Mickey Raphael: Press

Photo thanks to Janis from Texas, from backstage at the Woodlands, in Texas.

Imagine a world in which Willie Nelson was your boss.

What might be considered a dream come true to some has been a reality for the past 35-plus years for Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s ace harmonica player.

“He’s kind of a benevolent dictator,” Raphael said. “He’s very generous. You really have to screw up bad to get his attention. You just show up for the gig and do your best.”

Nelson is well-known for his laid-back ways, a philosophy he shares with his bandmates on stage.

“If you make a mistake, it’s laughed at. He’s great to work with, he provides wide open spaces, musically, to work with,” Raphael said.

In the early ‘70s, Raphael picked up the harmonica as a teenager in the Dallas folk-music scene. Before long, Raphael joined a local band that earned the following of University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal. Royal, a passionate country-music fan, invited Raphael to a post-game jam session at a Dallas hotel room. Nelson attended the jam session, took note of Raphael’s skill, and invited the harmonica player to join his touring band shortly after.

The unlikely notion that playing the harmonica, often viewed as a novelty instrument, has set the path for a career at the top of popular music isn’t lost on Raphael.

“I think (the harmonica’s popularity) is right below the accordian’s,” Raphael said. “It’s really not used that much, not that many people play harmonica.

“It’s kind of an aquired taste, and it is somewhat of a unique instrument, even though everyone probably had one at one time in their lives.”

Joining Nelson’s band forced Raphael to take a “crash course” in country music history. Learning to appreciate the classics was easy, he said.

“I fell in love with the classic country artists – Hank Williams, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Ray Price – it didn’t take me long to get into it,” he said.

Some of those artists haven’t hit the charts in more than 50 years, yet musicians like Nelson have helped keep the classic country sound alive despite an ever changing musical landscape.

“I am glad there is a real want for (classic country), but you can’t take anything away from the new stuff,” Raphael said.

Besides Nelson, Raphael has worked with many top artists spanning many genres, including Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Wynton Marsalis, Kenny Chesney, U2 and Neil Young.

When considering which artists he was most surprised to get a call from, Raphael came up with two household names.

“Probably Elton John and Motley Crue,” he said. “Motley Crue had a song called ‘Smoking In The Boys Room,’ and they wanted a harmonica player.”

Raphael was referred to Motley Crue through a producer who had worked with him on a Blue Oyster Cult song.

John had been a fan of Nelson’s “Stardust” album and enlisted Raphael to play harmonica for the title track of his album, “The Fox.”

Over his 50-plus-year career, Nelson has played for a lot of people. For the uninitiated, Raphael said to expect little banter and plenty of songs.

“It’s non-stop music. We do an hour to an hour and 45 minutes and we go from one song to the next,” he said. “We will play a couple of songs from the new record ‘Country Music.’ There’s no set list.”

If there is no set list, how does the band know what song to play next?

“(Nelson) usually starts the songs, so we know what to do,” Raphael said. “Everyone has been with him for so long, he can’t throw us for too many loops.”

Willie Nelson will perform in a sold-out show at the Seneca Allegany Casino Events Center at 7 p.m. May 8.

Mickey Raphael has been playing harmonica in Willie Nelson's band since 1973. A few hours before Nelson and the Family Band took the stage at Duck Jam on Saturday, he answered some questions about music, Willie and life on the road.

Q: After 37 years of playing and touring with the same group, what helps keep your interest? What keeps it fresh?

A: Well, I'm a fan of Willie's, first off. I love his singing and his guitar playing and his writing. But I do get to play with lots of other people, which helps to keep it fresh.

Q: You're a Dallas native. Where's home now?

A: I live in Nashville. My mom lives in Dallas, so I still visit a lot, and we play Austin all the time. But in Nashville, I can be close to the studio. The other day I was in Whole Foods and I got a call from Kenny Chesney's producer who asked if I was in the neighborhood if I could come by, and I just happened to have some harmonicas in my car.

Q: Does that happen often -- spur of the moment requests?

A: Enough to keep me there. Usually they don't call five minutes before, but I'm glad I was available.

Q: Most people know Willie as a musician and performer, but what's he like as a boss?

A: If he doesn't say anything to you, that's great. You don't want to elicit any kind of response. But he's great, I mean, anything goes. Well, not anything goes -- you gotta show up for the gig. He's a benevolent dictator, though. Everybody knows that he has the last word and everybody wants to please him. We all get along real well.

Q: Are there any members of the family who don't enjoy life on the road as much as Willie?

A: Everybody likes doing it. I do like going home, though. We're off next week, so I'll fly home for that.

Q: How often are you touring now?

A: It used to be two weeks on, two weeks off. Now he's wanting to work a little more, so this might be a four-week tour, then take two weeks off, then go to Europe for a month, then take July off. So, we're not consistent, but we do about 130 cities a year.

Q: Are you surprised that Willie wants to work more as he gets older?

A: Knowing him, it's not surprising, but I guess it should be. You'd think he'd want to slow down a little. Somebody asked him when he was going to retire and he said, "All I do is play golf and music. Which one am I supposed to quit?"

Q: How has the show changed over the years?

A: It really hasn't changed. The repertoire has gotten bigger, so every time he has a new album, he'll add two or three more songs and he really doesn't drop anything. The show right now is about 90 minutes, maybe a little over an hour and a half. We used to do two-hour shows and two-and-a-half-hour shows, but he kind of cut down doing that just to pace himself. Because he had trouble with his wrist and his shoulder's bothering him now, so let's not burn him out.

Q: The band has played in some of the largest stadiums as well as smaller venues. Do you have a preference?

A: The more intimate ones are scarier. But this is not so small. But I like being outdoors, and I love this town because it's flat here so I can ride my bike. It's always great to be back in Texas.

Mickey Raphael spent most of the last four decades playing harmonica with a music icon. As part of what’s often called The Willie Nelson Family, Raphael and the Red Headed Stranger have created music both on and off the road.

That road, which Willie Nelson famously can’t wait to get back on, will bring him to the Fox Valley this weekend. Nelson and his band will take the stage at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in downtown Appleton on Saturday.

In a phone interview, Raphael admitted he feels fortunate to have spent his life doing something he loves. He said he was “just a kid” when he first met Nelson in 1973. At the time, Raphael was playing harmonica on tour with a musician named B.W. Stephenson, who was most famous for co-writing the song “My Maria.”

One night in Dallas, Raphael found himself playing harp in a jam session that included Willie Nelson and Charlie Pride. Nelson invited then-21-year-old Raphael to sit in during a performance in New York City, and he’s been part of the band ever since.

“I never was really hired. I was just never asked to leave,” Raphael said with a laugh.

While Willie Nelson is a living legend, he worked hard to earn his place in the music world. Early in his career, Nelson struggled to find a record label willing to sign him. He made a living in Nashville by writing songs for other artists such as Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline and Ray Price. Then Nelson made a number of country albums with Nashville record producer Chet Atkins. However, most people are unfamiliar with those recordings.

Raphael joined forces with Nelson just about the time the outlaw country musician was gaining recognition from critics with the album “Shotgun Willie.”

But Raphael also has been able to breathe life into those early Willie Nelson recordings.

Released just last year, “Naked Willie” is one of Nelson’s most recent CDs. Raphael said he had an idea when the Beatles came out with “Let it Be … Naked” in 2003. Producer Phil Spector’s orchestrations were removed from the original Beatles’ album, leaving a version closer to what Paul McCartney had first intended. Raphael thought he could do the same with Nelson’s music from the ’60s.

“Chet Atkins produced this record and made a great record, but at the time everything in Nashville was recorded with background vocals and heavy strings,” said Raphael, who took on the task of essentially un-producing or de-producing the original recordings.

Raphael asked himself a question as he got to work.

“What if Willie had been the producer instead of Chet Atkins? Willie’s mantra is ‘less is more,’ and that’s kind of how I approached it.”

There is a noticeable difference in the effect of “Naked Willie” and “Let it Be … Naked.” Raphael points out that the Beatles’ songs on “Let it Be” had become ingrained in pop culture, and the new versions were hard for some fans to accept. In the case of “Naked Willie,” most fans were hearing the music with fresh ears.

When Raphael began playing with Nelson, he was partial to performing blues music as opposed to country. But Nelson’s music doesn’t fit into a specific box.

“Willie transcends all labels. You can’t say he’s a country artist,” Raphael said. “One minute he’ll be playing bluegrass the next jazz. It’s just good music. You can’t put a label on it.”

Some things on the road have changed since the ’70s, and some remain the same. These days Nelson travels in a bus fueled by bio-diesel from a company started by and named after the singer/songwriter. But Nelson still plays the same worn-out acoustic guitar affectionately named Trigger after Roy Rogers’ horse. As for Raphael, he’s blown through countless harmonicas over the years and hasn’t bothered to name them all.

Nelson’s longtime harp player describes his frontman as “an American classic,” pointing out how so many of the songs they’ve performed over the years have become part of the classic American songbook. Whether it’s “Crazy,” “Always on My Mind” or “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” Nelson’s songs leave lasting impressions.

Raphael said fans should expect to hear more than a few of those memorable tunes when the band hits the stage Saturday at the PAC. However, there’s never a clear-cut set list.

“We just play what we play,” he said. “You never know what we’re going to play.”

In addition to Nelson, Raphael has made music with artists including Elton John, Motley Crue and country stars Kenney Chesney and Vince Gill. He released a solo album in 1988 called “Hand to Mouth” and has been working on a project with the band Calixeco.

photo:  Taylor Hill/Getty Images

If you're looking for a word to describe the Willie Nelson sound, you can't go wrong with “distinctive.”

There's the Willie Nelson voice, often imitated, never duplicated; the guitar tone, pulled from a battered Martin guitar named Trigger; the songs, among the best in country music; and his Family band, a loose/tight unit that has backed him for decades. All are distinctive. And, where other country bands have a fiddle or a pedal steel guitar, the Family band has a harmonica player. Also distinctive.

“Willie has always been different,” said that harp player, Mickey Raphael, a band member for more than 35 years, from a Virginia tour stop. “He had one of the great steel guitar players, Jimmy Day, and he couldn't replace him with another steel guitar player, so he started using harmonica. The main thing, though, is Willie's voice and guitar.”

That distinctive sound will be on display Sunday when Nelson and his band play the Majestic Theatre.

Raphael came out of the Dallas folk scene where he learned from Donnie Brooks, worked places such as the notorious Cellar Club with Mike Ames and then joined B.W. Stevenson's band. In 1973, UT football coach Darrell Royal invited Raphael to a hotel-room jam that included Charley Pride and Willie Nelson.

“Willie was kind of knocking around Texas then, he wasn't doing a lot,” Raphael said. “He was playing dance halls, chilling out, working at Floore's, that was when John T. Floore was still alive. He asked me to join him.”

Raphael has been with Willie since. He's also played and recorded with Emmylou Harris, Toby Keith, Bobby Charles, Blue Oyster Cult, Elton John, The Chieftains, U2, Mötley Crüe and Neil Young.

“You can't seek out the work,” Raphael said, “but you have to let people know you're available. Elton John heard Willie's ‘Stardust' album and wanted some harmonica on a song, so he called me. I'm not strictly a country harmonica player, so I'm able to play with Blue Oyster Cult and Mötley Crüe if they call.”

Like Nelson, Raphael has a distinctive style.

“I'm kind of a melodic player,” he said. “I'm more known for my distinctive tone than for being a fast player. I play with a lot of songwriters and, to do that, you have to complement the lyrics. I've had some good teachers. Years ago, Grady Martin, who played guitar with Willie, told me: ‘Take that thing out of your mouth once in a while. You play too much. Smoke a cigarette or something.' I wish he'd told me that 20 years earlier.”

For years, when Willie plays, be it a Family band gig or album, a solo album or a guest shot, the constants have been Raphael and Willie's piano-playing sister, Bobbie Nelson.

“Bobbie and Willie are an entity unto themselves,” Raphael said.

The band that will take the Majestic stage on Sunday will feature Willie (guitar), Bobbie (piano), Raphael (harmonica), Bee Spears (bass), and the English brothers, Paul and Billy (percussion). That band has to be on its toes because Willie also has a distinctive idea of time and tempo.

“The analogy I use is a snake wagging its tail,” Raphael said, laughing. “We have a saying, ‘Donde esta el uno?,' ‘Where is the one?' The one is where Willie says it is. If you're a human metronome and just lock in and play in time, you're not going to be where you need to be when Willie gets to where he wants to be.”

The Nelson/Family repertoire is wide and deep. Nelson releases albums at a steady clip. His latest is “American Classic” (Blue Note Records), Great American Songbook selections. “Country Music” (Rounder), a collection of country standards produced with T Bone Burnett, is set for release April 20. And there are a lot of Nelson-penned hits to choose from.

“There's no set list,” Raphael said. “Willie starts with ‘Whiskey River' and then usually ‘Still Is Still Moving.' He's been doing a couple from the ‘Country' album, ‘Man With the Blues' and ‘Nobody's Fault But Mine,' and the medley is in there. I couldn't recite the order. I listen and usually I come in on the second verse. When I'm not playing I listen to his guitar work.”

Raphael has a solo album, “Hand to Mouth,” and another in the works with members of the band Calexico. He also produced, or “unproduced,” the Nelson album “Naked Willie,” for which he stripped strings and other embellishments off '60s-era Willie songs.

“We kept everything in its original form,” Raphael said. “Those songs were some of the first songs that Willie played guitar on in the studio and you can hear his guitar along with great guitar work by Chet Atkins and Grady Martin. And you can actually hear Willie.”

You want to hear distinctive.

New to Willie Nelson?   Don’t cop to that shit around these parts, partner, unless you do it in a Martian accent.  In his 76 years, Abbott, Texas’s native son has done so many phenomenal things a list of them would amount to a religious text, but let’s put it this way: He wrote a hit song for Patsy Cline (“Crazy”) and appeared in a Snoop Dogg video (“My Medicine”). The words “living legend” aren’t really adequate; that should’ve opened up a wormhole in space-time. We’re still waiting for him to bring his Fourth of July Picnic back to San Antonio, but you’ve got a chance to verify his actual existence Sunday at the Majestic Theater, 224 E. Houston Street, on  February 28, 2010, majesticempire.com.

Mickey Raphael has played harmonica with Willie Nelson since 1973. He produced 2009’s Naked Willie, featuring Nelson recordings from 1966-1970 stripped of their Nashville studio flourishes. Raphael is currently working with Salvador Duran and Calexico’s John Convertino and Joey Burns to record a follow-up to his 1987 solo album Hand to Mouth.

How is Willie Nelson’s hand recovering? [He canceled a concert last month due to hand pain.]

It’s good. I mean he plays. He had that carpal-tunnel-syndrome operation — it’s been awhile back [2004]. … We’re out on the road now, but we just had a day off yesterday, and we’ve got a day off Monday, so he’s giving it some rest. … He’s the only guitar player we got, though.

What’s the strangest experience you’ve had playing with Willie Nelson?

[Performing in Amsterdam with] Snoop Dogg was pretty unique. We’ve gotten to play with U2.  Willie and I went to see Bono in Ireland, and they were working on a record and they asked us to come down and record a song that they released in Europe [“Slow Dancing”].  I don’t think it was a U.S. release. Willie and I played in Georgia at Ray Charles’s funeral. We just did this thing with Wynton Marsalis [2008’s Two Men With the Blues].

How did you begin playing with him?

I met Willie through [former University of Texas football coach] Darrell Royal, at a jam session at the coach’s hotel room after a ball game. He had about 30 people in there … a bunch of musicians and just his buddies and stuff. They just sat around passing the guitar around. Willie sang some. I think Charlie Pride sang some; I can’t remember who else was there. And Willie just said, “Hey, if you ever hear we’re playing anywhere, come sit in.” I started checking his schedule and seeing where he was playing in Texas. … It just kind of segued into playing with him more often.

How did the idea for Naked Willie come about?

I just pitched the idea to the record label. I said, “We’ve got all these great songs from the ’60s, and I wonder what they would sound like without all these strings and background vocals. What would it sound like if Willie had been the producer?

So this was your idea?

Yeah, totally my idea.  Willie really heard it when it was finished.

The impression I’d had was it was similar to the way that Let It Be Naked had arisen— something that had been eating away at him for a long time.

No, no. It was something that had been eating away at me for a long time. •

by Alison Richter

You might say that harmonica player Mickey Raphael has the ultimate gig: for over 30 years, he has toured the world and recorded with Willie Nelson, sharing the stage with one of music’s greatest singers/songwriters/guitarists. For Raphael, being a part of the band is not only artistically fulfilling; it’s also an opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the legend that is Willie Nelson.

Raphael has recorded with a remarkable number of other artists; his discography is pages long and he remains in demand as a session and live player. Last year, he made his debut as an “unproducer” —  taking classic early Nelson tracks and removing the strings and choruses that were ubiquitous in the so-called “Nashville Sound” when the songs were recorded 40 years ago.  The resulting album, Naked Willie, puts a new slant on old favorites, and a spotlight on the man whose idea it was to strip the masters and bring Nelson’s unmistakable voice into the forefront.

Mickey Raphael spoke to verge about “unproduction,” working with tape, and the world according to Willie Nelson.

VERGE: How did you obtain the masters to “unproduce” these tracks? Who owns them?

RAPHAEL:   RCA. I didn’t know anybody there, but I knew someone at Sony Legacy, the label that releases Willie’s catalogs and reissues at Columbia, and they mentioned the Sony/RCA merger. A light came on in my head and I said, “I have a great idea. Can I get my hands on the masters?” They said, “They’re in a vault.” I went to a studio in New York, did a test project with a couple of songs and submitted them.

VERGE:   Were you working from the actual reels? How well were they preserved?

RAPHAEL:  The reels were in cardboard boxes, falling apart.  I didn’t actually touch them; the engineer did it. You can’t play them more than a couple of times because the magnetic surface disintegrates.  A lot of times they bake the tapes to keep them intact, so I had one shot to load them to my hard drive.  They sounded great.  I assume the vault is temperature-controlled, but you never know. Now it’s all on hard drive.  The next one will be the same, but with harmonica all over it! I can even take Beatles records, put them on my computer and put harmonica all over them …

VERGE:  Too late.  They did that themselves.

RAPHAEL:  This is true!

VERGE:  That album is like listening to an entirely different artist, not at all connected to what he is today.

RAPHAEL:  It is.  The first time I heard him, this is what he sounded like, so these songs have a special place in my heart. They piqued my interest in Willie.  I didn’t grow up on country music.  I grew up on the Stones, the Beatles and the Band.

VERGE:  How long had it been since you worked with tape?

RAPHAEL:  I recorded with Willis Alan Ramsey on tape in Austin, but it’s been a while. It’s interesting to see how they edit tape with a razor blade and cut the tape.  It’s so much easier now with digital. I run into kids who are in engineering school, and they learn analog, but not with a lot of hands-on experience.

VERGE:  Do you plan on doing more production, or “unproduction,” work?

RAPHAEL:  I would do it in a minute!  I was working with Buddy Cannon, who produced a string date for Willie and Kenny Chesney [Cannon and Chesney co-produced Nelson’s 2008 album, Moment of Forever], and I said, “In a year or two I’ll take this record and remove the strings.  That will be my livelihood.”  I would love to do more projects.  Producing Willie — that’s not my world with him.  I would not approach him. He has Daniel Lanois, T Bone Burnett; he doesn’t see me in that light, but I would love to produce somebody.  I will work with anybody that asks. I’ve done some work with Calexico; they’re great guys. We booked a couple of days in the studio and wrote and recorded some stuff, and I co-produced with Joey Burns, their bandleader.

VERGE:  Thirty years together — what have you learned from Willie Nelson?

RAPHAEL:   Less is more.  That’s his mantra.  Keep it simple, slow down, don’t sweat the small stuff.  He never lets anything bother him, which is something I haven’t learned how to do.

VERGE:  The “Nashville Sound” is not so different from some of what we hear today, minus the schmaltzy background choruses, thank God. Still, there are strings at times, and there’s a certain radio-friendly sound that Nashville strives for.  Willie Nelson didn’t fit then, and he doesn’t fit now.  That said, being an “Outlaw” has served him well in both record and ticket sales.

RAPHAEL:  Willie is not trying to get on the radio.  Now, a young band needs airplay, and to be heard and to be on the radio, they have to play what radio wants them to play. The DJ no longer comes to work with a stack of his favorite records.   It’s test-marketed on homogenized groups of people who represent what the public wants to hear.  It’s not art; it’s selling time and gaining sponsors.  In that case, you’re not going to get eclectic artists.  They have to fit into a niche and be what the majority rules that they want.  I’m not taking anything away from them; it’s just the way the business is.  

If you don’t care, like Willie Nelson, who has a fan base and no end game, you can do what you want and not appeal to the largest demographic buying records.  There are great artists, like Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, who sell millions of records and their music is what the public wants to hear.  If you want to make great records that sell and get airplay, listen to how they make their records, because that’s what is commercial.  They’re talented artists who invented and found a place where that sells.

VERGE:  You once noted that every kid had a harmonica when you were growing up.  How has that changed?

RAPHAEL:   Every kid has a Wii now.  It’s a different paradigm.  They’re into Guitar Hero.  But a lot of kids are also into retro and the ’70s, and the harmonica is associated more with the blues.  That’s how beginning harmonica players hear it.  I want to stretch out and use it in all kinds of music and applications.

VERGE:  Do harmonica players get short shrift, with people thinking it’s so easy to play?

RAPHAEL:  I guess so. It’s barely recognized as a real instrument because everyone can have one and it’s easy to learn “Oh Susannah.” It’s an affordable instrument, you can put it in your pocket and carry it around with you, but it takes work to master it.  It’s not as glamorous as being a guitar player, so the numbers aren’t up there of people playing it. It’s a small, dedicated group that’s totally obsessed with it.

by Rachel Sullivan 

Very little introduction is needed for Willie Nelson. His career and fame have lasted decades and show no sign of slowing down now.

Nelson, along with his band — sister Bobbie Nelson (piano), Paul English (drums), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Bee Spears (bass), Billy English (percussion) and Jody Payne (guitar) — are on the road again for the 2010 Willie Nelson and Family tour

According to harmonica player Raphael, who gave a recent phone interview, this tour “is to pay the bills and make the house payment.” He then laughed. “We always tour. It’s what we do — we play music and we like to bring it to the fans.”

In addition to touring, the band has been busy recording. “Country Music,” which will be released April 13 by Rounder Records.

It features 15 new songs, which according to Nelson’s official Web site, will be included in the songs played on tour.

Raphael also talked about a second album for release in the next few months, “Naked Willie.”

“This album features a lot of ’60s recordings of country music, back when the songs were all played with strings and backup singers,” he said. “We’ve stripped all of that out. It’s classic recordings, but only performed with the bare band.”

Raphael joked that he was drawn to music because he “didn’t want a day job,” but admitted that he spends far more than the traditional 40 hours a week at work.

“Maybe it’s not too late for me,” he said. “Maybe I can still find a nice cushy desk job somewhere.”

Unable to cite his favorite Willie Nelson song because “there are too many good ones,” Raphael compared music to time travel.

“A good song is like a time machine,” he said. “It has a way of taking you back to the moment when you first heard it and you get to relive all the same sensations and emotions that you did back then. It hits you hard, in the gut, and the rest of you just goes with it.

“I can’t pick my favorite song to play. Each of them has a different meaning and all of them are good. If you want my favorites to hear that aren’t ours, I lean toward ‘Everybody’s Talking’ by Fred Neil from ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ ”

Raphael couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for a trip to Macon.

“We love it there,” he said. “It’s just such a great place for musicians. I grew up listening to The Allman Brothers and I’m looking forward to going to the museum. After that, I’m going to find a good place to have some Southern food.”

As for the concert, Raphael “expects to have a real good time. Our favorite thing to do is to play for an audience and see everyone react. The energy is great and everybody has a real good time. Being on the road is sort of a necessary evil to give a concert, but we’re fortunate to be in a band and travel all over the world. We’ve been doing it since 1973 and we’ll keep doing it as long as we can.”

Willie Nelson, Norman, Oklahoma
Photo by Janis Tillerson

Harmonica player Mickey Raphael was performing with a folk singer when he was introduced to his current employer, Willie Nelson, by the legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal in 1973.

“When I first got with Willie I had no country background at all,” Raphael, 58, says. “I had one Willie Nelson record … Of course I did this amazing crash course in country music, especially Willie’s catalog. The more I heard, the more I fell in love with his music and his style.”

Thirty-six years later that musical love affair continues, and includes a Willie & Family date Saturday at Planet Hollywood with Asleep at the Wheel opening. Nelson is on a perpetual tour and the 76-year-old legend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He released a slew of albums this year, including “Willie and the Wheel,” “American Classic” and “Naked Willie.”

Raphael produced “Naked Willie,” reaching back 40 years and remixing some of Nelson’s recordings for RCA, stripping away the orchestrations to reveal the music’s plaintive core.

How did Willie get “Naked”?

 It was my idea. I was always a fan of those songs during that era of Willie. I thought it would be cool to go back and record them again, and I know Willie’s style now is “less is more.” He wants to keep things really simple … I wondered what it would be like to take the strings off, the way the Beatles did with “Let It Be ... Naked.” They took out all the strings that Phil Spector had put in, and it was just the Beatles without the orchestration. How did you create the new album? I was allowed to go into the vaults to get the multitracks of Willie’s records. I dumped everything from the tapes and put it into a digital mode and then put it on a hard drive … I just took it down to the bare bones, just the players really … which is kind of what it would have sounded like if we had just recorded it this week. The style in the ’60s was called “the Nashville sound,” with heavy strings and background vocals. Everything was being recorded with that formula, and some people had big hits with it, but it didn’t fly with Willie … It really wasn’t his style, but being a new artist, he didn’t have the input into the production. But the core players, the original band, were the crème de la crème of Nashville studios during that era.

Are you promoting “Naked” during this tour?

We don’t really promote anything. We just tour all the time, pulling from the classic songbook of Willie. There’s no set list. He just makes it up as he goes. I know we’re going to start each concert with “Whiskey River” and then we’ll do the medley — “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Nightlife” — but after that it’s kind of whatever comes to his mind.

A lot of times it’s the same at the very beginning but then he’ll throw in some new songs. We don’t know what’s coming but he starts all the songs off anyway, so once we hear the intro we know what’s coming up.

Willie’s underrated as a guitarist, isn’t he?

People don’t know what a great guitar player he is. Since (the band’s longtime guitarist) Jody Payne retired almost two years ago Willie’s the only guitar player in the band, and he really gets to stretch out.

Do you think Willie will ever retire?

Years ago when we were playing a lot of scary redneck joints I asked Willie, “How long do we have to play these places?” He said, “If we’re lucky, a long, long time.” He’ll play till he drops. Me, I’m just lucky to be making a living playing harmonica

photo by A. E. Images

Mickey Raphael will be in New York City next week at a screening for “”Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis Play the Music of Ray Charles”, the filmed recording of a concert featuring Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis last February.

The concert was a tribute to Ray Charles, and Willie and Nelson were joined by Nora Jones, Mickey Raphael and the Wynton Marsalis Quintet for the concerts.  Mickey will take part in a question and answer session following the screening. 

Also, for those of us who can’t be in New York, Mickey will take part in a Q & A on Twitter,  through A&E Entertainment.  To take part and ask Mickey questions about the concerts, you must 1) sign up for twitter at www.twitter.com (it’s easy and free), and 2) You need to ‘follow AEHomeEnt, and to ask Mickey Raphael a question, just reply @AEHomeEnt and use hashtag #MickeyRaphael.  Mickey will start answering questions at 3 p.m. ET, next Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time.    A & E tweeted that you could start asking questions now, and then they will give them to Mickey next Wednesday. 

by  Brian Dugger
www.theblade.com

Mickey Raphael has been Willie Nelson’s right-hand man of sorts for more than 30 years. If you see Willie strumming his guitar on stage, Raphael is usually close by playing his harmonica.

It was an unlikely pairing when they first met in 1973. Raphael really didn’t know too much about his future boss, but “he sure didn’t fit that mold of a country western singer,” Raphael says, chuckling at the recollection.

“Darrell Royal, who was the coach of the University of Texas football team, was a big music fan, so he invited me over to hang out and play music with his friends,” says Raphael, who at the time was playing in the folk music scene in the Dallas area. “He had a little party after the ball game, and Willie was there. I met him and sat and listened to him play and jammed with him. I was so taken by him and was so impressed by his musical ability.”

The feeling was mutual, and it wasn’t long before Raphael got a call to join Willie on the road. Turns out that was the beginning of the Outlaw movement, when Nelson’s career was about to explode.

Willie Nelson and his band will appear Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Stranahan Theater.

Raphael played with Nelson on the “Red Headed Stranger” in 1975. That just wasn’t done in those days.  Studio musicians played on albums, and they were brought in by a producer who told the artist what songs to sing.  Nelson and Waylon Jennings destroyed that model by picking and writing their own songs and bringing their bands into the recording sessions.  It wasn’t long before they were tagged with the moniker “The Outlaws.”

Jennings and Nelson in 1976 recorded “Wanted! The Outlaws,” which became a platinum album for sales of more than 1 million copies.

“I was just this wide-eyed kid back then. I was such a big fan of Waylon.  He had Donnie Brooks, who was my mentor, playing harmonica. I was just a fan of these guys. I was a kid in a candy store really,” Raphael says.

He wasn’t the only fan. The audiences for Nelson in those days were unlike the traditional country music crowds.

“Back then the country fans didn’t like the rock fans. There was a distance between all genres of music. Willie was one of those guys who got all those barriers dropped,” Raphael says. “That’s what I saw at his concerts. You had the hippies and the rednecks. Whatever animosity there might have been went away because of the music. Willie was an ambassador to that type of change.”

Nelson embraced the rock fans, often collaborating and appearing in Austin with rocker Leon Russell.

“Willie makes a connection with everyone,” Raphael says of how Nelson was able to win over Russell’s fans. “Everyone has had their heart broken. You can connect with his songs. Everyone can identify with the stories he tells and what he’s been through and he expresses in his songs.”

Since meeting Nelson, Raphael has become a historian of his music. He started digging into his pre-Outlaw songs, back in the days of the Nashville sound, when producers would add lush strings and heavy background vocals to give the songs a fuller sound.

“In the ’60s you were competing with Sinatra, Perry Como, and country music was known for fiddles and banjos. And I think they wanted to make it a little more sophisticated to compete with popular music. They sweetened the songs with strings and background voices to make the songs more relevant and commercial.”  

When he started looking at some of those songs, Raphael wondered what they would sound like if they had been recorded in Nelson’s typical low-key piano, acoustic, drums style. He converted dozens of songs, including “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “The Ghost,” to a digital format and stripped out the heavy strings, putting the focus on Willie’s voice. The result is one of Nelson’s recent albums, “Naked Willie.”

When he played it for Willie, Nelson “just nodded his head and said, ‘This is what it might have sounded like if I were producing it.’ ”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Nelson has one of the broadest fan bases in the world today. That’s partly because of hit singles “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Blue Skies,” “Always on My Mind,” and “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” but also because of all the acts he’s collaborated with over the years.

Along with Jennings, he was part of the Highwaymen, which also consisted of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. That group toured the world and recorded three albums. But over the years, Nelson has also worked with Ray Price, Merle Haggard, Faron Young, George Jones, Toby Keith, Wynton Marsalis, and many others.

Willie is now 76 and more often than not stays on his bus until it’s show time, but he still hasn’t lost his thirst for getting on stage. He played about 130 dates last year. This year, he’ll probably end up with around 120, including Wednesday night at the Stranahan.

There is nothing traditional about Nelson, and his concerts are no different. Most acts will print out a set list before the show and tape it to a wall backstage so the band knows what’s going on. Not Nelson.

“There is no set list,” Raphael says. “He’ll start off with ‘Whiskey River,’ then we have no idea where he is going after that. He’ll start off, and we’ll just follow him.

“We don’t know from one night to the next what to expect. That’s what keeps it interesting and fresh. He is playing more guitar than ever before. If you’re at all a fan of guitar playing, it’s worth it if he never sang a note. His guitar playing is outstanding.”

After all these years, there are still hippies and rednecks at Nelson’s shows, but they come in all different ages. His music transcends musical boundaries, but it also generation gaps. He’s still that artist who knows how to connect with his fans.

“He’s real, honest,” Raphael says. “When you’re in the audience and he looks at you, he’s actually looking at you. He makes eye contact, and he makes everyone in the audience feel like he’s singing to them, and he really is.”

Willie Nelson will appear at the Stranahan Theater on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $39.50, $49.50, or $59.50 and can be purchased at the theater box office, all Ticketmaster locations, by phone at 1-800-745-3000, or online at ticketmaster.com.

Before Mickey Raphael started jamming with Willie Nelson, the harmonica player blew with another Willie — Boxcar Willie.

While growing up, Raphael hung out at a Dallas recording studio, where he made $5 a song playing on the hobo singer’s records.

“It got to where I didn’t even have to listen to the song first; it was like let’s just go, you know, as many songs as you could get in an hour,” Raphael said. “I was 19 years old. I have no idea what [Boxcar Willie] was doing back then, probably some Jimmie Rodgers’ songs.”

A couple years later, Raphael met Nelson.

“Darrell Royal, who was the coach of the University of Texas football team, invited me to a little pickin’ party after the ball game, and there were a bunch of guys passing the guitar around and Willie was one of them,” he recalled. “I’d had one Willie Nelson record, but I really wasn’t that familiar with him.

“I was just really astonished with his musical style. Hearing these songs he was playing, it was like, ‘Oh, he wrote that?’ So it was an education from the beginning.”

Raphael started sitting in with Nelson in 1973.

“They were never looking for a harmonica player. Their steel player had left, so there was kind of a hole in the band,” he said by phone from a tour stop in Lake Elsinore, Calif. “And they never said you’re hired, but they never said don’t show up.”

The mouth organ player has been Nelson’s sideman since. He has recorded with a slew of superstars, including Johnny Cash, Blue Öyster Cult, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, U2, Dave Matthews, Indigo Girls, Ringo Starr, Wynton Marsalis, Mötley Crüe and Neil Young.

He summed up his playing philosophy: “Less is more; don’t overplay; listen and hear; don’t get in the way of the lyrics; play what needs to be played.”

That attitude served Raphael well as producer of “Naked Willie,” a disc released earlier this year. He chose 17 of Nelson’s songs from 1966 to 1970 and “stripped” the strings and background singers from the tracks.

“I wanted it to sound like Willie was the producer. Because back then, in the ’60s, the artists had no say in the production,” Raphael said. “I took the strings off and left the band on, which is how it would have sounded if we recorded it last week.”

Last month, Nelson released “American Classic” on Blue Note Records.

“It’s just another great record of Willie doing classics. Tommy LiPuma was the producer, and Joe Sample was the bandleader and played piano, just a small rhythm section and Willie’s guitar,” Raphael said. “I don’t know if it’s an answer to ‘Stardust,’ but it’s kind of in that vein. And Norah Jones sings on it and Diana Krall, and I get to play on a couple tracks.”

Willie Nelson and Family will play Stranahan Theater Sept. 23 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets range from $36.50 to $56.50. Raphael’s Web site is www.mickeyraphael.com.

Now that he has a little time off from road warrior Willie Nelson’s near-constant touring, Nelson’s longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael hopes to start up his own music project.

But Raphael, who has been in Nelson’s band since the mid-1970s, is still basking in the light of his “un-production” of Naked Willie, a compilation of 17 early Nelson sides that was released earlier this year.

Indeed, Raphael credited himself as the album’s “un-producer,” because he took the previously released recordings—culled from a dozen or so studio albums that Nelson recorded for RCA Records in Nashville between 1965 and 1974—and stripped away the lush orchestrations and backing vocals typical of the “Nashville sound” production style of the time.

“They’re from before I really knew Willie’s music,” says Raphael. “I was in the folk scene in Dallas and was playing with [‘My Maria’ hitmaker] B. W. Stevenson, and was more into bands like the Stones, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Band. Then I met Willie and had a crash course in country music.”

He first heard the songs that would make up Naked Willie while doing his research in 1972.

“Chet Atkins produced many of them and he was famous for the Nashville sound: sweet, syrupy orchestrations with heavy use of strings and background voices,” continues Raphael, whose first recording with Nelson was his self-produced 1975 landmark Red Headed Stranger. “Knowing him for the past 30 years and knowing that to him less is more, I’ve dreamed about going back and stripping them down to the basic tracks.”

Raphael cites the 2003 version of the Beatles’ Let It Be... Naked as a model, as it likewise removed the “wall of sound” embellishments to the original Phil Spector-produced 1970 release.

“The opportunity came after Sony and BMG merged and my friends at [the the newly combined company’s reissue department] Legacy started reissuing Willie’s records and I told them my idea,” says Raphael. “So I went to New York and transferred the tapes to a hard drive and came back to Nashville and started un-producing by taking stuff out and not putting anything else on: The original tracks were timeless, and I wanted to strip them down to just the band playing together at the same time in the same studio and sounding like it was recorded last week.”

Raphael doesn’t mean to belittle the initial releases, “just look at them through another lens and see what they would have sounded like if Willie was producing,” he says. “I had a lot to work with, except a lot of times everybody recorded in the same room and the tracks were limited by leakage, such that the strings went into Willie’s vocal [microphone]. Or I might have muted the piano to lose all the strings and then record another piano part, but I wanted to keep in the original parts and not mess with the overall integrity of the piece.”

He singles out the newly unproduced “Laying My Burdens Down.”

“There,’s some guitar playing by Grady Martin at the very end that was covered up by background vocals--that we brought up in the mix,” he says. He adds that on “I Let My Mind Wander,” Nelson’s voice “sounds so rich” from similarly being brought up in the mix.

“Everything’s centered on the vocal,” notes Raphael. “Because of the way it was recorded we couldn’t adjust the settings, but we warmed it up more and brought it up in the mix—so it’s not covered up by [background] voices.”

As for Raphael’s next solo instrumental project, he says that the successor to his 1988 debut solo album Hand To Mouth is in the works, currently in collaboration with Calexico’s Joey Burns.

www.willienelson.com

www.tahoe.com
by Linda J. Bottjer

Do you Love Willie Nelson?

Then you also love Mickey Raphael. For more than 30 years Raphael has been a member of the Nelson family. That is family with a capital “F” where connections are created not through marriage or bloodlines but instead musical talent.

It is Raphael's supreme command of a harmonica that pulsates the flight of desperation in Nelson's rendition of “Midnight Rider,” drops a touch of bittersweet poetry to “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” and wails like a night train cutting through the dark Mississippi Delta in “City of New Orleans.”

Nelson, who will be appearing with Bob Dylan and his band August 16 at Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena at Harveys, was a not the iconic superstar when Raphael was introduced to him at a party in Dallas during the early '70's.

Instead the “Red Headed Stranger” had recently returned from a stint in Nashville where his songwriting, not his singing skills, had gained him recognition. Songs such as “Crazy” and “Hello Walls” had been recorded by country legends Pastsy Cline and Faron Young.

It was also the age when the Nashville Sound was accompanied by a cookie cutter look of flashy jewel encrusted Nudie suits and pompadour hair for most male stars.

Calling him eccentric, Raphael recalls Nelson as being atypical. “He was able to connect to both the hippies and the rednecks,” he said.

As Nelson's fan base, primarily in the Texas Hill Country, grew so did his reputation for being a renegade in the music business. As a member of the band Raphael was heard in those early recordings too, including 1975's breakout album — “Red Headed Stranger.” Less than 40 minutes in length the album went multiplatinum and forever cemented Nelson's outlaw image and sound to the American musical landscape.

Soon Hollywood was calling and roles in movies such as “The Electric Horseman,” “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Songwriter” were a common occurrence. Raphael also appeared in the films.

When not playing with Willie Nelson the harmonica, or harp player, has collaborated with other musical stars such as Emmylou Harris, Elton John and U2. Realizing his long standing gigs with Nelson have given him more exposure he feels the journey is a circle.

What he observes in other recording sessions and tours he will bring back to his work with Nelson whom he fondly calls a benevolent dictator. Nelson, he observes, is easygoing and interested in hearing different opinions, but ultimately it is still his show.

When asked what lead him to first play the harmonica, Raphael's response was immediate and refreshingly truthful. “I was a terrible guitar player,” he said.

The year 2009 saw Raphael's sojourn into producing as he stripped down the overt lushness of heavy orchestrations and background singers from Nelson's RCA recordings circa 1966-1970. The pureness of song and lyric have been hailed by reviewers of the resulting CD “Naked Willie” Good reviews come with the territory.

 Raphael continually appreciates the overwhelming favorable responses the live audiences offer. While the family has played the world it was a concert in Bangkok with the country supergroup The Highwaymen that holds a special memory. Comprised of Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, the harp player recalls the exoticness of the locale as being the standout.

He has noticed the audiences have also become generational as older fans start bringing children and grandchildren to shows. During a year of economic struggle for many he continually sees people finding the money to see Willie. He believes this is due, in part, to the singer-songwriter-activist's overall approachability. “Deep down we all still good old boys,” Raphael said.

Looking forward to the Stateline show and cool mountain air after a series of desert and Central Valley gigs Raphael is aware of the upcoming altitude changes. An avid cyclist, he hopes to get in some time on Tahoe's trails and roads while in the area.

Of course he warns he and other family cyclists are known for their stellar swearing skills while tackling the hills. The air surrounding them could be as blue as the Lake.

If you go

Bob Dylan and Band, Willie Nelson and Family, the Wiyos
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, August 16
Where: Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena at Harvey's Tickets: $59.50 - $125 Purchase online: www.ticketmaster.com or www.apeconcerts.com

Where's Mickey Raphael?
by William Kerns

This may defy blog rules, but so what? LOL  Someone called to ask about Willie Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael — and I realized that my explanation is lost somewhere in the middle of the concert reaction blog’s 70 posts below.

So for Willie and Mickey fans, I return to the topic here:

Willie Nelson was not doing harmonica player Mickey Raphael any favors when he introduced his band on Saturday at Jones AT&T Stadium and said, “Mickey Raphael is drunk on the bus. … At least that is what Mickey told me to tell you.”

Not so.

Mickey called (Monday, Aug. 10) to explain that he became ill shortly before showtime. He was extremely nauseous, sweating and fighting a bad headache. At one point, he was looking for a cool tile floor, then lying down on it and texting his location to others.

I said I bet he’s now getting razzed quite a bit, as he has been such a health nut for years — a long-distance bike rider who only drinks water, no booze, not even Cokes.

Yes indeed. Or as Mickey responded, “No s—.”

I am not good pals with Mickey. But I had interviewed him before the show, and he was just nice enough to call and let me know why he was missing in action Saturday.

And yes, he also said the Saturday attendance at Jones AT&T looked like the “biggest turnout in several days,” and that also made him wish he could have performed.

I just told him he needs to make a point of getting Willie to return to Lubbock soon. Willie was super while playing in the sun, but Raphael’s harmonicas also create special moments.

Sex

Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? What about cycling?

www.Examiner.com
by Jim Bessman

Key players in the Mellencamp and Nelson factions of this summer’s The Bob Dylan Show with John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson concert tour of minor league baseball stadiums have formed a bicycle club as a healthy alternative to the traditional—if less healthy—means of offstage on the road entertainment.

“It’s my new drug,” says Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s longtime harmonica accompanist. “It’s a lot better than getting loaded on the road--which is what used to be protocol years ago.”

Raphael has formed an as yet unnamed riding club with tour mates Andy York and Mike Wanchic—both longtime guitarists for Mellencamp.

“We like to go out together on our days off,” Raphael says. “We just check the Internet for good places to ride or call the local bike shop because they know of places and sometimes have planned rides. It’s great exercise and a good way to explore the towns we go to.”

The other day the group found a 20-mile bike trail in Rhode Island and got 40 miles in.

“Everybody plays golf and we’re not golfers,” says Raphael, adding that his boss, a golf addict who owns a golf course, also brings a bike on the road “but he just tools around in the parking lot.” (Nelson’s manager Mark Rothbaum, he adds, rides 300 miles a week and has participated in numerous Iron Man competitions.)

The Nelson-Mellencamp bike club also makes for “good bonding time” for the members, says Raphael.

“We get to hang out and visit when normally they’d just come in and do their soundcheck and we’d do our respective gigs and leave,” he explains. And it seems to be contagious, in that Nelson’s stage manager just bought a bike, as did Mellencamp’s sound man.

“We all ended up at a bike shop in Dayton on our day off,” says York, who bought a “fairly decent” one that he can stash on the trailer pulled by the band’s tour bus (he'll leave it at Mellencamp’s Bloomington, Ind. studio after the tour “so I can ride it whenever I’m out there”). Afterwards, he and Raphael did 20 miles on the bike path by the hotel.

“It’s really great because we all go at the same speed,” notes York. “I’m not saying we’re slow by any means, but none of us are pros!”

York first thought of biking on tour when the Wallflowers opened for Mellencamp back in 2002.

“Their guitarist always had his bicycle and did the whole thing—the outfit and helmet and high-end gear—and probably rode 20 miles a day,” he recalls. “Then I found out he was good buddies with Lance Armstrong.”

York was good buddies with Steve Earle’s guitarist Eric “Roscoe” Ambel.

“Roscoe went from being a bike owner to a cycling master and gently nudged me in getting a bike because they were really great on the road,” continues York. “He said you could get away from everybody and do your own thing--and there are all kinds of bike paths and a bike shop culture of fellow touring musicians. So I bought a bike from him and started slow and took it on the road when Los Lobos opened for us in 2007. Now I use my iPhone map feature to find parks or map out the route to the gig from the hotel. It’s really good exercise and just seeing the country this way is a wonderful thing.”

Ambel’s been biking on the road since 2003.

“I bought a bike in Chicago and an hour later I was on the Lake Shore Drive bike path with a big smile on face,” says Ambel, who also owns the Lakeside Lounge in New York and has become a regular bike blogger and bike company consultant. He advises: “When you’re on tour, all you got to do is go to the nearest bike shop and ask where to ride. They’re always happy to help you, and when you’re on a bus tour, you get in to town early in the morning and have the whole day free so you get to go all over. It’s really fantastic!”

A true fanatic, Ambel even discovered a physical relationship between bike and guitar.

“I had a bike in my room one time and realized it was the same as a Fender Telecaster!” he says. “That’s because Leo Fender designed his guitars so all parts are interchangeable: If a neck went bad you get a new one and just screw it on. Same with a bicycle. Every piece is upgradable. You could get a different set of wheels or a new saddle or stem.”

Ambel actually likens his bike to a “travelogue,” since “this crank came from Portland, this saddle I got in Nashville,” and so on around the world. His conversion to cycling, he notes, was crucial.

“People say you play music, but you make music if it’s your life’s work and not a hobby,” he explains. “I had no idea I needed a hobby real bad! The benefit is that I’m going to be 52 and I feel I could kick my own ass from 20 years ago!”

Likewise, Raphael suggests that biking “might be the secret weapon” for increasing harmonica players’ lung capacity. “But if anybody asks me about playing harmonica,” he adds, “I say it’s all in the quads!”

 

www.lubbock.com
by William Kerns

No one with an ounce of listening experience ever will mistake country music icon Willie Nelson's voice. Most of Nelson's fans also are familiar with a tall, lean fellow playing harmonica on all of his tours and recordings.

That would be Mickey Raphael, who actually was introduced to the country headliner in 1973, before the latter had reached superstar status. In fact, it was then-University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal who invited Raphael to a post-game party at a Dallas hotel room, adding that he should bring his harmonicas.

It turned out that Nelson and Charley Pride planned to take turns performing at a guitar pull there. That night was the first time that Raphael, a member of B.W. Stevenson's band, played with Nelson.

Raphael, who would attend El Centro Community College in Dallas, began making music as a teenager. Aware that some may wonder why he didn't play a more ostentatious instrument, Raphael said, "Oh, my first instinct was to play guitar. That's really what I wanted to do, and I even played some guitar in junior high school. But man, I was a terrible guitar player."

He grew up a fan of Bob Dylan, The Band and the Rolling Stones and, like a lot of kids his age, owned a harmonica. He didn't start paying serious attention to it until he heard a fellow named Don Brooks playing harmonica at the Rubiyat, one of the Dallas night clubs he and other musicians frequented.

Some credit Raphael with paving the way for harmonica in country music. He will admit to feeling some nervousness when Nelson first asked him to fly to New York and play with him there. "I was just so taken with Willie when I met him," he said. "I wanted to tour with him on that big bus. And I thought that it would have to be on-the-job training, because I didn't play country music."

Later, he said, he realized that, "A lot of Bob Dylan's influences came from Jimmie Rodgers. And Levon Helms, in The Band, came from a really rural background.

"So what it came down to is that I just didn't know all of Willie's songs. Musically, it never was as much of a stretch as I expected it to be. After all, Willie was just playing a lot of old dances and beer joints back then. "He might play 'Fraulein' four or five times during the course of just one evening. When you do that, you've got to learn the melody very quickly." Raphael said,

"Before you can understand music, you have to teach yourself how to truly listen - which is not that easy - and you also have to know what each song means."

Thirty years later, Raphael is somewhat of a icon himself. He said, "As a musician, you just have to resign yourself to learning it. You can't just say, 'I'm a country player' or 'I am a blues player.' I personally had to adapt to all styles, just so I could keep working.

"I do stuff with Willie as often as possible. But I've also recorded with Wynton Marsalis, and I've played with everyone from Motley Crue to Elton John to Johnny Cash. I had to understand what all of them want.

In recent years, he said, he learned another important technique: when to "lay out" (not play.) In his younger days, he thought that the right thing to do was play as much as possible during every song.

He knows now to come into an arrangement only when he has the notes that can make a valid contribution. It is a decision that Nelson obviously appreciates, as Raphael has been a member of the Willie Nelson Family for more than 30 years.

"The reason we've stayed together so long," said Raphael, "probably is just the mutual respect we feel for one another. "I started off wanting to play with Willie because he was such a great songwriter, and that never has changed.

"Plus, Willie's crazy. He's always a real fun person to play music with."

And Willie as a boss? Raphael said, "I'd say Willie is a good boss. Actually, we call him 'the benevolent dictator.' "

This year found Raphael's duties expanding, thanks to a March recording called "Naked Willie" - produced, with no harmonica, by Nelson's harmonica player. Raphael explained,

"I have had the desire to produce for a long time, but I never had the opportunity before." He was inspired somewhat by The Beatles' "Let It Be...Naked," which found Phil Spector removing unnecessary strings from previously recorded Beatles songs.

The title's "naked" refers to the number of musicians whose work is plucked off an album that had been released earlier.

"I had a vision of what certain songs from early in Willie's career should sound like," Raphael said. He continued, "Producers generally are empowered to hire the musicians they need to help an artist make a record.

In this instance, though, Willie's songs already had been cut, and what I wanted to do was strip them down, simplify everything, and yet still maintain the songs' original integrity.

"We first had to digitally recognize the frequencies of the strings and other instruments we wanted to remove." Raphael noted, "I was influenced most of all by Willie's philosophy of 'less is more' from early in his career.

It helped that Willie thought it was a great idea."

Just don't expect the two to bond out on the golf course. Or as Raphael let it be known: "I don't golf. I bike." Indeed, Raphael and several other musicians from Bob Dylan's and John Mellencamp's bands will grab bicycles and take off for miles each morning during the present tour.

"The hills in Pennsylvania were murder," Raphael said. "It may not be too politically correct, but that's also when we started calling our biking group King Tourettes, because of all the profanities being used on those hills."

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/080209/fea_473786750.shtml

www.nctimes.com
by Scott McDonald

For over three decades Mickey Raphael has been the harmonica player in Willie Nelson's Family Band. If Nelson recorded an album, played a show, or made a guest appearance, it's more than likely Raphael was there.

Nelson's distinct voice and battered guitar have become synonymous with the braided icon's performances, but over the years, so has the ubiquitous presence of Raphael.

More than just helping to round out the band's sound, Raphael's harmonica playing has become a trademark of a Willie Nelson show. Yet the two men formed their relationship on a whim.

"I was just at the right place at the right time," Raphael said recently from a tour stop in New Jersey. "I was at a party in Dallas and Willie said I should come and jam with him sometime. So I did. I wasn't even into country music at the time. I was far more into the folk scene. But it all worked out."

Raphael started out in music by playing the guitar. One was given to him as a gift when he was young. He was self-admittedly terrible, but stuck with it and tried to make it work. It didn't. It wasn't until he heard a harmonica player at a local coffeehouse that everything changed.

"I had one as a kid," Raphael said, "but I didn't fall in love with the harmonica until I heard a guy by the name of Don Brooks play. He was my mentor, really. He was a harmonica player in Dallas and eventually ended up playing with Waylon Jennings. And that was the first time that anyone, at least in a country band, really took a harmonica player on tour with them as a sideman. It changed things and certainly helped me start with Willie."

It's now been over 35 years that the two have played together. And when Nelson and his band have taken a break over the years, Raphael has kept himself busy by playing with a diverse list of some of the biggest names in music.

In addition to Nelson, Raphael has played or recorded with Sir Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Wynton Marsalis, Neil Young, Blue Oyster Cult, Indigo Girls and Bob Seger. Raphael is also responsible for the harmonica solo on the Motley Crue hit "Smoking In The Boys Room."

Currently, he is again touring with Nelson on a summer stint that also includes legends John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan. "This is the third summer that we've been out with Dylan," Raphael said. "We didn't have Mellencamp on the other shows, so it's been really great this time. But I don't think the tour has ever been as far west as California. This'll be the first time we made it out there. And we're playing all these ballparks, so it's great being outdoors, breathing fresh air, and hearing all of the great music."

So far, Nelson's band has been taking the opening slot, Mellencamp has played in the middle and Dylan has been closing the shows. They switched it up on July 4th and Nelson and the Family Band closed the show. There has also been talk as the tour progresses that there may be some juggling of playing order.

But nothing keeps Raphael guessing as much as being on stage with Nelson. "There's no set list," Raphael said. "You never know what he's going to do. I mean, we know what we're going to start off with, but after that we don't know what's coming. He doesn't even tell us on stage. He just starts the songs. These days he does focus on the hits, but the sequence always changes and we never know what he's going to feel like playing."

Despite the uncertainty on stage, Raphael is more than familiar with the music. After playing together so long, the band's synergy on stage is second nature and Raphael has developed a great rapport with his band leader.

He's also logged numerous special moments ---- including recording with U2 in Ireland and performing with President Carter in Georgia ---- and really does appreciate his overall good fortune.

"I am aware of just how lucky I've been," Raphael said. "It's been a lot of fun and it's been an education. Actually, it still is. I continue to learn as I go."

Bob Dylan and His Band, John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson
The Diamond
500 Diamond Drive
Lake Elsinore
5 p.m. Aug. 12
$67.50 (children age 14 and younger are free with paid adult)
951-245-4487

stormbaseball.com

http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/music/article_bfa1f0c8-d919-537b-b317-c2ae93c9be45.html

Willie Nelson knows when he finds a band member he likes to keep them around as long as possible. Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s longtime harmonica player and producer of “Naked Willie,” a series of old tunes that are stripped down, fits that bill. Raphael has toured with Nelson for years, including the upcoming summer tour with Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp that comes to the Heritage Park Amphitheater in Simpsonville at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. After a show in Indiana, Raphael took some time to talk about his run with Willie, his excitement at the current tour and what’s next for one of the perennial musicians of all time. Jake Grove: I want to get a little insight on this current tour with Bob and John. How does a tour like this get started? Mickey Raphael: Well, we did it a couple years ago with Bob. They are friends and we are fans of them and them of us. It worked so well the first time, playing the ballparks and between management and everything, that it just fit they would do it again. JG: How does this tour differ from anything else you guys do? MR: I get to watch Bob Dylan every night. Honestly, it’s just a great way to spend the summer. Everyone gets to have a great hang, you get to see friends you haven’t seen in years and you get to play some great music. JG: What’s it like putting three legends of music on the stage in one tour? What are the audiences like? MR: The audiences are awesome and it’s a real wide cross of ages. I fall in middle of the demo (at 57) and I’m a Dylan fan and a Mellencamp fan. What makes this different is our sets are cut down to an hour. But Willie still plays the core of the hits. We might not be able to play three Kristopherson tunes, but the whole list and flow is stream of consciousness. He goes Whiskey River and Beer for Horse, but it’s a free for all after the medley. JG: What kind of feel does Willie and rest of the band like to put on this particular tour? MR: He treats this like playing in the club for 50 people. He just sees the guys on the front row hungry for the music and the vastness of a place doesn’t change that. Whether its three or 30,000 he still connects with the audiences. JG: Willie and Bob have done this tour together, but John has not been a part of it before. What was the reasoning behind bringing him into the fold? MR: I can’t really say. I don’t know. But it’s an American tour and he is grass roots Americana. Willie relates to the everyman and John is the same way. But Willie with the Outlaws, he is that everyday guy. We can all identify with him and with that. JG: What’s the pace of a tour like this? MR: Well, we all open or close or go middle from place to place. The show is paced well when we open because ours is quiet and Mellencamp is big guitar and Bob is Bob. But we can close, too, and everyone has a great time with it. The pace works no matter who is out there first, second or third. JG: What was the inspiration behind “Naked Wille”? Why did you guys feel like you need to “unproduce” those classic songs? MR: These were the first songs that I ever heard of Willie and something like this was always in the back of my mind. When the Beatles did “Let it Be Naked” and I saw how cool it was stripped down to the bear form, I wondered what Willie’s songs would have sounded like if Willie produced it. But I didn’t want him to rerecord those. And I mentioned it to Willie and got his blessing. And then we went with the “less is more” approach. I think it worked and so does Willie. JG: What was it like playing the first few shows of this tour? MR: It has been daunting to play with them. I am such a fan of Bob and he is so intimidating. But last time he called me over and had a bunch of blues DVDs he wanted me to watch. They were filled with great performances by great harmonica players. After that, it was easy.

On Thursday, July 30, The Arts Council of Big Sky (ACBS) welcomes the melodic country rock sounds of Micky and the Motorcars, from Austin, Texas, to the Meadow Village Pavilion stage. Gates open for the event at 6 p.m. with the music starting at 7 p.m. Coolers are permitted into the venue, but please leave pets, glass containers, and outside alcohol at home. Beer, wine, soft drinks and a variety of food will be available for purchase from local vendors.
Unlike the previous three albums by alt-country five-piece band Micky and the Motorcars, the group — this go-around — had plenty of time to prepare for its latest albums, “Naive.” During recording sessions on the past discs, says front man-lead vocalist Micky Braun, “if a good gig came up, we had to leave the studio.”

Now established as one of the best-drawing bands on the lucrative Texas Music circuit, Micky and the Motorcars had plenty of time to make “Naïve,” accumulating a large stockpile of songs before members even entered Austin’s Cedar Creek Studios.
Braun collaborated on many of the other songs on NAIVE with musicians such as his brother, Reckless Kelly lead singer Willy Braun, as well as Randy Rogers, Kevin Welch, Welch’s offspring, Dustin and Savannah, and Jack Ingram bassist Robert Kern. The Brauns actually wrote the title track, which Micky Braun calls “your classic wife-cheating-on-the-husband, husband-comes-home thing,” several years ago in their native Idaho. “It never really panned out, so I sat back down, and we ended up getting a good rock ’n’ roll version,” he says.

“Long Enough to Leave,” written by Micky Braun and Randy Rogers, covers familiar territory for someone traveling almost two-thirds of the year. “[It’s about] always being on the road, but never being able to stay,” he says. “Every time you get comfortable, you have to peel out.

“It’s funny,” he continues. “I played this song for my girlfriend and she said, ‘This is about a guy who’s cheating on his wife.’ I said, ‘No, not at all,’ and then I went back and listened to it and said, ‘Wow, that does kind of make sense.’ I think that’s what’s neat about songs: People come up with their own opinions and kind of live in ’em that way.”

Braun says that NAIVE, featuring guest appearances by Texas music heavyweights Lloyd Maines and Mickey Raphael, also has “quite a few love songs.” It’s also the first record for new Motorcars lead guitarist and Berklee College of Music graduate Kris Farrow.

“He had been playing around Austin for a couple years, playing with some bands we knew,” Braun says. “He’s a great guitar and saxophone player. We didn’t put any saxophone on the record, but he does play it live on a couple of tunes.”

The Braun family’s musical legacy extends far beyond the Motorcars — formed back in Idaho by Micky, brother Gary (vocals, guitar, harmonica) and childhood friend-bass player Mark McCoy — and Reckless Kelly (featuring older brothers Willy and Cody Braun).

All four brothers played with their father in their own special group that appeared twice on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.” In the 1950s, their grandparents drove an hour and 15 minutes every day from their home in Twin Falls, Idaho, to their jobs as house piano and organ player and cocktail waitress at a casino in Jackpot, Nev.

Even home from the road and an average 215 shows a year, members of Micky and the Motorcars tend to stick together, practicing, brainstorming, writing, hanging out. Braun says, “We’ll wind up calling each other and saying, ‘What are you doing? Let’s hit the town.” There’s plenty of time for that.

The Arts Council of Big Sky is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing musical and artistic performances to the Big Sky Area. Free Thursday night concerts continue on August 6 with the indie blues of the Patrick Sweany Band, and don’t forget the Doobie Brothers will be performing on September 4. For more information call 995-2742 or log on to www.bigskyarts.org

Willie Nelson, slated to perform at the Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion in Gilford at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 31, turns back the clock on his latest CD to reveal the heart of a country legend’s early songwriting craft.

At 76, Nelson has stripped bare his initial approach to music with “Naked Willie,” an RCA/Legacy recording that features 17 tracks from 1966 through 1970. The 2009 release follows last year’s career retrospective, “One Hell of a Ride,” which included 100 songs that encompassed his work on a dozen different record labels from 1954 through 2007.

The early 1960s were pivotal for Nelson, with three of his compositions hitting the country charts — “Hello Walls” (sung by Faron Young), “Funny How Time Slips Away” (Billy Walker) and “Crazy” (Patsy Cline). After two albums for the independent Liberty label in 1962-63, Nelson was signed by Chet Akins to RCA Victor, for which he recorded nearly a dozen albums, starting in 1965.

On Music City’s bustling production assembly line, Nelson’s RCA output was typical of the so-called “Nashville Sound”: good tunes but more often than not sweetened with lushly orchestrated arrangements and backing vocalists. This was business as usual, the way Nelson’s records always were produced, until his arrival at Columbia in 1975, when the terms “artist approval” and “final cut” were written into his contract for the first time.

In recent years, Nelson and his longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael have revisited early tunes, wondering what those RCA recordings would sound like if the original multi-track tapes were retrieved and laid bare, if the melodies and instrumentals were heard without all the excess backing.

Their collaborations went public this past March with the CD “Naked Willie.” Nelson’s vocals are the core, with guitars, piano, bass and drums mixed as they were originally heard in the studio. In other words, as Raphael has said, he “un-produced” the songs.

This new collection is a snapshot of songs written and performed by a then-aspiring young songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., from 1966 to 1970. The album provides an unfiltered glimpse of what Nelson originally had envisioned when he wrote the songs more than 50 years ago.

The majority of the songs originated as tracks on some of those RCA albums: 1967’s “The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs” (“The Ghost,” “The Party’s Over”); 1969’s “My Own Peculiar Way” (“I Just Dropped By,” “I Let My Mind Wander,” “The Local Memory”); 1970’s “Laying My Burdens Down” (“Where Do You Stand?” “When We Live Again,” “Laying My Burdens Down”); and 1971’s “Willie Nelson & Family” (“What Can You Do To Me Now?” “I’m A Memory” and his version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”). The other six songs range from the unpublished single “Bring Me Sunshine” to several tracks that stayed unissued in the Nelson archive for decades.

There are many chapters in Nelson’s life and times: his formative years in the 1950s as a U.S. serviceman, radio DJ and fledgling songwriter/recording artist in Texas and Washington State; his move to Nashville with his family in 1960; his RCA years from 1965 to 1972; his historic 18-year association with Columbia, starting with his self-produced “Red Headed Stranger” in 1975; and his adventures through the 1990s and 2000s.

Tickets to Willie Nelson’s 7 p.m. concert at the Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion in Gilford range from $25 to $64. The Whatnot will perform at 5:30 p.m. on the Second Stage. For more information, call the box office at 293-4700 or log onto meadowbrook.net.

Mickey Raphael of Willie Nelson & Family

'When Less Becomes More'
 
After establishing himself as a major Nashville songwriter (he wrote "Crazy" for Patsy Cline, among others), Willie Nelson signed his first serious artist contract at RCA in 1964. At that time, the producers and A&R men like Chet Atkins had complete artistic control. Singers weren't allowed to select arrangements, musicians or studios – any of the key factors in making the records the artist had in mind. Willie Nelson found himself constantly frustrated by the syrupy strings, vocal group choruses and generally "slick" final product that made up ‘The Nashville Sound’ and which was considered normal for country recordings in the 1960s.
 
But that was then. Now, in 2009, Willie and his long-time harmonica player, the Dallas-born Mickey Raphael, have gone back to the essence of those songs in the newly-released 'Naked Willie' collection.
 
Having tracked down the original tapes, Mickey remixed the tracks. Gone are the syrupy strings and choirs of back-up singers. Gone is the over-the-top production that often drowned out Willie’s voice, and in its place is a stripped down, ‘naked’ production.
 
Mickey Raphael ‘unproduced’ these seventeen tracks. As well as being Willie Nelson’s right hand man, Mickey Raphael has, over the years, played with such legendary artists as; Elton John, U2, Motley Crue, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, The Mavericks, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and many more. I recently talked to Mickey, and he gave me a fascinating insight into the making of ‘Naked Willie’.
 
Going back in time to re-mix old material seems to be a really original idea. Whose idea was it to revisit and work on songs that had originally been cut in the 1960s?
 
MR:  "Well, actually it was my idea. First off, I’m a big Willie fan. I loved this era and these years of his song writing and recording, and this was really my first experience of Willie’s music. I really didn’t listen to Willie until the early 70s, but I was listening to these songs when I first discovered him and I loved the songs and what he was doing."
 
"Then I came up with the idea of what would it sound like if he were to record these songs now. Because I knew that, at the time he was in the studio with Chet Atkins, he really had no say in the production. I didn’t want to change any of the performances: the players at that time were so wonderful, but I wondered what this stuff would sound like had Willie been the producer. It’s not like I thought Chet Atkins production was bad, in fact, it was brilliant for the time, but I thought the songs were timeless and I wanted to see what they would sound like, without the strings and without the backing vocals."
"The point is that they could have been recorded last week in this particular arrangement of just piano, bass, drums, guitar and Willie’s vocal. So, I pitched the idea to the record company and everyone thought it was a great idea. I was already stuck into the project before Willie got involved in it. I wanted to make sure it would work. I did a couple of songs as an experiment to see if my theory was correct. So I played Willie a couple of songs so he could hear what it might have sounded like had he been producing himself at that time."
 
Did you ever think of just re-cutting the whole album rather than ‘unproducing’ it?
 
MR:  "Well, that was one way to go but I think that the original performances were so classic that I really wanted people to hear them. I wanted people to hear the guitar player at the session; Grady Martin playing. There are some great solos of his that I uncovered that were covered up by the strings; and there’s a solo of Willie’s on ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ that really wasn’t too present in the mix. The strings were leaking, they were in every microphone that was open at the time, so there were a couple of songs I couldn’t work on because there was too much leakage and I couldn’t isolate some of the instruments."
 
"For instance, some of the strings bled into the bass track. I could have erased the bass track and re-cut it but I thought that would get away from the integrity of the original recordings and I wanted to keep everything original. So we didn’t change anything except sonically enhance Willie’s voice and make the guitars a little louder and re-mixed it to where it sounds a little more modern without losing the 60s feel. Those original recordings are such gems and they really stand the test of time."
 
Recording methods have changed a great deal in the last 40 years. From a technical point of view, how difficult was the ‘unproducing’ to do?
 
MR:  "These were all multi-track analogue tapes and all I did was put them into a digital mode so we could transfer them to Nashville, where I worked with my engineer. We put them into Pro Tools just so we could do the editing and mixing. So there’s still a lot of tape noise going on there, we didn’t take anything off or clean it up like we could have. However, we did warm up Willie’s voice a little bit because it sounded a little thin on those early recordings, but that was the only tweaking we did. We wanted to make sure that you could hear his voice and all the instruments."
 
Were you tempted to add any of your own harmonica playing to the songs?
 
MR:  "No, because I wanted to keep true to the original recordings. As a joke I would have loved to put my harmonica all over those songs. The great harmonica player Charlie McCoy played vibes on some of those sessions but there was no harmonica on the originals. I really wanted the original musicians, such as; Chet Atkins on guitar, Grady Martin, David Briggs, Chip Young, Jerry Reed and Buddy Harman, I wanted these guys, and their great playing, to be heard again by a younger record buying generation."
 
That 1960s country sound seems rather unloved these days, why do you think that is?

MR:  "You know, at that time, that’s what was selling. Everything that was cut in the sixties had strings on it and was called ‘The Nashville Sound’, and Chet Atkins was famous for it. But Willie was unique and Chet knew that Willie was different and he felt that this formula might not work, and it really didn’t. I seem to remember that out of twelve albums that he did only two songs ever charted."
 
"But that was the sound that radio wanted to hear and the producers knew that they had to become more mainstream with country music. So, the fiddles and banjos were replaced by strings and backing singers in an attempt to compete with records by pop performers, like Andy Williams and Perry Como. Willie’s never cared about being commercial but at that time he was a new artist and I’m sure he felt fortunate to be recording for RCA, so he would never tell the producer what to do. Much later (with the album ‘Red Headed Stranger’) he managed to gain artistic control and the result of that was one of the biggest selling albums of his career."
 
How involved was Willie Nelson in the whole project?

MR:  "His involvement was only to give me his blessings. I told him I was going to do the project and I would keep him posted. After it was done I played it for him and he loved it. He said that this was the sound he had imagined when he wrote these songs. So, I did all the heavy lifting and just hoped he liked it."
 
"It was always something I wanted to do and when Legacy acquired the RCA catalogue it opened up for me. I know Rob Santos at Legacy and I told him I had an idea about getting into these tapes and see if we couldn’t come up with something different. They liked the idea and Willie said “go for it”."
 
If this project is successful are there any other Willie Nelson albums you might want to ‘unproduce’?
 
MR:  "Yes, I think there is still some more material in the Willie catalogue that I can probably get into. There are seventeen songs on this record and I think I can probably hopefully pull together another ten or twelve songs. Knowing Willie as well as I do, his style has always been ‘less is more’. Keep things simple is the dictum with Willie, and these early recordings really lend themselves to that philosophy."
 
Who came up with the term ‘unproducer’?
 
MR:  "That was my idea. We were trying to figure out the credits. I couldn’t call myself a producer because Chet Atkins produced these tracks. Traditionally the producer picks the musicians, puts together the music and is responsible for the recording. And, since I went in there and started taking things off I thought I’m almost unproducing these tracks. One of the things that inspired me to do this was The Beatles ‘Let it Be…Naked’ I saw how they did that, how they took the strings off of the Phil Spector recordings and I thought that this would be a great thing to do with Willie’s songs."
 
Lastly, The Family still tour a two hour show all around the world and Willie meets the fans afterwards. How does he keep it up?
 
MR:  "We are on tour at the moment with Asleep at the Wheel. We work consistently two weeks on, two weeks off. The next tour will be in March in Florida. Somebody recently asked him “when are you going to retire?” and he said, “all I do is play music and play golf, which one am I supposed to retire from?” So, he’s 75, he’ll be 76 in April, this is what he loves, he really loves doing it, what better way spend your life?"
 
Interviewed by: Peter 'taB' Walker
http://www.annecarlini.com

www.stillisstillmoving.com
 
As it turns out, Billy Bob Thornton and Mickey Raphael have a lot more in common than both looking good in black suits and 50's sleeked back greaser hairstyles.  They both love music, they are very knowledgeable about music, and they are both are big Willie Nelson fans.
 
 
 
 
 
Billy Bob and his band the Box Masters spent a month on the road with Willie Nelson & Family this spring, and Mickey would join the band on stage and play with them, before getting back to his regular job of playing harmonica with Willie Nelson and Family. It was always fun to see him join WN&F after his set with the BoxMasters, all dressed up with his big hair.
 
In between shows, on the bus or in restaurants, Billy Bob and Mickey would get together and talk about music, mutual friends and life on the road. Fortunately, someone had the good sense to record these conversations, and now thanks to Legacy Recordings, we can listen to them as podcasts.
 
The interviews on the bus are appropiately set against the soundtrack of the road, with traffic sounds and honking horns. Billy Bob interviews Mickey about how he got started in music, his first musical performance (he played the triangle -- who knew?), and how he became part of the Willie Nelson and Family band. Mickey says that Willie never officially hired him, but that he never told him to leave, either. And there's the story of Willie asking Paul, "What are we paying Mickey?" "Nothing," Paul said. "Well, then double his salary!" Willie said.
 
As a music lover and Willie Nelson fan, Billy Bob does a great job asking Mickey questions we'd like to ask him and we get to learn more about Willie Nelson and Family and their music.
 
Billy Bob asks Mickey about how the 'Naked Willie' album came about. Mickey talks about buying his first Willie Nelson & Family album, and how much he enjoyed Willie's guitar playing and his singing, long before he got to meet Willie through their mutual friend, Darrel Royal, coach of the U of Texas Longhorns.
 
Mickey's been standing to Willie's left playing harmonica for over thirty years and his appreciation for the simplicity of Willie's approach to playing and recording music has continued to grow. "Less is more," is Willie's philosophy, Mickey says. "Keep it Simple."
 
There was nothing simple about Chet Atkins' production techniques, and the 'Nashville Sound' in vogue when he produced Willie in Nashville in the '60's. The recordings were heavy with layered strings and back-up vocals, which was what the public was loving and what they were buying.
 
Mickey said he always wondered what the songs would sound like if Willie had been allowed to produce the songs himself. They were such great songs, he thought maybe they should be recorded again, but recognized that so much would be lost if they did that, because Willie's original tracks were so beautiful.
 
 So, with Willie's blessing, Mickey contacted Sony/Legacy who had acquired the RCA catalogue, and pitched the idea of re-producing some of Willie's music from the 60's and '70's, and removing the choral backup vocals, strings and "Nashville Sound" from Willie's original tracks.
 
"At that time in Nashville, artists weren't allowed to produce themselves. I thought it would be like a gift to Willie, giving him control of the sound of those early recordings," Mickey said.
 
Mickey went to New York and got the original master multi-track tapes, had them transferred to digital and worked with another producer, Tony Castle, to remove the layers of stringed instruments vocals, and uncovered Willie's guitar work and Willie's voice that had been buried on the originals.
 
So here are the podcasts.  Click on the link, and it will download to your computer, and you can listen to the recordings on your computer, or upload them to your ipod. Enjoy!
 
They are divided into three separate recordings: Part 1 - Starting the project:
http://kiptronic.sonybmgmedia.com/production/HTTP/legacy.willienelson.nakedwillie.ep01.mp3"
 
Part 2 - Willie's artistry: http://kiptronic.sonybmgmedia.com/production/HTTP/legacy.willienelson.nakedwillie.ep02.mp3"
 
Part 3 Selecting the Songs http://kiptronic.sonybmgmedia.com/production/HTTP/legacy.willienelson.nakedwillie.ep03.mp3"

Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis
Live From Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC
Eagle Rock Entertainment
2008

Singer Willie Nelson, country music outlaw, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, jazz music ideologist, may well have seemed strange bedfellows when it came to performing together. This DVD of their concerts at the Lincoln Center perishes that notion.

Nelson has long been a singer without fetters. He interprets songs uniquely, his phrasing drawing every little emotion out of a word. Jazz may not have come his way, but that did not stop him from getting right into the groove with Marsalis and his band. He sings, as always, with a country twang and a low register drawl that almost dips into spoken word.

In one of the interviews that intersect the performances, Marsalis says that all music comes from the blues and demonstrates the rhythmic patterns to show how. His analysis is sound and he moves that into his arrangements, core to making the collaboration successful.

Marsalis's band comprising Dan Nimmer (piano), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Ali Jackson Jr. (drums) and Walter Blanding (tenor and soprano saxophones) is spontaneous in its execution. But the big surprise is Mickey Raphael (harmonica), who has long worked with Nelson. He references his playing with a resolute understanding of the idiom adding an edginess that jumps up from the guts.

Both country and jazz standards went into the programme filmed over two nights at the Allen Room of the Frederick P. Rose Hall. The two streams flow side by side and converge, without losing their impact.

"Georgia On My Mind" is a slow blues with Nimmer lighting the first glow on the piano. Nelson takes it down a country road but his timing fits right into the deliberate blues groove. If there was any doubt about Nelson's ability to get into a jazz frame, it is dispelled by "Basin street Blues." His interpretation and his sense of time and phrase are just delightful. Two blues tunes, two approaches, both successful in their adaptation, show how musical genres can be assimilated successfully.

Marsalis and Nelson have fun singing on "Ain't Nobody's Business" and on the country gospel "That's All." By the time "Down By The Riverside" comes around, the whole group has created a happy, exhilarating atmosphere.

This was an exceptional event. It worked because both Marsalis and Nelson were willing to look beyond the obvious—and they had a band who felt that wholeheartedly as well.

 

Tracks: Rainy Day Blues; Georgia On My Mind; Bright Lights Big City; Basin street Blues; Caldonia; Night Life; Stardust; My Bucket's Got A Hole In It; Ain't Nobody's Business; Don't Get Around Much Anymore; Sweet Georgia Brown; That's All; Down By The Riverside.

Personnel: Willie Nelson: guitar; Wynton Marsalis: trumpet; Mickey Raphael: harmonica; Dan Nimmer: piano; Carlos Henriquez: bass; Ali Jackson: drums; Walter Blanding: saxophone.

 

Production Notes: 85 minutes. Recorded: January 12 & 13, 2007.

 

Visit Willie Nelson / Wynton Marsalis on the web.

 

By Bob Ruggiero
http://blogs.houstonpress.com
 
For a disarmingly large number of his worldwide fans, Willie Nelson burst onto the country music scene in the mid-’70s, fully hirsute, sporting an earring and proclaiming the joys of being on the road again. Real aficionados know that his “overnight success” came only after decades of struggling as a songwriter (hitting big with “Crazy” and “Night Life”) and climbing even greater obstacles as a performer. 
 
For much of the 1960s, Nelson recorded for RCA at a time when there was great interest in country music “crossing over” to the pop charts (or at least removing itself from its redneck roots). As a result, it was common practice to overdub heavy strings and backing vocal choruses to sweeten the tunes, alternately referred to as the “Nashville Sound” or “Countrypolitan.”
 
And it was the producer - not the artist - who called the shots on everything from source material to studio locations to session players. Often, a performer wouldn’t even hear a “final” version of a song until the record had been pressed. Willie was no exception, as RCA producers Chet Atkins and Felton Jarvis - neither wanting to mess with the formula - give many of his records the treatment.  
 
Nelson’s longtime harmonica man Mickey Raphael loved the songs of the era, but not necessarily the sound, and began to ponder what how they would come across “stripped” of the fluff. With Nelson’s hearty approval, he delved into the master tapes of the era, and the result is Naked Willie (RCA Nashville/Legacy), featuring 17 tracks distilled into what Willie might have originally envisioned.  
 
Rocks Off spoke with Raphael from a hotel room in Austin, where he had just finished taping an episode of Austin City Limits with his boss and Asleep at the Wheel at Austin City Limits.
 
Rocks Off:   This is only the fourth record that Willie has released in the past year, and I know he’s got another one coming out soon. Shouldn’t he pick up the pace a bit? 
 
Mickey Raphael (laughs): I know! Isn’t that something? At least he didn’t have to go into the studio for this one.
 
RO: You call yourself the “unproducer” of this record, but I assume it was more than you just sitting at the board taking off the strings and vocals. 
 
MR: I went to New York and got the actual multi-track tapes and had them transferred to a digital mode. Then I worked with an engineer on ProTools and just tried to isolate the [things] we wanted to take off. 
A lot of those recordings were done with everyone in the same room, so you had the strings leaking into every open mike. So it wasn’t just a matter of hitting a button. We had to find the frequencies that the strings laid in and just sort of shave them away, but not take away anything we wanted, like Willie’s voice. 
 
RO: He sings a lot of these songs in a full-throated style that might surprise those more used to his later laid-back talk-singing.

MR: Yeah. It’s because he was really fighting those strings to be heard. Willie always says that “less is more.” There were a lot of people in the studio, so it was a big production. One thing we did uncover was a lot of [his] great guitar work that was sort of buried on the original recordings. 
I love these songs and this whole RCA era. I had thought about doing this for awhile, and once the Beatles did something similar recently [with Let It Be...Naked], now there was some sort of [precedent].
 
RO: I would guess that a huge chunk of Willie’s fans are only familiar with his music from the mid-’70s onward. What reaction do you hope to get from that kind of person when they hear this earlier material?

MR: I want somebody to hear this stuff and if they like it, go back to the originals, which are easily accessible. Just so they can see what was happening in another era. And to me, these songs don’t sound dated.
 
RO: How did you decide which tracks to include?

MR: I started with about 50 candidates. There were some I didn’t want to touch because I actually liked the strings on there. Others there was too much microphone leakage. And we just whittled them down. It was hard, though! “The Local Memory” and “What Can You Do To Me Now?” were two that I did get to work on that were favorites.
 
RO: Many writers and performers today denigrate the “Countrypolitan” sound as being fake and forced. But in the context of the times, it was hugely successful.

MR: It’s what was selling and what radio wanted to hear and what people were buying. The [country artists] were competing with people like Perry Como and Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra. And it did work for a lot of the artists like Jim Reeves and Ray Price. It just didn’t work for Willie.
 
RO: On another topic, you’re the one player from the Family Band that Willie does use on a lot of records and side projects that the Jazz at Lincoln Center shows with Wynton Marsalis.  You just did a second one — how did that go?

MR: We did two days rehearsal, and Mark Rothbaum, our producer, put together a song list, which was all Ray Charles. Wynton wrote out the charts that he and the sax player Walter Blanding did. For me, he would just say “fill here on the second verse.” 
We ran through the songs without Willie a few times, then brought him in, then we did the shows for two nights. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. And it was recorded. Norah Jones is involved too. 
 
RO: Going back to the beginning, I’ve always loved the story of how you got involved with Willie and just started playing with him informally, but there was never a time when he said you were officially in the band. That was almost 35 years ago! 
 
MR: Yeah, he’s never said I was hired. But he’s never asked me to leave, either! I was 21 and playing with this country band and really wasn’t familiar with his music. We’d play all these dance halls and beer joints in Texas that I was barely able to get in, and I was this long-haired hippie. Several times, Paul [English, Nelson's feared drummer] had to get me out of some sticky situations. 
 
RO: Do you have any particular memories of playing Houston over the years?

MR: Liberty Hall was such a great place in the ’70s. But one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done was sit in on an operation with [famous Houston heart surgeon] Dr. Red Duke! In the late ’80s, a buddy of mine who owns the Black-Eyed Pea and I were supposed to meet him for lunch, and while we’re at his office and he gets a call for an emergency trauma. He asked us if we wanted to watch him work!
 
So we scrub up and the patient is split wide open and I had to cover my eyes just to walk into the O.R. One of the nurses comes in and asks my friend and me “Are you with Dr. Debakey’s team?” And Red turns around and says “Naw, Mickey here’s a harmonica player and Billy owns a restaurant!”
 
We were in there for four hours! But he plugged in a little tape deck and he puts in music from Willie and I asked him how he does it. He looked at me and said “Well, you just gotta look at it like you’re working on your car!”
 
RO: Finally, you know, Willie turns 76 this year. Eventually, nature will stop him from performing and recording. Are we ready for a World Without Willie?
 
MR: I think he’s gonna outlive us all! We lost Waylon, Johnny, all the original producers on this record. We’re all gonna go. But Willie is such a young spirit and so active, he’ll go until he drops. He won’t retire. And there definitely won’t be a lack of material. I think he’s working on four different records right now!

 

www.nodepression.net
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
Jan-Feb 2008

Willie Nelson is known for his distinctive voice, the tone of his rugged Martin guitar named Trigger, and for the harmonica played by that tall lanky guy who imbues his sound with a timeless, rootsy quality.

The man playing that harmonica is Mickey Raphael, the tall, lanky Family Band stalwart who has stood to Willie’s left for 35 years and remains by his side whenever Willie solos with orchestras or joins other musical ensembles such as the jazz trumpet player Wynton Marsalis and his quartet. If Mickey’s not there, it’s not Willie. While he has recorded outside the Willie Nelson orbit including several albums with Emmylou Harris and most recently with Kenny Chesney, Mickey’s harmonica is joined at the hip with his boss.

When did you start playing harmonica?

My dad’s lawyer played washtub bass in a little jug band and he gave me a harmonica when I was a kid. Every kid has a harmonica. I grew up in Dallas. I was a terrible guitar player, but I loved music. I played a little guitar in junior high. The folk scene was happening and the Beach Boys and the heavy stuff. I was really into Dylan, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, the acoustic blues guys, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. I wanted to be a guitar player but just was not any good. I heard a guy play harmonica named Donnie Brooks at a tiny little coffeehouse called the Rubiyat where I used to hang out. Michael Murphey played there, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark. Donnie Brooks was playing with Johnny Vandiver [a Houston folkie later murdered in a drug deal gone bad]. When I heard Donnie Brooks, he just blew me away. I started to take this thing a little more seriously. I carried a harmonica with me wherever I went, I was always playing and listening to other harmonica players, blues records. And I had gone to a Canned Heat concert and was so inspired that I got home, was doodling around on my harmonica and was able to reproduce a lick that I heard “Blind” Al Wilson play. I thought, ‘Wait. There’s a pattern here. There is a method to the madness. I’d played a blues lick that I had heard in my mind. This is starting to make sense.’ That night I had an epiphany.

What were you listening to?

Acoustic blues. Sonny Terry, John Hammond, Jr., James Cotton, Musselwhite. I think the first album I bought was the Siegel-Schwall Band. That folk scene because it was obtainable at the Rubiyat, the music I was able to see live. Jimmy Reed. Butterfield. I was committed to the harmonica at this point. I got with Donnie Brooks on the steps out in front of the Rubiyat and he showed me how to play the diatonic scale starting at the low end of the harmonica and how the pattern worked, how you play all the way to the top, how the notes work. It was just a little pattern, like Draw hole number one, Blow two and three, draw three and four. It’s just a pattern, how the notes worked. It was my job to put those notes together.

Did you hear music on records or live?

Mostly records. I was still in school at the time. I’d go down to the Rubiyat when I first got my driver’s license when I was junior in high school. By high school I was hanging around Sumet-Bernet Recording Studio and got some session work. There was an engineer there named Phil York and he’d let me know when there was work. Ed Bernet, one of the owners of the studio owned a club called the Levee and the music director at the club was Smokey Montgomery the banjo player from the Light Crust Doughboys. Smokey and the Levee band would do these demos, these country packages. One of their clients was Boxcar Willie. He would come in there with thirty songs. They paid me five bucks a song. We’d do as many as we could. I learned my recording chops from doing demos there.

Since Dallas was the world capital of radio jingles, did you do any jingle work in the studio?

I’d get a call every once in awhile from Euell Box who did commercials. The music would be written out. He would have a string section. His wife would take me into another room and play the part for me on the piano. Then we’d go and record.

Were you playing with anyone live?

When I went to El Centro Community College I played with a guy named Mike Ames. He played flat-pick guitar in the style of Doc Watson. I played harmonica. We played the split shift at the Cellar [a notorious afterhours beatnik club where Stevie Vaughan and Dusty Hill of ZZ Top earned their spurs] from 8 to 8:30 and 4-4:30. He wrote some, he did a couple of originals, we did “Deep River Blues,” Michael Murphey songs, Steve Fromholz, Jerry Jeff Walker. I’d go to the Rubiyat and sit in with Michael Murphey, Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard. My playing wasn’t very refined. I was listening to Donnie Brooks who was playing on Jerry Jeff’s record and to Charlie McCoy. Then Donnie went to New York and was playing with Judy Collins. Murphey would bring me up from out of the audience to play a song or two.

After that in 1971 I got with B.W. Stevenson [a larger-than-life figure with a larger-than-life voice]. We played the same circuit, restaurant bars around Dallas, sports bars, and were loud. I remember playing these ballads and B.W. would get mad at the audience and tell them to ‘Shut up.’ They were not wanting to listen. We learned the hard way you can’t argue with the audience.

Were you playing the same stylistically as you are now?

Yeah, except I didn’t know how to listen and I was playing all the time. Now it’s OK not to play all the time. My playing wasn’t as refined. I didn’t know much about country music. The only country I’d heard growing up was ‘Blood on the Saddle’ by Tex Ritter. I was listening to Charlie McCoy a lot.

B.W. got a record deal with RCA and we went on the road. I went to New York for the first time. We played Gerde’s Folk City, opened up for NRBQ. We went all across the country in a van. I recorded with him too, did three albums.

When did Willie Nelson come into your life?

I was touring with B.W. but we didn’t work all the time. When we were in Dallas, I hung around with Ronnie Dawson. He had been a rockabilly as a teenager known as the Blonde Bomber and was in a band called Steelrail with Bobby Rambo [an all-star player who'd recorded with the rock band the Five Americans and Ray Sharpe of "Linda Lu" fame]. They played the Silver Helmet [where Dallas Cowboys football players hung out]. Sitting in with them, I really honed my skills. I played with him when they taped a special for the local Public Broadcasting television station at McFarland Auditorium and Willie was on the show. He was two hours late and rolled up in an Open Road camper. It was just Willie and Paul [English, Willie's drummer and best friend]. Paul was wearing his cape. I didn’t know much about Willie. I had gotten one record Willie Nelson and Family raiding the RCA storehouse with B.W. so I wanted to check him out. They did their show, the two of them, and just took off. I was going, ‘What was that?’ They made a strong impression.

I got a call a couple months later from Darrell Royal [the coach of the University of Texas Longhorns football team]. He said, ‘I’ve seen you play and I want to meet you. We’re having a little picking session in my hotel room after the ball game. Come on over and meet some of my friends.’ Willie was there. Charley Pride was there, [storied Houston attorney] Joe Jamail, Finley Ewing who has the Mercedes dealership in Dallas. They’re passing around the guitar and singing songs. I didn’t know any of the tunes. A lot of the songs Willie had written. I think I’d learned ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ off the Charlie McCoy album. I was this hippie kid with an Afro. I was into the Stones, the Band. But it was fun playing with them. Afterwards, Willie said, ‘If you’re ever around, come play with us.’

A couple weeks later I saw they were playing a benefit for the volunteer fire department in the high school gymnasium in Lancaster, just south of Dallas. I sat in with them even though I was totally lost. I didn’t know these songs. But I fit in because there was a big hole. Jimmy Day [the pedal steel guitarist] had just left. There was room. There wasn’t a fiddle. Willie was the only guitar player. Willie would give me a solo now and then. I was just hanging on for dear life because I didn’t know the songs and even if I did know, it wouldn’t have made any difference because Willie was playing the songs like Willie, not like anybody else. All the rules were broken. Anything I had built up in my arsenal about how to follow a song, those skills were out the window because Willie made up his own rules. B.W. and Murphey were in time. Willie was jazz, like playing with Miles Davis.

Willie wasn’t that successful yet. He was still playing beer joints. B.W. and Murphey were bigger draws. Jerry Jeff was probably the biggest drawn. Willie was a little left of center. He was an old guy, 39.

We went to a truck stop after the Lancaster gig [in the spring of 1973] for breakfast. I stayed for one more cup of coffee and that’s when Willie said, ‘Hey, we’re going to New York next month. Why don’t you come with us?’ [for the release of Willie's new album Shotgun Willie]. I was still playing with B.W. but he was drinking pretty heavily at that time. I wasn’t digging that. So I’d see where Willie was playing and I’d go sit in with him. I realized when he played the Western Place in Dallas he had this incredible fan base I knew nothing about. We played Big G’s in Round Rock, a cowboy joint north of Austin and they didn’t like long hair. So I kept close to the bandstand and close to Paul because these were the kind of places where I’m thinking, ‘Gee I hope I don’t get my ass whupped when I get out of here’ because I was a hippie.

I’d been playing three months with him when Willie asked Paul, ‘What are we paying him?’ Paul said, ‘Nothing.’ Willie said, ‘Fine. Then double his salary.’ I came aboard and was paid $50 a gig. We drove to gigs in our own cars. I carried Willie’s guitar. Paul carried Willie’s amp. I remember asking Paul how old he was. He said, ‘Forty.’ I was 21. He said, ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll make it to 40.’ Bee [Spears, the bassist] had left to go play with Waylon. I wanted to go play with Waylon. Donnie Brooks was playing harmonica with Waylon. I think because Waylon had a harmonica player that opened up the door [with Willie].

Your first Willie album was a live recording at the Texas Opry House in 1974 for Atlantic Records, but Atlantic’s Nashville division folded before the album could be released. Released in Atlantic’s Willie box set, it reveals a hard-charging, rocking band. But wasn’t the second album you did with Willie that changed everything?

We were playing in Dallas. We were doing these four-hour sets because the crowds were getting so crazy, it was safer to stay on stage. When we were properly fueled, it just didn’t end. Willie said, ‘I’ve written this album called The Red Headed Stranger.’ I told him, ‘I know this studio in Dallas.’ I called Phil York [the engineer Mickey had worked with at Sumet-Bernet studios]. He set us up. It only took a day or two. He would play a song, we’d listen to it, then play along with it. There wasn’t a lot of preparation. He had it written out on a piece of paper. The record company thought it was a demo, it was so simple. That’s the way Willie heard the songs. It was a concept record. I hadn’t heard that before, where all the songs tied together and told a story. This went against all the rules. Willie didn’t care. I thought it was pretty cool because it was so sparse. I thought there’s something here. At that point, I felt like a contributing member Ð Jody was in the band, Bobbie was playing piano, Bee came back from Waylon, and Paul. The album gave me some validity as a band member. Willie never said anything to me except when not to play.

Charlie McCoy was working a lot then, but mainly playing on record. I went back and listened to what he did with Tom T. Hall, Tammy Wynette, Roy Orbison, the old Willie stuff he did for RCA. I thought Charlie blazed the trail on record and I’d play it live.

Does the description sideman sing to you or not?

I like being a sideman. Jokingly, I asked Willie, ‘When do I get to stand in the middle?’

He said, ‘Any time you want.’

Where’s the Mickey Rayfield album? (back when they first met, Coach Royal bubbafied Raphael into Rayfield)

I did a little instrumental record in 1988 with Ben Keith [the pedal steel guitarist best known for his work with Neil Young]. We turned on the tape machine and just played Ð myself and this keyboard player and Ben. It was kind of a light jazz ethereal deal. I got tons of airplay in LA on The Wave [a New Age music formatted radio station] and was on one of their compilation CDs.

I’ve been in the studio with Tony Scher who’s this wonderful guitar player in New York. He plays with Bill Frissell, he plays guitar on Norah Jones’ record. We cut “Spanish Harlem” just messing around and also I’m doing some rock stuff here [Nashville] with Jay Joyce who co-produced and played on Patty Griffin’s Flaming Red. .

There isn’t a lot of call for a harmonica record by major labels. I’m doing it on my own. I don’t have that much time off to jump on it. I want it to be good. I don’t want it to be a bunch of instrumentals like “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.”

Do you always go with him when he has outside projects?

Willie wouldn’t pick favorites and say that I come and not Jody or Bobbie. It’s usually the producer that asks me to come.

When did you start doing outside projects on your own?

Rodney Crowell got me out to LA when he was playing with Emmylou [Harris]. I ended up playing on four of her albums. I moved to LA because I was getting [outside] work and I wanted a change from Austin. We’d get back to Austin from touring and it was like the tour never ended. It was so wild and I needed a break. I wanted to know the difference between touring and home. I liked playing live but I enjoyed working in the studio with other people. I loved doing ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’ with Emmylou. I did some soundtracks with Ry Cooder and Jack Nietzsche including ‘Blue Collar’ a Hal Needham movie where he used the harmonica and saxophone as the main instrument for the whole film. Ry played guitar and John Hiatt was the rhythm guitar player and sat in the corner and never talked to anybody. The producers didn’t like the soundtrack so they scrapped the whole thing and used fiddles and banjos.

I’ll get a call every now and then to play a session and think, ‘I don’t hear any harmonica on this.’ I’ll ask what they want me to do and the producer will say, ‘Just do whatever you want to do.’

And wherever you want evidently. I hear you record on your laptop in your hotel room.

Somebody will send me a file and I’ll play it on the computer. I did that on Kenny Chesney’s record. I recorded on five tracks; I think they used one. With the computer and Pro Tools, I can do an overdub easy.

What kind of microphone do you use?

I use a Beyer M160 ribbon microphone.

Your tools of the trade?

I use Hohner Marine Band. There’s twelve keys so I have harmonicas for all the keys and with different tunings. I have an Echo Harp which is a double reed harmonica that sounds like an accordion. They’re made in six keys. I have those. Then I have to have backups of everything because they go out of tune all the time. And I have some harps that are customized. Joe Filisko from Joliet, Illinois and Jimmy Gordon out of Vermont both customize Marine Bands for me. The body of the harp is like a composite material. The reeds are hand-tuned and set by hand. It’s like having a master craftsman take apart a stock harmonica and put it back together. It sounds better and plays better. They’re a lot more responsive.

What about the front man, does he keep you on your toes, do you know what to expect when you’re playing with him?

I never know what to expect. There’s no set list. I don’t start any of the songs. He’ll start the song. That’s my tip off.

What happens when he pulls out something from 1964 that you’ve never heard (as he did last year at the Fillmore)?

It’s unsaid, but if you don’t know what to play, don’t play. It’s OK to lay out. If you listen to it, you have time to figure it out. If there’s a question, don’t do anything.

Are there songs he’ll pull out that are technically hard to play?

We do some jazz standards that we play in soundcheck that I still struggle with or have to have written out in front of me like “All the Things You Are.”

Any favorites?

I like to play “Still Is Still Moving.” That’s always a fun song to play. That really moves.

You involved in any other projects?

I helped edit the four-CD box set Sony Legacy just put out. They gave me a list of 200 songs and I picked 60 out of the 100 they used. I know what Willie likes. I wanted to stay away from the same choices that are on other box sets. I also wrote liners about what it is like to play in the band with Willie.

So what is it like to play with Willie Nelson?

It doesn’t feel like a job. The guy’s crazy but it doesn’t feel like you’re working for a lunatic. All you need up there is Willie and his guitar. All the rest is icing on the cake. The way it’s always worked is, we listen to Willie, and we just play accordingly. You never want to cover him up and you always want to give him room to do what he does so well, which is play and sing. Grady Martin told me and he told Charlie McCoy in the studio: ‘Do not play when the singer is singing. Make sure you don’t cover up the words.’ He gave me the best advice, although he wasn’t very tactful in saying it. One night after a show he goes, ‘Man, smoke a cigarette. Take that damn thing out of your mouth. You play too much.’

What’s the Naked Willie project?

I love the music from the 60s that Willie did [for RCA], the tracks that are heavily covered with strings and voices. One day, Willie was saying, ‘We went in and recorded and I really thought we had a hit. I really liked what we played. Then we’d come back a few days later and they had done the Nashville Sound [over the recordings].’ The tracks had been heavily orchestrated and put backing vocals on it, which is what Nashville did at the time. They did it to everybody. RCA didn’t know what to do with Willie.

So I thought it would be great to go back and see what these tracks sounded like without the heavy strings and backing vocals. Strip it down like they did with Beatles’ Let It Be when they took Phil Spector’s string parts off. I’m hearing some great stuff. Willie’s playing some great guitar. Chet Atkins and Grady Martin are playing great guitar that was covered up on a lot of the tracks. With Willie’s singing you don’t really need a great big choir echoing what he’s doing. Those strings were so overpowering. We took the strings off of ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ [a Bobby Darin-esque swing tune that was Willie's first Top 10 country single for RCA]. On some tracks, we couldn’t take the strings out completely because there was leakage – the recordings were done on two or three tracks – so what strings you do hear are subtle. It might not be totally naked, but it’s really quiet and it fits.

Are you tempted to add some harmonica?

No. If I did that, I’d use Charlie McCoy.

[Joe Nick is the author of the biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, published by Little, Brown & Company on April 21, 2008.