Watermelon Wine

by Frye Gaillard

  “Don Vincent and I wrote it on a Sunday,” Vince recalled. “We pitched it to Webb Pierce on Monday, and he cut it on Wednesday. I thought, ‘Jeez, this is the easiest thing I ever did. I think I’ll do it every day.’ I’ve been hitting off and on ever since—mostly off, I might add.”

  The gyrations between high-riding success and abject, starvation-level failure have defined Vince’s career, and the capricious pummeling has taken its toll on his ego and all-around psychological functioning. His songs kept getting better and better, but his ratio of success remained frustratingly constant. There were some definite high points: He wrote “Bob” for the Willis Brothers, which was one of the most serious records that they ever did, and along with Jim Casey he wrote a song called “Toast of ’45” for Sammi Smith. It told the story of an over-the-hill movie actress, and established Matthews as a writer with a deep-seated understanding of the human condition.

  It established him, that is, among the other artist-types around Nashville, but not among the record-buying public. For the dry spells continued to plague him, and the eye-opening fact of the matter was that they had little relationship to anything—to how hard he was working, or how well he was writing, or even how deeply he wanted to succeed.

  That kind of psychological environment will leave you with a finely honed sense of the absurd, and it may have been for that very reason that Vince fell in so compatibly with Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson arrived in town several years after Vince had already established a toehold, and like Matthews he found himself bouncing around between his own basic confidence in what he could do and the hard and cold fact that no one was listening. So the two of them took what comfort they could in a loose confederation of other Young Turks, a sort of artistic cabal consisting of Mickey Newbury, Townes Van Zandt, Billy Swann, and a few dozen more—sharing songs, joints, and good times, and boosting one another’s creative instincts.

  Vince was genuinely stunned by Kristofferson’s ability with words, and during the lean years when the Music Row decision-makers weren’t paying much attention, Kris would bring over his latest compositions and lay his ego on the line for a Matthews critique. Sometimes he listened to what Vince had to say, and other times, fortunately, he didn’t. Once, for example, Kristofferson brought over a brand-new ballad called “Me and Bobby McGee,” and Vince told him it was great except for the line about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose.

  “Doesn’t fit,” Vince insisted. “Disrupts the story line.”

  Matthews will tell the story on himself with considerable delight these days, laughing in his semi-maniacal way about how Kristofferson’s words have become a sure bet for any updated versions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Then, with another slurp at his Budweiser, he will turn suddenly serious and affirm with a sheepish nod of his head that “there was actually a time when I thought I was as smart as ole Kris.”

  It’s a revealing confession, an unintended testimonial to the fact that his friendship with Kristofferson has been a double-edged reality. On the one hand it has certainly helped him, for Kristofferson has pushed his songs, plugged him on national TV, and even, on occasion, shoved him onstage for concert appearances. But on the other hand Kris became famous and Vince never did, and that’s a tough one to take no matter how well you and your ego get along. In Matthews’s case, the relationship with his self-esteem has always been a little bit turbulent, and he has spent more hours than he cares to remember wondering why he wasn’t born a genius.

  Actually, however, that may be the wrong question, for at his best Vince can write songs with anybody. Johnny Cash once maintained that a Matthews composition called “Melva’s Wine” was the “best contemporary folk song in American music.” And “On Susan’s Floor”—recorded in equally moving versions by Gordon Lightfoot and Hank Williams, Jr.—has its own mini-cult following among country musicians.

  So the barrier between Vince and stardom is not really his brain. But it is something equally basic: it’s his voice. He can’t sing a lick. Some people would argue, of course, that Kristofferson can’t either, but Vince is to Kristofferson as Kristofferson is to Mario Lanza; and to understand the full weight of that reality, you had only to accompany Vince one night a few years back to an Exit Inn appearance by Mickey Newbury.

  Newbury had established himself by then as one of the more magnificent vocalists on the country scene, with a voice that was mellow and strong and throbbing with emotion. When he turned it loose on his own compositions—songs like “Heaven Help the Child” and “An American Trilogy”—jaws would drop in the crowd, eyes became riveted to the front of the room, and all other sounds dried up with the kind of awe and deference that the occasion always seemed to demand.

  At least that’s what usually happened. But if Vince was along you never quite knew what to expect, and on this particular night he was so far on his way toward chemical alteration that he simply couldn’t contain himself. He began to sing along from his back-row seat, softly at first, but soon with all the power and sincerity of a wounded dog or a cow in labor.

  Through it all, he retained a sort of boozy and beatific tolerance toward the stares of hatred and disbelief that were being cast in his direction. However, when a waiter began taking whispered orders for drinks during one particularly moving number, Vince lurched up to him and demanded that he please show respect for an artist of Mickey Newbury’s caliber.

  But that, as people around Nashville are fond of saying, is just Vince. He has a fierce and unshakable loyalty toward people he respects, and the feeling is very often mutual. When he decided a few years back, for example, that he wanted to cut an album, Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein agreed to produce it, and Johnny Cash wrote some liner notes and even whistled background on one of the cuts. And surprisingly enough, given Vince’s limitations in front of a microphone, most people who heard it thought it was a pretty good record, especially in its content. It was a concept album titled Kingston Springs Suite and telling the story of Kingston Springs, Tennessee, a tiny, hill-country town that you could plunk down with equal validity almost anywhere in middle America.

  Matthews lived in Kingston Springs for seven years, developing a strong affection for its people, and he brought that feeling alive with songs about an old man dying, a young girl leaving town (because she believed, erroneously, that no one cared about her), and a village blacksmith who was also a dispenser of down-home wisdom.

  Counting the time he spent writing the songs, Vince worked on the album off and on for more than five years. He couldn’t find a record label to back the project, but it developed into an obsession with him and he went into the studio anyway. He says he spent fifty thousand dollars of his own money (actually money that he didn’t really have yet) buying studio time, paying musicians, and even having half a dozen records pressed in order to try to sell the finished product to a major label.

  But even with the intercession of his well-connected friends, nobody was interested, and Vince found himself financially and spiritually in considerable debt—especially since he wasn’t getting any songs cut by other artists. The year 1974 came and went before he had earned a penny, and the prospects didn’t appear too much better in the early months of 1975. So Vince said good-bye to Kingston Springs and Nashville and headed for New York, hoping desperately that greener pastures might be waiting somehow amid the concrete canyons. They weren’t.

  But then, in one of those unexplainable quirks that have characterized Vince’s flirtations with country music, a pair of newcomers named Gene Watson and Crystal Gayle decided to record some songs that he had written several years earlier. Watson’s version of “Love in the Hot Afternoon” went to the top of the charts, and Miss Gayle (who is Loretta Lynn’s little sister) did almost as well with “This Is My Year for Mexico”—the story of a housewife trapped by habit and dreaming of the places she would go if her spirit were only a little bit freer.

 
Charley Pride soon cut a masculine version of Crystal Gayle’s hit; Hank Williams, Jr., went into the studio with “On Susan’s Floor,” and suddenly—thirteen years after he’d first breezed into Nashville—Vince Matthews was hot commercial property. He signed a writing contract with Peer-Southern, a prestigious company headed by Ralph Peer, Jr., whose father, Ralph Sr., of Okeh Records, had wandered down from New York in the twenties to record such ambitious hillbillies as Pop Stoneman, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Carter Family.

  One of the first songs Vince wrote after his deal with Peer was titled “Who Was Bradley Kincaid?”—an ode of sorts to the college-educated Kentucky guitarist who had headed north in the early twenties to become a star on the WLS Barn Dance. All of that was symbolic to Vince, for he is, among other things, a student of the country tradition, and captivated by the concept that his own niche is being carved, somehow, by an inscrutable destiny with the inevitable doses of artistic suffering.

  All of that may be simple presumption or conceit, but then again it may not. For Vince has lived and embodied all the things that give country music its power: He has known the sting of failure and the whiffs of occasional prosperity. He has been drunk, lonesome, lovesick, and hungry, and through it all he has clung to the basic sensitivity and human compassion that have always been the cornerstone of good country music.

  “I like Vince a lot,” says Johnny Cash with a nod of somber finality. “He’s probably one of the greatest writers this business has ever had. I sure would like to see him make it.”

  Personally, I don’t think it will make a whole lot of difference to Vince, for he is equally at home cruising around Nashville in a Cadillac he can’t afford, or selling the damn thing and hitching a ride with a friend. Which is what he did a little while back, and as we rumbled down the alleyway toward a sleazy little tavern where the pickers gather for pinball and beer, he began to talk about the deal he had struck with Peer—a songwriter’s dream, he affirmed with a sweeping gesture that sent the rearview mirror spinning into nonalignment.

  “Oops, sorry,” he said, making a feeble attempt at repairing the damage. “Anyway, man, I ain’t saying it’s been easy, but hell, I’m only thirty-three. That’s not too bad, is it? I got two songs on the charts, I got a good deal with a publisher, hell I just might make it this time. But then,” he said, opening the door and pausing half in and half out for an eloquent summation, “I s’pose I’ve said that before...”

  As he grinned and went trudging off into the Nashville rain, humming off-key and wobbling toward the fog-shrouded honky-tonk, you had the feeling, somehow, that country music just might survive its current bout with success.

  2004 Epilogue

  The Nineties and Beyond

  The ’90s is the ’60s turned upside down . . .

  —Marshall Chapman and Gary Nicholson

  It was one of those magical Nashville evenings when the musicians gather from all over town, and the beer is flowing, and the music gains momentum with the night. They had assembled this time at the Station Inn, a flat stone building in a warehouse district less than a mile from the glitter of Music Row. It was a perfect setting for country music—a smoky room with low, dark ceilings and neon lights—and the star this time was Barry Tashian, a one-time rock ’n’ roller from Boston, who was once the opening act for the Beatles. Later, he worked with Emmylou Harris, and now he sings duets with his wife. They have a new album out, and it’s country to the core—a throwback, really, to the Grand Ole Opry and the old folk ballads of Appalachia, as Holly Tashian’s bluegrass harmonies twine through the melodies produced by her husband.

  The Nashville veterans are out in force—singers Gail Davies and George Hamilton IV, and a record producer named Allen Reynolds, whose biggest client these days is Garth Brooks. This is the kind of music they love, a virtuoso blend of guitars and mandolin and standup base, but there is also an irony that nobody mentions. Though the music is fresh and the hand-crafted lyrics come straight from the heart, none of it is likely to make the radio. A lot of the best music doesn’t anymore. It’s an era defined in many people’s minds by the bubblegum sexuality of Shania Twain, the saccharine banality of Faith Hill, and the endless stream of Nashville hat acts—all those generic, good-looking hunks who deal in pale imitations of Merle Haggard.

  It’s not that all of these performers are bad. You can make the case that Garth Brooks, among others, has pushed the popularity of country music to stunning new heights without sacrificing his feeling for the songs. For those who would doubt it, it was best, perhaps, to see Brooks on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, not in his flashy, full-concert venue with the spangles and the lights and the wall of sound, but alone before the audience with just his guitar. The song he picked at the peak of his career was Tony Arata’s “The Dance,” a haunting ballad of life made richer even by its heartache. It was riveting moment on the stage of the Opry, as Brooks’ tenor voice slowly filled up the room—a powerful reminder of the meaning of country music, not only to the people who had gathered in the building, but to the thousands who were still tuning in every Saturday.

  This was radio, of course, but it was not top 40, where songs as deliberately emotional as “The Dance” were rapidly going the way of wooly mammoths. By the 1990s, it was the insidious design of radio programmers to set out consciously for the safe middle ground—to hire their demographic consultants who would call up listeners and play them ten-second snippets of songs. It is almost a sacrilege to try to imagine what might have happened a generation earlier if someone had played ten seconds of “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine,” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” or Johnny Cash’s “San Quentin,” and then on the basis of the listener’s response, decided whether to play those songs on the radio.

  But incredibly enough, by the 1990s that was how it was done, and the result at the turning of the 21st century was a brave new Alice-in-Wonderland world in which the biggest stars—Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Shania Twain—did little to build on their musical tradition, except perhaps in financial terms. We were living instead in the era of Chad Brock, a country singer, of sorts, who had a Number One hit with a trifling single called “Yes.” (“She said, ‘Yes’/ I said, ‘Wow’/ She said, ‘When?’ I said, “How about right now?”) According to country music radio, this was the most popular song in America, yet it inspired only 175,000 people, a modest number by the standard of the times, to actually go out and buy the record. When his follow-up album barely sold 25,000 copies, Brock was summarily dropped from his label.

  A lot of people could see this coming. Allen Reynolds, for example, was the gentle giant among Music Row producers, an artist with an ear and a feel for the music who had produced brilliant albums with Garth Brooks, Emmylou Harris, Don Williams and George Hamilton IV, to name just a few. Back in the ’90s, one of the artists who came through his studio was a Canadian singer named Michelle Wright. She had already had a bouncy hit single called “Take It Like a Man,” a good ole girl’s impatient invitation to a man who might be worthy of his gender. She followed it up with something more risky—a poignant ballad of teenaged love called “He Would Be Sixteen.” Written in the third person instead of the first, the song told the story of a teenaged girl who was pregnant out of wedlock. Feeling that she simply had no choice, the girl gave up her baby for adoption, then wondered years later through the wave of regret how he might be doing at the age of sixteen.

  The song fell victim to the purge of honest feeling carried out in the ’90s by the radio consultants. There were the occasional exceptions, the ones that made it through, like Trisha Yearwood’s “Walkaway Joe,” and a handful of hits by Patty Loveless, Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea. There were male singers too—Dwight Yoakam, Randy Travis, Radney Foster, and Vince Gill—who did songs worthy of the country tradition. But the ranks were getting thinner by the middle of the decade, and it was about that time that Allen Reynolds declared: “If we’re not caref
ul, we’re going to market ourselves straight to hell.”

  By the turn of the century, that was exactly where the mainstream had gone. The irony of it, as Reynolds and many other people understood, was that if radio was the poison for creativity, it had once been the opposite. It was the place where country music came of age, home to the honky-tonking sound of Ernest Tubb, and the blue yodel moans of Jimmie Rodgers, and it was the place where the great Hank Williams could sing about the sky being lit by the silence of a star. Beginning sometime in the 1920s, radio was the cradle for the art—the setting where the music of the mountains could evolve into what the Kentucky folklorist Loyal Jones once called “the literature of the people.”

  “People know how hard life is,” says Emmylou Harris. “They have feelings. The need music that will give them a voice.”

  But on the corporate-run stations of the 21st century, music as literature was nearly gone. Not surprisingly, there were people who rebelled, and many of the musicians in Nashville will tell you that the graceful leader of the revolution was Emmylou. In 1991, she and Allen Reynolds decided to do a live album, and they rented the Ryman Auditorium for that purpose. Harris had always wanted to play there, “to feel the hillbilly dust,” as she later put it, but by the time her own career was established, the Opry had moved to the outskirts of Nashville and the Ryman was left as a near-empty shrine.

  When Harris took the stage that warm April night, she says she felt a surge of fear—much stronger than any she had known in a while. Part of it was gazing at the dusty auditorium, with its stained-glass windows and benches that still resembled old pews. The crowd was small, restricted because of the city fire codes, but that didn’t help her nervousness much. She knew she was taking a chance with this one—doing an album of all new material, and doing it live with very few rehearsals. But in a way she knew that the fear was good, a reminder that she was venturing into uncharted ground, taking the risks that an artist ought to take. The album itself had an old-fashioned feel. There were bluegrass songs from Bill Monroe, and one of her favorites from Creedence Clearwater, done this time with acoustic guitars. There was also a song from Stephen Foster, followed immediately by one from Bruce Springsteen, though it was hard for the audience to tell which was which.