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By Jeff Gordinier
Jeff Gordinier
Jeff Gordinier is an editor-at-large for EW; he has occasionally been mistaken for actor Edward Norton

Willie Nelson reaches across the table and whispers four soft words: ''It's good for you.'' His brown eyes are shining like sunlight on the Rio Grande. His voice is rustling like wind through a wheat field. And between those burlap knuckles of his, well, he's got a joint as fat as a rope.

It all feels like Luke Skywalker taking the lightsaber from Obi-Wan Kenobi. You can't say no.

So I don't. I inhale. Deeply. Which probably isn't the smartest journalistic strategy in the world, considering that my life's experience with ganja consists primarily of a couple of pathetic coughing fits in college. The thing is, there's something so gentle about Willie Nelson, so utterly blissful and reassuring, that climbing into his tour bus feels like stepping into the lost ashram of a Himalayan mystic. Just the sound of his laugh can lower your heart rate. Besides, it's late in the afternoon, and Willie's tiny office on the bus, the Honeysuckle Rose II, is already so banked with sweet herbal fog that a plane wouldn't be cleared for landing. A puff or two won't make any difference, right?

It's a busy day, even if it doesn't feel that way. Willie's supposed to ride the highway up to Boulder, Colo., to play songs from his haunting new album, Teatro, for radio station KBCO and a packed house at the Fox Theatre. Plus, he's just been named a Kennedy Center honoree, alongside wholesome entertainers like Bill Cosby and Shirley Temple Black, so people keep calling the bus to congratulate him.

If anyone deserves an official blessing from the United States government, why not Willie Nelson? He wrote national anthems like ''Crazy'' and ''Night Life'' and ''On the Road Again.'' He's saved Nashville from its cheesiest impulses with albums like Red Headed Stranger and Spirit and Stardust. His voice is seared on the American landscape as indelibly as the voices of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra. Besides, he's done a guest spot on King of the Hill. ''For me, Willie is what you'd imagine an elder would be like in native mythology,'' says Daniel Lanois, Teatro's producer. ''Without saying too much, he projects an aura that just makes you feel good to be around.''

But there's a fantastic irony here, too, when you think about a bunch of Beltway Babbitts squeezing into their tuxes and clinking their champagne flutes to the original Nashville outlaw, a man who's wrangled with drug laws and the Internal Revenue Service, who's crisscrossed miles of conservative highway with his beard and ponytails and beatific smile intact, who's spent a large portion of his 65 years whispering four soft, subversive words to the stress-battered American people: It's good for you.

''I was doomed to go to hell by the time I was 7,'' Willie is saying, ''because I had been told that if you smoke cigarettes and drink beer you're going to hell. And by 7, I was gone.'' Thus resigned to eternal damnation, Willie came up with the only spiritual approach that made sense: There's nothing to hide, and nothing to get too upset about. ''If you get up thinkin' everything's gonna be wonderful, you're gonna find out somethin' happened that wasn't that wonderful,'' he says. ''And if you think everything's gonna be terrible, then you're gonna miss what was good. So there is a little bit of Zen in there: You shouldn't be too elated at the good things, and you shouldn't be too depressed at the bad things.'' Not since Butch Cassidy has somebody so defiant been so laid-back about it.


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