“The Moon’s Just Holding Its Breath”: Shotgun Willie and Sweet Revenge

It’s 1973. There’s a virtuoso singer-songwriter, emerging out of the country tradition, with an idiosyncratic vocal style, who makes one of the best albums of his career. In fact, he and it would exemplify the 1970s in all of its patchwork soundscapes.

Except I’m not talking about just one guy. I’m talking about both Willie Nelson and John Prine. By this time, Nelson had left Nashville and moved to Austin, Texas, where he starts becoming “Willie Nelson,” and Shotgun Willie is, crucially, where he starts asserting control of his own music. John Prine is on his third record, Sweet Revenge, where the critical expectations intensify.

Shotgun Willie and Sweet Revenge don’t just come out firing on their opening title tracks; they use the irresistible force of savvy studio production—both albums have the legendary Arif Mardin as a producer—to make Nelson and Prine’s personal views feel like something you can get down with. I mean, it’s awfully hard to disagree with Nelson’s fuck you to Nashville in “Shotgun Willie,” sung over a funky, locked-in groove: “Well, you can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say.” And you can hear Prine’s defiance when the massive hook, in “Sweet Revenge,” arrives: “All my friends are not dead or in jail.”

Furthermore, by 1973, we’re well into Watergate, the scandal that’d take down Nixon and tarnish the American ideals that traditional country music celebrated (not that the Nashville establishment, would ever be too much aware of, or admit to, such seismic upheavals). On more provocative musical routes, cynicism signposted the questioning of authority, including the question of “good”/”bad” taste. Nelson, in “Sad Songs and Waltzes,” reminds us that what we’re hearing on the radio depends on what’s “selling this year.” Prine attacks the ugliness of the Midwestern social order in “The Accident (Things Could Be Worse)” putting a phrase, which we’d now be hesitant to repeat, in the narrator’s voice; it’s a strategy that Randy Newman was known for, and would take, a year later, to the limit, in “Rednecks.”

In addition, we’ve reached the moment where singer-songwriters are expanding the parameters of the genre. Freed from Nashville, Nelson records what he wants, going back to the goldmine of Western swing, to cover two songs by Bob Wills. Nelson even rerecords his own songs because, hell, maybe the world’s finally ready for their stoned-soul heaviness, and songs like “Slow Down Old World” go well with his newer songs — they have the same timeless quality.

For his part, Prine hones a lyrical ambiguity that’ll monkey-wrench any simplistic interpretations of his songs. “A Good Time” especially delivers on this account: “Well, I thought I’d heard and seen enough to get along/Til you said something neither of us knew.” Just as Nelson won’t explain why the songs that he writes aren’t making a whole lot of money, Prine points out that what’s not said in a song counts even more than what is. You can get lost in the narrative gaps of “Mexican Home,” as Prine’s words wash over you like a rainstorm: “Well the sun’s going down and the moon’s just holding its breath.”

Thus, it’s certainly tempting to call Nelson and Prine musical tricksters, too slippery perhaps even to have the singer-songwriter label affixed to them. But that’ll earn both of them, inevitably, comparisons with Bob Dylan. Nelson, however, is going to places — geographically Austin, and figuratively elsewhere — that Dylan hadn’t yet got to. And Prine’s bootheels are firmly planted on outlaw ground, not just wandering around it.

Another way of putting Shotgun Willie and Sweet Revenge into a historical context is to listen closely: you’ll hear the traces of what’s to come in the mid-1970s. Keep foregrounding the dance-floor stomp of “Shotgun Willie,” and the syncopated riff on Prine’s “Mexican Home,” and you’ll have a model kit for disco (some assembly required); Mardin would produce the hit records of the Bee Gees, starting in 1975.

In other words, somewhere in Shotgun Willie and Sweet Revenge, an artistic leap, or leaps, are made. You can have fun connecting the musical dots (laying LPs/CDs on the floor/making playlists, etc.). Nelson’s spellbinding cover of “Whiskey River,” that’d be the signature opening for his live performances thereafter, changes into a woozy, off-kilter waltz, like the room is spinning around you. It’s a foray into psychic oblivion that predates Neil Young’s 1975 record Tonight’s the Night. Prine’s “Christmas in Prison” has a yearning for romantic escape, expressed through the narrator’s drowsy consciousness — “And she’s sweeter than saccharin at a drug store sale” — that sounds as if Tom Waits, at the forefront of the next wave of singer-songwriters, is taking notes.

That Shotgun Willie and Sweet Revenge are such complete records might still seem wanting in a year of crisis, when there are more questions than answers. But as Nelson and Prine suggest, maybe time is on your side. Especially when you’ve got the songs.