Photo credit: Frank Stewart
Now that he has a little time off from road warrior Willie Nelson’s near-constant touring, Nelson’s longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael hopes to start up his own music project.
But Raphael, who has been in Nelson’s band since the mid-1970s, is still basking in the light of his “un-production” of Naked Willie, a compilation of 17 early Nelson sides that was released earlier this year.
Indeed, Raphael credited himself as the album’s “un-producer,” because he took the previously released recordings—culled from a dozen or so studio albums that Nelson recorded for RCA Records in Nashville between 1965 and 1974—and stripped away the lush orchestrations and backing vocals typical of the “Nashville sound” production style of the time.
“They’re from before I really knew Willie’s music,” says Raphael. “I was in the folk scene in Dallas and was playing with [‘My Maria’ hitmaker] B. W. Stevenson, and was more into bands like the Stones, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Band. Then I met Willie and had a crash course in country music.”
He first heard the songs that would make up Naked Willie while doing his research in 1972.
“Chet Atkins produced many of them and he was famous for the Nashville sound: sweet, syrupy orchestrations with heavy use of strings and background voices,” continues Raphael, whose first recording with Nelson was his self-produced 1975 landmark Red Headed Stranger. “Knowing him for the past 30 years and knowing that to him less is more, I’ve dreamed about going back and stripping them down to the basic tracks.”
Raphael cites the 2003 version of the Beatles’ Let It Be... Naked as a model, as it likewise removed the “wall of sound” embellishments to the original Phil Spector-produced 1970 release.
“The opportunity came after Sony and BMG merged and my friends at [the the newly combined company’s reissue department] Legacy started reissuing Willie’s records and I told them my idea,” says Raphael. “So I went to New York and transferred the tapes to a hard drive and came back to Nashville and started un-producing by taking stuff out and not putting anything else on: The original tracks were timeless, and I wanted to strip them down to just the band playing together at the same time in the same studio and sounding like it was recorded last week.”
Raphael doesn’t mean to belittle the initial releases, “just look at them through another lens and see what they would have sounded like if Willie was producing,” he says. “I had a lot to work with, except a lot of times everybody recorded in the same room and the tracks were limited by leakage, such that the strings went into Willie’s vocal [microphone]. Or I might have muted the piano to lose all the strings and then record another piano part, but I wanted to keep in the original parts and not mess with the overall integrity of the piece.”
He singles out the newly unproduced “Laying My Burdens Down.”
“There,’s some guitar playing by Grady Martin at the very end that was covered up by background vocals--that we brought up in the mix,” he says. He adds that on “I Let My Mind Wander,” Nelson’s voice “sounds so rich” from similarly being brought up in the mix.
“Everything’s centered on the vocal,” notes Raphael. “Because of the way it was recorded we couldn’t adjust the settings, but we warmed it up more and brought it up in the mix—so it’s not covered up by [background] voices.”
As for Raphael’s next solo instrumental project, he says that the successor to his 1988 debut solo album Hand To Mouth is in the works, currently in collaboration with Calexico’s Joey Burns.
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