From "How Willie Nelson Sees America/On the road with the musician, his band, and his family" (The New Yorker).
December 22, 2025
"His daughter Lana... recalls flying to Austin to visit Nelson and failing to recognize him until her son shouted, 'That’s Grandpa!'"
"The last time she’d seen him, in Nashville, he had short hair and wore country-club clothes. Now he had long hair and a beard and wore a T-shirt, a bandanna, and an earring. 'He went from jazz musician to hippie,' she said.
In Texas, Nelson cut back on the drinking. His face thinned out. His features sharpened. He ran five miles a day through the Hill Country, practiced martial arts, kept smoking weed—it tamped the rage down, he said—and read spiritual tracts and 'The Power of Positive Thinking.' People who killed the mood didn’t stay in his orbit for long. 'Somewhere along the way, I realized that you have to imagine what you want and then get out of the way and let it happen,' he told me."
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29 comments:
"He went from jazz musician to hippie"
Stereotypy to Bio-Willie
I'm struck by how healthy many of the Showbiz types are and how old they live. I wonder if they're getting some sort of expensive anti-aging treatments. Nelson wasn't really a poster boy for healthy living for most of his life. Yet here he is at 92, still going strong. Very strange.
Eastwood is 95. Woody is either 90 or close to it. In a couple years people like Jane Fonda and Jack Nicholson will reach 90. I could go on.
There's something going on, given that half the men die before 85, and large numbers cant really function too well past 80. It can't all be "clean living" and "lifting weights".
The MSM has always treated Nelson differently than other C/W stars because he openly smoked pot and was an out-and-out liberal Democrat. Usually, CW stars are treated as weird outsiders from another land or as Bumpkins.
Hell, Ricky Nelson would be 85.
Wait, Hanoi Jane sn't dead yet?
He's a really talented guy. I admire a lot he's done in music. However, he is also one of the biggest tax cheats in American history, so don't try any of that moral chutzpah on me.
Whatever dude.
You know who else was an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale & The Power of Positive Thinking? Trump.
Most people don't realize Willie's philosophy is achievable. You can have any life you want ... but you have to do it intentionally. If life happens to you, by mere happenstance, then you are its victim.
However if you sit down and consider, really ponder, the kind of life that you want ... poof, it all starts to come together and before you even know it, BAM ... that's the life you are living.
Anybody who tells you otherwise should be banished from your existence. And can be.
I like his music but the pot legends that abound around him turn me off. Never liked any stoners
In the 80s he took the stage in Saratoga drunk off his ass adn probably stoned of it too. They cut the first song and spent the next 90 minutes trying to sober him up enough to not have to offer refunds. They succeeded more or less…and yes I didn’t like the i’m a victim of the tax man either. Taylor Swift he aint…
He loved golf so I love him though…
I saw Willie Nelson at the Coconut Grove in Santa Cruz and I believe it was 07. I was struck by his extreme professionalism. I I suppose we in Santa Cruz benefited from the local reputation of growing some of the finest weed in the country was enough to attract Willie to a venue that sat less than 300 people.
I don't know if you Cox know it but the fact that Willie is a famous dope smoker and tax evader makes him a cult hero among the deplorable working men of this country.
No one really wants your puritanical hysterectomy, even if Trump pretends to be sympathetic to your holier than thou arrogance.
Willie had the best line in that forgettable '80s movie The electric horseman:
"I'm gonna get me a bottle of tequila, find me one of them Keno girls that can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, and just kind of kick back".
Yah I’ve been to a couple Willie shows too and his working class hero worshippers look like the same rich white people I see at Springsteen shows…
Howard said: “ Willie is a famous dope smoker and tax evader makes him a cult hero among the deplorable working men of this country.”
Sorry, not to me. He’s 0 for 2.
Howie is obviously dipping his alcoholic, mottled beak in the Kahlúa on this fine Monday.
I saw Nelson at a mountain resort above Los Gatos in ‘91 and the following day, when the famous mota monkey was out on his run.
Never understood the attraction to Wille. His appearance is ghastly.
Willie Nelson has a great voice and great musical taste, but if it’s all about appearance, then I guess you have a point.
His great cover of "Always on My Mind".
A best song of his appropriate to him is I Gotta Get Drunk. Line goes on "and I sure do dread it because I know what I'm gonna do".
Comparing photos of Willie from 1965 to 1990 delights. Are we sure it’s the same guy? Maybe the original Willie died and was buried in the desert and Impostor Willie took his place.
Boomers live on while youngers die early.
Obvious diff, lead, asbestos, tobacco, smog
'He went from jazz musician to hippie’
Not exactly a marathon.
Willie was a very successful songwriter, mostly recorded by other people, mostly in the early 60s, like Crazy by Patsy Cline or Hello Walls by Faron Young. Great records.
But Willie as a performer/singer? I was never a fan.
And damn, I didn't realize he was 92.
"Boomers live on while youngers die early.
Obvious diff, lead, asbestos, tobacco, smog"
Toughened me up!
Anyway, Willie is many things but a Boomer he is not.
Only off a liitle more than a decade.
'S'okay.
Just being a pedant.
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