Willie Nelson Will Catch His Breath at the Coach House

Life as Willie Nelson leads it nowadays would leave most people half his age exhausted, if not downright disoriented.

Sitting on his tour bus as it cruised through the Arizona desert and into California on a Thursday morning, this most grizzled and weathered of country-music stars enjoyed a vista of blue skies and distant mountains and chatted affably over his mobile phone.

He ran down his doings of recent months, detailing a daunting, fast-paced succession of phases, stages, circles, cycles and scenes, to borrow a phrase from his catalog of country classics.

“Well, I am disoriented,” Nelson, who plays Monday and Tuesday at the Coach House in acoustic-duo performances with old friend Leon Russell, said with a chuckle. An interviewer had just wondered how he has kept his balance over two or three months that have seen him sign a new recording deal, tour the Pacific, act in a Disney movie, write a bunch of songs and keep up with the responsibilities of being the father of two small boys.

“It’s fun doing it this way,” Nelson said of the follow-the-bouncing-ball career he continues to pursue, four months shy of his 63rd birthday. “Nothing much is planned.”

Even the Coach House shows with Russell were whipped up on little more than a week’s notice.

Nelson’s bus, Honeysuckle Rose II, was L.A.-bound as he talked, en route from the Florida Everglades, where he had done location shooting for his first film role since 1991.

The picture, “Goin’ Fishin’,” finds Nelson playing one Billy “Catch” Pooler, an outdoorsman who helps bail Joe Pesci and Danny Glover out of scrapes with assorted villains on a fishing vacation gone awry.

“I got to ride the airboats and pretend I was a fishing guru,” said Nelson, who in real life never touches rod and reel and will only pose a threat to aquatic life if he tees off into a water hazard.

Nelson said the acting offer came up suddenly and unexpectedly in November, while he was on a tour of eastern Asia and the Pacific with the Highwaymen, his ongoing partnership with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.

Once his bus reached L.A., Nelson expected to debark at Ocean Way studios and immediately begin a three-day round of recording with producer Don Was.

By the end of the weekend, Nelson figured, he’d have filled that one gaping gap in an unusually diverse recording resume that dates back to 1958 and spans classic honky-tonk music, lush pop standards and duets with more famous friends than it makes sense to begin naming. Now get ready for Willie Nelson, reggae singer.

If that sounds a bit dubious, Nelson notes that he and Was got approval for their new project from the record business’ foremost reggae authority: Island Records head Chris Blackwell, whose label was the first to bring Jamaican music to the wider world in the early 1970s, with such acts as Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff.

Nelson’s first Island release, however, will cover more familiar ground--it’s a sparsely arranged collection of country songs called “Spirit.” Due in February, it will feature mostly original songs--the fruit of a prolific writing streak that Nelson says he has been on over the past six months or so.

This flurry of diverse activity isn’t the typical regimen of an artist ending a year of boxed-set canonization. Nelson’s career has been the subject of three separate compilations in 1995: a three-disc rarities box, “Willie Nelson: A Classic & Unreleased Collection,” on Rhino; “Revolutions of Time,” a triple-disc set chronicling his 1975-1993 hit-making period with Columbia Records, and RCA’s “The Essential Willie Nelson,” a single-disc compilation of prime tracks from 1965-71. That was when Nelson was an acclaimed songwriter (having written such hits as Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” Ray Price’s “Night Life” and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls”) who was struggling, with strong artistic results but limited commercial success, to establish himself as a recording artist in his own right.

Besides touring, acting, recording, signing new deals, keeping a closer eye on his finances than he did in the 1980s, when investments in tax shelters that proved to be mirages dug him into a $9-million hole with the IRS--a debt the now-solvent but, as he tells it, still free-spending Nelson discharged in 1994--Nelson says he is trying to be less of an absentee daddy to the two small boys, ages 5 and 6, that he is raising with his fourth wife, Annie. Nelson is on his second go-round as a father; he has four grown daughters by his first and third wives. A son from his first marriage committed suicide in 1991.

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Given Nelson’s whirl of new projects, it’s fitting that his two-night layover at the Coach House with Leon Russell will be both a chance to relish an old musical friendship that goes back more than 20 years, and to break new ground.

Willie and Leon collaborated on “One For the Road,” a 1979 double album that contained one LP of tepidly tossed-off country and cowboy tunes, and one full of lovingly rendered pop standards.

They have often sat in as guests during each other’s performances. But they have never performed an entire concert together until now.

The program will consist of Russell at his piano, Nelson playing his famously battered classical gut-string guitar, and perhaps a few guests who’ll drop in, including harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who is working with Nelson on his country-and-reggae album.

Nelson says that while he and Russell may go into the shows with little or no rehearsal, he has no misgivings about the outcome.

“If we don’t [rehearse], we’ll just go for it,” Nelson said. “It’ll be all right, whatever, because Leon doesn’t make mistakes.”

Nelson says he first became aware of Russell at the same time everybody else did--in 1970-71, when Russell, an Oklahoma-raised musician who had become an L.A. studio ace, broke through with vibrant performances as the bandleader and second-billed star of Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” live-concert album.

“I became a fan immediately,” Nelson said. “He’s the best communicator on stage, the greatest onstage entertainer I’ve seen when he’s hot and ready and working hard.”

Nelson said his friendship with Russell helped him realize one of his most culturally significant career achievements. During the early 1970s, a time of stark divisions between the rebellious, questioning rock “counterculture” and the tradition-minded world of country music, Nelson made it his mission to find and enlarge upon the common ground of shared tastes that he believed existed between the two.

“It looked like everyone was choosing up sides, the hippies and redneck cowboys,” Nelson said. “But I knew from experience that wasn’t [inevitable]. Jobs I was playing, I’d play a big redneck country place and see a few longhairs in there.”

One of Nelson’s earliest large-scale gambits in forging a musical alliance of hippies and country kickers was a July 4, 1973, concert and picnic in a Texas pastureknown as Dripping Springs. Nelson recruited Russell, who was then at his commercial peak, to bring in the rocker crowd.

“It did a lot of good,” Nelson recalled of that picnic, which became a continuing, semi-annual event (Russell played at this year’s edition in Luckenbach, Texas). “I could see the positive results, the audience jumping and yelling together as one, and not as a divided audience.”

Connie Nelson, the singer’s third wife, recalled from her San Diego County home that Willie was just another close-cropped country singer until he became friendly with Russell, whose white mane and beard made him look like an Old-West cousin to Merlin the Magician. After that, Willie grew out his own hair and adopted his famous look--a central-casting vision of a cavalry scout who grew up among the Indians.

“No question, that’s what started it,” recalled Connie Nelson, who remains on friendly terms with her ex-husband and helped Coach House owner Gary Folgner line up Nelson’s first Orange County club appearances.

When Russell married R&B; singer Mary McCreary in 1976, Connie Nelson said, the wedding took place at the Nelson home in Austin, with Willie as best man and Connie as maid of honor.

Russell had a lot to do with another famous Nelson trademark: the written scrawls all over the body of his Martin. Covering this sweet-toned graffiti panel are the autographs of Willie’s musical mates.

“Leon started that,” Nelson said. “The first time we did a gig together, he had his guitar there, and he asked me to sign his guitar. I said, ‘Why do you want me to do that?” He said, ‘It’ll make it more valuable.’ I said, ‘Really? Then why don’t you sign mine?’ ”

Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Roger Miller and numerous others have followed Russell’s lead, making Nelson’s guitar not just more valuable, but irreplaceable.

“It brings back a lot of memories, just to look at the names,” Nelson said. “It’s kind of a living library. It tells a lot of stories.”

The first album Nelson recorded with that autographed guitar, which he calls “Trigger” in honor of Roy Rogers, was “Red Headed Stranger.”

The 1975 release was his big commercial breakthrough, significant not only for its sales, but for its artistic ambition. Breaking from Nashville norms of lush production and a focus on hit singles, “Red Headed Stranger” was a starkly, simply recorded concept album. It told the fictitious story of a 19th century frontier preacher who falls into a life of murderous nihilism, then rises again to find love and redemption.

In this year of celebrity murder trials and three-strikes sentencing, Nelson’s album remains thematically alive, raising hard-to-answer questions about justice and mercy.

Before Side 1 is over, Nelson’s preacher has notched three bloody strikes by gunning down his adulterous wife, her lover and a prostitute he suspects of trying to steal his horse.

By the album’s end, though, Nelson’s murderous preacher, like the killer-for-hire in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” has found a gentle new life thanks to a good woman’s love.

But does he deserve it? Should we applaud his return to a loving path, or grimace that he could so easily put those three corpses behind him?

“To me, on that album, the ending isn’t a happy ending. It was just an ending,” Nelson said. “Even though he had gotten away with those things, he had to live with them. No matter what you did, you don’t get away with it, because you know what you did.

“Is there life after that? Can you still go on after you’ve done something as horrible as that? The answer is always [that] you can, if you can forgive yourself,” he said. “That’s the big one. We all fall and we all try to get up. That’s life. What’s the Zen saying? You fall down seven times, you get up eight times.”

And if you’re Willie Nelson, when you get up these days, you still have new creative places to go.

* Willie Nelson and Leon Russell play Monday and Tuesday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $50. (714) 496-8930.