first point in your life where you were musically connected to Willie Nelson?

Jeffrey Himes (5:13)

Yeah. So as a kid, when I was in high school and college, I was a real rock and roll fan, like a lot of us. But when Bob Dylan and the Birds started doing country music, it made me curious and more investigated, the more fascinated I became by it. Same thing happened for me with jazz and blues. In much the same way, you don't like somebody who's a big star in your own time. And then you realize that, oh, they're influenced by this person and that person's influenced by that person. You learn musical history backwards. I've always felt that was true. And so I inevitably discovered Willie. And he was so fascinating because he has, as I write in the book, one of the things that's strange about him is he has this way of presenting himself as know, a sort of traditional country singer. He has that sort of East Texas twang in his voice. He tells these stories, these sort of short songs about troubled marriages or troubled financial times or people who die. And. And so you. You can sort of accept it on that level. But as you listen, you realize that, you know, behind that foreground, there's all these sort of jazz influences, there's these blues influences, there's this sort of Frank Sinatra phrasing that he has. And so it's a very rich kind of country music, I think, as a result. And the other thing I discovered when I really started looking at these songs and trying to explain to myself and ultimately to the reader, why they work so well. So I think that Willie has this way of talking about personal loss or setbacks or betrayals where he talks about how much it hurts and what a devastating blow it can be. But he always sort of maintains this sort of dignity. He always maintains this sort of belief that he's going to emerge from it and keep going. That's not going to knock him down for good. Dozens, hundreds of songs like that. He could be talking to the walls and hello walls he can beat his old ex lover and funny how time slips away he can fly into Los Angeles to get away from somebody In Bloody Merry morning But it's the same theme, and he never gets tired of it. We never get tired of it. Because that's one of the central challenges we all face in life, is how do you deal with loss, how do you deal with setbacks? And Willie doesn't tell us what to do. He demonstrates what to do.

Podcast Interviewer (7:58)

His unconventional phrasing and timing certainly sets him apart. And you made reference to it. When did he discover that signature style?

Jeffrey Himes (8:08)

Well, he told me in one interview, he said, my favorite country singer is George Jones, but my favorite singer of all time is Frank Sinatra. And I think it comes out of that sort of Sinatra era of pop singers had a strong jazz influence. And they wouldn't always hit the expected beat. They would maybe anticipate it or let it lag a little bit. And what that does is, if you do it correctly, it builds tension in a song and then releases it and makes the song that much more dramatic. And, you know, I think that when he singing old songs, whether it's the songs of Cindy Walker or Stardust or these old Bob Will songs, it's all from that era when he's growing up in the little town of Abbott, Texas, and it's what he's hearing on the radio. He's absorbing that. And it's in his DNA. When he plays the guitar, it's the same thing. It's always this sort of push and delay in the phrasing. And this is especially obvious when you see him live in concert, when he's playing these songs he's sung hundreds, thousands of times. Whether it's on the Road Again or Funny how time slips away, he's always looking for a way to keep it interesting for himself as much as for the audience. And so he's always tinkering with it. It's always shifting things and, you know, and so it keeps his vocals fresh, and it makes the song sound new to us, even though we've heard them hundreds of times.

Podcast Interviewer (9:49)

We had you on our new podcast, Taking a Walk Nashville with Sarah Harrelson, so folks should check that out. But can you talk about Willie's early struggles in Nashville? Why didn't that establishment really get him initially?

Jeffrey Himes (10:05)

I think it has a lot to do with what we were just talking about, is unusual phrasing. In Nashville, especially there in the early 60s, there'd be these session musicians. They would come in, they learn the song. You try to record three songs in three hours and boom, boom, boom. And these are great musicians, there's no question about that. But they weren't really given time to get used to Willy's unconventional phrasing. And so there was always this sort of uncertainty. Should they try to imitate his phrasing, should he try to imitate their phrasing? And there was always these mixed results, the sort of awkwardness sometimes we resolve. If you hear live recordings from that era, there's an album called A Country Music Concert, which was recorded at Panther hall in Fort Worth in mid-60s. He's playing with his own Texas band. Who knows how to play with him. You can hear how that sort of unusual approach is already there. He's already thinking that way. It's just that it wasn't translating to the Nashville studios because he wasn't playing with his musicians. He was playing with people who were unfamiliar. Not bad musicians, but unfamiliar. One of the things I write about in the book is that during his long tenure at RCA Records, Chet Atkins was his producer. And Chet is a great musician, very influential in country music history.

Jeffrey Himes (11:42)

But he had a way of doing things that he knew would create country radio hits, really wanted to have hits. He was not shy about that. But when he started singing, there was this instinct in him that sort of took over. And it was very sort of awkward for both men because they genuinely respected each other. But they just had completely different visions of what a Willie Nelson album should sound like.

Podcast Interviewer (12:11)

What was happening in country music that made the outlaw movement so necessary?

Jeffrey Himes (12:18)

Well, part of us is, what we're talking about is that the artist did not have a lot of say in the studio. It was the producers who had a formula that they knew this formula works. You know, if you follow this, you know you're going to be rewarded with hit records. Willie was sort of chafing against those restraints. It's, you know, Waylon Jennings, Merle Hackett, these all people who weren't comfortable in that kind of situation. And I think any formula, no matter how good it is, gets stale after a while. And I think that people were hungry for something new. These people are Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Jesse Coulter, who became known as the Outlaws. It was a new sound. It was. It was brilliant music. It was sort of filled with emotion. It was unlike what people have been hearing on the radio. And there was this immense response to it. Redhead is Stranger goes William's breakthrough album, one of the first country albums to go platinum. Wanted the Outlaws, which is the multi artist album the RCA put together, it went platinum. And so they were not only breaking through, but they were like raising the expectations for what a country could do.

Podcast Interviewer (13:37)

And talk about how Willie's move to Austin transformed him both personally and artistically.

Jeffrey Himes (13:45)

During the, during the RCA years, when he was sort of butting heads up against the system, you know, he would come to Nashville, he was living outside of Nashville, this place called Ridgetop. You know, he was recording in Nashville, his label was there, his producer was there. But he was always driving down to Texas every weekend to play live because that's where he had a big following. He didn't have anywhere else. And he had musicians that knew how to play with him. And his house in Richtop burned down. He moved down to Texas temporarily. Then this house got rebuilt, he moved back to Tennessee, and he realized, no, no, this is not making sense. If I'm going to be spending most of my time in Texas playing live, and I'm only going to be spending the occasional weekend in Nashville recording an album, it makes more sense to be in Texas. And then to Armadillo, which is an old National Guard armory in Austin, which was transformed into a nightclub or concert hall, actually it became a place where rock and roll and country music, and there's the saying, when rednecks.

Jeffrey Himes (15:02)

And Willie became bridge.

Jeffrey Himes (15:05)

That sort of participated with more of the taken away reaction to those records. He had the 670s.

Podcast Interviewer (15:13)

So did that bridge.

Podcast Host (15:14)

Welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast.

Podcast Interviewer (15:17)

Enhance his Zen like quality despite such a chaotic life? Is that where it comes from?

Jeffrey Himes (15:24)

I'm taking this from what I've read, not from my. I didn't know him back then, but people say that really was not a good drinker. You know, he would get angry and start fights and stuff like that. And he was much more agreeable to be around when he was started stopped drinking so much and started smoking or dope. So I think that's part of it. But I think also what we were talking about earlier, about the way he approached these songs and how he would sort of talk about how things could go wrong in your life and you still need to keep it together and keep going.

Jeffrey Himes (16:05)

That's a Zen quality to that. And so even in those early singles, back when he was drinking, you could see that that was part of his personality. And it became, it flowered more and more. Once he, especially once he had enough success that he wasn't like worried all the time about feeding his family, paying all his ex wives.

Podcast Interviewer (16:25)

When did activism sort of become the foreground of his personality? You know, his work for farmers, cannabis legalization, you know, how did this connect to his music?

Jeffrey Himes (16:37)

I think that, you know, the first sign of it is when Charley Pride was first courting as a singer and one of the few African American artists to be on a major label of country music. And really went out of his way to bring Charlie onto his shows and to, you know, make sure that the promoters treated him fairly and audiences treated him fairly. He had those instincts all along. He grew up during a depression when everybody was having a hard time. So he sympathized with people who were on the outs of things. And the other part of it is he was always sort of had sympathy for the renegade, the outsider, the outlaw, as they say in the outlaw music movement. And so he was likely to support people who were in that category.

Podcast Interviewer (17:37)

So he's most recently been out with Bob Dylan. Can you talk about that relationship, where it first began, how it has sort of manifested itself over the years and how they're in their own way, kindred spirits.

Jeffrey Himes (17:54)

I can't remember the exact year they first connected. I think it was on one of those early 80s albums anyways. You know, they're obviously kindred spirits. They're both songwriters. Can't remember who was for. I think Willie recorded a song that Dylan had written for him. There's 152 albums. I can't remember what Songs were on which albums necessarily, but periodically they would. They would cross paths and collaborate on something. I think that one of the key things that brought them together was farm aid. When Dylan performed at the We Are the World concert in Philadelphia, they said, you know, this is nice that we're doing this for the people in Africa, but what about the family farmers in the United States? Why aren't we doing something for them? And Willie sort of picked up on that and, you know, organized farm aid. And then Dylan said, well, yeah, of course I will perform at the first few of them. And I think that that was a connection that brought them together and moved forward. Dylan's like a reclusive guy, so it's not. He's not the guy that's going to sort of hang around Willy's golf course and pick, so. And for all we know, when they're.

Podcast Interviewer (19:14)

On the road, they really probably don't even connect that much.

Jeffrey Himes (19:18)

Right.

Podcast Interviewer (19:19)

I mean, it's not like they're doing jam sessions by the campfire till midnight.

Jeffrey Himes (19:23)

Right? Exactly. Exactly.

Podcast Interviewer (19:25)

There's one collaborator that has been with Willie for a long time, the great harmonica player Mickey Raphael. Can you talk about that collaboration and what you think that means to Willie's legacy?

Jeffrey Himes (19:38)

I can. As it so happens, I just interviewed Vicki for one of my podcasts on Hard Rain and Pink Cadillacs on Substack. Hasn't aired yet. It'll be coming out later this month. Yeah. Mickey was not a real country fan when he first met Willie. He played harmonica because he loved the blues, the Chicago Blues players like Little Walter. He ended up playing with BW Stevenson in Dallas, if you remember that name. Darrell Royal, the University of Texas football coach, was a fan of Mickey's from those Steve Stevenson shows. And he invited Mickey to come to one of the picking parties that Willie was going to play in. And this was a private party in the coach's house. Mickey brought his harmonicas, and Willie plays the songs, and Mickey played along. And at the end of the night, I said, yeah. Billy says, you know, anytime you want to come sit in with us, we'd love to have you. So whenever Willie was playing in a reasonable drive of Dallas, Mickey would show up at the play and play. And after several weeks of this, Willie asked his drummer and road manager, Paul English, so how much are we paying Mickey? And Paul says, oh, we're not paying him anything. He's just sitting in. And Willie says, double his salary.

Jeffrey Himes (21:08)

But they started paying him, and he just, you know, he says, I was never actually hired. I just you know, started getting paid, and 50 years later, you know, here I am. So the other side of this story is that Willie's Texas band, a lot of great musicians, had a steel guitar player named Jimmy Day who was like a country music legend, you know, just a genius on the steel. He was not. He drank a lot. He was not easy to get along with. And so Willie would fire him and hire him and fire him and hire him. And this went on for a while, and finally Willie had enough and said, now what am I going to do? I can't hire another steel player that's as good as Jimmy Day, but I need to have something to fill that hole in the songs. That's when he met Mickey, and he said, well, actually, this works because it has that sort of sustaining quality. Dennis Steele has a sort of, you know, legato lines. And so it actually fit better than you would expect. You know, harmonica, there's been harmonica in country music. Charlie McCoy was the great harmonica player that played a lot of songs, a lot of albums, including a couple of Dylan albums. And so Mickey was sort of in that mold. He was, you know, he could improvise, he could, you know, play the blues, he could play country. And it sort of fit the role of the stu guitar player, but sounded different. So it was one more thing that sort of set Willie apart from everybody else in Nashville. And Matt Rawlings, who's a keyboardist and producer who's worked with Willie, he told me that, you know, there are three things that make a Willie record a Willie record. That's Willie's voice, this acoustic guitar trigger, which is a nylon string guitar with a big hole in it, and Mickey Raphael's harmonica. If you have those three things, it's going to sound like Willie Nelson. That's so awesome.

Podcast Interviewer (23:12)

That is great. Well, everybody, check out the great book from Jeffrey Himes, Willie Nelson. All the albums, the stories behind the music. It is beautiful. It is so detailed. It is a wonderful piece of work. Just like Willie. A wonderful piece of work.

Jeffrey Himes (23:32)

Right?

Podcast Interviewer (23:32)

Very fitting. But, Jeffrey, thank you so much for your generosity and being on Taking a Walk. Really appreciate it.

Jeffrey Himes (23:38)

Wow. Glad to be here.

Podcast Host (23:41)

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

iHeart Podcast Announcer (23:59)

Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water. Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold butter. Yep. Chocolate ice cream. Sure thing. Barbecue sauce. Tide's got you covered. You don't need to use warm water. Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology. Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide.

Buzz Knight (24:28)

This episode of Taking a Walk is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Whether I'm booking my next vacation or going to a concert, Chase Sapphire Reserve is my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. When I use my Chase Sapphire Reserve card, I I get eight times points on all the purchases I make through Chase Travel and even access to one of a kind experiences like music festivals and sports events. And that's not even mentioning how the card gets me into the Sapphire Lounge by the club at select airports nationwide. No matter where I'm walking, travel is more rewarding with Chase Sapphire Reserve. Discover more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase Bank, NA Member, FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply.

Coca Cola Announcer (25:23)

What a matchup we got, y'.

Jeffrey Himes (25:24)

All.

Coca Cola Announcer (25:25)

This is that classic HBCU vibe. Non stop action. The band is rocking and the crowd lit. Chance echoing, drum beating, everybody showing that school pride. A game like this. Yeah, it calls for an ice cold Coca Cola. Ah, crisp and refreshing. That's a game changer right there.

Coca Cola Announcer (25:45)

Yeah, that taste always hits the right note. Just like the band at halftime. And just like that, we're back at it. Passionate fans, school colors everywhere and in ice cold Coca Cola. That's a winning combo. No matter the sport, no matter the yard. Everybody knows fan work is thirsty work. So grab a Coca Cola and keep that HBCU pride going.

iHeart Podcast Announcer (26:09)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.