That’s what felt so extraordinary, so life-affirming, about Nelson’s starry two-night 90th birthday concert in Los Angeles over the weekend. It wasn’t the cheer and sweep of the love fest — duets with Keith Richards, Neil Young, George Strait; a profusion of tribute performances from Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Booker T. Jones, Bob Weir, the Chicks, umpteen more — so much as Nelson’s ability to fit his bigger-than-yesterday life into these tidy parcels of melody and rhyme.
Throughout this song and others, Nelson’s guitar playing was judicious by necessity, a wise mind directing stiff hands, reducing all the jazzy dazzle he learned from his hero Django Reinhardt into only the most essential of gestures.
And if it felt as if more than half of the recording business had shown up for this thing, it somehow felt entirely reasonable. Is there a living nonagenarian with a wider pop-cultural sneakerprint than Nelson? His early songwriting masterpieces from the 1960s — “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” “Night Life” — are older than most of today’s country stars, and yesterday’s, too. Then, in the 1970s, Nelson’s albums took an industry-defiant turn toward the raw and the spiritual.
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