Forty years ago, another stellar year for pop music—why The Smith’s Meat Is Murder isn’t nearly unanimously named the Best Record of the 1980s is beyond me—two songs were released almost concurrently, and I rarely tire of listening to them. No suspense: “Highwayman,” from the “country super group” of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristoferson and Waylon Jennings; and my favorite REM tune, “Driver 8.” The latter, years before Michael Stipe became a Bono-like celebrity, is from REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction, when the band was in high gear, not yet playing huge venues, and is beautifully written, with the timeless Southern lyrics matching Stipe’s steady vocal.
Conversely, “The Highwayman,” is saved from Jimmy Webb’s trademark gibberish lines by forceful vocals, especially from Willie Nelson, who sings the first verse. I can’t think of another song in which Nelson is so affecting: “I was a highwayman/Along the coach roads I did ride/With sword and pistol by my side/Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade/Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade/The bastards hung me in the spring of ‘25/But I am still alive.” Three more Webb-reincarnation verses—from Kristoferson, Jennings and a lackluster Cash follow—and they’re corny (the narrator says he may return as “a single drop of rain”) but it’s not as if all pop standouts are songwriting gems. (David Bowie, for example, wasn’t a top-notch lyricist, which does little to diminish his rock-pantheon status.)
With the exception of Cash (a grab-bag career that included brilliant songs, especially from the Sun Records era, to ear-slicing dogs like “A Boy Named Sue” and “Man in Black”), I’m lukewarm about the other three stars. (Not incidentally, I’ll never forget seeing Bob Dylan and Cash sing “Girl From the North Country” on the debut of Cash’s variety show on May 1, 1969. It wasn’t The Beatles on Sullivan in ’64, but stunning TV nonetheless, given Dylan’s public recluse-status at the time.) I never paid much attention to Waylon Jennings (an admission that’ll get a tsk-tsk from my friend Crispin Sartwell); Kristoferson’s beloved songs never interested me much (nor did his acting career), although perhaps that was magnified by Janis Joplin’s cover of his “Me and Bobby McGee,” posthumously released in 1971, a big hit that I never want to hear again.
Same with Willie. In fact, until 1973, he was just a passing name, the guy who wrote “Crazy,” the 1961 Patsy Cline smash that was in my family’s collection of 45s. In September of ’73, my Texan roommate at college was wearing a t-shirt from the first Nelson-led 4th of July Picnic, held that summer in Dripping Springs, not far from Austin, and featured two of my favorites, John Prine and Doug Sahm. When I asked Mark about Nelson, his eyes widened, and said with shy amazement, “How can you dig Dylan, Prine, the Byrds and Gram Parsons and not be clued into Willie?” My knowledge of Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys (the band’s audacious name stuck out, eclipsed only by The Dead Kennedys in 1978) and Bob Wills (“Take Me Back to Tulsa” and “Faded Love,” didn’t dent Mark’s confoundment. That is, until I schooled him on Wilson Pickett, the Dells, the Ronettes and Mary Wells, and he admitted we were even. That’s important when you’re 18!
Nelson’s “Always On My Mind” is famous, but left me cold; however, his turn in 1997’s Wag the Dog as Johnny Dean singing “Good Old Shoe” was a standout in a standout movie.
As noted above, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction is my favorite from that band. “Driver 8” is tops, but “Maps and Legends,” “Old Man Kensey” and “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” also reel me back into the 1980s before frontman Michael Stipe traipsed around the world as an insufferable Activist Rock Spokesman. More than vaguely analogous to “Highwayman,” at least in the feel of the lyrics, “Driver 8” has this verse: “I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm/The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won’t get snagged/The bells are ringing through the town again/The children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing.” It’s almost as perfect an 80s pop/rock song as the Smith’s “What She Said,” The Clash’s “Train in Vain” and Elvis Costello’s “New Amsterdam.”
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023