by Gerry House
Our security expert silently ushered and shooed the thrilled trespassers out the bedroom door. As they crept out, the guard said he looked back and Roy was still sawin’ away.
I always wondered if these folks went back home and were showing slides of their vacation. How they must have described being in Roy Acuff’s bedroom: “Oh, Opryland is just so wonderful. We rode the Log Flume and got all wet. We had a nice lunch at this little country place. And we went into Roy Acuff’s bedroom and watched him catch some z’s.”
“I hope next year we can see Dolly all racked out.”
I think if the Opryland powers-that-be had incorporated this into the tourist agenda, they’d still be open and doing big business.
Sake’s Fur and George Jones
“SAKE’S FUR QUIT WORKING,” Allyson announced one chilly evening in March. I’m used to her saying things like that, so I asked her how she knew Sake’s fur had “quit working.” “Look at him,” she said, pointing to the obviously shivering little Japanese Chin. “He’s just freezin’. I guess his fur just gave out and can’t keep him warm anymore.”
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Sake was a Christmas Eve panic purchase I’d made with Autumn as my endorser. We couldn’t think of what to get Mom, so we bought Sake at some pet store in a mall. I know it’s a terrible thing to do, but we’d had two glasses of wine, and it was getting near the gift shopping deadline.
I don’t believe Sake ever actually came to me when I called for him his entire life. He was a sweet little guy, but he either slept or stared out the window. He was a deep dog.
You could hear him thinking as he looked out while things blew by. Leaf. Leaf. Squirrel. Leaf. I am convinced Sake was actually a $900 rabbit. Sake has gone to doggie heaven now, but I kinda miss him giving that thousand-yard stare and bumping into the furniture.
I think George Jones’ fur just quit working. It was possum fur, to be sure, because that’s what a lot of people called him. I always thought bringing up George’s resemblance to one unattractive rodent was an insult. He never seemed to mind and even referred to himself as the Ol’ Possum. I maintain actual possums look so horrible because, when panicked, they fall over and pretend to be dead. To convince something that’s about to eat you that you’re dead, you have to look like “death on a cracker” all the time. Thus, and ergo, possums are horrible looking—like they’ve been up drinkin’ and snortin’ cocaine for two weeks. Now that I’ve said that, I understand why George Jones was called the Ol’ Possum.
I knew George when his fur quit working. He’d been the King for a long time and married to the most delightful woman ever, named Tammy Wynette.
Tammy Wynette’s voice just killed me. Nobody had that little “heart tug” in her voice like Tammy. “Stand By Your Man,” “’Til I Get It Right,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” and dozens of others were due to Billy Sherrill, a true genius producer and songwriter. Ask anybody to name one of their favorite all-time classic country songs, and I bet Billy is involved somehow.
After George Jones, Tammy married a friend of mine, Mike Tomlin. That lasted about as long as some of my lunches. Then she married George Richey, a songwriter and music business guy. That’s who I always saw her with. I was there the morning she did that weird TV interview with the networks. She claimed she had been kidnapped and beaten up. When I asked her about it, she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at me. I have a pretty good bullshit detector. Years of talking to strangers over the phone on the radio will do that for ya. It broke my heart because something didn’t sound right. I hugged her and told her to take care of herself. She had big tears in her eyes when she walked away. She seemed smaller than I remembered. I think she sang “Stand By Your Man” one too many times.
George and Tammy made some beautiful music together. This was before the duck. When I saw George years after divorcing Tammy, he talked in a duck voice. Not every now and then as a joke, but all the time. There was the rare sound of George’s actual speaking voice, but usually he responded in Donald Duck–speak. To be honest, it sort of became natural after awhile.
This was during his “No Show” period. He was hell-bent and hell-bound. George snorted up half of Peru, from what I heard. He went broke and Johnny Cash slipped him some Cash cash to keep him going.
I always feel sorry for people who are addicted. It’s a downward spiral you can’t get out of. You wake up one morning and talk like a duck. Don’t wake up one morning and talk like a duck.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Jane Pauley, host of NBC’s Today show at the time, came to Nashville for some excursion or another. As one of the “Music City Guides,” I gave Jane the grand tour (to quote a George Jones song) of the “inside” Nashville: the clubs, the homes, the stars. Jane also had broken her ankle or foot, so she was on crutches. We started out one afternoon at Printer’s Alley just for some camera shots and discussions of what a typical night in Nashville was like.
Printer’s Alley, where I broadcast that live TV show with Johnny Paycheck, is a tiny street filled with several strip joints and bars. In fact, I only went there when people did TV shows. For some reason, whenever anybody comes to town, they go to the Loveless Café, the Opry, and Lower Broadway. It’s the law. You have to go to these three places and then explain to your TV audience, “It’s the insider’s Nashville.”
So I took gimpy Jane Pauley and a couple of camera guys to Printer’s Alley. It had a long history of gambling and Lord knows what else going back as far as Prohibition. Every city has a section of town like that. A little dangerous, a little risqué, and usually a lot dirty—this was Printer’s Alley back then. Jane loved it.
We stood inside the nightclub. Actually, it was really a bar. More precisely, a honky-tonk. OK, let’s just call it a strip joint. Jane hobbled around and suggested a place she could do a “stand up” and shoot some stuff. I wandered off to the bathroom. It was about 5:30 P.M., and the place was deserted. A tiny stage, worn carpet, and sad pictures of horses on the walls made this your typical dive. I tried to open the bathroom door, and as I did, I whacked some guy in the rear who was bent over the sink. The guy was George Jones.
I am not gonna guess what George was doing, but I knew it was not examining the sink top for cleanliness. He stood straight up and said in that unmistakable actual Possum voice, “Well, hello there, son.” I was dumbstruck. And he didn’t talk like a duck.
I led George back into the club and introduced Jane to the King of Country Music. She looked puzzled, as she should have been, and asked what George was doing in that club at six in the evening. Then the most amazing thing happened. George saw the cameras and somehow through his foggy brain figured out he was there to perform. He mumbled a few things we didn’t understand. And then the man himself, the Voice, the King of Country, got up on that tiny stage and started singing.
We sat there like we’d been hit by lightning. The camera guys started to film, and Jane, much to her credit, stopped them. George wasn’t aware that there wasn’t a band. He didn’t need one. George Jones sang “He Stopped Loving Her Today” all the way to the end. It was breathtaking. The tiny crowd was his, and we clapped. George made his way offstage and banged his way out the door and into the street. The Possum was gone.
Jane Pauley went back to New York and the Today show after visiting the Opry, Lower Broadway, and the Loveless Café. She cheered how great their biscuits were. Everybody up with the damn biscuits.
George Jones married Nancy in 1983. She saved George’s life and legacy, simple as that. George was a sweet man who had gone off into the ditch. Nancy got him started on the long road back.
She got the Possum’s fur working again.
Songwriting and Songwriters
PROBABLY AMONG THE QUESTIONS I get asked most are, “Do you miss radio?” and, “Are you sick of being mistaken for Pierce Brosnan?” and, “How does songwriting work?”
The answers are “Kinda,” “No,” and “I don’t know.”
I do know I couldn’t have be
en only a songwriter. I don’t have the nerve to do it, I don’t have the thick skin to do it, and I certainly didn’t have the money to do it. Songwriters are out there on the fringes of actual employment. You can be a songwriter and do it once every time Halley’s Comet goes around. Nobody knows. Your wife probably knows and so do your creditors, but otherwise, you can put “songwriter” on your passport and everybody nods in acceptance.
In my case, I had another career/job as a radio guy. It was a double-edged sword. I played the songs my friends wrote and got paid for, but I also longed to play my own songs. How ego-driven is that?
Songwriters are brain-damaged. Imagine working alone in a room or with another songwriter on a tune for hours on end. Crafting the lyrics, honing the melody. Working the demo and pitching it to an artist. It bombs. Nobody likes it. Not one human being on the planet says, “I am going to record that.” That happens in Nashville over and over and over.
Being a songwriter is like being a piñata for judgment. People will listen to ten seconds’ worth, turn down the volume, and start talking about their hemorrhoids. Your heart and soul are still playing in the background. Whoever is listening rejects it within seconds, and without so much as a whisper of regret says, “What else ya got?”
Once I was standing in the outer office of a major record producer. A guy who could make a hit out of a song on a cassette. I witnessed a young, scruffy, scared songwriter walk through the door like he was going to his execution. He said, “Howdy, ma’am,” to the receptionist/door guard/gatekeeper/executioner. “I just drove all day to bring you this song ’cause I heard they take songs, so I brung down a hit.” Now, this was early on in my songwriting experience, and it sort of chilled me. Without looking up and without a word, Eva Braun stuck out her hand. The rattled song-smith handed off his hopes and dreams. She tossed it over her shoulder, where it crashed into a massive cardboard box on the floor that used to hold toilet paper. It slowly settled into the thousands of other songs to join the black hole of hits. He stood there awkwardly and then backed out the door. Welcome to Nashville, there, son. I never saw that poor guy again.
I got the whole picture in that twenty-second exchange. She wasn’t really being mean. It’s just that everybody’s song is a hit. If only I had been paid a dollar each time I had to listen to somebody’s latest unrecorded wonder. We all do it. Usually it’s the last thing we wrote. This is the one. Usually it isn’t.
Here is songwriting in a nutshell, which I am covered in right now—a thin nutshell. I arrived in town having written some songs. I didn’t know anybody or anything about the music business (often referred to as the music “bidness” or the “leave me alone, I don’t want your songs” business). I drove to Music Row. I saw a building with the words Combine Music on the front. Quickly, I cleverly deduced, “They must take songs in that place.”
I had four songs with me and pushed the creaky glass door open. The receptionist listened politely and said, “Hold on. I’ll see if somebody will listen to your stuff.” I was in. She told me to go up the stairs, turn right, second office on the left. As I trudged up those steps, I saw awards plaques lining the walls. A BMI award to Kris Kristofferson. A Million-Air award to Dennis Linde. A Most-Played Song of the Year award to Tony Joe White. It was intimidating, to say the least.
Suddenly, I was in the office of Al Cooley. He was lighting a cigarette, and we exchanged a few words. He was busy. I was nervous. I gave him the tape of my tunes. He listened to about twenty seconds of all four. He then looked me straight in the eye and said, “These are the weirdest songs I’ve ever heard in my life. Man, I don’t know what else to tell ya. I couldn’t get these cut if I had a gun.” He had shot me straight though the heart, but he was honest and direct. That was his opinion, and I liked that. (We later became friends and smiled when we saw each other. And I didn’t really like it, but people always say they like honest criticism.) If you believe people love criticism of their work, check out the rejected singers coming out the door on American Idol.
Armed with the knowledge that I had four of the “weirdest songs ever heard,” I walked across the street for a block and saw the MCA Music Publishing sign on the front of an old house. Most publishing offices were in old houses along Music Row. I was gonna try it again. Receptionist-songwriter words exchanged here. Go up steps. More plaques of honor on the walls in office. There sat John Ragsdale. Songwriter-publisher, awkward conversation, hand over tapes. John Ragsdale leaned back and blinked, winced, twitched, and listened. All four, all the way through to the end. He leaned forward and looked me straight in the eye. “Man, I don’t know what else to tell ya. I love these songs. I think I can get these cut.”
Same songs. Same day. Same Music Row. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. John Ragsdale is Ray Stevens’ brother. (I didn’t know that at the time.) John Ragsdale put up his own money and some of MCA’s to make professional demos of my pitiful guitar/vocal versions. Two got recorded. This is gonna be easy, thought the kid with songs in his head and dreams in his heart. As they say in the commercials, “But wait! There’s more!” And that is, it ain’t so easy.
I guess as a songwriter, I’d admit, “Thank God for radio.” I’ve had several actual hits and dozens of album cuts, but I’ve never had that enormous smash. I always thought that the late Van Stephenson from the band BlackHawk had the best definition of a true hit song. Van had been a recording artist on his own and had one big hit single. He said one day, “I wanna write a song I don’t have to sing to anybody. I’ll say the title and they’ll already know it.”
Usually I have to explain the title again, and the star who sang it, and then I sing a little . . . and give the era . . . and then sing a little more. And then people will say, “Oh, yeah, I sorta remember that one.”
My friend Don Schlitz can say to a room full of strangers, “Hi, I’m Don Schlitz and I wrote ‘The Gambler.’” Everybody applauds. Don actually made up the words, “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” I’ve heard that in movies and TV shows and political speeches a thousand times, which explains why I hate Don so much.
Country songwriters are deeply brain-impaired by the fact they are surrounded constantly by the C & W. It’s just painfully obvious. Consider this: I know a songwriter who kept a stack of pictures on his kitchen table. You’d go over, and they’d be there. Just photos of a big boom box. When asked, “Buddy, why the pictures of the radio?” he would delightfully tell ya, “Man, I took them pitchers at the exact moment George Strait was singing my song on the radio.” The song was a big hit, and Buddy had confirmed this moment in musical history by taking a picture of the radio. Of course, he could have taken it yesterday and it would look exactly the same, but in Bud’s country-ravaged mind, he could sense George was singing his song. See what I mean?
I paid the bills with radio and earned my “mailbox money” from songwriting. Some guys live on one hit. They get a single song through the “system,” and it gets played and then goes into the giant cardboard box of forgotten records. No matter, it’s their badge of honor for the rest of their lives.
I knew John Ims, who had two hits—one for Trisha Yearwood (her first) and one for Reba. I saw him while he was taking that glorious “hit songwriter” ride, and he told me, “Ger, I am moving to the Rockies. With my lifestyle, I can make enough now to last me for thirty years. Gonna take it easy.” And he left. Couple of homers, and he’s going to the showers. Good for him.
I know a gentle soul who was constantly at the bar I inhabited. Of course, I was there all the time, but I always thought, He is here all the time. It’s like going to a country club and seeing the same golfers. Don’t you people have homes? Bud (yes, another Buddy) was there drinking and telling stories and laughing. He was the sweetest man in the world. That afternoon, a producer friend of mine (Ron Chancey) said, “Come up to my office. I wanna play you something.” I was pretty interested. Ron then proceeded to tell me, “I just paid off Bud’s bar bill at Maude’s” (a fa
mous Music Row watering hole). “In return, he gave me his publishing share on this song.” (I’ll explain publishing sometime, but basically the publisher makes the same amount of money as the songwriter.)
Ron said, “Tell me what you think. Did I just blow a thousand dollars?” (I guess Bud had run up a good tab over a few weeks.) Wow. A thousand bucks for some song some guy wrote that I didn’t know. Pretty risky stuff.
Ron started the tape and a demo singer began, “Blame it all on my roots. I showed up in boots and ruined your black tie affair.” For the price of a set of radials, Ron now owned half the publishing to “Friends in Low Places.” I can’t imagine the millions that song made. In many ways, it started a wave of new country artists led by a singer named Garth Brooks.
Nobody got ripped off. Nobody strong-armed nobody into that deal. Willie Nelson had sold the rights to “Crazy,” the Patsy Cline masterpiece, for fifty dollars, so Bud actually got about the same, adjusted for inflation. It’s just the way the town is—the game that is Music Row. Songs are like magic floating in the air and talked about and rumored and BANG! Hits are born, and lives are changed. Fortunes are made, and some guy walks in style up 16th Avenue.
You can, it’s hoped, now see why some people get wacky from country music. I’ve known people who hit the jackpot and lost it all. One guy had an enormous hit and spent his first big check on a tricked-out Winnebago, left to explore America, and never came back. It’s that wildcatting thing that does it to everyone.
It’s sort of calmed down a bit nowadays. This is a factory town, with guys going to little song mills and hammering out a piece of art and hoping someone will like it. It’s not a coincidence that Willie knew, early on, enough about songwriting to write “Crazy.”