The cosmic cowboy rides again

Country legend Willie Nelson talks to Tim Cumming
Willie Nelson

As the house lights dim, the applause rises, a Texan flag falls over the back of the stage and Willie Nelson strolls on, followed by his band. You can't quite say the crowd erupts - this is Bournemouth, after all - but the applause carries them high as Willie strikes the first chiming chords of Whiskey River, the tippling classic that has opened his concerts for some 30 years. It doesn't let up until the last chorus of Hank Williams's Move It On Over closes the show, 36 songs and two hours later.

Bournemouth was the second date of what is, remarkably, Willie Nelson's first-ever full-length UK tour. Two days later, at the Royal Albert Hall, the set features many of the same songs but with subtly different interpretations, as Nelson leads the band on his nightly exploration of one of the most remarkable songbooks in American music.

His discography alone is enough to fill a book. Between 1975 and 1993 Nelson produced over 35 albums for Columbia, ranging from collaborations with the musicians who first inspired him to the classic set of standards, Stardust - a record thatalmost single-handedly brought a lost generation of songs back to life. In the 1990s he moved to Island and made some of his finest music with Spirit and Teatro. The Great Divide, a pop-rock extravaganza orchestrated by producer Matt Serletic, is his first release on the Lost Highway label, and four more albums are in the can: "There's a reggae album, an album I just did with Ray Price, a jazz record I did with some friends of mine in Texas, and there's an album of Hank Williams songs with Larry Butler. We'll try and get that, maybe, for Lost Highway."

Nelson plays up to 200 dates a year, so it seems appropriate that our conversation takes place on the tour bus. "The first songs I remember learning were mostly gospel songs like Amazing Grace. I started writing poems when I was about five years old. Then as I learned to play the guitar a little bit, some chords, I started putting melodies to the poems. I learned a lot of music from the other farm workers, black spirituals and Mexican songs, all those different sounds on a cotton patch." He and his sister Bobbie were raised by their grandparents - "great musicians, music teachers and voice teachers. My mother and my dad were divorced when I was like six months old, but through the years we hung out a lot together, and I got to hear them play too. Dad played in the band with us for a while, so the whole family had some kind of talent."

Born in economically depressed and drought-stricken rural Texas in 1933, Willie first played professionally for a polka band when he was 10 and led his own band from the age of 12. By the mid-1950s he was working as a DJ and playing the notorious Jacksboro Highway near Fort Worth, all the while writing classics such as Night Life and Family Bible, both of which he sold for a few hundred dollars. "There was a lot of nightclubs out on the strip," he remembers, "and I think I've played 'em all. They could be rowdy places, and any given night, anything could happen. There was always a big crowd out there. Nightclubs are still a great place to play, and if it wasn't for them, I probably would've quit the business a couple of times."

The spit and sawdust of Jacksboro may be a long way from the Albert Hall, but it's only across the street in terms of his musical ethos. "I try to keep playing those small venues along with big venues. I enjoy playing both, but for me it's important to play the clubs, where they're drinking more and they seem to be partying a little heavier. And that's always nice."

At the end of the 1950s Nelson arrived in Nashville with a suitcase of songs and little else. He fell straight into the country music capital's nightlife. "Tootsie's Orchid Lounge was directly across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where the Grand Ole Opry was every Saturday night. All the acts that played the Opry would cross the alley into Tootsie's and have a beer after the show, and you got to meet a lot of people there - Faron Young, Billy Walker, Patsy Cline, all those folks. Mostly just having a beer, talking." Pitching hit songs as well: both Young and Cline had huge successes with songs written by Nelson (Hello Walls and Crazy).

Incredibly, there are still a bunch of those old songs awaiting release later this year - "old demos I thought were some of the best things I ever did in the studio, because I was allowed to get all these great musicians that I knew and worked with in Ray Price's band. In a three-hour period we might do 20 songs. If you know the songs and can play, there's no reason to do it a thousand times. Once you think you got it you can move on to the next song, and I think I did some of my best records this way. Teatro in four days, the Red Headed Stranger album I did in two, and Spirit in a couple of days."

Nelson had hit his productive peak as a songwriter, but he was still a long way from becoming the "cosmic cowboy" with the mane of red hair who broke Nashville's hegemony along with Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson in the early 1970s. The turning point came when his house in Tennessee burned down and he returned to Austin, Texas to find a burgeoning music scene. Along the way he had weathered several stormy marriages and developed habits that were hard to break. "I grew up drinking; it was something I had to grow out of." His famous Fourth of July picnics drew rednecks and hippies on to the same level field, and 1975's Red Headed Stranger, the first country music concept album, decisively opened the door to success on his own terms.

Nelson's huge discography is testament to a fecundity the business has found hard to accommodate. Famous for being a musical outlaw who achieved success by laying down his own law, Nelson sees the corporate control he fought against three decades ago as an even greater threat today. He is wary of corporate power elsewhere as well - especially in his role as president of Farm Aid, an organisation he helped establish in 1985 to raise funds for needy families in rural areas. "Farmers are having a rough time, not only in America but all over the world. The small farmer is being trampled under by the big corporations, and that's definitely something I'm in favour of reversing. It's worth a try - mainly to let people know what we think and let them have a chance to think about it."

He follows the same line of openness on his drug of choice, marijuana, for which he has long been an advocate and for which he has been busted more than once. "'Most all of Europe is moving closer to Amsterdam, which I think is a great way to look at it. But there's still opposition everywhere, from that group of people who just don't know, and until the education is complete there'll always be people who say no no no, bad bad bad. But anything's bad if you abuse it."

Outside, beyond the darkened windows of the bus, the chanting of fans and well-wishers can still be heard. "I've been more places and seen less things than anybody," he says of the touring life. "Most of my time is spent travelling; there's not really much time to do anything else."

· The Great Divide is released on Lost Highway. Willie Nelson & Family are touring until June 20.