After tour postponement, WillieNelson brings outlaw charm to Inland Empire
The crowd surged to their feet the instant he stepped into the spotlight, raising his arms less like a monarch and more like a regular gent plucked from a crowd to speak his piece. At 86, spindly under a black t-shirt that bears the name of a favored village in Hawaii, he's craggy of feature, with a hawk's hooded, alert eyes. Without a word, he and his family-centric band launched into that half-mournful tale of dissolution, "Whiskey River.
Part of the meta is a storied defiance of convention. The Willie we associate with boozing songs could be, in the words of his great outlaw brother Waylon Jennings, lonesome, ornery and mean -- or at least, as one old friend has put it, "a little sarcastic." But when a fellow songwriter from the fringes of a Nashville system both loathed proffered a first joint, Willie was abruptly en route to an entirely re-stocked bad boy rep.
The Tuesday night concert was the finale of a tour leg that had been postponed when Willie had to temporarily beg off last August due to lung conditions robbing his breath. If he talked a few of the windier lines that he once might have sung, he still displayed a strong, confidently note-nailing voice. And he was, as usual, bewitchingly fluent on the famously battered acoustic known as Trigger, steadily displaying his committed, string-bending picking.
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