Review: It's a Long Story: My Life

It's a Long Story: My Life by Willie Nelson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Willie Nelson is a terrific artist. Much of the fun of reading this memoir is coming across him recounting how he dashed off one or another of his songs. He claims, for instance, to have written “Crazy,” “Night Life,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” in the space of little more than a week while hustling between part time jobs as a young husband and father in 1960 in Houston.

Describing the experience of it, he gets off my favorite line in the book: (this is a paraphrase since I listened to it) “It felt like they came fully formed. It came so easily I wasn’t sure I deserved the credit, but no one else was around.”

The best of this book is a satisfying reflection of the best of what makes him one of the most significant country artists of the 20th Century and one of the significant American musicians as well. Like few others, he can boil a feeling down to a concrete image, and then he can convey that image in clear and memorable language. That makes him a poet.

And it also shows him reflecting a wonderfully wide range of influences and collaborators. It seemed odd to have him open this book with a reflection on T.S. Eliot’s claim that “In the end is my beginning,” but why not? Both are men who’ve spent a lifetime trying to work with words.

By the end of this, it’s encouraging to find that Nelson, who’s committed to sustaining America’s gospel music heritage and who’s often enough embraced by people nostalgic for a time we now know was rife with inequality, broke the implicit color line when he played with Johnny Pride and later Ray Charles, campaigned for Democratic candidates as far back as the early 1970s, and more recently recorded the first major label LGBT-themed country song with his cover of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond Of Each Other).”

In other words, he is, as he frequently boasts, a man who’s constantly reinventing himself, someone who’s always following his personal inspiration and aesthetic. That’s especially true (as he discusses) in his idiosyncratic vocal phrasing. He had a hard time establishing himself as a recording artist precisely because his timing was so unusual. He marched (or sang) always to his own beat, finding things others overlooked along the way.

At the same time, Nelson – like a lot of significant artists – has turned out his fair share of shlock. T.S. Eliot has Old Possum’s Book of Cats, and Nelson has a lot of string-laden, trite numbers too. I can forgive him, of course; the man has recorded – no joke – 92 studio albums in his career, so some will obviously be less excellent than others.

We see some of that over-the-top tendency in this book, though. As wonderful as many parts are – especially the ones where he reflects on his various inspirations – we also get passages shot with cliché and evasion. On the one hand, it’s touching that he refuses to say a bad word about any of his first three wives. Each is beautiful, talented, and devoted to the family. It’s not as flat as all that; each is also headstrong and passionate, and each is hurt when he begins to betray her. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel we’re missing important parts of Nelson’s story.

In one peculiar incident, he talks of one wife understandably losing her temper when she opens a hospital bill for the expenses around the birth of his daughter to another woman. As readers, we’re as blindsided as she is. In the preceding chapters, he’s barely addressed his dissatisfaction with his current marriage. Instead, we get the bad news all at once, and with it we get the let’s-just-move-on determination.

As I come at last to see it, Nelson’s forte is the song, the concentrated 3-5 minute drama. The parts of this book that most fully reflect that artistic vision are the ones most worth savoring. The ones that call for more nuance, though, the ones that ask him to reflect on his mistakes as a parent or husband over time, tell us less – or tell us what they do in a shorthand of “faith” and “keeping on” that we’ve heard explicated more carefully later. I am glad to hear him talk about his commitment to legalizing marijuana, but we don’t need soapboxing here.

So, this is one for the real fan, or even the moderate fan, but I don’t think it’s for the who-is-Willie-Nelson reader. It’s good to have this artist still rolling, though, and – as I hope will happen with any musician’s biography or memoir – it’s helped me discover fresh ears for material I’ve enjoyed a long time.


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