Willie Nelson Turns 90

Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday is happening this week.

One of his greatest performances was at a concert in 1973 that only a very few have ever heard of.

On that occasion, just as Nelson was emerging from the cultural churn of the late 1960's and early 1970’s as a Nashville renegade and country music outlaw, and just before he released his album “Red Headed Stranger”, he performed along with several other Nashville exiles at an ill-fated concert held in the West Texas high desert near the ghost town of Terlingua. To insure its success, its producers had intentionally scheduled the event to open at the same time as Terlingua’s popular annual chili cook-off. Whereupon the chili cook-off folks reportedly filed a lawsuit to prevent the concert’s principals from claiming association with their better known event. The resulting legal snafu seriously subverted concert promotional efforts and on opening night hardly anyone showed up.

The promoters had carved an amphitheater out of a bluff, off-road in the middle of nowhere. A documentary film crew manned a hot air balloon that hovered just above the stage. Nick Ray, director of “Rebel Without A Cause” and “Johnny Guitar” in the 1950’s had been engaged to direct the film. Given the sketchy financial circumstances and Ray’s penchant at that point in his career for abusing mind altering substances, the film was never completed.

The unfolding of the event itself was surreal. What crowd there was represented an odd mixture of cultural tropes of the time: outlaw country music and the abuse of alcohol and recreational drugs the only things everyone held in common. There was no visible security. Nothing ran on time. No one seemed to know what was going on.

Jerry Jeff Walker was scheduled to headline at 8pm with Willie Nelson to follow. Hours passed between sets. Walker didn’t appear on stage till midnight. He was clearly not happy, at the very least inebriated, and played, a short set, facing his band with his back to an increasingly boisterous crowd, the aforementioned hot air balloon bobbing up and down above their heads, frequently dipping down to block their view. Members of the audience, slowly growing hostile, in turn, began to heckle the film crew and stage hands, tossing empty beer cans and bottles at them as the evening progressed. In this environment, Willie and his band set up shortly after midnight and began to play without apology, as if they were performing in front of a packed stadium of enthusiastic fans instead of a ragtag crowd of misfits too drunk and high to have left early.

It was an extraordinary performance, one the audience hadn’t deserved, and one the band and its leader weren’t, under the circumstances, beholden to give.

When it was over, everyone in attendance knew they had seen something special. Only later did it occur to me that I had witnessed a performance achieved for no reason other than to make a masterpiece out of an otherwise failed spectacle — even if no one would remember later that it had happened. It was a performance that not only displayed the depth and breadth of Willie Nelson’s talent but also took the measure of the man himself and found him to be generous of spirit and destined for greatness.

By now, the occasion of the concert has descended so far into obscurity that I could find only one reference to it in an online article in which Ray Benson, leader of the Texas swing band “Asleep at the Wheel”, recalled that “It was supposed to be a big festival — but nobody came.”

Over the years, all but one of my negatives covering the event have been lost. The photograph pictured here is one, only recently rediscovered. It was captured with a borrowed 300mm telephoto lens, taken 50 years ago, and has been restored and printed in an edition of 20. Ten prints at 9 x 14 inches remain available. Feel free to contact me for more information.