It was February 5th, and the New York air was cold and dank. By sunset, the snow would be blowing down Broadway horizontally at about 20 mph. I stepped into the entryway of 11 West 60th Street, pushed the elevator button and shivered. This wasn�t the kind of surroundings I normally associated with country and western music.

Neither was what awaited me on the second floor. Atlantic Records has spent the last twenty-five years building a sterling reputation for jazz, soul music, and, in the 60�s, rock. Album covers line the office walls: Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Cactus, Doctor John. .. The receptionist looked up. �Uh, the Willie Nelson session?� She tilted her head: �Down the hall.�

Down the hall I would find a mildmannered little Turkish fellow sitting behind the board with two implacable assistants watching the tape sliding past the gate. The man�s name would be Arif Mardin, an Atlantic staff producer who built his reputation producing acts like Sonny & Cher and moving on to do string arrangements and some production work for Aretha. Knowing all this;' is it any wonder that I was very skeptical about how the week of recording ahead would turn out? Like I said, it was hardly the kind of surroundings I normally associated with.

Well, with what was coming over the monitor, for one. And with what Arif was watching through the window. Seated on stools by two microphones, I saw Doug Sahm, and three people, one of whom seems to be Sammi Smith, who made a million-seller out of Kris Kristofferson's �Help Me Make It Through The Night�. But the song they were singing when I walked into the control room was �May The Circle Be Unbroken,� and by the lead vocal, which sounded like a man with a sawmill stuck in the back of his throat, I knew that Willie Nelson himself was somewhere in that mass of cables, baffles, and microphones. Willie Nelson, one of the Nashville bad boys, the man who has written countless hits for others and never had one himself; the man who chucked the whole Music City merry-go-round for a life of ease in Austin, Texas; the first (and to date, only) big name country star Atlantic Records signed after they announced last fall that they were entering the country field.

As the last note faded away, Arif punched the button in front of him. �Want to hear it back?� he asked. Everybody nodded. The assistants rewound the tape. Remarkable, I thought. This sounds just like a country gospel album. Everybody was apparently very much pleased with the cut, because they nodded at the end of it, some of them clapping. Doug rushed out of the studio and into the control room, talking furiously as usual, grabbed my hand and shook it and said �FOUR OUT!!! This�s gonna be so good, uh, see ya later I�m gonna go back to the ho-tel and git my fiddle� and he was gone.

I walked into the studio itself and looked around. Bunches of people were standing around, and some of them were sprawled on a set of risers that comprised one end of the room. The whole studio was painted a kind of puke green that will be familiar to those who have been in the Navy or worked for the Government. The central part of the room was filled with mike booms and huge moveable partitions called gobbos, covered, like the walls and ceiling, with pock-marked acoustic tile. Across from the risers was the drum cage, and a Hammond B-3 organ with a Leslie speaker attachment sat on the wall facing the control-room window. Today is Monday, I thought. I�m going to be here twelve hours every day til Friday.

It was evidently time for a break, and what seemed like a hundred bottles of Heineken�s was brought in. Time for introductions. Willie was short, much shorter than I�d expected, and his hair was quite a bit longer than it had been in the pictures I�d seen. He had the start of a beard, and wore dark glasses most of the time. It was hard to figure how this quiet, gentle-seeming person who looked at peace with himself could write such tortured, haunted, posessed songs.

Playing piano, dressed all in black, was a woman who resembled him a lot. She should, because Bobbi Nelson is Willie�s sister, and she�d come to New York for the first time ever to play piano on this record. That was Sammi Smith, too! In tight, tight blue jeans with a patch that said �Caution: Budweiser-Powered!� Singing with her were Dee Moeller, a perky little blonde from Nashville for the soprano parts and Larry Gatlin, also from the Music City, singing tenor. All these sacred songs, I asked them, are they just some warming up? Oh, no, came the reply, Willie�s gonna cut three albums: one sacred, one straight country, and one rock. �In five days of sessions???� Shrug. Now I was really getting wary.

A tall, skinny cat with a big cap on his head was toting the most beat-up bass I�d ever seen, and he was introduced as Bee Sparks. He was chatting with a pale, talkative man with reddish hair and pale skin, who turned out to be the owner and master of that blue steel guitar: the legendary Jimmie Day. I turned around and almost jumped out of my skin. A tall, lanky guy with a feverish look in his eye and a strange cut to his beard and sideburns dressed all in black turned out to be the drummer. It�s no wonder that Paul English has �The Devil� for a nickname. . .

A1 Bruno, one of Nashville�s topflight acoustic guitarists, was sitting over by the window, ripping out fills. He chewed on a pick, but took it out of his mouth and lit a cigarette, which he inserted under the strings at the top of the guitar. He waited for the opening, played a fill, picked up the cigarette, flicked the ashes off, took a drag or two, put it back, and it was time for the next fill.

No doubt about it, these folks were professionals. If anybody could record three albums in a week, they could. Lord knows Willie had the material ready — over where his muchautographed guitar was sitting was a two-and-a-half-inch-thick pile of song lead sheets representing his output over the last eight or nine years. Plus, there was the hymnal, filled with songs which, as Willie said, �you sing one of �em, and you remember two more.� It�s true — you could sing them all week. Everywhere but New York City, they call that a revival.

Tuesday�s sessions started at 2 on the dot, and by 4:15, when the first break rolled around, there was enough of the gospel album in the can for Arif to ask �Ready to try some other stuff, or do you want to stay with this for a while longer.� Willie opted for a change of pace, and what a change of pace it was! When they heard what it was, Bobbi and Willie�s wife, Connie, a tall, regal Texas woman with platinumblonde hair, decided to go shopping for a while. Willie roared into the chorus:

And the Devil shivered in his sleeping bag �n said travellin� on the road is a fuckin� drag. ..

It�s got a good, insistent rock beat, and by the time they�d finished it, it sounded enough like a hit that Arif had them prepare an overdub that said �such a drag� just in case. . .

Then they moved on to a Johnny Bush classic, �Whiskey River,� probably to thank the golden-throated Texan for hitting so often with Willie�s songs. Willie had a definite arrangement in mind for this one, dividing the song into halves, one pretty much straight couqtry, the other with a hard rocking beat. The New York studio musicians who were augmenting Willie�s band wanted to go one way, the Nashvillians another, and Willie stayed with it, pushing it into a protracted jam until the musicians all understood each other, and Willie was throwing solos out of his funky electrified gut-string guitar that had those city boys open-mouthed. But then, these guys backed David Bromberg for a living.

Finally, they got it, and Willie threw back his head to sing the chorus, �Whiskey river take my mind,� stretching out �miiiinnd� until his voice cracked. He�d never sounded better on records, and Arif was smiling like Meher Baba in the control room.

After a drink break of Puerto Rican soul food and burgers around the corner, it was hymn time again. �Whispering Hope� was followed by number 113 in the hymnal, �Shall We Gather At The River,� and Willie announced that he wanted a �large, untrained chorus� on it. So he lined up Connie and the band and Arif and Dave Gahr, who was snapping photos and Sam Uretsky, who works for his manager, and the guy from Country Music Magazine and the guy from CREEM, and we all sang �Shall we gather at the river/The beautiful, the beautiful river� until he was satisfied. (Buy the record, folks. For most of us, it�s our recording debut.. .)

�Now here�s the song I�m gonna name the album after,� he announced. �Just me and the guitar.� Arif dimmed the lights, and Willie sang � The Troublemaker,� a brief song about a guy with long hair and a bunch of scraggly followers who disrupts the town and gets crucified, and who, naturally, turns out to be Jesus. In the hands of anybody but a master like Willie, it could have been mawkish and overobvious. But the room was silent for minutes after he finished it. Finally Arif broke the silence: �Want to hear it back?� Willie nodded.

The next day, we were told, things were going to be a little different. Some visitors were due. I�d heard the tumors about Dylan and everybody dropping in, so I showed at 2 exactly, ready for anything. Willie set right to work recording a typically gloomy number called �My Life Ain�t Mine Any More.� Then Jerry Wexler, Atlantic�s vicepresident, a well-known producer in his own right, showed up with Doug Salim and a bunch of his friends, and the next couple of hours were spent on a swingtempo blues number, with Arif playing electric piano. Next up was �Milk Cow Blues,� but in the middle of working out the arrangement, Jerry had to leave. It was just as well — dinnertime had rolled around. Well, almost — there was still time to whip a beautiful take of a sure-fire future country hit called �I�m So Ashamed� onto the tape. All it took was three or four tries.

Over dinner, Willie was reminiscing abdut the old days in Texas, playing bass in Ray Price�s band and writing songs for him. Jimmie Day Was in that band, and the bass that Bee was qow using Willie had inherited from a youngster named Donny Young, who had gone on to fame and misfortune (and now fame again) as Johnny Paycheck. Willie�d also done a stintias a deejay in Texas, and it was during this stage in his career that he made his first records, �a couple little 45�s on my own label, the Willie Nelson label. I don�t know anybody who�s got �em now.� Bobbi looked up from her steak. �Oh, 1 have �em both, at home!� Hadn�t you, I asked him, once played with Bob Wills? Willie laughed. �No, but somebody told me once that I was probably the only guitar player in Texas that hadn�t.

It was a pretty clear, crisp night, as we walked back to the studio via. Lincoln Center. Willie and Jimmie Day looned around, staring straight up at the huge buildings and crashing into lampposts and each other. �Hey, d�ya think anybody�d guess we wuz from the country?� Bqbbi noticed a sign and said �Juilliard! That�s where this evangelist I once played for told me he�d send me if I stuck with him. Is it a good place to learn piano?� Sure, you could do worse. �By sticking with him, for one.�

Back at the studio it looked like a small army had invaded. Doug ran around madly while an old codger in a yellow jump-suit and thick glasses walked around cadging reefers off people. A silent black dude bronked his baritone sax, while Augie Meyer, formerly with Doug�s Quintet, was shaking hands with old friends. Pretty soon the maelstrom of activity began to resolve itself as people took their places and before anybody in the booth quite knew what was happening, Doug was head-arranging the Bob Wills classic �Bubbles In My Beer� for this huge group, Doug and the old man — who turned out to be another Texas legend named J.R. Chatwell — leading on double fiddles. Next up was an old standard, �Stay A Little Longer.� J.R., who has been through a couple of strokes recently, was having some trouble with the words, but pretty soon everything was okay, and the whole big band was swinging away. And after they�d done that, they went back over the afternoon version of �Milk Cow Blues� and polished it off. By this time, everybody was exhausted, and it was time to call it a night once again.

If you�ve never been ne&r a recording studio, you�ve missed one of the most remarkable things about this story so far. Your average rock group, especially one with a couple of volatile egos in it, can take weeks on just one cut. Overdubbing on the overdubbing, constantly changing, re-changing. . . And you get the damn album home and put the needle on it and forty minutes later the eight weeks of recording, three weeks of overdubbing, and five weeks of mixing is a memory of some sound waves that came through your speakers. Conversely, in Nashville, you�re allowed only three hours of sessions a day, or three songs, whichever comes first. The musicians get paid for three hours, no matter what happens. Which is maybe why so much of what comes out of Music City sounds like it was cranked out by machine.

That�s why Willie took to New York so well. He got the Nashville musicians he wanted and brought them to the Atlantic studios, where he was allowed as much time as he needed to get things done the way he wanted 'em. And he was given a producer who paid scrupulous attention to what everyone was doing — so well that he�d occasionally break in on the talkback and say things like �Jimmie Day, try a G sharp on that turnaround instead of a G and see if it makes things better.� �He knew I was havin� trouble with that turnaround,� Jimmie Day said. �What a great guy! He�s the first producer I�ve ever worked with who gives a shit what�s going on on the other side of the glass. Other guys�ll sit up there with a bottle and a broad and tell you when the three hours are up. Or we once had a producer who spent the whole session on the phone making land deals.� And I don�t know where Arif came by his expertise in producing country music, but it sure was evident as Willie cut one country hit after another under his direction.

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Jimmie Day came in early on Thursday, because Donny Hathaway had heard he was in town and wanted him to overdub some stuff on his next album, believe it or not. Jimmie Day was really pleased, too, because it was his first non-country session, and he was impressed with Hathaway. Then Willie came in, staring at a Holiday Inn envelope he held in his hands. On it was a new song, �Shotgun Willie,� which he�d written the night before in the hotel room. He cut it right away. Then he turned his attention to a little number in 3/4 time called �Sad Songs And Waltzes (Aren�t Selling This Year),� one of his cleverest lyric jobs, and a most attractive song. �And Atif, while we still have that feel...� he launched into another pure country song, �Burning Both Ends of the Candle.�

Thursday was a short day, and we all had the evening off. Chet Flippo had come from Austin to cover the story for Rolling Stone, which had sent him a check for the airline ticket marked �Plane fare for Dylan/Russell session, NYC.� And it was true, every time the studio door opened, all eyes in the place which weren�t focussed on the business of recording Willie�s album turned, expectantly. Was it Dylan? Leon? Kris? Rita? pr was it just the cat with the beer. . ? By six, Willie had done a couple of other numbers, and it was over for the day. The Press Corps adjourned to Max�s, where, it was rumored, Doug and Willie would show up to play with the featured attraction, T-Bone Walker. They didn�t show. Instead, Willie stayed in the hotel room, where Connie pierced his ear and Paul�s, and inserted a gold earring in each.

On Friday, a'surprise guest finally did show — David Bromberg, resplendent in one of the most tastelessly embroidered cowboy shirts I�d ever seen, featuring a huge bull with alissome blond lass straddling his underside, while a desert landscape watches. The emblem was so large you couldn�t miss it even if you wanted to. Bromberg had brought what amounted to a virtual museum of stringed instruments, and when he wasn�t busy playing one, he was caressing them, stroking them in a bizarre show of eroticism.

After starting with a Jimmie Day tune, �I Guess I Drank Our Precious Love Away,� Willie started a long blue jam going, and wound up re-doing �Whiskey River.� Then a romping version of �Under The Double Eagle,� that old picker�s favorite, and another Willie Nelson original, �Save Your Tears.� This last took some time, >as Bromberg had to piece his solo together.

Dinner at a bizarre Chinese/Cuban restaurant followed, with Connie discovering black bean soup and Bee discovering Moo Goo Gai Pan. Willie was talking a lot more now than he had been earlier in the week, mostly about how pleased he was with Arif. �I�m just as glad more people didn�t show up than did, too,� he said. �I think things�ve gone pretty smoothly, and they might not have otherwise.�

As if to prove his point, he knocked off two Leon Russell songs, �Your Song,� and �My Cricket and Me,� as solos as soon as he got back to the studio. Arif.brought forward some 1970 Chateau Bonnet (Entre Deux Mers), and various touching up continued right up until it was almost midnight. As Arif and a couple of other people overdubbed onto the afternoon�s bluesy jam, called �Willie�s After Hours,� Bee found a bottle of cheap vodka and took a swig. �Ecccch,� he said, holding the cap between thumb and forefinger, �goodNthing we ain�t broke the cap, or else we�d have to drink all of it,� and — of course — that�s just when the cap broke.

�Well, Willie,� said Arif, �How does it feel to have broken the Atlantic Studios� record for number of cuts finished in a week? You�ve recorded three albums, so your commitment to Atlantic is over. Who are you going to sign with next?� Willie just smiled. It had been a long week and a full one. Later, he and Arif and some others would go to Nashville for a bit of touching-up, but for now it was over, time to think about heading back to Austin, which had just had a record snowfall.

We all took cabs back to the Holiday Inn, and as Willie waited for an elevator, I decided I�d ask him something I�d wanted to ask for a long while. �Willie, why are all your songs so sad?� �Gee, Ed,� he replied, �I guess you might say I�d had thirty negative years.� Then he smiled at Connie and got on the elevator. At the age of thirty-nine, Willie Nelson has just started his career. He�s been through a lot, and only now have some of his songs shown a touch of optimism.

After this week in February, I�d say that optimistic is a pretty safe way for him to feel. v