He snapped away, and those shots—basically the moment I stepped out of my car to do the session—turned out to be the ones everyone wanted for the cover. I was glad, too, because there was no phoniness about ’em. That was the guy who was following his dream, the guy who was making music.
Soon after we finished recording the album, I lost my longtime house gig at the Ragtime. It happened on a Sunday night during the peak of summer. By then, people were coming from all around, from as far away as the Carolinas. The little club was packed. During the intensity of our last set of the night, a fight broke out. There were always fights, but this one had guys waving guns and knives. People were flying over tables.
“Holy shit,” I said to Terry Shelton (we were still playing at the time—well, barely playing). “Someone’s going to die.”
Terry nodded, stopped playing, unplugged his guitar, and headed offstage. He had a scar across his throat from where he’d been slashed years earlier during a brawl in another club. “I’m out of here,” he said.
“Bud’s going to fire us,” I said, referring to the Ragtime’s owner, Bud Waugh, who was drunk as hell and already screaming at us to get back onstage and play.
“The hell with that shit,” he said.
All of us followed him. The last one off the stage, I looked around and saw blood everywhere. The cops were already on their way, and Bud was going ape-shit.
When we returned on Monday to inspect the damage, he was waiting for us. He had moved most of our equipment outside the club.
“You guys are fired,” he said. “You let me down last night.”
There went my steady gig.
Gradually we picked up a club in Knoxville; another place on the Tennessee–North Carolina line; a Cowboys in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Miss Kitty’s in Marietta, Georgia; another Cowboys in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Bronco’s Lounge in Richmond, Virginia; and the Executive Inn in Paducah, Kentucky.
The gigs earned new fans, like Raymond Bullock, a Vietnam vet who came into Bronco’s almost every night just to hear “Some Gave All.” His mission in life was to find homeless veterans and drive them to the VA hospital or wherever they needed to go. He drove an old limo—and I mean old—but he wanted the vets to feel like they were going first class. One night he piled me in the back of his limo with about eight other vets who weren’t able to or didn’t want to go into the bar. I pulled out a cassette with a rough mix of “Some Gave All” and gave it to Raymond.
“This is the song I told you guys about,” he said, sliding the tape into the stereo. Then he turned to me. “Is it a hit yet?”
“It’s not out yet,” I said.
“Well, get it out, man. It’s the best song I’ve ever heard.” Then he cranked it up.
I knew something big was going to happen once that album was released. I felt it in my bones. But I was worried. As crazy as my world had been a few months or even weeks earlier, it was getting even crazier. It was like the ground was shaking and the sky was filling with thunder. Something was going to happen. I called Jack daily. “You gotta call the label and get them to move on this record,” I implored. “It’s time. It’s past time. We’re losing time. I might die here if I don’t get out of here right now,” I said in a voice that was as close to screaming as I got. “I’m going to die here.”
“Patience, my boy,” he said. “Harold takes his time and thinks these things out.”
“But I don’t have time,” I said. “You don’t understand what it’s like for me. If I stay here, I’m gonna run out of air. It’s like I’m a big fish in a tiny bowl. There’s not enough oxygen in the water.”
In October, Cindy filed for divorce. There were no hard feelings. Both of us recognized our marriage was a relic from another time. I gave her half of my share of the royalties on the six songs on Some Gave All that I’d written while we were together. I wanted to give her something that no one could ever take away—a thank-you for all she’d endured while we were together.
In December 1991, Mercury finally came up with a plan to release Some Gave All. Jack McFadden and I sat down with Harold Shedd, Buddy Cannon, and other executives in the label’s conference room. They explained they were going to put my album out early the next year. I clenched my fist and thought, finally. It was about time.
As we dug into the details, I shared my thoughts on artwork, song sequence, song titles, and the most important part of all, the first single.
I told them how the crowds where I played all had the same reaction to my songs. They come in used to cover bands that play boot-scootin’, line-dancin’ cowboy music, so the first time they hear my Appalachian swamp rock, they hate me. They wanted to hear straight-up, boot-shuffling country music, and I don’t really do that. “But as soon as I played ‘Don’t Tell My Heart,’ they hit the dance floor and the rest of the night was a flat-out good time.”
Everyone at the table nodded.
“I’ll tell you something, though,” I continued. “The name of that song is wrong. Everyone calls it the Achy Breaky song. They yell it all night long. ‘Play that Achy Breaky song.’ I hear it every night, all night long. ‘Play that Achy Breaky song.’ I could probably just play it over and over. I think it should be called ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’”
Harold leaned halfway across the conference table, nodding as though he’d found where the treasure was buried.
“I think you’re right,” he said.
After agreeing that “Achy Breaky Heart” would be the single, we made plans to shoot a video of me performing the song live. One of the promotion people suggested a dance contest, too. A couple of weeks later, we met with choreographer Melanie Greenwood, singer Lee Greenwood’s ex-wife. She got up and did a few line-dancing moves for me.
“Yeah, that looks cool,” I said. “That’s exactly what I see a lot of them doing in the club. But it needs a hook, like the Twist—something that connects the dancers to the singer.”
“What do you do when you sing it?” she asked.
“Uh, I don’t really move,” I said. “I’m the singer… If I do move, it’s probably something like this—” I got up and kinda moved my hips from side to side.
She froze her discerning eye on me for a moment, then smiled. “I got it.” And she did. She showed me a small move, which I tried, and suddenly everyone at the table began high-fiving each other.
The dance created in that conference room soon became known around the world as the Achy Breaky. We made an eleven-minute instructional line-dance video and later shipped it to cowboy bars and dance clubs across the country. Mercury sponsored a nationwide dance contest. Suddenly everybody was doing the Achy Breaky and the record wasn’t even shipped yet. The stage was set.
PART III
Be Careful What You Wish For
CHAPTER 19
“Achy Breaky Heart”
ON JANUARY 20, 1992, we shot the video for “Achy Breaky Heart” at Ashland’s majestic, old Paramount Arts Center. Although it required eighteen takes and we worked late into the night, the final version was perfect. I was really happy with it, and also with everyone who was in it. If you watch closely, you will see that the crowd included Tish, Brandi, my ex-wife, Cindy, and my sister, Angie. It might be the only music video ever made with both an ex-wife and a future wife in it.
In early March, the video came out. On the day it aired, I was playing—and living—at the Executive Inn in Paducah. Harold Shedd drove up from Nashville, and during a break between my first and second sets, we walked outside and he pointed up to the sky.
It was a starry night and we were out on the banks of the Ohio River, the backdrop for many of my life’s more significant moments. Harold looked up at the sky.
“You see all them stars up there?” he said. I stared up at the Milky Way, too.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Well, you may not realize it, but you’re gonna be right up there with all them real soon… starting tonight.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, confidently. “A big star.”
But my reality was still inside that club. I did another two sets that night. Between them, I went back to my room and saw the video for “Achy Breaky Heart” on TV for the first time. It should’ve given me goose bumps, but the volume on my video sounded about 10 percent lower than it did in the other videos, and that upset me. This was my one chance, and I’d fought for it.
It turned out, my ears were correct. Joe and Jim and the others figured out that one of the dubs they’d sent to CMT did contain an error and wasn’t playing as hot as other videos.
Luckily, everyone who could hear loved what they heard. The moment Melanie Greenwood’s dance video reached clubs across the country, millions of people embraced “Achy Breaky Heart.” It hadn’t even made it to the radio yet! By the end of March, the song hit the Billboard’s Hot Country Songs singles chart—still without the single having been officially released yet. It was happening. All of us knew it. The fuse was lit and inching toward the TNT.
On April 3, I performed “Achy Breaky Heart” on Nashville Now, Ralph Emery’s prime-time show on TNN. Emery, the Country Hall of Fame TV host, provided the most important platform for country music, especially for a new artist. Like an unknown comic going on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, it either launched your career or got you a pat on the back and a “Nice try, kid.”
From the moment I signed with Jack, and even back with Del Reeves, I badgered them about getting me on Ralph Emery’s show. “Just get me on,” I said. Now that it was going to happen, I obsessed about it. I talked about it with my mom and dad, Jack, and the guys in Sly Dog right up until the moment the director cued us to start playing, and then it was as if I had visualized the whole thing.
During those three and a half minutes, I felt the world shift under my feet. My dad had come to the show, and we talked in the parking lot afterward. He asked me what I thought. Grinning, I said, “Dad, I think the teeter just went to totter.”
The next day I played a show at the Paramount in Ashland. Before the show, I ran around out front and posed for a photo with the marquee over my shoulder in the background. It read: SOLD OUT. It might as well have said BLAST OFF. “Achy Breaky Heart” had all the magic I’d anticipated, and then some. In the weeks following the dance video, we had harnessed a perfect wave of momentum. It was No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs for five weeks. It spent twenty weeks on the chart overall. It also went to No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and became the first country single to go platinum since Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s 1983 smash, “Islands in the Stream.”
The record company was deluged with calls, including one from someone at CMT in a happy panic. “What in the world have you done to us? The phones are ringing off the hook.” Another came from an angry plant foreman in Dothan, Alabama. “You’re going to have to tell us when this video airs because I can’t get my ladies out of the break room!”
That reaction was just the start. On May 19, Some Gave All was released and it was like the burning fuse had finally reached the dynamite. The album debuted at No. 1 on both Billboard’s country and pop album charts; within a week, more than a million copies were sold. The numbers it put up were not only impressive, they were, as Harold Shedd and Jack McFadden both told me, unprecedented. The album spent seventeen consecutive weeks at the top, went platinum nine times over, eventually sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, and became the biggest-selling debut album by a male artist ever.
And where was I when all this happened?
Hangin’ on, workin’ and runnin’ just as hard as I could to keep up with this rocket.
We were flooded with offers and deals, some for huge amounts of money. I only said yes to one concert right away, and I agreed to do it for free. It was the fifth annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, DC, an event to honor prisoners of war and those labeled missing in action—in other words, those who gave all. I considered their logo and flag—“You are not forgotten”—the very embodiment of “Some Gave All.”
The concert was at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. Nearby was the Vietnam Memorial Wall. People and motorcycles, vets and their families, filled the National Mall. It was an amazing sight, thick with emotion. Rain came down steadily as I took the stage. I was bummed, thinking this moment could’ve been great if not for the rain; then I looked up and imagined those drops were tears cried for all the names etched on the wall.
“Cyrus,” I said to myself, “forget the rain. You get up there and give it everything you got.”
Don Von Tress, the writer of “Achy Breaky Heart,” joined me onstage, for the first of many times we played together. He was a two-tour Vietnam vet who’d served with the 101st Airborne and been part of more than 140 helicopter missions. Having him sing “Some Gave All” with me that day only made it more poignant.
My mom and Cletis stood in the wings. I remembered when she’d told me not to give “Some Gave All” to Charlie Daniels because it was my song. But as I watched the crowd, I realized it wasn’t my song. It was their song—and always would be.
Backstage, I was rehashing the set with Don when my mom appeared and gave me a hug.
“Billy, did you see it?” she asked.
“What?”
“During ‘Some Gave All,’ right at the last chorus, a bald eagle swooped down in front of the stage, then flew across the sky and over the Capitol.”
“Ruthie, I hate to burst your bubble,” Don said, “but that was a seagull.”
My mom shook her head.
“It might’ve been a seagull to you,” she said, “but it was an eagle to me.” We shared a laugh. It was a special moment and a special time.
I went back to Bronco’s Lounge for one last stand. My manager thought I was crazy to give up a week, when I could be making five figures or more, for a gig in a bar where I was likely to spend more buying drinks for old friends than I’d get paid. But I honored every commitment I had made before the record broke, and Bronco’s was one of them.
The Toronto Sun, of all places, loved that angle. The paper’s editor was a big Elvis Presley fan, and he sent a reporter to find out about this hillbilly who was being called the new Elvis. The reporter found me in a crappy hotel in Richmond, Virginia, saw what was going on, and busted the thing wide open. In fact, he coined the phrase “Cyrus Virus.”
But what’s great is all the different and surprising ways music touches people, all kinds of people, everywhere. There are no boundaries. And one night I heard a knock on my hotel room door. I looked out the peephole and saw this big old veteran standing outside. It was Raymond Bullock, the guy who would bring a limo-load of vets to the bar every night and have me play “Some Gave All.” I’d never seen him without his green beret on. Now he was holding it, along with his dog tags. After I said “Hi, what’s up,” he solemnly extended his hand and offered me both his beret and tags.
“Mr. Cyrus, I want to give you these,” he said.
“I can’t take those from you,” I replied.
“No, they’re yours,” he insisted. “The first night I heard you sing ‘Some Gave All’ was the first night since returning from Vietnam that I felt like I was home. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”
After Bronco’s, I knew it was time to climb into the rocket. I was ready. I rented a small apartment in Nashville so I’d have a place to dump all my stuff, but I barely remembered the address. The road became my home. I said yes to practically everything. In the last six months of 1992, I did at least two hundred dates… and probably more. Good Morning America? Sure thing. Top of the Pops in London? I’ll be there. A club in Fort Knox? No problem. Alabama, you want me to play at your June Jam in Fort Payne? Sure, tell me what time I go on.
In fact, it was in June, while I was on my way to that annual country music extravaganza, that a little controversy arose. Travis Tritt told some folks in the media that he thought “Achy Breaky Heart” was “frivolous” and he hated to s
ee country music devolve into an “ass-wiggling contest.”
Trust me, I knew with “Achy Breaky Heart” it was either love it or hate it. There was no middle ground, not with a song that big. And I knew the media loves a good fight more than anything. I considered responding but my dad, who knew a thing or two or twelve about critics from being in politics, had his own suggestion. “Son, you take it as a compliment that you made someone so upset. You know every action has an opposite and equal reaction. You can’t have so many people out there love that thang without having someone hate it. So you don’t say nothin’. You just go about your business.”
Good advice. Then, without me even knowing beforehand, none other than Bruce Springsteen—the Boss himself—played “Achy Breaky Heart” at one of his shows and said, “I don’t care what anybody says. It’s a damn good little rock song.” You can only imagine how much that meant to me at the time.
And then Jack McFadden called to tell me that I’d received a letter from another supporter, a man whose gravelly voice and black boots carried a lot of weight: Johnny Cash.
The Johnny Cash.
Here’s what the letter said:
Billy Ray,
I was very impressed recently to hear you give God the credit for your success. It’s good to be reminded where all goodness comes from.
Thirty-six years ago I was working with Elvis and saw him take the same kind of flak you’re taking now.
Congratulations on the way you’re handling it all. In your case, as in Elvis’, the good outweighs the bad.
Let ’em have it. I’m in your corner.
Johnny Cash
Nashville insiders were always reluctant to let new people into their circle, and I wasn’t much on schmoozin’. Some of them didn’t know what to make of a guy who was more comfortable in tennis shoes and cut-up T-shirts than black boots and a Stetson.
Hillbilly Heart Page 14