He kept on about Willie, and so did I. “The minute Willie gets here he’s gonna get on that bus, and here comes some of his old smoking and drinking buddies and they’re going to have a good time out there. They’re all songwriters, and Willie looks around and sees that they could be doing a bit better and maybe he should go off a bridge for them, and the next thing you know here is Willie coming around a corner and there’ll be somebody behind him wailing and Willie will say ‘He wrote this song and we’re going to do it.’ It’ll be a dumb fuckin’ song, and we’re stuck with it. Don’t put Willie through that and don’t put me through that. If he wants to be here, he’ll be here. Willie’s got a big heart, and if a guy starts crying in the right tune, he’ll do it.”
Bob eventually got his way by doing the Waylon and Willie Clean Shirt album, which Epic thought had too many Mexican horns. They didn’t do too much with my first album for them, The Eagle, either, despite “Wrong” finding its rightful spot on the charts. Jerry Gropp must have smiled down from left-hand Heaven.
One of the reasons I had originally gone with Epic was the presence of Marge Hunt. I’d known her since she was sixteen, and we had been friends for years. I thought she was one of the people in the A&R department who would be on my side. I reunited with Richie for the album that would become Too Dumb for New York City, looking to find the key to the sound we had created together in the seventies. Richie figured it started with my guitar playing, and convinced me that Br’er Rabbit’s Hiding Place, the rhythmic thumb I use for strumming, should come out from undercover. Suddenly, while I was in the studio, a young guy named Doug Johnson started dropping by. I didn’t know it, but he was the new head of A&R.
He told me how much he loved my work, and I was one of his inspirations. Then he started calling Richie with suggestions. When Richie told him, well, we’re not finished with it yet, they changed into demands.
One night Reggie Young was in the studio, and Johnson stopped by. “I hear an Eric Clapton guitar on that,” he said.
“Why don’t you put it on?” I said, sitting him down in the seat behind the mixing board and pointing him at Reggie. He sat there. I looked over his shoulder. The air could be cut with a knife. I didn’t move until he did.
The album was beautiful, he kept assuring me, only he wanted us to keep cutting sides. Change a verse and a chorus. Remix and remaster. I said, that’s bordering on fucking with me. By the time Too Dumb came out, in 1992, we were both pissed off. Epic sat on the record, big-time.
Don Was had wanted to do a record with me. When I talked to the Epic A&R department, they wanted to give me a budget of only $150,000, just about what a new act gets. At this point, my old friend Marge Hunt said, “He ain’t worth it.”
If you can get a guy under forty years old or Waylon Jennings, you take the guy under forty. That’s what they were telling me. Oh, yeah: Young Country. I had been Young Country once myself, and maybe Ernest Tubb and Carl Smith and Roy Acuff had felt me nipping at their heels. But I didn’t do it at their expense. I tried to follow in their tradition and comprehend the depth and meaning of what they were singing about. The experience.
You always need new blood. I look and listen to Travis Tritt and Leroy Parnell and Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mark Chestnutt, and I see country’s next generation starting to grow. There ain’t no hats-and-thighs there; just intelligent artists, searching for their dreams and singing yours.
Country is the only music I know that seems to have no age boundaries. You look out at the audience, whether it’s a boot-heel saloon or state fair, and there’s everything from babies to grandparents, with a lot of wild folk in between. They appreciate that you don’t have to be of any one generation to know love, loss, fireworks and playing-with-fire, and that we all need to share a good time now and again.
Videos mean you have to be good-looking these days. I don’t know how Ernest Tubb or Hank Locklin would fare on the small screen; they weren’t what you would call pretty. Still, every new generation picks up a little from what’s going on around them. George Jones and I may have chosen country, while Jerry Lee Lewis, Brenda Lee, and Johnny Cash immigrated to these fair shores; but the presence of rock and roll in our music was undeniable. Television only enhanced the glitter of Porter Wagoner, not to mention Crook and Chase.
I didn’t mind a bunch of new mavericks on the scene. But Epic was telling me my time was over with. People don’t want to hear you sing. Radio don’t want to play you no more.
One day I went up to their office. They asked me to call up radio stations and influence them to play my record. They put me in a room, gave me a cup of coffee, handed me a couple of pages of phone numbers, and walked out. I sat there. There were cutouts of everybody but me around. Marylou placed a couple of calls for me. At one, the program director wasn’t there; at another, they put her on hold.
I thought, boy, there was a time when I wouldn’t do this. Then I thought again. What did I mean, there was a time? I ain’t doing it now. I told Marylou, “Let’s get in the car.”
You gotta know when it’s time to leave. Don’t look back.
I wasn’t planning to record anymore. I knew I could play live for as long as I wanted; my shows still sold out, and I was doing more than a hundred dates a year. I couldn’t possibly perform all my songs in a night anyway.
I didn’t have to write any songs, so of course I got extraordinarily prolific. The only difference was these “poems”—they hadn’t been set to music yet—were all from the perspective of a five-year-old boy.
I had started to watch Sesame Street because of Shooter. I missed it the first time around, because my first kids had graduated elementary television about the era of Captain Kangaroo. I love the way the show talks to children, and the pains that are taken to not mislead children, and to teach them at the same time. The music is clever as well, and when I appeared on the show to sing “Wrong,” it kind of fit naturally.
I’m proud to say that I’m a personal friend of Big Bird. Whenever I appear in the New England area, Carroll Spiney and his wife, Debbie, come visit the show. Nobody believes he’s Big Bird, or Oscar the Grouch, until he opens his mouth. I’ve seen little kids rooted to the spot when they realize he’s the soul of Sesame Street.
Carroll and Debbie live in an old house that is just like a fairyland. A model train runs around the rafters, and toys are spread everywhere. He is transformed when he puts on the yellow Big Bird costume, all eight feet tall, his hand up in the air making the movements of the mouth and eyes, and the other moving around as the Bird’s wing. There’s a television set monitor inside the chest, so Carroll can see what’s happening outside, though he has to do everything backward. He’s the only Big Bird that’s ever been.
He also is the voice of Oscar the Grouch. If both he and Big Bird are onscreen, Debbie’s back there moving Oscar. He takes great pains to make sure children don’t see him with the top of his Big Bird outfit off. He knows imagination is built on illusion, and Big Bird isn’t anything more than a Big Kid himself.
I played a turkey farmer in the movie Follow That Bird. They dressed me up in overalls and a plaid shirt, put a red bandanna in my pocket and a straw hat on my head. I hate to ruin your Thanksgiving dinner, but those gobblers are nasty creatures. I smelled like turkey for weeks.
We were sitting in the cab of a truck for one scene. I hadn’t stopped smoking yet, and Carroll hadn’t smoked for ten years, but sitting next to me in the small truck cab, between takes, surrounded by tobacco haze, he began thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
We were covered in flies, up north of Toronto. A square cloud in the sky passed overhead, spitting lightning. It was hot. Carroll had set the top half of his costume outside the truck. We were sitting there. Suddenly, we smelled something burning. I looked over and Big Bird was going up in flames! I had set him on fire. That’s a good way to get yourself strung up by an angry mob of four-year-olds.
I was thinking a lot about children, watching Shooter move toward
his teens. I had written a story, with Shooter’s help, about a racehorse that didn’t grow. He was a miniature pony, who reminded me of when Shooter had been the shortest kid in his class. He’d worried about it, fretted on it, until one day he came home and said, “Dad, I’m not the littlest kid in my class anymore. There’s this girl from Texas that just moved here.”
The horse in the story, nicknamed Useless, was the runt of the litter and the pride of the farm. He was so mischievous that it was thought they were going to sell him to a traveling circus, but a lightning storm allowed Useless to become a hero, rescuing the bigger horses from the barn when a fire erupted. “The Little Horse That Didn’t Grow” had saved the day.
I wrote a song, “(Some Things Come in) Small Packages,” to go along with it. Then I wrote a poem called “Dirt,” remembering how I used to put some dirt in my grandpa’s snuff, and how it was the best toy of all. And then I wrote “A Bad Day,” which was inspired by a five-year-old friend of mine named Charlie, who lives in Tulsa and reminded me of my grandson Josh, who’s always getting into scrapes; and “When I Get Big,” “I’m Little,” and “Cowboy Movies,” where my Saturday afternoon matinee idols were seen through the eyes of a Nickelodeon and Muppet fan.
I never liked children’s records; I always thought they talked down to kids. But these poems were different. I was seeing life through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, and that five-year-old boy was me. I wanted kids to know that everything they’re going through, the little missteps they get in trouble over, I got in trouble for that, too. That’s okay. That’s part of growing up.
I was getting back my sense of wonder. Going back to the dreaming days of lying back on the grass, looking up into the sky, “off to see the world / If I could only fly.”
Shooter read the poems and said, “Dad, they look like songs to me.” I started arranging them into verses and choruses. Jessi added her encouragement. Epic had just started a children’s label, but they wanted a cast of superstars to do the singing. That wasn’t what I had in mind. I remembered when I had sung “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and “The Tennessee Waltz” at Shooter’s school; there had been a children’s chorus backing me up. They’d be the only superstars on any children’s record I envisioned.
Someone at Epic played it for Shelley Duvall, the actress, who passed the word along to Lou Adler, who used to produce the Mamas and the Papas. He had just had a little girl, which made him more than susceptible to the charms of children, and had started an offshoot label called Ode 2 Kids. He said, “You’ve got me in your pocket if you want it.” I loved his enthusiasm.
At the same time, Clifford “Barney” Robertson called me after many years. He and his wife Carter had been Waylors ten years before, and the last time they’d seen me I was a crazed man. They had started a family, and phoned to say hello. What had he been doing?
“You’re not going to believe this, but I produce children’s records,” said Barney.
Well, I had something he wouldn’t believe, either. I asked him to produce these songs, and we decided to use only country instruments. Sonny Curtis came along for the acoustic ride. From my Waylors band, steel guitarist Robby Turner, drummer Jeff Hale, and Jigger pretended they were back in the sandbox. Even Oscar the Grouch grumbled a little bit from inside his trash can.
Cowboys, Sisters, Rascals and Dirt wasn’t a grown man singing children’s songs. I thought it was a big rascal singing about little rascals, and when I got to my own little rascal, well, “Shooter, you are a friend of mine. … Your life makes my life worthwhile.”
It was like coming face to face with a younger version of myself, walking down a street in Littlefield, bare feet meeting tooled cowboy boots. Both of us couldn’t know what the future would bring, so it was free to lead anywhere, to anything.
Possibility. Hope. The excitement of the moment of creation. All I knew for sure was that songs and ideas were starting to pour out of me, sometimes so fast I couldn’t write one down before the next one started growing. I’d found my way back to me, at last.
CHAPTER 12
THE TROJAN HOSS
And then there’s the road.
For any migrating performer, travel takes on a life all its own. The shows become stopovers; the highway is where you spend most of your time. In transit. In transition.
You enter a strange space when you get on the bus. You’re not home, and you’re not there yet. You’re on the way.
Mostly, you’re living in the present. Day to day. All you’re really concerned with is getting to the show, wherever it might be. Everything else is looking around at your surroundings, taking stock of where you’ve been, where you might be headed, cruise-controlling the speedometer. You have a lot of time to think about what you’re doing, and yet you’re doing it.
It’s a traveling universe, your own private world that consists of whoever is on the road with you, the jokes you share, the camaraderie and idle chatter and tall tales and slices of life you encounter; and then leave. The Flying W.
Having a bus helps, because it’s like your traveling home. You can eat on it, sleep on it, and like I did for a while, never get off it except to play. It’s filled up with everyone who was ever in your band, hopped on after a show and stayed for a few more towns, became family or friends, or joined the crew, who might be the motleyist bunch of them all, and really sees to it that we all get from one place to another. Ready to move on.
On. That’s as good a description as any. When I’m home at Southern Comfort, outskirting Nashville, I’m most definitely off, sitting in my big chair with a remote control and a glass of iced tea by my side waiting for the boxing matches to start. Dinner at five? You got a deal.
But when I step on board Shooter IV, even if we have a day off to play golf and kick back along the way, I’m on, tapping into the energy of whirlwind touring, five cities in seven days, eleven cities in two weeks, twenty-five cities in two months, one hundred cities in a year. It gets in your blood.
If you do it for thirty years, it becomes your natural rhythm. You might get off the road and feel tired, beat, needing to sleep in your own bed. All you want to do is lay down and rest. Once you get rested, you get restless. Then you’re back out there again.
Jessi says we don’t play music for a living. We bounce for a living. The real rhythm of the road is up and down, jostling and knocking your body around as you navigate the speed bumps. You can get dingy. Silly. It’s really not natural to stay on a damn bus, all day and all night, going from one place to another. Everyone tries to grab some sleep, but you can’t, at least not more than an hour or two at a snatch. Cradled in your bunk, drapes drawn, no light, you wake and think it must be morning. It never is.
When you first start out, you think you have it made. You’re young and ready for anything. You shake your head at those unfortunate people who have regular jobs, go home every night, eat supper, fall asleep, and start the same old ritual the next morning when the alarm goes off. The further along you get, the more you realize that maybe they have the best setup of all.
It works in reverse, too. They look at you sailing down the highway and think that must be wonderful. It’s glamorous, no doubt about that, unless you take into consideration how you itch around the edges because you haven’t had time to wash, and are bone tired from lack of deep sleep, and haven’t eaten anything more than a ham sandwich from a backstage deli tray.
Yeah, we’ve got the video player and the stereo system, the microwave and games galore. We can stop at any truck stop and fill up on the hamburgers, T-shirts, and souvenir postcards that are the stock in trade of Roadside America. We know that the next destination is a show where we’ll play our music and people will let us know how much they appreciate our coming by to visit them.
But when you’ve traveled three hundred miles on a bus … well, you’ve traveled three hundred miles on a bus.
Shut the door and let’s get rolling.
We’ve got a full house th
is trip. Every band member that’s ever played with me is along for the ride, scattered around the inside of a bus that looks like every bus I ever owned, from the Black Maria through a succession of metallic Eagles to my latest Prevost. This is the Quitter’s Party to end all parties, where we sit around and remember those moments where we lived, breathed, and played music together. Being a band.
The bass players are sitting over in the corner, talking about whether to go five-string. There’s Jigger, and Duke Goff, and my brother Tommy, and Sherman Hayes, and Kevin Hogan and Sonny Ray and even Paul Foster. The guitarists take up the whole back of the bus. Gropp is leading the pack, which is fitting for someone who worked for me five different times. Gary Scruggs shoots the breeze with Billy Ray Reynolds, while Rance and Gordon play a little Farkle. There’s Jigger, again! He moved over to the six-of-strings section a couple of years ago, and he ain’t left since.
The drummers are grouped around the kitchen table, beating out calypso rhythms. Richie’s over there, Jack Huffman and Jeff Hale. The steel section mostly consists of Mooney, Fred Newall, and Robby Turner trading licks; Robby’s mom Berniece and dad Doyle were in Hank’s original Drifting Cowboys, and when he was twelve, he took guitar lessons from legend Jimmy Bryant. Mooney’s telling Robby how he wrote his hit song, “Psycho Falanges.” Robby is tying keyboardist Fred Lawrence’s shoes together. They’ll have so many knots he’ll have to cut ’em off. Sometimes I’d hate to have to travel on the band bus. They’re crazy over there!
Right now, though, they’re all over visiting me. I’m like Ulysses, and Troy is about to fall.
I always wanted a band. I need guys I can depend on, to be my cast of characters, and since I never use a set list, whatever gang that winds up playing with me has to watch what I’m doing, otherwise I win the game of Stump the Band. There’s only one time I’m the honcho, and that’s when we’re up on the stage. I don’t want to be any big boss the rest of the time. I never cared for that star-sideman mentality.
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