O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Time Slips Away but Not Willie, Merle

Though “chilly” might have been a more accurate term by the time the marathon “Chili, Willie and Merle” show ended Sunday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, those who remained through the cool evening (which had been preceded by an afternoon chili cook-off) will be hard pressed to find a better country show this year.

Boosted by a powerful set from the Desert Rose Band (and an innocuous turn from openers Mason Dixon), Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s sets reasserted that country’s strongest music still comes from those who have carved their own long, hard paths.

It is fortunate, though, that most of Nelson’s longtime fans are honest, straightforward types: Otherwise, they could foist off some tremendous feats of prognostication on others. All they need do to assume a seemingly mystical prescience is take an uninitiated listener to one of Willie’s shows and unerringly predict what the august singer will do next.

Veteran Willie-ites can call nearly every song in order--and if there’s a tune they don’t expect, they can tell you when they don’t expect it. It can be pretty eerie.

But of course, the only mystery to those who have seen Nelson several times is how he can perform practically the same set every year without slipping into a well-earned coma.

While the timeless Nelson-penned songs of his set certainly bear repetition, Nelson did at times show signs of getting a bit blue around the gills amid their unvarying march Sunday. A medley of some of his oldest standards--”Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy” and “Night Life”--was more spoken than sung, with little feeling going into the lyrics.

Much more often, though, Nelson still found new paths through the well-worn fare, finding new phrasings for his craggy croon of a voice and coaxing fanciful flurries of notes from his demolished Martin classical guitar. Nelson is nearly alone among country twangers in using a nylon-stringed guitar. His solos at times took on manic zither tones more common to “The Third Man” theme than to honky-tonks.

Nelson’s seven-piece band was as capable as ever, with Nashville guitar legend Grady Martin shining throughout, particularly when offering an ethereal foil to Nelson’s dusty vocal on “Stardust.”

Still, the verve that they all brought to the non-staple “I Never Cared for You,” performed here as an ominous rumba, suggested how much greater Nelson’s shows could be if he would shake them loose a bit.

Because Nelson and Haggard have recorded two hit duet albums, it was a likely expectation that the pair might join on stage for a few songs. But the Willie prophets were on the money again: The eternal closers of a gospel medley and “Whiskey River” doused any hope of the show ending on a special note.

Like Nelson, second-billed Haggard is a personal, introspective writer who follows his own vision of what country music should be. That vision Sunday blended his hard-edged Bakersfield sound and the jazzy inflections of Western swing in a loose but highly musical interplay that left no question that, yes, even a trombone can be a country instrument.

Despite some personnel changes over the past few years, Haggard and bandleader-steel guitarist Norm Hamlet have a 10-piece outfit with an almost-psychic musical intuition. With sometimes no more than a nod from Haggard, his players followed each other with seamless solos that nearly always further defined the heavy sense of mood and atmosphere that Haggard brings to his songs.

It is odd, but the man who penned the hippie-hatin’ “Okie From Muskogee” may now be fronting the closest thing country music has to the Grateful Dead.

Haggard has mellowed considerably since his “Fightin’ Side of Me” days. His vocals most often now have a wistful phrasing that recalls Nelson as much as it does his old mentor, Lefty Frizzell. Combined with his still-biting guitar work, he transformed even the simple-seeming “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star” into a questioning, heartfelt ballad.

While conjuring pure fun on the lighthearted hangover tune “It’s Been a Great Afternoon” and the Western swing standard “Ida Red” (with not nearly enough of Haggard’s fiddle-playing), Haggard brought a time-stopping intensity to the dark-hued “Today I Started Loving You Again.” The pained vocal on his closing song, the condemned prisoner’s ballad “Sing Me Back Home,” clearly came from a man who remembers when he actually was a cell neighbor of murderer Caryl Chessman in San Quentin.

While overshadowed by the headliners, the Desert Rose Band asserted its place as one of the freshest sounds in country. Front man Chris Hillman has lost none of the upstart love for the music he displayed when he and Gram Parsons spurred the country-rock movement with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers more than 2 decades ago.

Flanked by some remarkably hot picking from guitarist John Jorgenson and pedal steel guitar player Jay Dee Maness, Hillman and second vocalist Herb Pedersen worked fine harmonies through 12 songs, including John Hiatt’s “She Don’t Love Nobody” and “Running,” a song Hillman dedicated to the pristine Orange County in which he grew up during the ‘50s--and which, he said, “has turned into condo-nightmare-freeway weirdness.”

Closing the set was the up-tempo “The Price I Pay for Loving You,” which opened with a blinding solo from Jorgenson, mixing speed-demon country runs with the free-form, modal note splatters that Hillman’s one-time Byrds-mate Roger McGuinn pioneered on “Eight Miles High.”