The album Here for the Party soon followed on the heels of the single and things got even crazier. The album was number one on the country charts the day it came out and was certified platinum by the end of the first week of its release. In a little office ceremony, John Grady handed me a gold record and a platinum record on the very same day. The publicity demands kept increasing and I was just trying to keep my balance and sanity on a day by day basis. Things got big fast. I was asked to perform at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas. I was getting ready to make my Grand Ole Opry debut, this time for real. I started meeting people like Charlie Daniels, whom I had admired for a lifetime. I got to play before a hometown crowd of twenty thousand in St. Louis—it was just like playing for the forty-five people who knew me down at Big O’s, only this time they brought all their in-laws and everyone from down at the welding factory. And I started showing up on programs like the Today show and The Tonight Show. I seemed to be everywhere at once.
The Today show, for instance, was the first national morning show I’d ever done and only the second time I had been to New York. My very first trip to New York, only a short time before, was to do a showcase as a new artist on the label for Sony executives. I remember talking to Jeff Foxworthy on his radio show the minute I got to town. He immediately asked, as he always does, “Where are you and what are you wearing?”
“Well, Jeff,” I said, “I’m in New York City laying on the bed in some fancy-schmancy hotel and I’m wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and tennis shoes and I can’t find a cup of coffee that doesn’t have cinnamon or something in it.” He got a big laugh out of that—wide-eyed country girl in the Big, bad Apple.
For the Today show appearance, it was a really, really early call, and for a late-night bartender/singer like myself, it was not exactly the perfect time of day to be on stage yelling “Hell yeah!” I will never forget setting up for that performance. We were outside Rockefeller Center and when we did the sound check and quick rehearsal, it was five A.M. and still dark outside. There were only a few people in that predawn crowd and half of them were probably wondering who the hell I was. (There are hard-core country fans in New York, but there is little or no country radio or other widespread exposure.)
So, at five o’clock in the morning in the middle of a plaza in the middle of New York City, it was time for us to rev it up and kick ass. And that’s just what we did. The response surprised the hell out of me. This growing crowd of people who looked nothing like my regular fans were starting to smile, whoop it up, and call out my name. For me, coming from a world light-years away from this ultra-urban backdrop, it was bizarre. It was one of the strangest stage experiences I’ve ever had.
On that same trip to New York, I did Live with Regis and Kelly. After my second album was released, I went back to Regis and Kelly. This time, backstage before my number, I happened to mention to Kelly that my Aunt Vickie always calls it The Kelly and Regis Show. Regis must have picked this up on Kelly’s microphone or something, because when he said goodbye to me on the air, he ended with, “Hey, Gretchen, say hello to Aunt Vickie!” He busted me then and there. Nothing gets past an old pro like Regis Philbin.
A lot of numbers were being thrown around in those early weeks after the album came out. Apparently Here for the Party sold 800,000 CDs in less than a month. Experts were proclaiming that it was on its way to being the biggest selling debut album in the history of country music. I broke all the records, they said, even some of those set by Garth Brooks. Of course Carrie Underwood from American Idol came along and broke my records. But I had all the bragging rights there for about fifteen minutes.
It was hard to grasp the significance of all of these statistics piling up. I was thrilled that so many people liked the music and just happy to be out there singing. Singing, I knew how to do. Everything else was exhausting. It was a dizzying life of bus-plane-bus-plane-bus-bus-car-plane.
And then the awards started coming. The first statue of any kind I’d ever won was the first award I won at the Country Music Awards (the CMAs). It was the Horizon Award for Best New Performer. The live show was the first time I ever had to say something to an audience like that. It was also the first time I had ever sung in front of the whole country music industry.
The song I sang was the ballad “When I Think About Cheatin’.” I was so scared, looking out at all those famous faces. I caught the eye of Alan Jackson, who was sitting in the first row. He had a friendly look so I focused on him throughout the whole performance. Every time I opened my eyes, I found Alan. My thinking was, “He looks like he’s on my side.” I’m sure others were, too, but I was too frightened to notice.
Then I had to get back on stage to accept the award and I don’t remember anything I said except that I had been in the back of the same audience the year before and dreamed I could be up here, and here I was. The rest is a complete blank. It’s a good thing that I didn’t get into this business to talk, because I wouldn’t have gotten very far.
My first big performing tour was opening for Brooks & Dunn. I was the opening act, the very first performer on stage. I got to play twenty-five minutes and since it was summer and outside, it was still daylight when I went on. There are usually three acts in a country concert like this. The opening act, in this case, me, gets to play with the sun often glaring right into their eyes. The second act—on this tour it was Montgomery Gentry—gets to play in part daylight and part darkness. Finally the headliner, Brooks & Dunn, the act that everyone paid to see, comes on when everything is just right—the sky is dark, the air is cool, and the crowd is ready to whoop and holler.
Despite the afternoon sun and heat, this was great fun because I shared the stage with some of the best performers in the business and their audience was probably a lot closer to me than those people on the streets of New York. Even before that tour, I got to stand on home plate at Busch Stadium in St. Louis and sing, on national TV, the national anthem at game four of the World Series. Having grown up only fifty miles away, I’ve been a huge Cardinals fan since I knew what a baseball game was. This was like another Pocahontas homecoming, in front of the whole world.
It was in the middle of the Brooks & Dunn summer tour that we had a ten-day window, ten days with no concerts scheduled. I was ready to go home for a decent spell and play in the backyard with Grace, but my management gurus had a different idea—a quick, round-the-world media tour to promote the album.
And I mean, around the whole world. In that ten-day period, we traveled 27,000 miles. The redneck woman went global.
It made good sense, of course. The record was breaking worldwide and the timing was right to put a face to the music from Australia to Sweden. We took off and literally circumnavigated the globe in ten days in July. We started in Australia and then flew around the world to London, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and a few points in between. I did only four live gigs, I think, in London. Everything else was radio, print, and TV. We did morning shows, late-night shows, variety shows, you name it. In a place called Ulladulla, Australia, we did a long-running variety show called The AFL Footy Show. “Footy” refers to Australian football, which was the launching pad for the show. I shared a dressing room in the back of a semi with a muscleman and a nine-year-old kid who dressed up like Gene Simmons of Kiss and lip-synched Kiss tunes on stage. It was fun, but it was nuts.
Marc Oswald claims that the only time I lost it through all these interviews and appearances in places I had never, ever been before was on one occasion in Germany. I was trying to call Grace across four or five time zones and the connection was less than perfect. I missed Grace terribly—this trip was the longest time we had ever been apart in our life. Anyway, in the face of my frustration in trying to talk to her, I broke down and cried. I regained my composure pretty quickly but, frankly, I’m not sure how. I was operating on some source of energy I didn’t even know I had. This was it, I figured. This was the time to go all-out, and that’s what I tried to do.
The fans in every
one of those places were great. In Australia they seemed to know who I was. In England, at least my first trip there, the media people knew about me but most music listeners had never heard of me. I did have a little trouble with the food in most of those places—even Australian beef tasted a little funny to me. I was happy to see that you could find a McDonald’s from Melbourne to Stockholm. We once made a fueling stop in Singapore that was just enough time for me to find a McDonald’s, fill up a to-go bag, and get back on the plane. I’m sorry, I was still a country girl—I couldn’t go to Sweden and eat something off the menu like salmon fetus. Marc claims I am capable of finding a McD anywhere in the world in under three minutes. A lot of the time, it was either that or starve.
The accents occasionally threw me off a little, too. Most people everywhere spoke English, but sometimes it was a fractured English. In Oslo, I remember, we were doing a morning radio show and the interviewer was a very nice Norwegian man with only a partial grasp of American English. It was a live show broadcasting all over Norway; the whole country was listening in. The interviewer was asking me about how I wrote my songs, and in the middle of the discussion he blurted out the following question: “When you write these songs, do you feel like you’ve touched yourself?”
I knew what he was getting at, but my mouth dropped. My comeback, as I recall, was something like “I don’t think I’m gonna answer that question.” I had already been playing this media game for a while. With questions like that, you either think fast or sit there turning six shades of red.
Back from that trip, and at least partially recovered from the weird food and strange questions, I was asked to do a feature for 60 Minutes. Ed Bradley came out, spent some time getting to know me, and then together we took a trip back to Pocahontas. Ed began the profile by listing all the great things that had happened up to that point—a number one album, my first awards from the Country Music Awards and the American Music Awards, the four Grammy nominations that I had just received, all in a pretty short period. Then he went right into the meaning of the song “Redneck Woman.” My answer:
“I’ve never associated being a redneck with racism. . . . I think my grandpa was a little bit on that side, you know? I loved him just the same, but I had to tell people, he’s just—and I hate to say this about him—but he’s just ignorant.”
I didn’t pull any punches, either about Grandpa or a few other aspects of my life. I talked about drinking too much, but also noted that I never had any kind of drug problem. “I attribute that,” I said, “to being witness to some of my mom’s problems. There are times I remember having to go get her at the tavern. She wasn’t capable of driving herself home. You know, for a kid who’s . . . trying to get to bed for school the next morning, that made me mad. I mean, it really pissed me off.”
I guess I was glad to get that off my chest, in front of fifteen million of my closest TV-watching friends.
Finally, after endless months of traveling and talking and singing and posing and packing and unpacking, I got a break. For a few great weeks, I got to spend all day every day with Grace. By that point I had gotten my first royalty check and could at least pay a few people back, if not buy a few things for myself. I remember going down and picking out a new truck. It was a GMC Sierra three-quarter-ton pickup with an extended cab and four-wheel-drive Duramax Diesel. A hit record, a beautiful daughter, a new truck—what more could a country girl ask for?
But the roller-coaster ride soon started up again. Between the performance dates and the personal appearances and the video shootings, I had a new album to put together. Again, working with John Rich, Vicky, and other great writers, we turned out some songs that I felt expanded on the personal, almost autobiographical, tone of the first album. The more I wrote, the more confident I was that if I just said what was on my mind and in my heart, I’d keep connecting to my listeners.
“Not Bad for a Bartender,” for instance, came from a line John kept repeating every time we got an award or went to some fancy event. He’d look at me, smile, and say, “Hey, not bad for a bartender.” That grew into a song that truly expresses my amazement at what had happened to me. When I sing, in reference to my fans, that “I can’t believe how long they wait in the autograph line,” that’s the honest truth. I’m thrilled, of course, but also continually surprised. “Who are they waiting for? ME?”
Of course what was sometimes on my mind bothered a few other people, which we found out when that second CD came out.
Take the song “Skoal Ring,” a simple little tune about a woman who loves men who chew tobacco. Now, to me, that’s country to the bone. The song opens with:
Don’t need no diamond ring
Don’t want a bunch of bling bling
The only thing I really need
Is a man with a Skoal ring
What I’m talking about here—as I had to explain to a few Northerners like Matt Lauer on Today—is the ring mark that a can of Skoal tobacco leaves on the back pocket of your blue jeans. It’s not hard to spot if you come from my part of the country. As we were writing the song, I came up with a line about the singer (me) being a Bandit Girl—one kind of Skoal—and the guy being a Long Cut Man—another kind of Skoal. John Rich almost fell over laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Gretchen,” John said, “only you could think that people are different because they chew different flavors of Skoal. That’s the most redneck thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”
And that little bit of redneck reality made it into the song:
I’ve always been a Bandit Girl and he’s a Long Cut Man
Somehow we still get along with different colored cans
When that boy comes home from work smellin’ like the farm
That berry blend on his lips still turns me on
When “Skoal Ring” hit the airwaves, there was some definite mumbling among the anti-smoking crowd. Some people thought I was promoting the use of smokeless tobacco among my fans, especially impressionable underage girls. The attorney general from the state of Tennessee wrote me a letter and asked me to stop showing a can of tobacco on stage while I was singing that song. The implication was that I was contributing to the delinquency—and ill health—of minors by singing the praises of an addictive drug, not to mention all the adults picking up a can on the way home from the concert.
I could see the point. Smokeless tobacco is far from harmless. Used in excess, it can damage teeth and gum lines and increase the risk of developing cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus. Just because you don’t smoke it doesn’t mean the same toxins don’t find a way into your body.
But I wasn’t trying to promote tobacco. I’d never dream of pushing alcohol or tobacco or anything like that onto a child. I have a child, you know, and I don’t plan to encourage her to chew, smoke, or drink Jack Daniel’s. This is a song that happens to feature a very common figure from real life—a good-looking, hardworking good ol’ boy with a big ring mark on his faded back jeans pocket. He is of age to chew, as is the singer of the song. I guess I could have identified the same guy by his hat or his truck or the beer can in his hand, but I choose the ring on his pocket. I in no way meant to offend or upset anybody, but the song rings true to me and says something about the people I know and like. Because of that, I’ll keep singing the song and hope that parents out there will teach their own kids about the dangers of smokeless tobacco.
Another song from that record that got people talking was the one I sang with Merle Haggard, “Politically Uncorrect.” It was a Merle-type song—say what’s on your mind. I liked it right away because if you listen closely, it’s a song about the pride and dignity of common people. It’s not about politics, as many people assume without hearing the lyrics. It’s about the underdog and maybe because Merle sings on the cut and the fact we say “God” a time or two, some people have seen it as a kind of conservative anthem. It’s not that at all. Politically, you can interpret the lyrics any way you please, but the only point I’m
making when I sing it is, “Hey, see these people. Give them some respect. They’re as real and as worthy of praise as all those Hollywood stars and media types who pop up on TV every day.”
Singing alongside Merle Haggard is hard to put into words. Even today, when I listen to that recording and his voice comes on, I get goose bumps and the hair on my arm stands up. Merle is a legend—in some ways, the epitome of country music—but more importantly, Merle is a great, great singer and no less so today than thirty years ago. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but if you listen to a lot of country radio, it’s like they’ve forgotten about people like Merle. And Charlie Daniels. And George Jones. George’s last record is one of the best he’s ever made. Same with Hag. People ask me all the time, “So, what’s in your CD player right now?” And the answer is, “It’s the old-timers, man, and they’re making music better than ever and no one in commercial music seems to be paying attention.”
I have become friends with and hope to write songs with a whole list of country legends, including Hag, Tom T. Hall, and Loretta Lynn. Loretta is as real as a member of my own family. She reminds me of both my grandma and my mom. She is like an instant mom to whoever she is talking to. And she’ll tell you exactly what’s on her mind.
At one CMT Awards ceremony, Martina McBride and I were set to give Loretta a special award called the Johnny Cash Visionary Award. We were standing offstage as they played clips of Loretta’s incredible career. Loretta, of course, is not paying any attention to this. She’s going, “Do I look fat in this dress? Martina, tell me the truth, does this look bad on me?” So the three of us started jabbering about anything and everything until someone said, “Loretta Lynn!” The curtain opened and Loretta the Star walked right out.
On another occasion, Kris Kristofferson gave me a ride in his limo one night in New York to the premiere of Walk the Line. A couple of months later he was putting together a charity album featuring various artists singing his songs and he asked me to record the song Johnny Cash made famous, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” I of course said yes, but it was a very tough song to sing and I wasn’t sure I had done it justice. I don’t think I have ever sung a song that heavy.
Redneck Woman Page 14