The Devil's Dream (40 page)

“What islands?” Rhonda said.

But then all of a sudden Tommy said “Shit” and rushed into the kitchen, where he started to play with a knife in a dangerous way. Rhonda went in and took it away from him, and marched him back into the living room with his arm twisted behind his back. When Rhonda wants you to do something, you do it. Rhonda is six feet tall and weighs two hundred fifty pounds.

“Tommy and me will be just fine, won't we?” she said, twisting Tommy's arm until he nodded and gritted his teeth. “You go right on, I think the rain has about quit now,” Rhonda said to Felice, who took this opportunity to get out while the getting was good.

Later, Rhonda and Don would find out about the shoplifting and the other things. Right then, the main point seemed to be that Felice wanted to get him out of her pretty red hair. Then Don came in. He took Tommy out in the backyard and pointed at the old Chevrolet resting there with the weeds growing up around it. “You want to help me tune that thing up?” Don asked him. “Then I'll teach you how to drive.”

When Tommy turned back around to look at Don and see if he really meant it, he had tears in his green eyes.

I'm not going to tell the next part of this story in too much detail, because this here is where my story gets to be just like everybody else's. There's a whole lot of knocking on doors up and down 17th Avenue, a lot of following up leads that go noplace, a lot of living on one meal a day at Linebaugh's, a lot of people that run out on you. There's a lot of nursing beers at the Exit-Inn, hoping you'll meet somebody important. And then there's always a producer who listens to your demo and takes you out to dinner and tells you how much he can do for you and then takes you out on his houseboat at Percy Priest Lake for the weekend and tells you some more about what he can do for you, and gives you a margarita.

I know all about that.

I've been out to Percy Priest Lake.

Any woman who makes it in this business has been out there, no matter how sweet and down-home and pure as the driven snow she comes off sounding in an interview ten years later. She's been out there, too. She's had that margarita. She's had several. But finally she's figured out that this don't help much. Nothing is going to happen overnight, in spite of what you read. Finally it's all a combination of good luck and good timing, not talent, not looks.

This town is full of pretty girls that can sing their hearts out, it's full of country boys with a great song written down in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper folded up real little in their back pocket. Most of those pretty girls will go back to singing in their own hometowns eventually, and then they'll get married. They'll sing in church. Most of those boys will go back home, too, and get a job doing something else, and sing on the weekends for a while with some old boys they went to high school with, and then they'll quit, too. They'll think about Nashville some over the years, about the time they spent here, they'll make it out in their minds to be better than it was.

Because it was not fun, mostly. It was hard, hard.

The first thing you do, of course, is call up whoever you know, but when I tried to call Rose Annie I got a recording that said, This number is no longer in service at this time. I was sure it was the right number—I had written ahead to Rose Annie and she'd written back on the nicest notepaper with a color picture of their home on the front. So I kept trying from a pay phone, and getting that recording.

I was staying then in a room at the Parthenon Tourist downtown, right across from the park. When I went out to get some supper, I passed a rack of newspapers and saw immediately why I couldn't get Rose Annie on the phone. “BLACKJACK JOHNNY SHOT BY WIFE” pretty much said it all. I bought a couple of newspapers and a couple of beers and some nabs and went back to my room and read all about it. It was just tragic for Rose Annie, to have left Buddy Rush for
him
and have it turn out this way. I was sure he'd deserved shooting, since she'd shot him. I never thought otherwise. As I was reading, it occurred to me that Johnny Raines had been just waiting for that bullet his whole life long. I can't tell you exactly what I mean by that, but I know it is so. There's some men that are born to be killed. Johnny Raines was one and Wayne Ricketts was another, and every minute they're alive is borrowed time. Right then, in that dark back room at the Parthenon Tourist, I started writing my song “Borrowed Time.”

The next day I went back out to the pay phone and called Mamma.

“Mamma?” I said. “This is Katie.”

“Katie who?” she asked.

“Your
daughter
Katie,” I said.

“I used to have a daughter,” Mamma said, “but she went to Hell.”

“Now Mamma,” I started to say, but she had hung up on me.

I stood there in that phone booth looking at the Parthenon in the park across the street. You know it is an exact replica of the real one in Italy. It's real pretty, with perfect proportions, as this hippie fiddler would tell me later, who went to Harvard. He said the Parthenon was Art.

Right then I wasn't studying on Art. I missed my girls, and the money I'd saved up was going fast. I kept trying to get ahold of Dawn Chapel, but it was hard to get the call through, and then when I finally did get her on the phone, we had the strangest conversation.

At first she was real nice.

“You know I just
loved
that song you sent me,” she said when she finally remembered who I was. “I still get requests for it all the time. I'm going to put it on my new album,
The Best of Dawn Chapel
.”

“Wow! Great!” I said. “I can't tell you how honored I am, Miss Chapel.”

“Dawn,”
she said. Then she asked me if I'd been writing any more tunes. At this point in the conversation, she was still being real nice.

“Why, yes ma'am, as a matter of fact I have,” I said.

“Dawn,”
she said. “Call me
Dawn
.”

This is the point where, if I had played my cards right, I might have gotten someplace, at least I might have gotten her to listen to some more tapes. But I was still upset about Rose Annie, and more desperate than I realized. So I said, “As a matter of fact I have just recently moved to Nashville, and I'm trying to get somebody to listen to me sing. Do you have any ideas, Miss Chapel? Who is your agent, anyway?”

A silence as definite as a black blanket fell over the line.

I cleared my throat and went on. “I cut a record with Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops in 1952,” I said, “and then I did ‘New Eyes' for Four Star, and it did pretty good. Maybe you heard that one? I could bring it by,” I said, “if you'd like to hear it.”

Dawn Chapel's voice got funny and faraway, like I was a Jehovah's Witness that had come to her door, or somebody selling burial insurance. “That sounds nice,” she said. “Call my agent, honey, why don't you?” And then she hung up without ever telling me who her agent was, and I stood there looking at the Parthenon.

No matter how big I get, I will always remember this moment. I will always try to be nice to the kids coming up in this business and treat them decent, not like Dawn Chapel did me. It's a great feeling to help another artist who's really struggling as a new-comer. And I know what it means to a new artist for someone else to just speak up for them a little bit.

So I will always be grateful to those people that finally did help me, especially Jim Reeves and Chet Atkins, and Tom Barksdale, who signed me with MCA and produced my first album,
Call Me Back When You've Got Time
, which featured “New Eyes” of course, but also the tune that turned out to be a surprise hit, “You Made My Day Last Night,” which went on to be nominated by the Country Music Association for Single of the Year. So I bought the house on Harding Place and brought Rhonda and Don and the kids up here from Shreveport at last. They just loved Nashville from the start, all of them, taking to it like a duck to water! Tommy had his first drum set by then, so he could take lessons with the best. Rhonda ran into Patsy Cline in the grocery store at Green Hills the day after they got up here, and almost died she was so excited! Rhonda took over running the house and Don took over some of my business for me, as it was getting to where I just couldn't keep up with everything.

They were all right there when I got invited to sing “You Made My Day Last Night” on the Grand Ole Opry. This is a night I will never forget, April 10, 1964.

I can't even begin to tell you how much it meant to me because of all the nights in my life I had listened to those Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on the radio, dreaming of someday being there myself and meeting some of the greats, like Ernest Tubb, who turned out to be the
first person
I happened to run into backstage. I couldn't believe it!

“We're mighty proud to have you on here tonight, darling,” he said. He seemed real warm and did not appear to notice my outfit one way or the other, which was good.

I was worried to death about my outfit.

The truth is that during the period while “You Made My Day Last Night” was climbing the charts, Tom Barksdale stuck onto me like a leech. He told me where to go, what to do, who to talk to. I gave in to him on everything, including image. So not only did my first album have a real smooth, contemporary sound, but I myself was no longer the same girl I'd been in my appearances with Wayne Ricketts. Tom Barksdale had me wearing my hair long and straight now, “California hair” he called it. I had on white cowgirl boots and the littlest white fringed skirt you ever saw. I didn't know what folks on the Opry would think of my outfit, but since that's what I was wearing on the album cover, it had become my trademark at that time. Tom said we were aiming for a bigger audience now, and that I'd be cutting my next album in L.A.

Tom said Nashville was dead and L.A. was where it was happening. He was switching all his operations to L.A.

Tom was
not
backstage with me at the Opry that night, though—I put my foot down. Tom Barksdale had long blond hair and wore things like turtleneck sweaters, and while I knew I was real lucky to have him produce my album and all, I just didn't want to let him come backstage at the Opry with me.

The Opry was for
me
in a way that I knew Tom would never understand, as he was a northerner from Michigan who had gone to the Berklee College of Music. “A technical genius,” people were calling him.

Maybe so.

But I preferred to stand by myself at the right side of the stage, where I could see everything that was happening, and if anybody minded my outfit, they sure didn't show it. They were nice as pie, making me feel like it really
was
one big happy family, as it had always seemed to me, and for that night anyway, I was part of it. Lucile White asked me where I was from, and I got to hear Roy Acuff sing “Great Speckled Bird” and work his yo-yo. He's great with the yo-yo! Skeeter Davis was on that night, and the Wilburn Brothers. And Jim and Jesse, who I have always been crazy about, were making a guest appearance, too.

Standing back there waiting for my turn, I got real nervous for the first time in years. I wanted a drink so bad! Of course, I had tossed back a stiff one across the alley in Tootsie's Orchid Lounge before I went in the Ryman. That's what you do. You go in Tootsie's first. Because of course you can't have a drink at the Opry, those people are real straight-laced. The only thing you can get backstage is a Coke from a machine, or coffee and orange Kool-Aid, which they've got laid out on a table.

There was something like a
church
about the Opry in those days when it was still at the Ryman Auditorium—why, shoot, the Ryman used to
be
a church, come to think of it. It's got those pews, and the balcony, and stained glass in the windows. There's something solemn about the crowd, too—even now, over at the new Opry House—something worshipful, which has to do with how far the fans have driven to be there, and how long they've been listening to their favorites, which is
years
, in most cases. For you know, the country music fan is like no other, they'll follow you for years, through good times and bad, and never tire of hearing your old tunes one more time. They are the biggest-hearted, most devoted folks in the world, and they are the ones that have made the business what it is today. It is not the stars. It's the fans.

Standing backstage at the Ryman was when I really realized this, watching them get up and slip forward as their favorites came on, walking one at a time right up to the footlights to take their own photos to carry back home. It's exactly like people going up for Communion in a big Catholic church, if you ask me, the fans moving forward in a steady stream to pause and snap, pause and snap, and then move on, back to their seats, back to Ohio and Maryland and West Virginia and all the places they came from, where they will get these pictures developed and put them in frames where they can point to them and say, “I was there. I was right there.” It was just wild when “Pretty Miss Norma Jean” and Porter came on, you never saw so many flash bulbs! It was like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Norma Jean must have been seeing spots before her eyes. You sure couldn't tell it from her performance, though. On her way offstage, she passed real close to me, and reached out and squeezed my hand. She was pretty as could be. “Good luck, honey!” she said. And I'll confess, I was star-struck! I felt like I was a kid again, instead of a grown woman with my own kids in the audience. I felt ridiculous in my outfit.

I could look out and see my own girls right up front, and Tommy who looked so much like Wayne Ricketts it spooked me, like he was a ghost sitting up big as life in the Ryman Auditorium, waiting for me to come on.