Listen To Willie Nelson
It is Funny How Time Slips Away
While you are considering plans for 2024 and how to imagine getting from where you are to where you want to be, you might like to listen to a little Willie Nelson.
You might not recognize Willie Nelson from when he was a young man with a promising career in the music business.
He looked and acted the way he was expected to act.
But that all changed at the end of the sixties.
At 40 Willie Nelson was a down-on-his-luck, near-failed musician who had squandered youthful promise and spent a full ten years in the servile employ of the Nashville music factory. The creative indignities he suffered in pursuit of success within this system might be summed up with the cover of his 1969 RCA album, the ironically and incongruously named "Good Times" pictured here.
The label lost interest, he lost at love, and he was past 40 (which was an old man in those days) in a young person's world. To make matters worse his home burned down and he didn't have insurance.
What did he do?
He went back to where he came from. He grew his hair, and a beard such as he could. He started writing new songs on an old classical guitar - both of which he could own. He stopped drinking. And he held a picnic, a 4th of July picnic that brought together all the people he loved from very different worlds; hippies, rednecks, patriots, farmers, and all kinds of people, miraculously connecting them all.
Amidst personal tragedy in tragic times for the country - oil crisis, recession, cultural struggle, political corruption - he stopped his life and started again. A new man. His authentic self.
It brought him success - creatively, socially, and monetarily - like few have ever known.
20 years later, at 60 Willie lost everything. Again. The Tax department took all he had and gave him a bill for $32 million ($68 million today). He lost everything except the old guitar, which he renamed Trigger after Roy Rogers' famously loyal horse and traveling companion.
With nothing left but an old guitar, a bucket of bad business decisions, and a pocket full of songs, Willie could have retreated from life and sunk under the unpayable waves of debt.
But he didn't. He started over. He made friends by being a friend - to young musicians, to farmers, to successful artists in need of songs and inspiration, and to thousands he met along the road relentlessly touring and playing for anyone, anywhere that would have him. People talk about Willie's songwriting and musicianship, but it is his ability to value friendship that saved him every time and made him rich beyond money and imagining.
In 2023, at 90 years old, Willie Nelson is second to none in the entertainment industry, but more importantly, is loved by so many people it took the whole year to celebrate his birthday with all the events, celebrations, tributes, and just plain old parties that were planned.
Good times indeed.