Diary of a Player

by Brad Paisley

  Being a dad now, I was well aware that I was making music that my kids may actually hear someday, and I think that awareness hit home in the best way. As a parent, you tend to feel so much more than you have ever felt before. Having a child is to have your heart go walking around without you. Just about the best and most joyful out-of-body experience that I know. On the American Saturday Night album, I made a decision not to shy away from writing about everything that I was experiencing, and as a result, the album became a kind of musical autobiography in a way I’d never dared try before. I just decided to let the album be what it would be—whether that meant writing about Kim, about my sons on a song like “Anything Like Me,” or just about myself and all the thoughts running around my head at the time.

  But to be a parent is also to take the state of the world a little more seriously, and American Saturday Night was also written in the midst of a presidential election, so I had to take a longer look at the whole world through a new set of eyes. Frankly, I don’t really care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, Tea Party, Sausage Party, or whatever party knocks you out, but I think we can all take just a moment to be amazed at the remarkable changes all around us.

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  I don’t really care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, Tea Party, Sausage Party, or whatever party knocks you out, but I think we can all take just a moment to be amazed at the remarkable changes all around us.

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  My grandfather went to the Philippines during World War II to fight the Japanese, and now a few generations later I record for Sony Records and have toured twice in Japan. By the same token, a lot of us grew up under the impression that a black man didn’t have a chance at becoming president of the United States. As a parent, I’m happy that my kids will no longer think the color of your skin determines who is eligible to hold that high office. So as a very proud American who has been able to live my own version of the American Dream, I was very honored to go to the White House in July 2009 and do my first live performance of “Welcome to the Future” for our president and the First Lady as part of “A Country Music Celebration.” This celebration brought me together with Alison Krauss and with my first famous fan, Charley Pride, who’d made a point of cheering me on back when I was a kid at the Wheeling Jamboree.

  And now, a few short years later, the same kid who was given a Sears Silvertone guitar on his eighth Christmas had written and recorded his way to performing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I know of no other Christmas gift that could possibly contain this much potential to shape a life.

  In retrospect, American Saturday Night feels like a unique album for me. As I write these words, I am readying my next record, This Is Country Music. The album feels like a very different chapter, less personal, more rootsy. This Is Country Music isn’t really about any large issues or even necessarily about me. Just the other night, I realized that a lot of my songs on the ASN album start with the word “I.” Not the new record—for some reason, a lot of the new songs begin with words like “she,” or “you’re,” or “he.” If there’s a thread to This Is Country Music, then it’s about storytelling and looking at life from a perspective bigger than my own.

  Speaking of bigger, the tours I was taking to bring all these musical stories to the people got larger and larger as I hit the road in the wake of American Saturday Night. But as we prepared to launch my biggest show yet, the H20 Tour—named in honor of my single “Water”—we had no idea what was about to happen.

  Just as we were making final preparations to launch the first leg of the H20 Tour in May 2010, something happened that changed the way I look at touring, and my crew, forever. In the first two days of May, over nineteen inches of rain fell on Nashville, and the Cumberland River rose and crested at more than fifty feet—a level it hadn’t reached since 1937. Tragically, there were twenty-one deaths reported in Tennessee, and more souls lost in Mississippi and Kentucky too. The floods displaced thousands in Tennessee and tremendously damaged many of Nashville’s most familiar landmarks, including the Opryland Hotel, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, and the Grand Ole Opry House itself.

  In light of all that happened to so many friends and neighbors in Nashville, I’m a little reluctant to mention the impact the flood had on our now ironically named H20 Tour. Yet for the record, here’s what happened: a very big mess.

  Personally, I lost every single guitar and amp that I tour with besides my main old paisley Telecaster, which happened to be with me at home that day. All of our equipment was in a storage facility that flooded, so everything we had ready to go on the road for the tour was suddenly gone. This included drums, keyboards, speakers, mandolins, risers, and cases. And my entire custom effects rack, which was covered in river mud—somehow the water had found its way into the seams of the case. Also destroyed were my beloved amps—which, as a lifelong amp-head, really hurt.

  If you take a look at the Underwater documentary for GAC, which we started shooting about the tour before the flood hit, you can see for yourself what happened when they opened up my guitar container and all this water just came pouring out. Fortunately, I made a call to my friend Bill Crook at Crook Custom Guitars, who makes my electric guitars just the way I like them—one at a time with a real dedication to vintage craftsmanship—and he got right to work making me some new ones.

  And so, in the wake of what some called a thousand-year flood, mounting our H20 Tour suddenly became, without a doubt, one of the bigger professional challenges of our lives for absolutely everyone in our little touring village—and mind you, these tours can be a pretty decent-sized challenge even without a natural disaster. Put it this way: three weeks prior to the tour we had almost everything we needed to start that tour. Then our H20 Tour—celebrating the joy and romance of water in our lives—was suddenly in the middle of a total disaster zone created by too much water.

  We now had almost nothing we needed to start that tour. We had no stage because it was set up at the arena and got flooded. We had no guitar amps. We had a video wall that suddenly looked more like a chessboard. The only things working were our lights, because most of them were already hanging on the ceiling and thankfully, the water didn’t reach that high. Now, it’s quite hard to do a big concert without any guitars or a PA system, but rest assured, we were going to be really well lit as we stood there doing absolutely nothing.

  Fortunately, my team simply refused to let us do absolutely nothing.

  By Monday afternoon, we were already ordering the new gear we desperately needed to get the tour started. I needed cables. I needed guitar effects. Possibly I needed a little therapy, but first I needed new amps, and the folks at Dr. Z Amplification started building me new ones right away in Cleveland, so they could ship them to us in time. Meanwhile, the folks at Moo TV somehow managed to pull together enough video so that our show would still look like a million dollars.

  I will always be very proud of and thankful for what every one of them did to move heaven and earth and get our show on the road for us and for our fans too. I can tell you that we didn’t sleep very much those few weeks. Everyone pulled together and supported one another. It was an unbelievable thing to watch, because even I didn’t know if we were capable of pulling it off. We had to summon up our better angels to achieve this feat. There was no taking anyone for granted because we needed everybody’s best efforts, and we got them. We only got all of it together the day before the show. Our team showed the same spirit of cooperation that the town of Nashville showed as everyone reached out to help their neighbors.

  The country community also came together to do what we could. But it took the American media a while to understand what a big story this was. I tried to help, and I must admit it was pretty strange to find myself on CNN talking with Anderson Cooper about my conversation with the president of the United States to discuss how Nashville was doing.

  Finally, we started our H20 Tour in Virginia Beach, right on schedule. We were joined for the tour by Darius Rucker and Justin Moore
on the main stage, and for the first time we also had a second stage in our own Water World Plaza, where we presented Easton Corbin, Steel Magnolia, and Josh Thompson.

  That first show was one of the most emotional and triumphant moments I will ever experience onstage. I’m sure the people in the audience that night had no earthly idea what it had taken to bring all this together on time. That didn’t matter so much. What mattered is that we knew. My whole team would never be the same.

  As I made my big onstage entrance in Virginia Beach that night, I literally came up out of the water and suddenly, there was a whole different sort of waterworks. Thinking about everything we’d all just gone through, and about how lucky I am to have such people in my life, along with my wife and our two healthy and happy boys, I teared up again. I couldn’t sing our first song, “Water,” until I stopped crying tears of joy.

  You win some guitars. You lose some guitars.

  Yes, in 2010, I lost a lot of guitars, but when I think back on it, I’m pretty sure what I will remember most about that time is the one guitar I gained. I have always wanted a prewar Martin acoustic guitar, but they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it definitely seemed like an extravagance for a kid from Glen Dale, West Virginia. But after having lost my entire touring collection, and with a large insurance check in hand, it felt like maybe the guitar angels were trying to tell me something.

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  Sometimes guitars find their way home like a lost dog.

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  So in the wake of this tragedy, I went to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, a fantastic, one-of-a-kind store where you can walk to the second floor and play ten prewar Martin guitars. As far as I’m concerned, Gruhn’s is the best place in the world for a vintage-guitar man like me; very few other stores would have even two herringbone D-28s, but they have a dozen or so hanging there like fruit. So there I was, fantasizing over these amazing works of art. I went through strumming one at a time, really just soaking it in. But when my hands hit one particular guitar, those aforementioned angels sang.

  In every way, this Martin struck me as the most perfect instrument imaginable. When the right guitar hits your hands, it feels a little like a love connection, and right away I felt strangely and strongly connected to this one. Call it a guitar player’s sixth sense. As I was about to discover, sometimes guitars find their way home like a lost dog.

  Like a guy with a crush, I found myself going back to the store every few days just to play it and be close to it again and again. Then I asked my favorite guitar whisperer, Joe Glaser, to come with me to look at this Martin and see if it was as good as I thought it was. Joe checked it out, strummed it a few times, and said, “Buy it!” So as I was wrapping my head around actually owning this gem, the Gruhn staff brought out a framed account of the guitar’s history written by the daughter of the man who had owned it for most of its long life.

  All I knew was that this instrument had come from San Diego. But that wasn’t the whole story. The daughter of the man who owned it wrote that back in 1936, her father had been given a beat-up old guitar by his own dad and was told that if he played it to suitable proficiency, then his father would buy him the best guitar he could find. Well, he must have made the grade because in 1938, his father paid a local musician named Cowboy Loye Pack to go to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and pick up a Martin guitar for his son, and not just any Martin guitar, but a 1938 herringbone Martin D-28. The best guitar money could buy.

  Here’s the detail that made me realize that I was somehow fated to have this guitar. The woman explained that her grandfather had the money to buy such a good guitar because he had a good job during the Great Depression as a telegrapher for the B & O Railroad in Colfax, West Virginia. I couldn’t believe my eyes because that station was literally one station down the line from my grandfather’s own eventual place of employment, where he did the same exact job: telegrapher for the B & O Railroad.

  During World War II, this man enlisted—just like my grandfather—and took the Martin guitar along with him to all sorts of exotic places, including Cuba. After he returned, he and his family eventually moved to San Diego and lived there until he died in 1994. Following his death, the Martin guitar gathered dust for a few years. Eventually, the family couldn’t bear the sight of this beautiful instrument just sitting there silently, and they brought it to Gruhn’s. Then some collector bought the Martin but traded it in for a cleaner example. See, there’s a little X mark on this guitar that the daughter scratched on it when she was a little girl and got spanked for. After I had read all this, I realized, okay, I’m buying this no matter what. I could not bear the thought of letting anyone else get this guitar.

  My father later told me that the guitar’s original owner and my grandfather must have corresponded with each other and spoken by telegraph quite frequently. Dad also said that knowing my grandfather, the two of them would have talked about his three favorite topics: the railroad, country music, and his family. It struck me that the guitar was something my grandfather took up because of his long hours working on the railroad. Think about it: all that time between trains in a small-town station with no TV and not much communication. So there he was by himself with nothing much to do but pick up a guitar and play to pass the time.

  When I bought the guitar, I asked the folks at Gruhn Guitars if they would call the family and just let them know that I was the Martin’s new owner. I figured that since they were from West Virginia, they might be happy to hear that it was now in the hands of another player from the area.

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  SOLO

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  Brad is one of the nicest guys in the business. He’s also a really good guitar player and singer. I’m real proud of the husband and dad that he is too. That shows me the real Brad Paisley.

  —RICKY SKAGGS

  Anyway, my newly purchased 1938 herringbone Martin D-28 finally got delivered the morning Little Jimmy Dickens and I were among those invited to be at the Grand Ole Opry to see the six-foot-wide circle of wood taken from the original Opry stage at the Ryman reset at the Opry House. It’s a piece that Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and Minnie Pearl all walked on, and it was quickly removed for restoration soon after the Cumberland River rose and flooded the Opry House.

  * * *

  Like the circle, this guitar was also a piece of wood that had seen a whole lot of history.

  * * *

  At the last moment, it struck that me my first time playing my new old Martin was to be at this ceremony. Like the circle, this guitar was also a piece of wood that had seen a whole lot of history. But it had never made history. Little Jimmy Dickens and I—an eighty-nine-year-old West Virginian and a thirty-seven-year-old West Virginian—stood on that newly restored historic stage and sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” together while I played my new favorite guitar for the first time—itself a seventy-year old West Virginian of sorts.

  The very next night, I was playing Charlotte, North Carolina, when fifteen minutes before I hit the stage, I got a surprising note. The note read: “Here are some photos of your guitar—your 38 Martin. Enjoy it.” The note came from a Mr. Nichols, the son of the original owner, who unbeknownst to me lived in Charlotte. Fortunately, the note mentioned where he was sitting in the crowd, so I invited him and his family backstage after the show. I told them that even though I’d only owned this guitar for about forty-eight hours, it was already my favorite. He told me, “Well, Dad would have loved you—and you would have loved Dad.” They had not seen the guitar in a while, so I brought it out and played them a few songs while we all teared up.

  The son even told me that he used to push the strings to stop his father from playing, just like I did with my grandfather and my sons, Huck and Jasper, do now. Then Mr. Nichols tells me of his father’s love for traditional music and how they laid him to rest to a recording of “Li
fe’s Railway to Heaven.” I just shook my head. Of course they did. That also happens to be the very first song I ever played for an audience, that very first performance at the Glen Dale United Methodist church, so many years ago.

  When I was starting out, I wanted to be a player, a real player. Nothing more. Then I realized that I wanted to be a songwriter and communicate with the world that way too. Then you have a couple hits, and all of a sudden it’s time to put on some kind of show. So in a sense, that part of the picture came last to me. Being a big showman was not what motivated me.

  But being the front man of a band is a blast. There is nothing like bonding with a musical group that weathers the miles and the ups and downs right along beside you. Professionals who every night have your back. And I have the best band that I could ever imagine. Like most of the songs we play, these guys are road tested. Basically, we’ve kept the same group together since 1999 or 2000. My bandleader, Kendal Marcy, on keyboards, banjo, and mandolin; Ben Sesar on drums; Kenny Lewis on bass; Gary Hooker on guitar; Justin Williamson on fiddle and mandolin; and Randle Currie on steel guitar. They are called the Drama Kings. And they have definitely earned that name. You can imagine that in over a decade of highs and lows, there is a sense of family that is only barely eclipsed by DNA. And we have watched as our lives have changed together. From the status on our Facebook pages, to the houses we could afford, to the vehicles we drive, not much is the same.