“Thanks for coming to my dad’s birthday party,” said Micah Nelson, a few songs into an all-star tribute to Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl, attended by a sold-out house happy …
, symbolically representing how welcome Willie has been in the worlds of country, rock and cannabis, respectively. In the preceding hours, he was serenaded by such disparate musical figures as the Chicks, the Lumineers, Ziggy Marley, Miranda Lambert, Beck, Chris Stapleton, Tom Jones, Norah Jones, Bob Weir, Jack Johnson, Margo Price and the rare surviving figure that can still count as one of his actual contemporaries, Kris Kristofferson.
The most emotional moment during Saturday’s opening night came not while Nelson was on stage for the final stretch, but literally hours earlier, when Rosanne Cash brought out Kristofferson to join her for a song he wrote, “Lovin’ Her Was Easier .” Kristofferson’s longstanding issues with memory took him off the road years ago, and his voice wasn’t built for sweet harmony singing even in the best of days.
Strait also provided his share of light-heartedness a bit earlier by joining Nelson on “Sing One With Willie,” the ultimate meta song, inasmuch as the 2019 track literally has as its sole subject Strait and Nelson finally getting to record a tune together. A bit more solemnly, they followed that with a duet of “Pancho and Lefty” .
“We went and cut it down in Austin. There was one moment where he sat down and was like, ‘Do you want me to do the first verse, do you want me to sing harmony — what do you want me to do?’ To have Willie Nelson sit down behind a microphone with his coffee and say, ‘All right, what do you want me to do?’ — I froze. But it was great. I mean, he’s 90 years old and he kicked ass on it.
Some of the most authentic-seeming “outlaw country” moments of the night came from a pair of true I-did-it-my-way performers, Jamey Johnson, who sang Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever,” and Sturgill Simpson, who did “I’d Have to Be Crazy,” a song popularized by Nelson that Simpson covered for one of this own albums. They were the two performers on the lineup least likely to crack a smile, but the authoritative air they both brought outweighed whatever they didn’t bring in the way of party hats.
The Lumineers’ Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz at “Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90” held at the Hollywood Bowl on April 29, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.“He doesn’t have the traditional timing of like most singers,” remarked Wesley Schultz on the carpet. “I would say it’s almost like on Valium or something. It’s just like, ‘I’m gonna say it when I want to say it and it still feels correct, but you have to get used to it.
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