MUSIC: Merle Haggard hangs tough at Aliante Station

    I’ve had my share of regrets in life – just look at that haircut – but as a music fan, perhaps the biggest one is missing out on the one opportunity I had to see Johnny Cash, back in 1997, when he played my college town of Champaign, Illinois.
    I never got another chance to see him before he died, and I told myself I’d never miss another legend like that should he or she come to my city.
    And so naturally, I was plenty primed for Merle Haggard at the Access Showroom at Aliante Station on Friday night.
    The thing is, though, going to see a luminary like Haggard late in his career is always fraught with uncertainty, especially considering that the man is only months removed from having surgery for lung cancer.
    You never know what you’re going to get. Are you going to catch the rousing final act of a sterling career? Or are you going to witness someone diminished by time, hanging on too long, like a prizefighter whose bell has been run one too many times?
    It’s almost like committing an act of infidelity, in a weird sort of way: sure, the temptation is strong and obvious, but ultimately, will it tarnish what has come before it?
    Mercifully, Merle Haggard proved to be worth the gamble.
    Two Fridays earlier, I had gone and seen another country great, George Jones at the Silverton, and while Jones too turned in a worthwhile show, he struggled with his breath from time to time and frequently got winded.
    Haggard, on the other hand, had no such troubles, though he didn’t sing with the power he once did.
    Backed by a sizable band, complete with a saxophonist and a trio of guitarists in addition to Haggard, it was enough to overpower the man at the center of it all from time to time.
    But for the most part, Haggard demonstrated why, some five decades into his career, he can still pack sizable showrooms like he did on this night.
     With a crowd that consisted of a few punks and rockabilly dudes in addition to the silver-haired country lifers, Haggard took the stage to one of the tunes that first established his outlaw country bonafides, “Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink,” a song about whiskey and regret that goes down just as hard as the stuff that inspired it.
    It was played as a slow, wizened waltz, as many of the tunes were on this night.
    Haggard’s shows these days are more about reflection than the raucousness once associated with a man who spent a good deal of his youth behind bars.
    He’s lived a long life, and he frequently looks back on it and how the world around him has changed.
    “I wish Coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be,” he sang during “Are the Good Times Really Over?” “It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV, before microwave ovens, when a girl could still cook, and still would.”
    But Haggard doesn’t come across as a bitter dude -- far from it. He was loose and in good spirits at the Access Showroom, smiling wide and cracking wise.
    “We’re the oldest travelin’ band in the world,” he quipped at one point. “We’re the only band that travels with nurses instead of roadies.”
    Maybe so, but the band still turned in loose, light-footed, almost jazzy versions of some of Haggard’s best-known tunes, from “Mama Tried” to “If We Make it Through December.”
    If some of the arrangements of his songs have evolved over the years, so has Haggard himself.
    “This is a song I wrote for my daddy,” he said by way of introducing “Okie from Muskogee,” his classic hit that is often seen as a conservative battle cry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with today.”
    This from a man who supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries and who recently wrote a song about Barack Obama – he didn’t vote for him, though.
    None of this is to suggest that Haggard has mellowed any with age.
    “I read about some squirrelly guy, who claims he just don't believe in fightin'” he growled during “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” “An' I wonder just how long, the rest of us can count on bein' free.”
    The Hag will be dead and buried before he stops throwin’ haymakers, and his mortality is on his mind, these days.
    “Just a few more weary days and then  I'll fly away,” he sang at show’s end, tipping his hat, bowing a little, and refusing to take flight just yet.