I started in the stage crew. We’d tear down one set only to set up another for the next night’s show, often long into the night. Many times I got only an hour or two of sleep before I heard Riggs roll up his security door.
Working with Riggs brought with it another benefit. He was well known, had a thriving business, and as a result had a constant stream of some of the world’s greatest guitars coming through his door. All of which I got to play. Martin, Gibson, Taylor, Collings.
I really fell in love with a handmade guitar called a McPherson, but given that they started at about seven thousand dollars, I just enjoyed those from afar. The McPherson was designed and built by an engineering genius who offset the sound hole. Most guitars have a sound hole right in the middle beneath the strings. McPherson argued that center-hole placement removed much of the resonance, so he positioned it off to the side, giving the top more resonating surface.
He also made one other change that was fundamentally different from every other guitar; he cantilevered the neck. Most guitar necks joined the body in a dovetail joint, but McPherson argued that had a way of deadening the sound. Why not cantilever the neck above the body to allow more sound travel and resonation? It worked. It was one of the most melodious, ringing, bell-like guitars I’d ever played. Almost had a voice-like quality. A lot of the bluegrass guys didn’t care too much for it, because it had too much resonation. Bluegrass guys like to play a note and then let it die so they can get on to the next. But finger-pickers or singer-songwriters or rhythm folks or studio guys who needed something to fill in, who strummed to create a blanket of sound, loved McPhersons.
Playing so many guitars made me think of Jimmy a good bit. Every time I strummed a guitar, I compared the sound to Jimmy. I wondered where he was. Was somebody taking good care of him? Did they play him? Had they pawned him? Thrown him over the bridge? Stuffed him in a corner? Of all the things I’d done to my father—striking him in the face, stealing his money, stealing his truck—the deepest pain in me had to do with Jimmy and my failure to take care of him.
I could never go home without him.
Working with Riggs in the daylight and at the Ryman at night became my life. I got to know some of the regulars at the Ryman, and before I turned twenty I’d seen maybe a hundred shows and begun to appreciate music from the audience side of the stage. Which was good. It taught me a lot that experience from the stage had never taught me. How to interact with an audience. What draws them in. What turns them off.
Most of all, I learned one thing that my father had told me early but I’d never quite appreciated: “Great music, the kind that moves people, is an offering. Anything less is a counterfeit, and those who hear it know it best.”
I also confirmed for myself another of Dad’s truths—the great players aren’t great because they can dazzle you with hummingbird wings for fingers. They dazzle by knowing what notes to leave in and what notes to leave out. And more often than not, it’s the leaving out that makes them great.
Almost three years had passed since I left home. Riggs fed me dinner every Sunday and introduced me to his family. His wife. His son. His house outside of town. His midlife-crisis Harley, which his wife wouldn’t let him ride. During those years I tried to put thoughts of Colorado behind me. Dad. Big-Big. The tents. The sound of the highway beneath the tires of the bus. The sun coming up over the mountains. My dad’s voice in the aspens. Snow on my face. Jimmy.
It was a lonely time.
That does not mean its education was lost on me. I kept my eyes and ears open and became a pretty quick study of people.
Either through experience or condition, we think of a bar as a good-time hangout. It’s primarily a function of flashing neon signs and media bombardment, but think about the names we give them. Lounge. Speakeasy. Watering hole. Club. Do any of those sound like someplace you don’t want to go? ’Course not.
Think about every advertisement you’ve ever seen for wine, beer, or spirits. Very intelligent and well-paid executives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to cause you, Pavlov’s dog, to salivate at the sight or sound of their ad. Television shows with catchy theme songs do the same. Who doesn’t want to go someplace where everybody knows your name? Where you can pull up a chair and laugh with your friends. Take a load off with total strangers. Turn your back on the outside world, even if just for an hour.
But the longer I lived on Broadway, the clearer it became to me. Truth is, folks frequent bars to medicate something. That something is one thing when they walk in. It’s another after a few drinks. Usually less shrouded. Alcohol is the great unveiler. The backstage tour. The thing that pulls back the curtain on Oz. Most who walk in that door drink to drown. Or drown out.
The second major lesson I learned is that an entertainer lives three lives. They occur in descending order. And like gravity, no one escapes the inevitability. The first is the best. It’s the ascendancy. The rocket shot. Where they feed daily on the all-you-can-eat buffet of hope and promise. That’s the one everybody talks about and likes to remember.
The brilliance of the flame varies, but for a star to be made, a rocket must take off. Some possess the blast of a bottle rocket. Some the Endeavor. Stars vary in their brilliance, and some shine longer than others. Whether a long, slow burn, a trip to Mars, or a self-inflicted flash-in-the-pan, they all eventually run out of gas. It’s the nature of being the rocket. And as their sustainability fades, the has-been entertainers are left orbiting the casinos, which are filled with broken people who have hung their hope on the lever, the wheel, the dice, or the cards, praying, “Please, dear God . . .” And because casinos are really good at taking people’s money and making them feel worse than they did when they walked in, they offer live entertainment to medicate the malaise. Or lessen the blow.
No matter how bright the marquees, the casino stage is the entertainer’s second life. And while there are exceptions, casinos are cemeteries for entertainers. Where stars go to flame out. From Biloxi to Atlantic City to Vegas, casinos pay the has-beens to be, once again, what they once were. Which they never are. Fading stars take the money—which they swore they’d never do when they were riding high—and gig to thinning crowds and tired memories, in clothes that are too tight, with voices that don’t carry. Because some applause is better than no applause.
The casino circuit lasts longer for some than others, but it too must come to an end. Those who can no longer play casinos, play bars. Life number three. Where an entire stage has been replaced with a single stool. Where sound crews have been replaced with a pedal at your feet. Where pyrotechnics and lasers have been replaced with a sixty-watt bulb hanging from a frayed cord above your head.
Whatever the case, no matter how it’s spun, bars are the bottom. The last stop before the black hole. While many launch a career from honky-tonks and roadside speakeasies, nobody rebirths a career from a bar. Those who return to play bars are played out. Done. For the singer, songwriter, musician, entertainer, pop star, once-was-has-been-never-will-be-again clinging to life support, the bar scene is hospice, and the drunken, muted applause all the morphine they’re going to get.
The third and possibly most valuable bit of information I gleaned from my life in these years was this: a lot of contemporary thought and criticism is given to gauging and critiquing voices. Comparing one to another so we know where their pedestal ranks in relation to others. Inside us, there is an incessant need to segment and compare. The experts who joust in this field use words like vocal quality. Timbre. Nasality. Range. Head notes. Neutral larynx. Chest register. Vibrato. Tone. A list. B list. C list. Star. When the critics are done tearing apart a single set of vocal cords, trying to understand what makes it sound the way it does and what its limitations are, the voice they were cutting on is left a twitching corpse on the sidewalk. Disconnected parts with little resemblance to the whole. Roadkill. Not enough left to sing “Ring around the Rosie.”
I don’t understand half the language used by critics. What I do un
derstand is how music makes us feel. Watch any group of Southern boys when they hear the first riff of “Sweet Home Alabama.” What do they do? Jump to their feet, remove their hats, cross their hearts with one hand, and raise their beer cups with the other. No discussion. No collaboration. They are tied to a tether and the music tugs at it.
Music reaches people at a level that is beneath their DNA. Dad was right. Again. Music exposes what and who we worship.
In my mind, the single highest compliment an audience can pay a musician is this: the last note rings out and is dangling from the rafters of heaven, where it echoes and resonates before fading. The audience responds with pin-drop silence. That’s right. Crickets. With head-shaking disbelief and awe. Followed by rising, ear-piercing applause that lasts long after the performer has left the stage.
That’s when you know that the music wasn’t about you. In truth, it never was.
21
One Wednesday night about midnight I found myself in a small area backstage next to a phone hanging on the wall. I stood there, twirling the knotted cord between my fingers. I danced around it, trying to act like it didn’t have my undivided attention. After an hour, I dialed the number.
A voice answered, “Hello?”
There was a lot I wanted to say. To explain. But more than that, I wanted to hear his voice. I stood there quietly. Silence settled over the line. Twenty seconds passed. Then thirty. When he finally spoke again, his voice was soft. “Are you safe?”
I’d been discovered, so I reached to hang up the phone, then stopped short. I returned the phone to my ear. Stood there. After a while I managed a broken whisper. “Yes, sir.”
I heard him sit down in the creaky chair in the kitchen. I could see him sitting with his elbows resting on the kitchen table, staring west out across the mountains. I could smell coffee from the percolator.
He cleared his throat. His gentle words wrapped around me like velvet arms. “You find the map?”
The picture in my mind’s eye was of the motel room where the air conditioner cover had been left open on the floor, the screws all lined up in a row, and the memory of how I’d lost my dad’s life savings pierced me. “Yes, sir.”
He paused, and I could hear his palm brush over the whiskers on an unshaven face. “Good. That’s good.”
I returned the phone to the cradle and slid down the wall, leaning my head against peeling wallpaper. A calendar on the wall caught my attention. It was my twenty-first birthday.
While I had very little desire to play publicly, that did not mean I didn’t want to play. To write music. I was seldom without my small black notebook. I’d become so good with the Nashville Number System that I could write a song with verses and complete music in just a couple minutes.
Riggs used to watch me with muted amusement. He wasn’t nosy but he was interested, so every now and then I’d ask him a question. Turns out he had been a studio musician for a few years, and what I lacked in some of the specifics, he knew.
One day he handed me a Martin he’d been tweaking for a customer and then tapped the notebook at my back. “Play me something?”
I hammered out a few licks and sang a verse and chorus. Not too much.
He walked away and said nothing. Couple hours later we were locking up, and he put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t keep all that to yourself.” He mussed up my hair. “I don’t dig at you. I reckon you’ll talk when you feel like it. But there are two types of people in Nashville. Those who want to get something. And those who want to give something.”
He pointed at a Martin hanging on the wall. “That thing is only beautiful when it’s making the sound it was meant to make. Otherwise, why’s it hanging there?”
I walked upstairs, stood on the roof, and cried. Everything in me wanted to go home. To fall on my dad, tell him about Jimmy, and tell him “I’m sorry.” But there was another part of me that would not let me do that. And that part needed to make something of the mess that was me. To walk home with something more than scars and empty hands. To be something other than a failure. I was caught in the middle of that tug-of-war.
I didn’t know what to do with the ache in me, so I developed a rhythm. Riggs trusted me. He would take vacations and leave me a week in the store. Sometimes two. My boss at the Ryman gave me my own set of keys. Trusted me with lockup. I kept to myself, did my work, arrived early, stayed late, did more than I was asked, and kept my ear pointed at the stage. I was learning on multiple levels. This endeared me to what I learned were, though admired and adored, mostly lonely people.
I got to know the acts, the performers, managers, producers, agents, everybody who came through the door. I got them what they needed when they needed it. I became known as the jack-of-all-trades. I hemmed shirts, tuned and strung guitars, bought new boots when a pair didn’t arrive in time, gave a guy my shirt, called babysitters to tell them so-and-so would be late, reserved rooms at hotels, gave directions, ordered takeout. Many nights I solved problems before they became problems. Some of the biggest names in the business began trusting me. Phone numbers. Home addresses. Drives across town. Safekeeping. They trusted me with their secrets. Their confidence.
While I could have leveraged this time with the stars to advance myself, I did not. I didn’t care. Or at least I told myself I didn’t. Riggs had grown increasingly suspicious that I’d once been more than I let on, that I could have been more than hired help earning a little better than minimum wage, that I once had dreams. To his credit, he didn’t probe. He could see that I needed a place to mend. To heal. I kept my nose to the grindstone and worked with a singular purpose—to save up enough money to pay my father back what I owed him. Which was a lot.
At a fair price, the truck was $7,500. I’d stolen $12,800. On today’s market, Jimmy was worth between 17 and 25K. At a low end, I needed $37,300. I told myself that when I had that I could walk home, face my father, and buy myself out from underneath the weight on my shoulders and the stone in my gut.
I’d not told Riggs my story, but he saw my affection for Martin guitars every time my hands touched one. I had told him I’d once owned a Brazilian D-28 named Jimmy. When he asked what happened to it, I didn’t answer. I think he thought I pawned it or something. He asked me if I’d know Jimmy if I ever saw him again. I told him that when my mom gave Jimmy to my dad, she’d had Ruth 1:16–17 engraved into the back of the headstock. Only way to remove that was carve it out or remove the neck—both of which were unlikely.
Life in Nashville was not all hardship and pain. One part was better than anything I’d ever known.
Life at the Ryman.
When the crowds left, when they turned out all the lights, when the floors had been swept and mopped and the bathrooms cleaned, when power to the soundboards had been cut and echoes faded, I was left locked inside. Alone with my voice and one of the most hallowed stages in all of music. While some around Music City thought that understanding the Nashville Number System was the key to the kingdom, in reality it was the Ryman. Every night, right or wrong, I strapped on a borrowed guitar from Riggs’s shop and played my heart out for an empty auditorium. For two years I “performed” there six or seven nights a week. I looked for Blondie, but he never showed. Not once. Only the rats knew.
Then Daley Cross came to town. And took the world by storm.
And fire.
22
Daley Cross had been discovered in a California talent show. Malibu looks matched to an angelic, pitch-perfect voice. A one-in-a-million combination. Her people touted her as a country voice with crossover star potential. Meaning she could make money in several markets. Including world tours and multiple endorsement opportunities. Her stage presence endeared her to young and old and belied her twenty-one years. The buzz backstage was that her Ryman performance could be the ignition to her rocket shot. All she needed was a hit. A song that distinguished her from the rest of the dime-a-dozen pop star crowd.
For the last year I’d heard the rumblings. They’d have been to
ugh to miss. Her first single had climbed into the top ten. An easy-to-sing pop jingle that got a lot of airplay and showcased a bit of her range. The conversation around her included words like, It’s only a matter of time. Over the last several months she’d begun making the rounds of second-tier talk shows and drive-time radio shows. Her sound and picture were becoming more heard and seen. Her brand was growing. She was on her way.
Whenever I heard her, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Don’t get me wrong, whatever “it” was, she had it, but whenever I heard her voice or saw her glittery picture gracing some magazine cover or television screen, I always thought that whoever was in charge of her was trying to make her fit into a box she wasn’t made for. Someone had taken the sum of her, chopped her into little pieces, and was trying to reassemble those pieces into some formula that had worked elsewhere. I sensed in her a resident sadness that no light show, electric guitar solo, or eyeliner could disguise.
Evidently I was alone in this analysis, as everyone else was head over heels for her.
With much media buzz, her show had come to the Ryman. Several black tour buses and just as many semitrailers logjammed the streets. Her rehearsal began early afternoon, ran late into the evening, and included a lot of people yelling, “Again!” or “Daley, that won’t cut it. Not in this business.”
One guy in particular liked to throw down his earphones and clipboard whenever he wanted to emphasize his immense dissatisfaction. To me, she seemed little more than a pinball, and somebody without her best interest in mind had his hands on the flippers. As she sang the same stupid song for the umpteenth time, I kept wondering why she let them try to make her into someone she wasn’t. She could sing that song fifty times, but she’d never find her voice in it.
But nobody was asking me, so I kept my nose down, mouth shut, and hands on the mop.