by Bruce Feiler
The early research on “On a Good Night” confirmed what everyone had known all along: It wasn’t a very good song. The first week it was tested by Marketing/Research Associates (week five in the life of the song) it scored a 51.4, putting it at the bottom of the thirty songs tested that week and barely making the fifty-point cutoff needed to be included at all. The next week it dropped to 41.9 and fell off the list entirely. This was the week that “On a Good Night” almost lost its bullet and ended its run on the chart in the mid-twenties. But then the odd reality of country radio kicked in: If people hear something peppy and hard-driving long enough, they will eventually grow attached to it. This is why research encourages up-tempo songs instead of ballads. More people like ballads, but more people dislike them as well. Invariably, songs that test very high also test very low: This is the curse of good art and the biggest flaw of relying on research. It promotes songs that are homogenous, not songs that are inspiring. As Joe Heslet told me: “Familiarity is the key to success in radio. I’ve been in this business for twenty years and the one thing we know for sure is that if people don’t like a song, they’re going to punch the button. And if your competitor is not playing songs they don’t like, the listener will stay there until they do. So the theory behind radio is if one in five people is likely to bail on a song, I have to ask myself what the benefits are to playing it.” In other words, the goal of a radio programmer is not to play songs that people love, but to play songs that people don’t hate enough to switch the station.
“On a Good Night” certainly passed that test. It wasn’t a bad song. It was fun, and its hard-driving fiddle and thumping guitar did put a little bounce on the gas pedal. Eventually the research did detect that: Though few people liked it enough to give it a five, few people disliked it enough to give it a one on the research scale. In fact, the number one song in the country at the moment, “My Maria,” like many megahits, had a high number of both fives and ones. Accordingly it would “burn out” faster on the radio, meaning it would scorch to the top of the charts, stay for a few weeks, then get dropped precipitously, presumably making way for more mediocre songs.
“On a Good Night” built more slowly. After losing its bullet in week six, it scored a 53.4 on the research scale in week seven and regained its momentum, moving from twenty-four to seventeen bullet (“We picked up two of our holdouts,” Debi said. “We’ve got to get the rest…”). The following week it moved from seventeen to twelve bullet (“KIKK in Houston said they’ll be with us next week. We’re Columbia, damn it. We’re hot. We’re proud…”). By week nine, just at the time when the album would go on sale, the single was just where Debi wanted it wanted to be: poised to go into the Top 10. Debi had worked her sleight of hand. Ricochet, following Shania, would have its chance to go number one in early July. Wade Hayes, it now seemed likely, might also have a chance, several weeks after that. “We’ve done our job,” Debi said, assessing her sudden turn of good fortune. “We turned the song into a hit. The only thing is,” she added, “we can’t make people buy records.”
TWELVE
THE POLITICS
The stage of Limerick’s Theatre in downtown Dublin, Ireland, was black. A single white light reached down through the dark, where a man from Miami sang a song, cut in Nashville, about a woman from Havana who escapes to America. “I’d like to dedicate this song to my aunt,” the man said, “and to everyone who’s died trying to make that trip.”
And then from this somber scene came a voice, the most haunting voice to emerge from Music Row since Roy Orbison thirty years ago. There was a bit of flamenco hot pink in it, a hint of South Beach blue, but at this moment it was a single color: an angry, bleeding red. “This ninety-mile trip / Has taken thirty years to make / They tried to keep forever / What was never theirs to take / I cursed and scratched the devil’s hand / As he stood in front of me / One last drag from his big cigar / And he finally set me free.”
On a chilly night at the height of the “Gone Country” era, the most unusual—and arguably the most daring—artist to come out of Nashville in the 1990s was standing on a stage in downtown Dublin, wearing a bright purple Manuel jacket, and pouring sweat from his rock-idol bangs. Raul Malo was an unlikely front man for a country band. The son of Cuban-American émigrés, Raul and his band, the Mavericks—four guys from Miami with funky facial hair, no cowboy hats, and an affinity for Vegas underworld clothing (picture Quentin Tarantino doing a makeover on the “Rat Pack”)—jolted Nashville out of its protective cocoon by making Fidel Castro, his counterpart John F. Kennedy, and the entire suburban lounge culture of that era the centerpiece of a new brand of retro-revival. They also cussed, smoked dope, dissed their colleagues, threw wild parties, and, in the process, completely redefined what it meant to be country stars (actually, they called themselves “rock stars”) at century’s end. By doing so, they also made a point: Cowboys aren’t the only heroes in Nashville; rebels have a cause, too.
“‘From Hell to Paradise’ is about the Cuban struggle in particular,” Raul, the stout, often brooding leader of the group, told me later that night. It was the first day of their maiden swing through Europe, and we were talking about whether country music had become “America’s Music,” as it liked to call itself. “But when we started touring,” Raul continued, “I met a lot of folks who came over as Polish immigrants, or Jewish immigrants, or Italian immigrants, who came over at times of oppression in their countries, and that song touched a nerve for them. Here was this little song about my family that turned out to be about America.”
Being about a new kind of America is what made the Mavericks notable. Their music—a smarter, hipper version of the Nashville Sound (country without the twang, but with an edge)—seemed to test the boundaries of what constituted country in the nineties. On the one hand, the Mavericks were a perfect embodiment of all that was different about the contemporary South: They were young, outlandish, and spoke a foreign language. (The final verse to “From Hell to Paradise,” in which the woman promises to return home, is sung in Spanish.) Politics pervaded their aura. “I remember having a pretty good understanding of how the democratic system works,” Raul said, “because I remember my parents discussing how different it was in Cuba.” On the other hand, their highly contentious style (one cut on From Hell to Paradise took on religious fundamentalists like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker) was a direct challenge to Nashville’s conservatism. That they chose to make their home in Nashville, instead of New York or L.A., seemed to foreshadow a broadening of country’s base. “We wanted to play music that we loved and only loved and nothing else,” Raul said of the band’s original manifesto. “We wanted to play country music because it was wide enough and growing enough that it could take us in. Nashville still had Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and Nanci Griffith. We figured if they could do it, we could, too.”
At first, they couldn’t. For all their initial efforts at bringing the voice of Little Havana into Middle America, the Mavericks’ sloganeering and dark message songs turned off radio programmers and failed to interest fans. “There were times I just thought, ‘I can’t believe this isn’t going to happen,’” said Robert Reynolds, the bass player, who is married to Trisha Yearwood. So they adapted. With their second album, What a Crying Shame, produced by Don Cook, the Mavericks took their fascination with the past and broadened it to an entire look and feel that mixed the grit of Hank Williams and Roy Orbison with the panache of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. By doing so, they finally hit the essence of country music: its longing, its sentiment, its romance. In the process, they also uncovered a previously hidden craving in the new suburban fields of country music: While some consumers might escape their five hundred channels and TV dinners with cowboy hats and horseback riding, others clearly prefer an edgier version of the past—swanky pool halls, red velvet blouses, his and hers cigars. The Mavericks exploited this craving with a style that was part white trash (So what if Elvis had dirt under his fingernails?) and part bourgeois (It’s cocktail hour!
): You can ride Harleys and play blackjack; you can eat pesto and still embrace Nashville. In the genre-bending spirit of the 1990s, they had created a new form of music: martini country.
“I remember when we were trying to decide the album art for Music for All Occasions,” Paul Deakin, the drummer, told me of the band’s latest album as we walked through a drizzle to a private nightclub where the Mavericks, in the selfless name of sowing Nashville’s seed, would field the adoring pawings of their fans. “We were thinking of the time of our parents.” The record, a sort of Valentine to the music-to-make-love-to era, had campy art and dancing typography on the cover and inside a photograph of the band pushing lawnmowers across a “Leave It to Beaver” front lawn. “When they were our age, they were listening to Ray Conniff, Peggy Lee, and stuff like that. They were all alcoholics back then. Real liquored up.”
“Of course, we’re all products of those fucks,” added Robert.
And they were. Instead of poor children growing up in the fields of the South, the Mavericks were four children of the middle class (even Raul’s father had become a banker in Miami) who were singing about their own sense of nostalgia, even though their longing for the past was vastly different from that of, say, Garth Brooks. “It’s a highly unique thing that’s going on with the Mavericks,” explained guitarist Nick Kane, the son of an opera singer. “As long as I’ve been in the business, there’s no rule that says that just because you’re talented, and just because you work hard, and just because you give a shit, you’re going to be successful. There’s a part of society that was ready for this kind of country music.”
Which is what’s most surprising of all.
Of all the misapprehensions at loose in the world about country music, perhaps the most persistent is that it’s the music of racist, redneck Republicans. Certainly all these groups have a home in Nashville. “Redneck” is still a term of pride in many country songs, like Joe Diffie’s parody “Leroy, the Redneck Reindeer.” Racism has been a theme in country music for seventy-five years, including Hank Williams, Jr.’s 1988 anthem “If the South Woulda Won.” And Republicans have thrived in Nashville for decades. Richard Nixon, feeling the heat of the Watergate scandal, opened the new Grand Ole Opry in 1974 by singing “God Bless America” and “Happy Birthday” to his wife Pat. George Bush, facing reelection, attended the CMA Awards in 1991 with his wife Barbara, then asked Wynonna to sing at his renominating convention. Four years later, Travis Tritt did the same at the behest of Newt Gingrich. “I’m a fan of his,” Travis told me of the congressman from his former hometown. “The thing I’ve always respected about him is that he’s not a politically correct politician, and that gets him in hot water. I’m proud to say he’s a friend of mine.”
But while country may give voice to Southern conservatives, its origins and fan base are far more diverse. Liberalism, for one, thrived in the fields of the South. “Most of the Southeastern audience for country music comes out of the Appalachian tradition,” Bob Titley, the manager for Kathy Mattea and Brooks & Dunn, pointed out to me. “And big-dollar, big-government, New Deal programs have done a lot for those people.” From Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” the ideal of the little guy fighting big business has long been important to country music. Beginning in the 1960s, though, economic liberalism was overshadowed by social conservatism in the South as Republicans exploited widespread Southern support for the Vietnam War (and opposition to civil rights) to build a base in the region. Pro-war anthems like “Ballad of the Green Berets” and “Okie from Muskogee” drowned out protest pleas by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Liberals still had roots in Nashville, but conservatives carried the day, especially since many of the economic assistance programs put into place by the New Deal had worked, thereby eliminating the chief source of liberal protest.
The South, in other words, was no longer filled with rural workers fed up with the system; it was filling, instead, with suburban middle-class workers with their own set of problems. By the 1990s, Nashville finally turned its attention to addressing their concerns. And though some claimed this amounted to an abandoning of country’s “roots,” in fact it was a belated recognition that the country itself had abandoned its roots. For country music to explore a place other than where the nation was at the time would have been the biggest abandonment of all.
Instead, Nashville took up the plight of the middle class, as unheroic as that might seem. The result was a completely new set of themes. If, as Public Enemy’s Chuck D once famously asserted, rap music is the “CNN of the ghetto,” country music, in the nineties, became the CNN of the suburbs. The news from that front was surprising. On the surface, politics themselves seemed to be of little interest to middle-class country music listeners. Gone were the days when Johnny Cash could rail against mistreatment of Native Americans in “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” or Merle Haggard could discuss the darkness of his own prison life. Gone, no doubt, because those children of the Depression no longer seem relevant to today’s descendants of Cheez Whiz and Pop Tarts. Instead, hit songs in country were now almost exclusively about interpersonal relationships: people fighting people, instead of the elements. In many ways, country became the pop music parallel to the confessional, self-referential talk-show boom on television (though without much of the deviance). Even old beer-in-the glass staples, like breakup songs, developed a pampered middle-class feel to them, a freshly buffed coat of self-esteem. Terri Clark, for example, had a smash hit with a song that listed all of the things she’d rather do than see her ex-boyfriend, including washing her car in the rain, checking the air in her tires, and “straightening her stereo wires.” “I’d love to talk to you / But then I’d miss Donahue.”
When issues were raised in the music, they invariably related to domestic turmoil—alcoholism, child abuse, spouse abuse—rather than such external issues as class, race, or poverty. Anxiety became internal in country music. The threat was not across the ocean or even on the other side of the harvest, but on the street where you live, in what Mary Chapin Carpenter called this “House of Cards”: “On the surface, it looked so safe / But it was perilous underneath.” The most striking example of this trend was Martina McBride’s defiant hit “Independence Day.” In the song, named 1995 CMA Song of the Year, a battered woman decides to burn down her house with her husband still in it. “Throw the stone away / Let the guilty pay / It’s Independence Day.” The song, like many in the new social landscape, was written by a woman, Gretchen Peters.
Still, despite a few powerful songs like “Independence Day,” country music in the nineties by and large recoiled from engaging the world. It was the genre’s biggest weakness. Though the music certainly reflected the new middle-class reality of its audience—on a three-hour trip back from Knoxville not long after our journey to Ireland, I heard no less than three songs on country radio that were set in airports—it seemed to have little understanding of where those planes were flying. I can think of no song I ever heard on the radio, for example, that mentions the name of a foreign country—and I don’t mean Mexican food. (“From Hell to Paradise,” a sterling exception, was never released as a single.) Instead, just at the moment its audience was at its broadest, country music became more narrow-minded than it had ever been before. What passed for depth in most country songs was best captured in a Tracy Lawrence hook, which said that if the world had a front porch “like we did back then,” the world would still have problems, “but we’d all be friends.” Even some of the stalwarts of thoughtful music eventually succumbed to navel gazing. Mary Chapin Carpenter, who produced such searing songs as “House of Cards” and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” lightened in her advancing years to “Shut Up and Kiss Me” and “I Want to Be Your Girlfriend.” Eat enough TV dinners and drink enough martinis and even the hardest edge becomes fat.
Which is exactly what happened to the Mavericks. When Raul, Robert, and Paul came to town (Nick met them there) in the early 1990s, they repr
esented everything country music abhorred but needed: They were arrogant, brash, and iconoclastic. After winning their first CMA Award, the Mavericks were asked if they listened to the music of their competitors, like Blackhawk. “Nope,” Raul answered bluntly. “And you know what? We won, so fuck ’em.” It was certainly honest. But by the following day, disc jockeys around the country had listeners call into Blackhawk/Mavericks face-offs and Raul was forced to apologize. Music Row’s conservatism had begun to rear its head.
“When I was young, I wanted to change the world,” Raul told me the day after the Dublin concert. We were sitting in a hotel brasserie in Belfast eating fish-and-chips and pâté de campagne. “I was angry. I was young. I wanted to be Bruce Springsteen.”
That morning the band had made the four-hour trek to the North, where an uneasy calm had settled over the civil war.
“I think there was a certain naïveté about me back then,” Raul continued. “I was naïve enough to think that I could make a difference. I wrote that song ‘Children’ about child abuse, and we played it for a while. We played ‘End of the Line’ about Jim Bakker. And you know what? It didn’t change a fucking thing.” His hair plopped over his face again. Around his neck an elaborate cross jiggled against his black corduroy shirt. He looked like a biker. “So I kind of changed myself. Instead of worrying about changing the world, I decided I’m going to take care of myself and my family. Instead of worrying about whether the other guy is smoking or not or eating granola or not. Do whatever you want. Let’s not kill each other, and I’ll raise my family.”