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Best Austin album of all time
- “RED-HEADED STRANGER” BY WILLIE NELSON (COLUMBIA) 1975
Although he wrote neither the title track nor the breakout smash single Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain,'' Willie Nelson's masterpiece is rightfully considered to be this country opera about stolen love and retribution, salvation and sin. Recorded for $20,000 at Autumn Sound Studios in Garland,Red Headed Stranger” came out in the midst of the Austin-based outlaw country'' movement, when Willie's Fourth of July Picnics drew close to 100,000 hippies and rednecks to Dripping Springs each year. But even as he had recharged creatively with 1973'sShotgun Willie” and ‘74’s “Phases & Stages,” Nelson had failed to make much noise nationally.
That all changed with Red Headed Stranger,'' which was built on a song of the same title that Willie first heard in his early '50s deejay days. On a long drive from Colorado to Texas, Willie and his third wife Connie, conceived the project, which brought contemporary observations to Old West themes like gunfights, saloon girls and that thin line between preachers and outlaws. They started thinking of songs that would fit with the concept and Willie rememberedBlue Eyes Crying In the Rain,” an obscure Roy Acuff number written by Fred Rose in 1945. As a redhead with blue eyes, Willie backed those covers physically, but it was his spiritual kinship to the tunes that really shows up in the recording.
Stranger'' was Nelson's first album of a newcreative control” deal with Columbia, and when the label heads received the finished album, they reportedly wondered out loud why Willie would send them a demo. The spare backing, mournful bray and Texas gypsy guitar playing have all become part of Willie’s musical persona as happy hour singer at the honky tonk of regret. But in 1975, at a time when Mickey Gilley and Crystal Gayle dominated the airwaves and, therefore, the country charts, label heads were aghast at this moralistic mood piece. Just as when Dylan released the stripped down John Wesley Harding'' at a time ofPurple Haze” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Satanic Request,” Nelson slowed it down and wringed it out when the world expected its outlaws to be wired to the gills.
At least with Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain,'' Nelson had given his label one song with commercial potential. He gave country radio a ballad to break up the stream of hillbilly show tunes and in the end,Blue Eyes” was the No. 1 country song of 1975 and everybody wanted to know about this dope-smoking hippie redneck whose hero was Frank Sinatra.
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