“Looking for Ring Dawson,” I said.
“You missed him by a month. Ring’s long gone. Shut down his operation. Moved to Nashville.”
“You know where in Nashville?”
“No idea.”
Dead end.
San Antone turned out to be doubly dead. Not only did I miss Dawson, I also missed getting paid after our gig. The owner slipped out before we got offstage, leaving word that he had to be in bankruptcy court the next morning. But Brother Paul wasn’t buying it. He found out where the man lived and paid him a two a.m. visit. Didn’t get all our money, but enough to pay for gas back to Fort Worth.
“Hell,” said Brother Paul as we headed for the highway, “we got enough gas money to take us all the way to Nashville.”
“You wanna go to Nashville?” I asked.
“Ain’t a bad idea,” he said. “You’re the one who calls Nashville ‘the Store.’ You’re always saying that if you wanna sell songs, you gotta bring ’em to the Store.”
“Yup. I believe that’s true.”
“So it’s settled.”
Before I could say yes or no, Brother Paul turned on the radio. A deejay was saying, “Here’s a hot one from that little lady who’s burning up the airwaves with her ‘Cheatin’ Ways.’ Here’s Bambi Love.”
“Maybe so,” I finally said, thinking about my two-hundred-dollar poker winnings. “Maybe Nashville is the right move after all. Maybe Nashville’s the place to live.”
MUSIC CITY
Back in the early 1960s, Nashville was a funny place. At first glance, it seemed relaxed and laid-back. If you were a picker or songwriter, you’d find your way over to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry carried on every Saturday night. Tootsie was a sweetheart. She had a good word for all the writers, even if you were new to town like me. She made me feel welcome.
Underneath the fellowship, though, was a strong strain of killer competition. Sure, your fellow songwriter might inspire you with his latest composition. But if you were looking to get your song to a big artist, say, like Marty Robbins or Patsy Cline, he’d have no compunction about tripping you up to get to those artists before you. Nashville was tough.
To give myself time to get settled, I arrived without my family. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t find steady work. There were a lot of clubs featuring live music, but there were a lot more—hundreds more—live musicians looking to get hired. When the wife and kids arrived, all I could afford was twenty-dollar-a-week accommodations in a trailer park, the same seedy one that Roger Miller would sing about in “King of the Road.” Bottom line: I had to go back to hawking encyclopedias door to door.
I had one shabby dark suit, one white shirt and one red-striped tie. My black lace-up shoes had holes in the soles. This was my uniform as I hit the streets, ready but hardly eager to sell books of knowledge to the good citizens of Nashville. The sales manager gave me a list of homes to hit up, all in an area of four or five square miles.
My third day out, I still hadn’t sold a thing. It was early April but still no sign of spring. Winter was hanging tough. The air was frosty cold, and without an overcoat, I was chilled to the bone. Lugging my briefcase stuffed with sales brochures and sample books, I walked up and down the tree-lined streets of a nice neighborhood of two-story houses. Knocking on the door or ringing the
doorbell, I was usually greeted by either an angry dog or an angry homeowner who resented the disturbance. I didn’t blame ’em.
It was about three p.m., that time of day when I got to dreaming of napping in a warm room across from a roaring fireplace. Far as selling encyclopedias, I hadn’t even had a nibble. I was on the verge of quitting. This was going to be my last house, a redbrick ranch-style home with a brand-new baby-blue Oldsmobile 88 sitting in the driveway.
A woman who looked to be in her late forties came to the door. She had a pretty face, a dyed red beehive hairdo high on her head, and an orange velour pantsuit. Nice figure, nice smile, seemed like a nice lady. She spoke in a thick Southern accent, saying that she and her husband had two kids in junior high, and just by coincidence, she’d been thinking how it might help their studies to have a set of encyclopedias sitting in the den. In short, this was the easiest sale of my life. No, she didn’t need the easy payment plan. And yes, she could give me a check right now. She was fine with a two-week delivery time. Making out the sales slip, I asked her full name.
“Ruby Walters.”
“Walters,” I repeated. “Your husband isn’t in the music business, is he?”
“Why, he certainly is. Jack Walters.”
“Sometimes called Slick?”
“Personally, I never call him that. To me he’s Jack. It’s just that the music business likes to give out nicknames. But I don’t think he’s slick. I think he’s sweet. At least he used to be.”
“Is he home?” I asked. “I’d like to thank him for his business.”
“You can thank me,” said Ruby. “He don’t care too much about books. He don’t care too much about anything except his hit records. Right now he’s at the studio. He practically lives there.”
“If I’m not mistaken, ma’am, he wrote ‘Cheatin’ Ways’ for Bambi Love.”
“Oh, that woman . . .” said Ruby, her voice trailing off as her face flushed and her eyes narrowed.
“I’m guessing she’s gonna be a big star,” I said, hoping to hear more.
“If you can’t say anything good about a person, don’t say anything at all.”
I knew I’d better drop the subject.
“Just wanna thank you again for your order, Mrs. Walters.”
“Ruby,” she corrected me. “Call me Ruby.”
Was there something suggestive about the way she invited me to call her Ruby? Or was it just my imagination? Either way, I shook her hand, which was extremely warm, and went on my way.
Turned out to be a great day. Four doors down from Ruby, I sold a set of encyclopedias to a grandmother with instructions to send it to her son and grandkids in Memphis. Two sales in two hours—a record for me.
I decided to give up the rest of my route and go home. In driving home, though, I really wasn’t thinking about encyclopedia sales. I was thinking about Vernon—thinking that, although I’d lost all track of him, I really hadn’t. I was back on his tail, back on the trail that would lead me to learn more about him. And the weirdest thing—the one thing I couldn’t explain—is that all this had come about without trying. Maybe there were unknown powers, maybe there were strange pockets of positive energy that were conspiring in my favor. I remembered what I’d told my Sunday school class back in Fort Worth: “I’m working on a good cause and you all have inspired me to keep at it.” Maybe the universe was feeling my inspiration and doing all it could to help me out. At least it made me feel good to think so.
Don’t wanna get too philosophical, but it sure does seem like the more you go with the flow, the more you get where you want to go. That was exactly the case of my early days in Nashville. In May, a small publisher had given me a steady job writing songs. This was a miracle. For the first time in my life, I was actually paid to sit in a small office and fool with my guitar until I came up with a decent tune or two. Not only did this mean I could quit the door-to-door encyclopedia routine, I had a legitimate reason to seek out Slick Walters: I had songs to sell.
“I don’t believe Walters is too interested in anyone’s songs but his own,” said Brother Paul when I told him that I was about to make my move. On weekends, I’d put together a band where Brother Paul, myself, a bass player and a steel guitarist were working clubs around the city.
“Well, Slick does more than write,” I said. “He’s also a producer. That means he has artists who need hit songs. He can’t possibly write all of ’em.”
“He can try.”
“You ever meet t
he man?” I asked Paul.
“No, but I hear he’s a prick.”
“Says who?”
“Says Jimmy Dale, a buddy of mine, a drummer who’s been working on his dates. Says that he found a way to screw Ring Dawson . . .”
“The record man from San Antone who moved here . . .”
“And now’s moved back to San Antone ’cause Slick done pulled one of his slick moves and pushed Ring out of the picture. Now Slick’s doing more than writing and producing for Bambi Love. Now he’s managing her.”
“I gotta meet this man.”
“If you do, I’m tagging along,” said Paul.
“You don’t need to bother.”
“The hell I don’t. Jimmy Dale says he packs heat and got a nasty temper to boot. You never know what the hell he’s gonna do.”
“I got no reason to piss him off,” I said.
“You sure about that?”
“Well, not entirely.”
—
A couple of days later, Brother Paul and I were walking into a small one-story building on Division Street, just around the corner from Nashville’s Music Row. The sign outside said WALTERS ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTS, JACK WALTERS, PROPRIETOR. A middle-aged woman with a long face and tired eyes asked our business.
“We’re friends of Jimmy Dale, the drummer,” said Paul. “He said it’d be okay if we came by the session today.”
“Mr. Walters’s sessions are closed,” she instructed us.
“Oh, it’s okay, Margaret,” said Jimmy, who walked through the front door. “These are my pals. Come on back, fellas.”
Paul introduced me to Jimmy, a portly man in his early forties, of good cheer and bouncy energy.
“Hear you got a couple of hit songs out there,” Jimmy said to me. “Got something to play for Slick?”
“That’s why I brought my guitar,” I said.
“Good deal. Slick’s always hungry for hits. Like I told Paul, he’ll be glad to meet you.”
We walked down a long hallway leading to the recording studio. The walls were covered with show posters of country artists Slick produced. None of them were superstars, but I recognized several as having current popular songs. The picture that caught my eye was a framed advertisement for Bambi Love’s “Cheatin’ Ways” in Cash Box, the trade magazine. “Smash hit of the year!” the ad declared. The photo of Bambi was from the waist up. She wore a white sweater tight enough to grab my attention.
Jimmy noticed me noticing Bambi.
“We’re almost done with her album,” he said. “We’re cutting the last song today.”
“What’s it been like working with her?” I asked.
“What I can say? She’s a fox.”
Just by chance, I knew all three of the musicians who were in the studio. Two were from Texas and the third I’d met at Tootsie’s. Handshakes all around.
“Slick’s back in his office,” said Jimmy. “He’ll be coming out soon. And Bambi, hell, you never know when she’ll show up. She wanders in whenever she feels like it.”
I shot the shit with the musicians for the next thirty minutes until the studio door opened and a man wearing a shiny jet-black toupee stormed through. The toupee was the first thing I noticed. It was that obvious. The wig was fashioned into a sharp wave that, jutting out a couple of inches past his forehead, had the same shape as the fancy fin taillights on a ’61 Cadillac DeVille. The toupee seemed to have a life of its own. I half expected the thing to fly off his head and zoom around the room. Beneath the wig were a set of intense gray eyes, large ears, a long nose and thin lips on a mouth fixed in a scowl. The man was medium height and medium build. He wore a black Western shirt with white stitching, and blue jeans held up by a belt and a buckle with his oversized initials—JW—in brass. His face looked a good twenty years older than his wig. I guessed he was in his fifties.
“Slick,” said Jimmy. “Meet a couple of pals.”
Jimmy introduced Paul and me.
“I see you got your guitar with you,” Slick said in a bottom-of-the-barrel baritone voice. “You looking to play on this session?”
“I was actually looking to play you a couple of songs of mine,” I said.
“Had any hits?”
When I named a couple, he said, “Hell, I didn’t know you wrote those. Sure, I’ll listen to your songs, but first take out your guitar. Last night I wrote a song myself. There’s a guitar solo after the first verse. You might want to take a crack at it.”
“Sure thing.”
In spite of all the warnings, Slick acted like a pretty normal guy. Hell, he was willing to hear my songs and invited me to play on his session. He didn’t seem crazy at all.
“Lemme show you this new song,” he said.
Slick wasn’t a musician, so he couldn’t play the tune on any instrument. He also explained that, because he couldn’t read music, no notes were written down. All he had was a yellow pad with lyrics. He put the pad on a stand and, before he started singing, said, “I got a low voice, and this thing is written for Bambi. You’re gonna have to close your eyes and imagine her singing it.”
Easier said than done.
In his froglike voice, Slick sang a song called “Something I Got.” It was an up-tempo tune that sounded awfully familiar. The story was written from a woman’s point of view. “Early in the morning or in the midnight hour . . . something I got gives me all the power . . .”
When he was through singing, he told Jimmy Dale to lay down a beat. He pointed to the piano player to work up some chords. The bass player fell right in. Thanks to the professionalism of these musicians, the song came together quickly. After they ran it down once, Slick showed me where he wanted a guitar solo. No problem.
But then something funny happened. While playing the solo, I suddenly realized why the song sounded familiar. It was basically a rewrite of Vernon Clay’s “Something You Got,” the tune that was supposed to be the A side until “Faith,” the B side, took off instead. Not only was “Something You Got” released as a single, it also appeared on Good Friends’ first album that, by now, I’d listened to many times. Just as Slick had ripped off Vernon’s “Cheatin’ Days” and turned it into “Cheatin’ Ways,” he was now turning “Something You Got” into “Something I Got.” None of this was sitting well with me.
“Beautiful,” said Slick when my solo was over. “Now let’s run through the whole thing again so when Bambi shows up, we can knock it out in a just a couple of takes.”
“One quick question, Slick,” I said.
“Shoot,” he urged.
“I’m presuming you’ve heard all those records Bambi made when she sang with Good Friends.”
When I said that, I was sitting down and Slick was standing over me. His expression changed. His mouth tightened and his eyes reddened.
He practically spit out the words, “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, the guy who put the band together, Vernon Clay—”
“Never heard of him,” Slick interrupted.
“Anyway, he’s the one who wrote ‘Something You Got.’ It was their first single. Bambi, who was calling herself Marla back then, she sang it and—”
“What the hell you babbling about?” Slick interrupted me again. “I ain’t got time for no stories. We’re here to make a record.”
“Well, that’s just my point,” I said. “She already made the record. Vernon called it ‘Something You Got,’ and the one you just showed us—except for changing the ‘you’ to ‘I’—is basically the same song.”
Reacting to my words, Brother Paul and Jimmy tensed up. My frankness surprised them.
Slick leaned down and got right in my face. I could smell his bad breath. I could practically see flames shooting out of his eyes.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “you calling me a thief?”
/>
“I’m just calling Vernon Clay a damn good writer.”
“I never even heard of that bastard.”
“Maybe not, but you sure as hell must have heard his song.”
“What gives you the damn right to walk into another man’s studio—a studio I paid for with my own sweat, a studio built on my hit records that I produced? Where do you come off waltzing in here and accusing me of stealing some song from a man I don’t know from Adam?”
“You don’t have to know him,” I said. “You just have to know his song. Just the way, I suspect, you knew Bambi Love’s ‘Cheatin’ Ways.’ That’s a tune that came out under your name but was originally written by Vernon Clay, who called it ‘Cheatin’ Days.’”
That did it. Slick exploded. He grabbed me by my neck. I reacted by kicking him in the nuts. He moaned, releasing his grip on me and nearly falling over. But before he hit the floor, he got control of himself and ran out of the studio.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” said Brother Paul.
I agreed, but before we could, Slick was back in the room holding a pistol aimed dead at my head. My life suddenly flashed before me.
Because Slick was focused on me, he didn’t see Paul reach for his piece. Neither did I. I didn’t understand what was happening until I heard Paul say, “Put it down, Slick, before I blow your ugly mug to smithereens.”
No one in the room could question Paul’s intent. Paul was just as crazy as Slick—maybe crazier—and Slick, though still fuming, came to reason.
“If either one of you cocksuckers gets within ten feet of my studio, I swear I’ll kill you,” he said as me and Paul—still pointing his gun at Slick—backed out of the room.
Once outside, Paul was shaking his head. “Didn’t I warn you?”
“You sure did.”
“Then what the hell were you doing back there?” he asked.
“Just looking for some answers.”
“Yeah, but in all the wrong places.”
“Sometimes you gotta go to the wrong place to get the right answer,” I said.
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