The Nashville demos Willie Nelson cut after he first got himself a country music job in 1961, as a contract songwriter for Ray Price’s publishing company Pamper Music, have ever since been reputed to be among his most compelling vocal performances — comparable to Carol King’s, cut further north at about the same time.
This collection finally assembles eighteen of those tracks, some unleashed haphazardly on albums over the years, others never heard before now. Most make for compelling listening; together, they demonstrate that Nelson’s performing career took another decade to get going because he was already very much, inimitably, prematurely — Willie.
The songs, and the singing, keep walking that wavering Texas line between three-chord twang and jazz, quietly adventuring further in that direction than even Ray Price’s version of a song (for example, this collection’s “Are You Sure”, which Price did on his classic Night Life LP). Nelson’s demo plays as some matter-of-fact late-night comment in a bar.
Tracks such as that, and the really famous one, the original demo of “Crazy” — the one Patsy Cline heard — are lessons in classic, natural American speech singing. (Verses of “Crazy”, in fact, sound like Willie’s teaching the singer this brand new number, being careful that she hear those words just right, in the process producing the startling sensation that it’s the first time we’ve ever heard it too.)
Bare-bones guitar-and-vocal demos such as “Save Your Tears” are just the sort of thing Willie would take to #1 with “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain” in a more accepting 1975; the same goes for the previously unheard “What Do You Think Of Her Now”, written and sung with stablemate Hank Cochran.
“Opportunity To Cry”, eventually recorded by Willie on Liberty Records, is stark, delicate, and smooth in the demo version. A revelation of this compilation is the degree to which Nelson’s songs of the ’60s were scary dark and casually near suicidal, for all of their lilting polish. Numbers here talk of this being “a perfect time for me to die,” and “saving a tear for the ones who are living” — and, in a relentless, hypnotic version, “Three days…that I hate to be alive” (yesterday, today and tomorrow). Talk about “hello walls crazy.” And with other arrangements in other hands, some of those got to be hits!
For all that smooth starkness, the variety of what Nelson could come up with is already in evidence — from hard-driving two-step shuffles (“Things To Remember” and “Within Your Crowd” are very good ones) and beer-tear honky tonk (the much-covered “Undo The Right” and “Something To Think About”). There are even a few positively peppy, if peculiar, upbeat numbers, such as “The Local Memory”.
A surprise bonus is a charming, substantial on-disc video, in which Cochran reminisces amusingly about Willie’s early Nashville days. We also get to see what it really looks like to dart from backstage at the Opry and the old Ryman across the alley to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the legendary songwriter hangout.
As striking as the individual songs on Crazy: The Demo Sessions can be, the CD has been put together with a historical sort of approach that puts all of the utterly stripped-down solo acoustic cuts up front, then follows with somewhat more lushly arranged tracks featuring often wonderful instrumental turns by the likes of “Pig” Robbins on piano and Jimmy Day or Buddy Emmons on steel. The order makes it tougher going as an album than it need be; if you have a “shuffle” button on your CD player, you might want to use it, to better mix the solo ballads with the shuffles.
