The generically titled concert documentary Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Celebration was, its onscreen credits claim, directed by one “Yabo Yablonski”, though IMDB lists it as the work of Werner Brandt. It is the only thing on Brandt’s resume, though there is, or was a “Yabo Yablonsky”–different spelling, but mighty close–who directed and wrote the memorably unhinged 1971 exploitation film B. J. Lang Presents (a virtual one-man show for its star, Mickey Rooney) and had a handful of writing credits, including the 1981 John Huston film Victory, and who died in 2005. If all this raises more questions than it answers about who really directed the film, there are survivors of the concert we could ask, but I’ll bet their memories are cloudy. It’s been a long time, and they all had other things on their minds, and as Willie himself hollars to the crowd at one point quite early on, “Is everybody loaded? We are!” He is not referring to either their firearms or their retirement funds.
4th of July Celebration bears a 1979 copyright date, but it was clearly made years earlier, before Nelson’s annual holiday galas became a massive institution. Confoundingly, the movie includes no helpful information while you’re watching it, but the consensus seems to be that it records the second annual picnic show, back in 1974. Maybe the editors needed the five years to recover from their contact high. In the end, the movie seems to have never received much if anything in the way of distribution, although parts of it were excerpted for the old late-Friday-night live-music show The Midnight Special (whose logo is much in evidence), which accounts for that jarring shot of Wolfman Jack standing in the wings. I never even knew it existed before I learned that Anthology Film Archives here in New York was digging it up for a couple of holiday screenings, one of which I was enjoying while the rest of the country was watching Sarah Palin fall on her sword; the second is on Saturday at 6:00 P.M. The images and sound have most definitely not been painstakingly scrubbed and remastered, but I was able to convince myself that this only added to its from-the-vaults charms. Since I already know quite well how these songs are supposed to sound, the biggest problem with the muddy soundtrack (and the Archive’s string-and-a-Dixie-cup audio system) was that it rendered much of the spoken banter unclear. Did Waylon Jennings really just dedicate “Good-Hearted Woman” (“in love with a good-timin’ man”) to Willie’s mother-in-law? I guess I’ll never know.
The film is a record of an especially rich moment in the relationship between country and rock music, when “redneck rockers” and “outlaw country” artists, based in Austin, Texas and in open rebellion against the overproduction machine in Nashville, were introducing a new level of sophistication and hip self-awareness to their music and, in the process, contributing to a new kind of looseness to Southern life. It is a period I have the kind of nostalgia for that you only feel for the things on which you just missed out; at the time these people were hooting and hollering and having fun, I was squatting in my front yard in Mississippi playing with a stick. Leon Russell, who serves as emcee here, partly because he appears too far gone to do anything more complicated than sway in front of a microphone and try to remember his dear friends’ names, makes a back-handed acknowledgment of how liberated the scene feels when he manages to squeeze the words “strange”, “weird”, and “peculiar” into one otherwise not particularly coherent sentence. In the crowd, men dance in a fashion that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a wino direct traffic. There are several comely ladies in the crowd who knew how to dress on a summer day before word got out that the ozone layer was no longer holding up its end. After the movie had been running for about ten minutes, I had a vision of the cameraman being told that he’d get an extra dollar for every shot he had of a topless woman sitting on someone’s shoulders; by th end of the movie, I had a vision of the fellow collecting his earnings and buying a yacht. Sweaty, horny, half-naked, buzzed, happy, and not ashamed to demonstrate their lack of natural rhythm: these were my people, before evil Republican Yankees drove down, made them register to vote, and told them that God wanted a missile defense shield and the repeal of the capital gangs tax but hadn’t mentioned it in the Bible because it was such a no-brainer.
Those who do not share my peculiar belief that we had this country just about perfect at some point around 1975 before everything went to shit will still find pleasures here, if they can ever get to see this movie. It is a very pleasing thing to see a young and healthy Waylon Jennings, years before he first spoke aloud the words, “Well, about this time them Duke boys…” It is good to see Willie flash his gleaming smile in a face that is not yet grandfatherly and to see Leon Russell not looking like an Old Testament prophet, which is not to say that he doesn’t look like someone who sometimes hears voices. (Leon spends much of his screen time staring at his fellow musicians in a way that might be his way of showing admiration for their talent or might be the way he looks at someone while wondering what they’d taste like deep fried. When Willie asks him to sing, he stalls for time by embarking on a long monologue that would put a stake through the heart of any A.A. meeting. “I drink,” he finally says, “and sometimes you got to.” “Or else it won’t get done,” chimes in Willie.) Also prominent among the revelers is Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw, outfitted in an eye-rotting red jacket and matching pants and looking like the bastard son of Vincent Gallo and Marty Feldman; the late Texas singer-songwriter B. W. Stevenson, best remembered for the great “My Maria”, which, sadly, he does not perform here; and the sainted Lost Gonzo Band, with their sometime employer Jerry Jeff Walker in attendance. (Their numbers include the splendid “London Homesick Blues”, which would eventually be adopted as the theme song for Austin City Limits and so is generally assumed by millions of TV viewers to be called “Home with the Armadillos”, from the only snatch of the lyrics that can be both heard and easily deciphered when played on that show.)
The Neil-Diamond-in-The-Last-Waltz performance comes from the sappy, wheedling-voiced Michael Martin Murphey, who subjects those too stoned to flee to a would-be anthem for hip crackers about his desire to be a “cosmic cowboy.” It’s a very strange experience, watching a dullard like Murphey (whose song ends with an out-of-nowhere, aggravatingly mean line about Nixon being “the only dope I wanna shoot”) perform what’s basically a thesis paper in the form of a song, explaining the cultural significance of what the other performers have spent the preceding hour and a half simply embodying. It’s like watching a spoken-word poetry slam where Celine, Rimbaud, and William S. Burroughs are followed by a trust fund baby whose work is about how gramps would have a heart attack if he knew what his outlaw grandson were spending his money on during the weekends. I plan to wash the taste of Murphey out of my mouth later by re-reading Larry L. King’s 1975 Playboy article on his experience of the third annual Willie Nelson 4th of July picnic, which is the single funniest piece of English language prose ever written that doesn’t include Bertie Wooster or an argument that Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression. Note: that’s Larry L. King, not the guy with the suspenders and the baboon heart. The essay, which I’d like to think was written for the express purpose of making me proud to be an American, can be found in King’s 1980 collection Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians, and Other Artists, used copies of which can be found at Amazon and had for sums that start at one cent and slowly work their way up.
–Phil Nugent
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