At the Willie Nelson Concert, at the Indian Casino, in Wheatland, California, with Mom, in the Summer of 2024

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Until last night I anticipated that the title of the present essay was to be: “At the Bob Dylan Concert, at the Indian Casino, in Wheatland, California, with Mom, in the Summer of 2024”, for that is how I had been thinking of the event in question for the several weeks leading up to it. Only one of the evening’s featured artists had a Nobel Prize in Literature, and only one, or so I thought, played a significant role in shaping my own sensibilities in art, music, and life. I came away surprised by the inevitable conclusion that this was entirely Willie’s show, that a variety of factors, having to do with the demographics of the audience, the marketing and promotion of the event (part of the “Outlaws” tour), and the artistry of the performers, ensured that even Dylan, or perhaps especially Dylan, could not have held a candle to the Red-Headed Stranger.

1. John

But allow me quickly to deal with the first of the evening’s three acts. John Mellencamp entered my consciousness as “John Cougar” with his little ditty about Jack and Diane several decades ago. This moniker had been imposed on him by industry suits, and he went along with it grudgingly, in order to have a record deal at all, only later to change it first to “John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp”, and then to let the animal mascotry drop out altogether. His is a particularly sad story, of the cynical idiocy of the music business, and of how it can take a perfectly competent musician and render him into a mediocrity. As far as I can tell John Cougar was imposed on us, indeed was imposed on John Mellencamp, as a result of the industry’s perception of a market for a lesser avatar of Bruce Springsteen, with a different regional inflection (Indiana as opposed to New Jersey). Like the Monkees to the Beatles, huge successes always create new niches for lesser successors, and our Midwestern roots rocker happened to come along at just the right moment for such a bargain as this: work in the shadow of the Boss, or don’t work at all.

Mellencamp’s particular brand of Americana is compelling enough, I suppose, and it was touching, I admit, to see all the sagging and leathery old Boomers waving their arms and singing “Ain’t that America…” in some kind of nostalgic ecstasy. His voice is deeper and raspier than it was back in the ‘80s, and overall more compelling, and it is always a jolt for me to be reminded that, even with artists I really care nothing about, I still know basically every single line of every single song. What else might have filled up my memory, in the absence of such phrases as “suckin’ on chili dogs”? I don’t know. The possibilities are infinite. I only know that what did end up getting lodged in there constitutes who I am no less fundamentally than, say, the prayers of the rosary or my people’s myth of the Creation might have done. Human existence itself displays a mastery of leitmotifs, I find, that even the likes of Richard Wagner could only faintly imitate in art. I walk into the supermarket and I hear “Hurts So Good”, and it induces in me a sense that indeed, after all this time, I am still at the center of the same story. 

What else can I say? Mellencamp is a sturdy old work-horse, out there on tour making an honest living. But he doesn’t really matter.

2. Bob

The displaced Okies of Yuba County do not keep track from year to year of the Nobel Committee’s decisions in far-away Oslo, so it should have been no great surprise that to this crowd Dylan is just another musician who’s been around for ever. I had been hoping to try out a little joke on the people seated around me —“I’m still angry about him going electric”, I was going to say, and if they replied “Wait, what year were you born?” I was going to say “1972; I was born angry”—, but I found no one who seemed to be in possession of sufficient historical memory to have any hope of landing it.

Dylan doesn’t exactly help the crowd to care about his place in history. In fact, he doesn’t help the crowd to appreciate him at all. I had been warned about this, but I had to see it to believe it: our great bard, the only surviving voice of “Old, Weird America”, the great distiller and sublimator of Alan Lomax’s field recordings and of Harry Smith’s esoteric curations, could not care less what the crowd thinks of him. He comes out, does not say hello or so much as nod his head, mumbles his way through a long list of mostly forgettable two-to-three-minute numbers, with basically all of the musicality, such as it is, being contributed by his backing band. The only song I recognized from his set was “Ballad of a Thin Man” from Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and it was such a relief to hear even this faint evocation of past greatness. When he was finished, he got up and left. There was no build-up at all to the succession of songs, nothing remotely suggestive of a climax. The most interesting thing about his presence was perhaps the yarmulke this former born-again Christian has, for his own inscrutable reasons, recently taken to wearing. Robert Zimmerman does whatever the hell he wants. As he himself once reflected, on his adoption of Dylan Thomas’s first name as his own last, but more generally on his entire way of being: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” 

The good people of Yuba County do not seem all that sensitive to the outward signifiers of Jewish identity, and none of the mutterings of general disapproval of his performance should be taken as signs of growing antisemitism. But the import of these mutterings was unmistakable: the people did not like him. “Why can’t we hear some ‘Lay Lady Lay’ or ‘All Along the Watchtower’?” the old duffer behind us said to his young date, who nodded patiently. “I’m definitely underwhelmed”, said my nephew, who is currently deep in a microgenre of underground rap I am not competent either to praise or to criticize (Xaviersobased, Edward Skeletrix, and some guy named simply ‘Joeyy’, are among this scene’s luminaries). “Even Mellencamp was better.” I tried to explain that it’s cool how unappealing Dylan is, that that’s the whole essence of his genius. The Basement Tapes, I discoursed, are simultaneously one of the most important recordings of the 20th century, and basically unlistenable. I myself, anyway, have never got all the way through them. “I can respect that,” my nephew said.

Now that I think about it, in fact, my experience of The Basement Tapes is a lot like my experience of the play-list of underground rap to which I was subjected on our recent ride from Berkeley to Sacramento: amorphous, directionless, fizzling soundscapes and video-game bleats that, for all that, somehow do seem to draw the entire history that shaped them into the instant of their creation, and, like all great art, to speak to their time while also transcending it. Is this play-list charged up with genius too? I’m not in a position to say, but Dylan is always there to remind me that my raw aesthetic judgment is something quite different from, and less than, the full use of my historically informed critical faculties.

As we were walking out to the lot at the very end, some in the crowd had still not recovered from their surprise. “Dylan was a load of garbage, man,” some old guy wearing a “Weed Makes Me Happy” t-shirt said. “Who was that second guy they let play?” said a young woman. “He was terrible.” My nephew and I heard these comments and laughed knowingly.

Dylan was great, man.

3. Willie

The Wheatland Toyota Amphitheatre is an outdoor concert venue annexed to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, which is owned and operated by the Estom Yumeka Maidu tribe (Herman Melville could have seen it all coming: the Feds ban gambling, but in this country of foxes the riverboat operators and the sovereign rez dwellers manage to find that law’s loopholes and exploit them to the hilt). It can accommodate 18,000 people, and last night it was filled to capacity. By my count, three of those 18,000 people were Black, two of whom were bona-fide Black cowboys of the sort our culture habitually and shamefully neglects to acknowledge, as if the rural/urban divide mapped perfectly onto the racial divide. But here’s another relevant figure: of the 17,997 or so white rural or ruraloid Americans in attendance, I only saw one wearing Trump paraphernalia. Chew on those numbers, like a generous pinch of Skoal, as we proceed to consider the headline act of the evening.

When we arrived at 5:30 or so it was still 105 degrees out. The Central Valley sun was pounding down, nor was there any protection at all from it in our assigned seats. Numerous Boomers had already collapsed, and the first-aid crews hauling stretchers around quickly became an unsurprising sight. Mom kept insisting she could handle it, but my sister went off anyway to rent four lawn chairs, at a total price of $72, which we set up in a shady corner far from the stage. When the sun sank a bit lower, mom, who did not wish to miss a single second, insisted on going back to our real seats. I agreed to stay in the rental chairs for a while, which enabled me to remain in the shade, and to stay true to my promise, which I had already announced on several occasions, not to dedicate a shred of my attention to John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp.

Within seconds of their departure, a pair of shirtless wastrels appeared and asked if they could sit down in the lawn-chairs. I told them I was saving them for my family members, but they sat down anyway. “I’m Lucas, this is my buddy Evan,” one of them said to me as he put out his hand, which, uncharacteristically, I shook warmly. They were both wearing nothing but knee-length shorts with an American-flag pattern. Lucas had an unkempt beard and long hair that might have been in the early stages of dreadlocks, but might just have needed a wash. We spoke of the Park Fire and the threat it posed to Chico and to Red Bluff. We spoke of the booming industry of legalized cannabis, and of how this had transformed their leisure activities in recent years. Evan tried to stand up when some young women walked by, but quickly fell back down. “You seen Willie before, man?” Lucas asked, and I told him no. “It’s good you’re doing it now, man. He’s 91, man. A living legend!” I suggested the same could be said of Dylan, even if he’s a decade younger, but Lucas just shrugged. T-shirts streamed by in totemic celebration of “Shotgun Willie”, of “Willie and Waylon”, of “Pancho and Lefty”, of “The Outlaws of Country”. The American flag featured prominently on many of these garments, as on my wastrel friends’ shorts.

When Willie finally took the stage it was dark out. Bold artificial lighting confirmed his status as the headliner, and illuminated the enormous American flag behind him. What is this symbol all about? I wondered. Willie has been arrested countless times for drugs. He has been hounded and at least temporarily impoverished by the IRS, whose agents will never understand that not all of us are capable of attending to such things as revenue declarations. And he has positioned himself boldly and defiantly as an “outlaw”. What could that flag possibly mean to someone like him? Initially I thought of Jasper Johns’s Flag (1954), which took the same symbol and copied it more or less faithfully from the Boy Scout manuals and other sources of patriotic indoctrination, not in the vein of exaltation, but in order to show it in all its mundanity, as commonplace as a bottle-cap, worthy of no more reverence, nor, I suppose, any less. But then it struck me again that Willie’s flag, in 2024, very much unlike Johns’s in 1954, is rare and striking in its classicism, modified by no “Thin Blue Line” or MAGA insignia. It’s the real thing, and in the present historical moment this is already enough to come across as a significant political statement.

This is the prevailing feeling in the presence of Willie and his worshippers: that ours really is a country of outlaws, and wastrels, and trash, which is to say of beautiful souls, continually renewing the mythos Willie has been appointed to sing. This is the America that’s left over when you consider this country in abstraction from its power — its laws, its wars, its wealth. I don’t want to say it’s the “true” America, since the outlaws obviously could not exist at all if there were no law to be “out” of. In 2024, it seems, historical dynamics have brought it about that the plain old Stars and Stripes now stand as a symbol of Outlaw America, while authoritarian America, the America that worships soldiers and cops, has moved on to decidedly non-standard vexillological innovations. I know which side I’m on.

Here are a few things I’ve only come to appreciate about Willie Nelson in the past 24 hours. First, I have been stunned by his musicianship. This seems like a dumb thing to say, as I really should have known by now that he is not only legendary for his braids and his attitude. He has a very distinctive style on the guitar. He uses a flat-pick like most guitarists, yet he has discovered a unique way of simulating bass accompaniment on the low strings, much as thumb-pickers do, while picking out sharp melodies on the higher ones. He has a singularly organic connection to his guitar, Trigger, whom he named after Roy Rogers’s horse, with whom he has collaborated since 1969, and who now has an enormous hole worn into his (her?) face right next to the sound-hole. It is such a pleasure to watch his finger-work up close, which does not seem to be at all diminished even at this late moment, though his voice is now plainly weakened and static, defaulting to a sort of Sprechgesang rather than singing in the fullest sense.

Unlike Bob, Willie wants to please the crowd, and that means playing mostly the corniest of his hits — “On the Road Again”, “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”, etc. And the crowd is indeed pleased. So is mom. After several of his songs she applauds and says: “Go Willie!” And when he sings “Roll me up and smoke me when I die”, that exclamation seems particularly heartfelt.

In his somewhat diminished state Willie has also turned over a great part of the responsibility for keeping his shows going over to his son, Lukas, which is touching, and indeed in keeping with a long tradition in country music — but is not, to be honest, particularly interesting. There was only one person up on that stage with any charisma, and everyone knew it, including Lukas. But whatever was not or could not be concretely displayed on stage of Willie’s lifetime accomplishments nonetheless seemed to be shining out from within him, seemed to be the force constituting his charisma.

It was only after the beginning of his set that I recalled, for the first time in decades, that I was not entirely unfamiliar with Willie’s considerable musical range. When I was a kid, mom used to put on his Stardust album from 1978 as she drove us to school. This was a daring turn in Willie’s career, away from country music entirely, and towards the standards of early 20th-century American pop. Arranged and produced by Booker T. Jones, here Willie offers his take on, e.g., “Moonlight in Vermont”, “September Song”, and of course the titular “Stardust”. I think in many cases I was first exposed to these songs through his renditions of them.

In interviews Willie has said that his greatest vocal inspiration is Frank Sinatra, who taught him how to sing slightly behind the beat, in a manner more characteristic of jazz improvisers. After winning the Gershwin Prize in 2015, like Brian Wilson before him Willie came out as a Gershwin-head and released Summertime, an album of that great American composer’s songs. Nor do American pop standards exhaust his range. While I had previously known that the hipsters, or whatever comes after them, have a soft spot for Willie, I never quite knew the precise sources of this affection. When he did his collaboration with Snoop Dogg (a cannabis-themed trifle), I took this largely as a gimmick. Snoop Dogg collaborates with everyone, after all, giving a long line of washed-up white people the opportunity to borrow a bit of his retired-gangsta frisson. But Willie is no Martha Stewart, and in fact this collaboration is just one instance of his vast musical explorations and his apparently insatiable desire to try new things. I had not previously known, for example, that Willie made an entire album, also largely focused on cannabis, with the reggae legend Toots Hibbert, from which we have some dumb but sweet videos filmed on location in Jamaica.

And somehow I entirely missed his 1998 album Teatro, which is surely Willie’s most thorough foray into genre-busting experimentation. It was made in collaboration with the great Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, who is also responsible for the unmistakable sound of U2’s Joshua Tree (1987). In the same decade in which Johnny Cash turned to Rick Rubin for reinvention, paring his work down to nothing more than a guitar and what sounded like the voice of a dying man, Willie pursued an opposite maximalist sound that incorporated Caribbean influences, Cuban jazz, prog rock, and even a sleek accompanying feature-length video from Wim Wenders, with very much the same look and feel as Buena Vista Social Club (1996), or Nick Cave’s performance of “From Her to Eternity” in Wings of Desire (1987). It’s all a bit too much for my taste (especially the Latin dancers in silhouette), but the version of Willie’s classic “I Never Cared for You” captured by Wim Wenders shows him, I think, at the very pinnacle of his musicianship and of his charisma (here, too, is a more classic version of the same song, from around 1965).

It is crazy to me to think that this is the same man who wrote “Crazy” for Patsy Cline. Patsy has been dead since 1963. Here is Willie performing the same song at the Grand Ole Opry in 1965. You can see he gets a bit choked up when he introduces it. Why do some people live so long, while others just flash in and out of existence, like mayflies? Nobody knows.

4. Leitmotifs

It is ages ago now that we used to listen to the Stardust cassette in the car on the way to school, up Raley Boulevard out of Rio Linda, onto I-80 towards Reno until the Longview Drive exit, up Watt Avenue, left onto Marconi, left again onto Norris, until we arrived at Our Lady of the Presentation Elementary School. Willie was already an ancient and crusty divinity even then, while I was just getting started. I used to pop my mom’s tapes out when I couldn’t take it any more, and pop in my own. The Talking Heads’ More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978) was among the ones I was particularly eager to put on, and I imagine mom heard it with the same blank indifference bordering on distaste with which I myself now hear Xaviersobased. I distinctly remember her displeasure when “Found a Job” came on, even though that song is, of course, a small work of genius.

It is a blessing and a miracle that this music has simply always been there for us, helping to sustain some kind of approximation of eternity. Something like eternity, I think Willie himself understands, is what is packed into the notion of “standards”, such as these took shape over the early 20th century through the efforts of Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, et al. But there were always two registers of standards: the ones that made their writers rich and famous, and the ones that circulated in the vernacular culture, covered by no copyright, bubbling under the surface — the “outlaw standards”, you might say. Bob and Willie both did much to bring these latter into the shaping of American identity in the mid-to-late 20th century. Only Willie seems to have done so in a spirit of love, and of what might be called musical humanism, rather than of impish and inscrutable genius. Bob may have won the Nobel Prize, but who is Alfred Nobel, to us Americans, next to the magnanimous spirit of our Gershwin?

NOTE: An earlier version of this essay included a ‘CODA’ that I’ve since deleted, for the simple reason that it contained a misattribution, to Kate Manne, of what had in fact been part of a theoretical example she had drawn from another person. I might have something more to say about what makes me uneasy about using that example, but this isn’t the place. So I’ll just say, Sorry! to Kate Manne, and to all my readers for having to witness this lapse of judgment!