Hillbilly Heart

by Billy Ray Cyrus

  This was the quote that had kept me going through tough times and self-doubt, and now it was motivating me to go for it, to go to Los Angeles, and, well… in short, to never give up.

  CHAPTER 12

  Baby Toys and New Cars

  THE NOTECARD ON MY bedroom wall said everything about this next chapter in my life:

  You will go to your cousin Saundra Sark’s house in California, where you will set up camp and begin to infiltrate the Los Angeles music scene. Within a month, you will surround yourself with the best musicians you can find, start a band, land a house gig, and strike a deal within three months with Capitol Records.

  My dad gave me his car, insisting I drive cross-country in a vehicle more reliable than my truck. I drove most of the way by myself, with only the radio for company. In Albuquerque, I stayed with a cousin who made weird special effects. One of his creations was a life-size skeleton with its own wardrobe and a place in the back where I could stick my hand and swivel its head, like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  I called this character Charlie Ray, and stuck him in the passenger seat for the last leg of my drive to California. He was good company.

  My cousin Saundra (she was my dad’s sister’s daughter) lived in Long Beach, and after settling in and saying hello, I made a beeline for the beach, which I thought would look like a postcard straight out of a Beach Boys song. But instead of blond surfer chicks and golden sand, I found warehouses next to the beach and cargo ships idling offshore. The weather was cold and foggy—where was the fabled sunshine? I bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sat on a bench, and fended off hungry seagulls dive-bombing my chicken.

  When I drove to Capitol Records—a round building designed to look like a stack of records—I couldn’t even get in the front door. Nor could I get in anyplace else. No one cared about my demos, head shots, or pitches.

  As my funds ran low, I landed a job as a forklift operator at Western Pacific Craft, a manufacturer of heavy-duty boxes that produce farmers used in the fields. The boxes were dipped in giant vats of hot wax and then I hauled them away. My coworkers were black and Hispanic men, many of whom were affiliated with Long Beach gangs that hated one another. The place was a cauldron of tension. One night a knife fight broke out and I almost got my throat slashed trying to break it up.

  The funny thing about being there was that none of those guys knew my name. They heard my accent and called me “Country.” It was so ironic. Here I’d come out to L.A. to rock and I was…

  Well, it was a rough six months. After working all day, I was too tired to spend nights hustling my music and looking for gigs. Then my cousin Jerry (son of my uncle Larry, who had been with my dad the night he picked me up from jail) drove me to the Palomino Club, a North Hollywood club whose stage was a West Coast home away from home for Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, and Hoyt Axton.

  It was Wednesday night—open mic night.

  “Hold on,” I said as we settled in at a table near the bar. “Where are we again?”

  “The Palomino Club,” he said.

  “No, I mean what city?” I said. “Because this is where I belong. No offense to you, but where I’ve been staying is the wrong side of L.A.”

  I promptly moved from Saundra’s to Van Nuys, a suburb in the middle of the sprawling San Fernando Valley, only ten minutes from the club. I rented a room in the back of a house owned by an older couple from England. On my first Wednesday night living in Van Nuys, I showed up at the Palomino, guitar in hand and a batch of songs in my head. Oh, man, getting back onstage in front of people rekindled the waning flame in my soul.

  Unfortunately, open mic night didn’t pay. Nor did I ever see any scouts from the record labels there looking for undiscovered talent.

  I wrote a lot of songs in my room and answered ads for musicians in trade papers, but L.A. in the mid-’80s was all about heavy metal and hair bands. As soon as people heard my name and the twang in my voice, they gave me the usual thanks-but-no-thanks and advised me to go to Nashville.

  I gave myself pep talk after pep talk. When I was a boy, my dad had frequently quoted Thomas Edison, who was once asked how it felt to have failed thousands of times to create the electric filament. “I have not failed, not once,” he said. “I have discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

  I suppose I was making my own discoveries. Having quit my forklift driving job when I moved, I got a day job at Baby Toytown, a kids’ store that sold strollers, bouncy seats, changing tables, and everything else new parents would need. It was near where I lived. I didn’t know much of anything about stocking a nursery, but I tried to make up for it by being polite with a can-do attitude.

  One day an expectant mom came into the store looking like she might have her baby any minute. I greeted her, and she turned out to be a talker. As I rang her up at the register, she declared that I was the best salesman she’d ever met.

  “I didn’t do anything, ma’am,” I said.

  “You were absolutely charming,” she said. “And a help. I want you to meet my husband. He runs the Guy Martin Oldsmobile dealership in Woodland Hills.”

  “I appreciate the thought,” I said. “But I wouldn’t make a good car salesman. I don’t even know how to change the oil in my own car—or even where to check for the oil.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You go see my husband, Tim Richardson. He’ll hire you.”

  Tim was from Alabama, and he liked my accent. It reminded him of home. But I imagine it was really his wife who had some powerful sway over him, because he hired me even though I didn’t have experience or own a suit, or even a pair of pants that weren’t blue jeans.

  I was not a good car salesman. Just as I’d warned. In fact, the other guys in the showroom claimed that I actually drove customers away. One day, after I’d been there about two months without selling a car—without even getting a nibble—Tim Richardson called me into his office. I had a pretty good idea why.

  “Bill, I love you as a human being,” he said. “But we’re losing a lot of customers who might buy a car. You gotta go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I knew this was a bad idea coming into it.”

  “Well, you tried,” he said. “Finish out the week and we’ll settle up.”

  Fair enough. At least the pressure was off. As luck would have it, I showed up the next day and sold my first Oldsmobile. The day after that, I sold two cars; the following day, three more. All of a sudden it seemed like I only had to walk up to a customer and he’d open his wallet. I had no idea why, but I was making money, so I decided to stay, and Tim let me.

  One Saturday I sold eight cars, a dealership record. The other salesmen continued to hate me, but now it was because I was the hottest car salesman in the Valley. In one month alone, I hauled in $20,000 in commissions. I rewarded myself with a couple of expensive new suits, and Tim Richardson thanked me with a new Cutlass Chalet, a sports car with a super-modified engine and tinted windows that branded me as a badass.

  My luck took more than a professional turn the day Tim Richardson fired me. On the way home, I was stopped at a traffic light on Van Nuys Boulevard when a Camaro pulled up next to me with a drop-dead-gorgeous girl behind the wheel. She had strawberry-blond hair, a beautiful smile, and sparkling eyes. She was wearing a football jersey that said CALIFORNIA above the number. If anyone belonged on team California, she did.

  I smiled at her, and she rolled down her window. When her hand rose, I saw she was holding a joint. “Do you smoke?” the girl asked.

  I nodded and followed her to a nearby park, where we stood under a tree, talked, got high, and talked some more. There’s the cliché love at first sight. For me, this was love at first hit.

  I had a vague sense of having seen Lynne sometime before and, after a couple dates, I learned that she was an aspiring model who had once been a centerfold in one of my favorite magazines. When she told me, I blurted, “I thought I’d seen you.” Maybe not the best thing to
say to a beautiful young woman I was just getting to know, but she understood.

  Soon we were living together in a tiny apartment in Van Nuys. We adopted a couple of kitties, including a scrawny black one we named Spooky. We had a brown plaid sofa and a large poster of Pat Benatar on the wall. Practically every morning I had to double-check my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Was that really me? I mean here was my hillbilly self living with a centerfold I had once fantasized about, and best of all, she was even nicer than she was sexy.

  That was the thing about Lynne: the more I got to know her, the more I realized she was also pretty on the inside. New layers opened up all the time, like a flower unfolding slowly, and I would marvel at the quiet sensitivity she revealed. Her mother was homeless, which weighed on her daily. Lynne was determined not to end up living like that. She worked as a bartender and heard every line ever thought up by a guy. She learned to protect herself, and that gave her a bit of an edge. Yet she’d come home and share that big, soft heart.

  For the next seven months, life was good. I was a top car salesman, confident, and in love. I continued to play music, mostly Wednesday-night freebies at the Palomino. I also wrote songs. They reminded me of what I was really about and, more important, that I wasn’t alone no matter how much I felt like a fish out of water in L.A. Whether it was Robbie Tooley or someone else, I knew I had help from somewhere.

  The only glitch was that I was still having trouble finding a way for people to hear my music. Near the end of 1985, a letter arrived from my dad. He knew I was struggling and said he wanted me to know that no matter what, he believed in me and was certain that I would do the right thing. He said something along the lines of, if I knew I was following my life’s purpose, keep on doing it no matter how frustrated I got, because eventually I would get to where I was supposed to be. His love and encouragement, always beacons in my life, never shined brighter than when I read his letter that day. “Always know where you are and where you are going,” he wrote, “but don’t ever forget where you came from.”

  Those words went straight to my heart. I loved Lynne and appreciated my lucrative job, but I wasn’t making any progress toward reaching my dreams. As I did daily, I repeated the goals I’d set for myself: to change my own life and the lives of others, and to share God’s light and love, through my music.

  Then Kebo called, explaining that Changes had been rebuilt and that the club’s owner, Jimmy Getty, wanted me to fly in for an inaugural New Year’s Eve show.

  It took five seconds for me to make my decision, and back to Changes I went. During my absence, Kebo had been playing with a band called Main Street, and the marquee outside the rebuilt club said, NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY WITH BILLY RAY CYRUS AND MAIN STREET. The club sold out. The celebration overflowed into the parking lot. I saw familiar faces and made new friends.

  Afterward, Jimmy and my brother both suggested I stick around and keep the party going. I’d been thinking the same thing. Lynne was disappointed that we’d be apart for longer than we’d planned, but she understood. About a week and a half later, I checked in with her. I was all jacked up: I’d played five nights in a row for the first time in nearly thirteen months.

  “It’s like I woke up from a nightmare,” I explained to Lynne, “Changes burned down, and I ended up in California selling cars!”

  “I wish I could’ve been there,” Lynne said. “It sounds like a great time.”

  “I opened my eyes and was right back where I’d been,” I said. “Thank God I woke up.”

  In early 1986, I returned to L.A. to tell Lynne that I was going to quit my job and go back to Appalachia for good. The problem was, I loved her and didn’t want to see her upset. Then, before I had a chance to detonate my own bomb, Lynne told me that our little black kitty, Spooky, was gone.

  I printed up fliers with Spooky’s picture and our phone number and canvassed our neighborhood, knocking on doors in our apartment building and others’ nearby. If people didn’t answer, I left a flier under their door. I also tacked them up on telephone poles. At one place, an old lady answered the door. She was bawling her eyes out.

  “Have you seen this kitty?” I asked.

  “Have you seen what’s happened?” she asked in response.

  She opened her front door wider and motioned toward the TV across the room. To me, the screen looked blue, almost blank. From where I stood, I thought maybe there was a dot in the middle of it, maybe a dot with smoke coming out. But I couldn’t tell.

  “The space shuttle blew up. With Christa McAuliffe on it,” she said, weeping. “It just blew up. They’re all gone.”

  “What?” I exclaimed.

  “Just after takeoff,” she said. “Come in; watch the report.”

  With this old lady sobbing next to me, I realized the irrelevance of my problems: Where was my kitty? How would I break the news of my departure to Lynne?

  Still, Lynne didn’t take the news well when I finally worked up my nerve to break it to her. She cried her eyes out for days. I kept telling her that I’d get my feet on the ground and then maybe she could visit—or even stay. I described the woods, the rivers, my people. Even though I knew she was a full-blooded California girl, I said, “Maybe you’ll like it there.”

  To Lynne’s credit, she understood why I was going back to my roots. Although my heart was committed to her, I had to follow my gut. I was a musician. I didn’t belong out in L.A. wearing Florsheim shoes and selling Oldsmobiles. The next few weeks were painfully sad. At the end of February, my brother Kebo flew out and helped me load my stuff into a U-Haul, which we hooked up to the back of my car.

  “I’m going to come see you,” Lynne said as we hugged one last time. “A lot!”

  I headed east, picked up Interstate 40 around Barstow, and never looked back.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Roses in the Winter”

  I’D BEEN HOME A little more than a month when Lynne came to visit. Excited, I picked her up at the Cincinnati airport and drove her down the Appalachian highway, a brand-new stretch of road. Accustomed to multilane freeways in L.A., she was amused as I explained this was progress over the two-lane road we’d had before.

  For the next two weeks, I showed her my old life before I moved to California. We hiked in the woods and boated on Greenbo Lake. She watched me play at Changes. She saw the way the crowd multiplied between the first show and the fourth, when the whiskey flowed and the dance floor was packed. Lynne had fun, but she was smart and could read between the lines. Night after night the bar was packed with beautiful women. It was a nonstop party, and I loved being part of it.

  Both of us were sad when she had to go back home. Our drive to the airport was quiet, painfully so, and when we said good-bye at the gate, we knew it was really good-bye to something special.

  I stayed in party mode. The band—Kebo, Mark Carlisle, and Bobby Phillips on guitar, Joey Adkins on bass, and big Bob Anders on drums—was pretty dang tight. I was jubilant that I’d found my way back home, literally and figuratively, and turned back into a big fish in a little pond. By summer, Changes continued to rock even harder and so did we. Booze, weed, music, women; it all flowed nightly and mightily.

  Our set list was a high-octane mix of outlaw country (Willie, Waylon, Merle), southern rock (Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Charlie Daniels), straight-ahead rock (ZZ Top, Bob Seger), and a bunch of originals I’d written, including “Snooze You Lose,” “Appalachian Lady,” and “What the Hell Is Goin’ On.” People knew when I hit high gear. I stood front and center, my shirt ripped or completely off, and leaned out over the dance floor singing Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.”

  As the nights got hotter and stickier, I noticed this pretty blonde in the bar. The first night I remember seeing Cindy, she was wearing a small halter top and very short shorts. It was probably about twelve fifteen on a Friday or Saturday, and with her sweet little face, greenish blue eyes, and that outfit, Cindy stood out among the crowd on the packed dance floor.

  She was with an
older man, who also stood out for being smaller and better dressed than all the rednecks. I wondered about her, but she disappeared after a few songs.

  The next week and the week after that, Cindy continued to come to Changes. We played a game where we didn’t speak. The stage was elevated about three feet above the dance floor, and I noticed each time she came in she got closer and our eye contact became more direct. I think she tried to dress a little more provocatively each time, if that was even possible.

  The tension between me and Cindy was a battle between willpower and desire. It was like Eve tempting Adam all over again. I sang about it, too—the song “Pink Cadillac” was on the set list nightly. Then one night she sent me a drink onstage—and yeah, I gave in. I bit the proverbial apple.

  Over the next month, I would step outside during breaks with Cindy and her friend Johnny. She and I would smoke a joint as Johnny, a nonsmoker, kept the conversation going. He was the first openly gay man I’d met, the first who became a close friend. As he heard me talk about my career, he was impressed with my positive approach, and he arranged for me to speak to his students about setting and achieving goals.

  Eventually I asked Cindy out to dinner and then took her to Greenbo Lake, where, with the addition of various substances, our unbridled lust careened out of control, and our relationship took off from there. I remember it being like a nonstop party.

  In December, Cindy took a few days off from her job to accompany me on one of my periodic trips to Nashville where I hoped to persuade someone to listen to my songs and sign me to a deal. I had a meeting or two, but neither was a for-sure appointment. It was an unusually warm day, though, perfect for a pretty drive. We took Cindy’s convertible and started the good times immediately. By the time we got to Lexington, the top was down and Cindy was riding shotgun without her shirt (she liked to get the sun). Between there and Morehead, we had finished our first joint, and I turned to her and said, “You know what? Nashville’s nice… but it’ll wait.”