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The following is an excerpt from:
Will The Circle Be Unbroken: Country Music in America
edited by Paul Kingsbury & Alana Nash
Produced by DK Publishing and the Country Music Hall of Fame
Red Headed Stranger In 1973 [Willie] Nelson left RCA for the more progressive Atlantic Records – the label that launched Ray Charles and Led Zeppelin – after A&R chief Jerry Wexler decided that Atlantic should have a country division. "It was 1973," Wexler recalled in his autobiography, "when Willie was looked down on by Nashville's assembly-line producers as eccentric. But his eccentricity was exactly what attracted me. I suggested he use his own band, something he'd always been denied, since I wanted him to be comfortable… "Other than Willie, we never broke any [country] artists. Given time, I'm sure we would have pulled it off, but as Atlantic's chief financial officer, Ahmet [Ertegun] made the call: it's in the red, so close it down."  In sync: Willie Nelson and Shania Twain bridge two generations of country music. Running a country music division was an interesting idea that could have further changed country if Atlantic had not too easily abandoned the idea, as Wexler, one of the most accomplished producers in pop and R&B (after successes with the likes of Aretha Franklin) could have wrought unimaginable wonders in country. As it was, Nelson's two Atlantic albums, Shotgun Willie (1973) and Phases and Stages (1974) were well-thought-out aural sagas that have stood up remarkably well over the years. Phases and Stages actually was something of a hit for Willie, selling nearly half a million copies. More significantly, though, at Atlantic, Nelson learned who he was as a recording artist. His next record, Red Headed Stranger, was a natural outgrowth of where Nelson was headed after his brief but fruitful stint at Atlantic. When Columbia Records signed Nelson he was suddenly a hot property, and after a small bidding was with Warner Bros. Records, Nelson got what he had wanted all along: total artistic control. So he headed down to tiny Garland, Texas (near Dallas), to a studio that had been used mostly for recording advertising jingles. There, in three days and for only $20,000 of studio costs, he cut Red Headed Stranger. When he brought the album to Columbia Records in Nashville, head A&R man Billy Sherrill argued against releasing the album. It was unfinished, he said, It sounded like a demo. Other execs agreed with him. But Nelson stuck to his guns and noted that his contract gave him final say. "They thought it was under produced, too sparse, all those things," Nelson wrote in his autobiography. "Even though they didn't like it, they had already paid me a bunch of money for it, so they had to release it under my contract. And since they had money in it, they had to promote it." It is impossible now to overstate the impact of this seminal 1975 album. It legitimized and intellectualized country, and immediately made country a mainstream popular phenomenon. A concept album about a mysterious hombre who rides into town from nowhere, kills a saloon girl who tries to steal one of his horses, and then rides off, Red Headed Stranger had mythic resonance. It is a brilliant saga-song western epic album, a very minimalist work, but one that plucks every heartstring, wrings every emotion, subtly explores eerie aspects of the human condition. And it just plain sounded good. Buoyed by the album's first single, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," – Nelson's first No. 1 – Red Headed Stranger built into a massive seller and proved the worth of country-music concept albums. Above all, though, it turned Willie Nelson into a star. |
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