A Willie Nelson reggae album is an idea that's almost as crazy-brilliant as casting the Red-Headed Stranger as Uncle Jesse in the Dukes of Hazzard movie. For starters, both country and reggae build on outlaw imagery and class issues, making heroes of rebels and outsiders, and the sunny island rhythms have the potential to counterbalance the dark gospel sobriety of many of Nelson's songs. Furthermore, Nelson's reputation for cannabis consumption, while not a pervasive trend in conservative country music, suggests that maybe music wasn't the primary motivation for recording in Jamaica. It's an act of cool wit that Countryman prominently features a marijuana leaf on the album cover-- although many chain stores are stocking the tamer version, which features a palm tree.
The idea for Countryman is one that Nelson has been entertaining for about a decade: He began recording tracks for it in 1995 when he signed to Island, but the album was shelved during the late-90s turmoil of label buyouts and mergers. Now Nelson's new label, Lost Highway Records, is finally showing it the light of day. However, what's intriguing in concept doesn't hold up very well on Countryman. The album mixes new versions of old songs like "Darkness on the Face of the Earth" and "One in a Row" with a few covers, most notably Johnny Cash's "Worried Man" (here a duet with Toots Hibbert) and Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come" and "Sitting in Limbo". The 72-year-old's feisty musical curiosity is certainly admirable, and the results prove more listenable than Nelson's recent genre outing Milk Cow Blues, but these songs generally sound half-baked.
Much of the blame can be placed on producer Don Was, who dresses the songs in garishly percolating rhythms that seem to have no connection to Nelson's laidback vocals. Nelson has trained his nylon-string guitar and his tried-and-true touring band to follow his signature phrasing, which is patient and unfussy as it skirts the beat. But Was's generic rhythms keep chugging along irrespective of Nelson's vocals, so that the two elements sound disjointed. As a result, songs like "Do You Mind Too Much If I Don't Understand" and "You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago" have the awkward musical synthesis of an amateur mash-up. "I've Just Destroyed the World" and "Darkness on the Face of the Earth", in particular, suffer unflattering comparisons to better versions on the more or less contemporaneously recorded Teatro; coming off the success of Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball, producer Daniel Lanois showed a much more intuitive understanding of Nelson's limitations and worked the songs accordingly. While it's certainly ambitious and even occasionally playful, Countryman displays no such musical comprehension; it's usually just a shambles, and not even an interesting one at that.
There is, however, one song that makes this excursion more or less worthwhile. Nelson's cover of "The Harder They Come" proves all the more adventurous for sounding more like Nelson than like Jimmy Cliff. Was keeps the percussion to a minimum-- mainly it's just wood blocks and a gently struck tom-- which leaves more room for Mickey Raphael's harmonica, Robby Turner's dobro, and elegant backing vocals from Toots Hibbert's daughter Lieba Thomas and Jamaican singer Pam Hall. Nelson seems perfectly at home in this mellower setting, confidently translating Cliff's urban rebel philosophy into a desert drifter's credo. "The Harder They Come" is pure outlaw reggae, fulfilling the album's crazy-brilliant promise to meld island rhythms with plains melodies. However, even as it provides the template for a remarkable and powerful reggae record, it also reinforces how disappointingly this one turned out.
