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=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: Charlie Nakatestes, Japanese Golfer on July 11, 2003, 02:01:00 pm
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Granted, most of you youngn's will probably care less about this article...
JULY 2003 GQ
starting on page 95
AMERICAN SCENE
Sex, Heartbreak and Blue Suede
For more than seven decades, the Grand Ole Opry has been country music's premier
stage and radio show - a bastion of Nashville respectability where Patsy Cline
got
her start and Johnny Cash once kicked out the footlights. A pop punk hillbilly
crashes its rhinestone gates
by ROBBIE FULKS
Photographs by NORMAN JEAN ROY
ONE SATURDAY LAST SUMMER, I Went to Nashville to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. I
rented a car at the airport, put the windows down and drove the five smoothly
curving miles up Briley Parkway. The weather was transcendent, and I was
feeling
giddy. I switched on WSM 650-the AM radio station that got the Opry going
seventy-seven years ago and has broadcast it every weekend since-and immediately
heard a promo with my name amid a cluster of '50s pioneers and a few new Garth
types. I had to laugh out loud. What was a pop-punk-hillbilly obscurity doing
sullying country music's premier stage? It seemed like a cosmic error, but the
mundane fact was that two of the show's regular stars, Gail Davies and Jean
Shepard,
liked my music and had gradually worn down the gatekeepers on my behalf. No
matter
how I had arrived, it felt too fantastic to be true.
PHOTO CAPTION: Brand New Opry. Country singer songwriter Elizabeth Cook is the
kind of young talent the Opry is recruiting to secure its future.
The sprawling suburban complex called Gaylord Opryland comprises a hotel,
convention
center, theater and mall. It sits in a U by the Cumberland River, northeast of
downtown Nashville. The Grand Ole Opry House theater is a 147,000-square-foot
brick-and-tile artifact of '70s high pastoral. Walking across the stone
courtyard
among vacationing families and T-shirted seniors, I saw Gail and her band
setting up
on an outdoor stage. Gail is a cheerful honkytonk of a 55-year-old with an
overlay
of girlpower pizzazz. She wears her hair in a flapper cut and has a personality
like a small rampage.
She strode over as I laid an arrangement of irises by her mike stand. "Gail,
how
can I ever thank you for this?"
"Well, listen. That's what we've got to do if it's going to be about the
music,"
she explained, now heating up. "When I had five songs in the Top 10, do you
think
those guys running the Opry wanted Gail Davies? They didn't give a shit.
Politics,
just good-old-boy politics. Never forget, one artist needs to help another.
God
knows, those bastards" - she pointed vaguely to the sky somewhere above the
Tower
Records megastore - "never will."
The way she carried on, you'd have thought it was 1950, when the Grand Ole Opry
was
at the peak of its power, the top country radio program in America, a
kingmaker.
Back then, WSM's transmitter was a 50,000-watt 808-foot wand, transforming
backwoods
untouchables into wealthy superstars and primitive folk music into a showy and
sharp-trimmed industry. Classic country was a peculiar kind of art, a demotic
expression of savage emotion, deep-grained and bold, written with Flaubertian
precision and performed with reckless humor and a ticking-clock focus. The
Opry's
weekly broadcast forged country's national image and presaged Nashville's
emergence
as its capital.
But since then, that city's Music Row - the source of the majority of country
music
as commonly and commercially understood - and the Opry have diverged, the one
growing ever more pop-mimicking and machine-tooled, the Opry pretty much staying
put. WSM and its flagship show are now Nashville's last sanctuary for hard
country.
This is why the Opry still matters very much to us fundamentalists - and should
matter to anyone not immune to rough beauty nor completely infatuated with the
present moment.
PHOTO CAPTION: Gentlemen Jims. Little Jimmy Dickens, left, and
singer-songwriter
Jim Lauderdale at Tootsie's, where performers cao to drink after the show.
So how is the health of the church? The days when every true believer east of
the
Rockies tuned in for Saturday-night services are long gone. The contemporary
Opry
is a tourist-driven enterprise and, in recent years, an unsteady one. It offers
little current-hit fare: The Faiths and Shanias would be loath to give up a
weekend
night for the few hundred dollars in union scale an appearance pays-even if
their
recycled rock didn't clash too bizarrely with the Porter Wagoners and the
Charlie
Walkers. While many of these midcentury figures are still in good form, their
ranks
are rapidly thinning, and they have no obvious heirs. When they die, the Opry
will
die with them, unless it allies itself with fresh talent and somehow broadens
its
appeal without sacrificing its identity.
I WAS A TEENAGER when I first visited Opryland, in 1977. After watching the
Canadian singer Hank Snow ("I'm Movin' On") play an afternoon matinee, I went
outside to the back of the building and jumped the low concrete barrier near the
stage entrance, hoping to get his autograph. When the 63-year-old emerged, he
was
with a man-eater blond who sang in his show at the time; neither of them was
amused
to see me. Approaching the same door twenty-five years on, I still felt like a
trespasser.
The Opry House's backstage is a drab grid of light brown tile and fluorescent
lights, with a U-shaped lockerlined hallway curved around a greenroom. The
place
was as clean and charmless as a nursing home, at least until familiar forms
started
popping up and bringing it to life: Jumpin' Bill Carlisle, born in 1908, now
hunched and trembling in a wheelchair, with seven decades of stage leaps,
yodels and
dirty novelty records behind him; and Jean Shepard, a protofeminist forerunner
of
Patsy Cline, belting a kick-ass "Crying Holy unto the Lord." Down the hall,
Whispering Bill Anderson, singer of sentimental recitations, former TV-game-show
host and pitch-perfect lyricist, was whipping his hair into a frizzy T. J.
Hooker
splendor. Each of them had been here for more than forty years.
I knocked tentatively on Whispering Bill's door. I had met him before but
hadn't
met his band, who were slipping into their lemon yellow sport coats. "Boys,"
said
Bill, "this is Robbie. He's the one that wrote that song about Music Row....
Now,
what was the title of that?"
"'Fuck This Town,' " I said. They laughed and pumped my hand. New friends!
Country's iconic zero-for-conduct typesHank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash
(who drunkenly smashed the footlights here in 1965) - have tended not to
prosper at
the Opry. But the broader rank and file have been served well. For the singers
elected to membership, the Opry is a sinecure, a fiercely protected institution
and
a dependable haven from hellish state-fair PA systems and sleepy casino crowds.
For
younger musicians like me, it's a place to commune with our betters: the old
and
the dead. Attire is therefore paramount.
PHOTO CAPTION: Ladies of Opry Above. Mandy Barnett at the Opry House. Left.
Connie Smith, Jan Howard, Jeannie Seely and Jean Shepard at the Ryman
Auditorium,
original home of the Opry.
"Some of these younger acts come on here like it's a bar gig," Gail told me.
"The
older people take it as disrespectful."
I do, too. For my big night, I had dropped $200 on a blue faux-suede western
suit,
which I wore with an Americanflag necktie. Once I had changed and pomaded my
flattop stiff, I felt lighter. I went to watch the show and wait my turn in the
stage-right wing. Most of the house's 4,400 seats were full.
The WSM announcer, Hairl Hensley, stepped to the lectern to boom his opening
lines.
"Presenting the 3,989th consecutive edition of the world-famous Grand
...Ole...Opry!" A fiddler named Hoot Hester kicked off a brisk two-step,
accompanied by a troupe of cloggers; then Hensley introduced Little Jimmy
Dickens,
the host of the first segment. Dickens sang his hit "Sleepin' at the Foot of
the
Bed," following it with a few comic remarks about his no-frills upbringing
("Fifteen
kids! Six boys, six girls and three others"). Then he reintroduced Hensley, who
read some unctuous ad copy from segment sponsor Odom's Tennessee Pride, "The
Real
Country Sausage." Hensley then reintroduced Dickens, who introduced another
act,
and so on....
As with any long-lived variety show, the format's the thing. The Opry shows -
one
on Friday and two on Saturday - are two and a half hours long and split into
five
segments, each with a dedicated sponsor and host, typically a veteran like
Dickens.
They bring out a few other acts (usually musical, but also some dancers and
comedians) who hold the stage from four to twelve minutes each, depending on
their
market value.
I waited in the wings for a small eternity of subsegments. Finally Gail came
on.
Jean Shepard joined her, and the two of them introduced me. I was feeling no
proper
fright, but I couldn't stop bouncing on my heels and opening and closing my
fists.
The milling civilians eyed me, trying to determine if I was someone
important-the
suit was doing its work. Gail hit her final turnaround, and my legs tensed for
the
sprint into the lights. Just then a stagehand noticed the string ends jutting
uncut
from my tuning pegs. "Want me to cut these off for you?" he asked pointedly.
"No thanks," I said. "It's a look."
He left, then reappeared a moment later with the world's largest pliers and took
hold of my headstock.
"The Opry has a look, too," he explained. Meanwhile, Jean and Gail were windily
logrolling. "This woman is a legend!" cried Gail. "This woman ought to be in
the
Country Music Hall of Fame!"
Over the cheering, Jean snapped, "Do it before I die, y'all!"
Gail said a few words about me and asked Jean if she wanted to do the
introduction.
Jean fell silent for a second, then she simply said my name. I trotted on to
very
quiet applause.
When I crossed the line from the wings to the stage, a door closed behind me I
could
never again open. After many years of fanhood and close listening, I had come
to
feel intimate with Webb Pierce, George Jones, Jean Shepard and the rest. Their
music had moved and calmed and shaped me. It had helped me through times of
loneliness and despair. It had brought me to believe that the deepest truths
dance
perilously close to cliches like "times of loneliness and despair." In return
for
all this wisdom and comfort, I had given the music my unconditional love. But
of
course, fanhood is a childish idealization permitted only to observers in the
wings.
At that moment, I surrendered all that. I was still an obscurity, but I was in
the
club.
FIVE MONTHS LATER, Vince Gill and I were sitting on the back steps of the Ryman
Auditorium, the restored nineteenthcentury tabernacle that housed the Opry show
from
1943 to 1974 and was once again serving as the show's base for its off-peak
winter
season. Vince had just finished his segment, which had not gone smoothly. His
vocal mike had shocked him twice, and the star with the gentlest of public
personae
had cursed colorfully and well on the stage of the old church. But now he was
himself again and in a reflective mood. "When the show went out to Opryland,"
Vince
was saying, "it totally lost its alley vibe. And for a long time, downtown
didn't
have much going on. Now it's a place to be, havin' the Opry down here, and
everybody slippin' back and forth and listenin' to music in the alley."
After the show fled to the suburbs in '74, the Ryman fell into disrepair, but
the
building was restored in the early'90s and finally outfitted with central air.
Now
the show was back, broadcasting during the winter season from the 2,038-seat
smaller
venue. The alley Vince had mentioned separated the Ryman's back doors from
those of
the honky-tonks on Nashville's lower Broadway, where rednecks played for tips
into
the small hours. A man in a ball cap spotted us. "Hey, Vince!" he yelled.
"There's a great Telepicker over here!" He was motioning toward Tootsie's, the
bar
that once served as an after-hours salon for the likes of Hank Williams and
Roger
Miller. It was where Willie Nelson wrote "Crazy" for Patsy Cline. "I know,"
Vince
replied. "Johnny."
"Johnny!" The stranger nodded solemnly. "He's awesome."
"Amazing," Vince agreed. "I wanna go over and hear him." He turned back to
me.
"What I love about this place is, it has never done what pop culture does-find
the
next new thing and use it up and discard it."
Another passerby saw us and stopped his cell-phone conversation midsentence.
"Oh,
my God!" he said.
"Hi," said Vince.
"You're not going to believe this," the passerby said to the phone. Then, to
Vince:
"Can you just say hello? She's your biggest fan. It won't take long."
"You got that right," said the singer, rising to take the phone with weary
forbearance.
At Opryland, country music dignifies the surroundings. At the Ryman, it
strives to
measure up to them. The auditorium is aesthetically and acoustically ravishing
and
perfectly embodies the best country music's depth of spirit and insistence on
getting it right. And the backstage quarters-eight cramped dressing rooms and
two
narrow passages-reflect the music's communal humility. Singers and players
stand
clustered near the stage, laughing and talking about tractors and drywall,
occasionally falling silent during a superior performance. The show itself
seems
like a bit of unreality that happens to take place between the wings.
In this atmosphere, you can better appreciate George D. Hay's characterization
of
his brainchild as a "good-natured riot." Hay came to Nashville in 1925, a
mild-mannered 30-year-old Hoosier newspaper-and-radio man with a crush on rural
culture and a backward-leaning imagination. He'd been hired as program
director by
the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which was curious to see
whether
its month-old station (whose call letters abbreviated the slogan "We Shield
Millions") could be useful for selling insurance policies beyond city limits.
This
experimental mating of commerce and sentiment was an instant success, and by
1939
the Opry had network coverage. By then, the musicians Hay had pulled from the
Smoky
Mountains-hard-drinking fiddlers and genteel family bands in overalls and felt
hats
- were giving way to canny popularizers in Stetsons and tailored suits with
earsplitting embroidery.
This is the period, roughly between Pearl Harbor and "Heartbreak Hotel" - the
period
of Hank senior's three-minute masterpieces, of raunchy hillbilly boogie and
primitive pedal-steel pathos, of live analog recording whose elegance and
dimensionality have yet to be surpassed-that many of us backward-leaners
especially
revere. Thus, I was curious to get a better sense of modern country's infancy,
when
connecting with fans was not as easy as picking up a cell phone.
To hear Jean Shepard tell it, before the interstate highway system, country
stardom
was like an interminable game of bumper cars, with intoxicants. "Three broken
noses, twice in the same place; one broken kneecap," she said, pointing at the
spots. I asked Bill Anderson if he could recall his longest drive between
consecutive bookings. "British Columbia to New York City," he said. "We
stopped to
shower in Minneapolis." The itineraries were typically merciless: 2,500 miles
a
week in a crowded car, much of it done while tired or drunk or both, with an
obligatory stop in Nashville to make a Saturdaynight appearance on the Opry.
Sex is remembered with more evident amusement. On WSM one recent afternoon, a
young
singer traded tales with Jeannie Seely, the Oprys equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor.
"On
my last tour, I really learned what you older artists endured," the young singer
said, "strugglin' to get on my hose before the show in the front seat of my
car."
Seely shot back: "That's funny. I seem to recall strugglin' to get them
offafter
the show, in the backseat"
My dreamy affection for a remote hillbilly Eden was not shared by all its old
inhabitants. They had worked too hard to get the hell out of it. The wits of
these
single-minded people were honed by years of poverty and savage treatment. The
hillbilly singer Stonewall Jackson told me that his earliest memory was of his
stepfather pausing in the middle of hacking up a car with an ax to lift him off
the
grass and spike him into the dirt "like you do a football." Hank Snow's father
not
only delivered brutal beatings to Hank and his baby sister but also sentenced
his
children to long shoeless lockouts in the Nova Scotia snow. According to Jean,
Hank
(who died in 1999) broke a long estrangement to visit the old man, then in a
nursing
home, to grant him forgiveness. The father leaped from his wheelchair and
snarled,
"I don't want your goddamned forgiveness, you son of a bitch!"
Jan Howard's history trumps even these Dickensian memories: raped at 8 by a
family
acquaintance; married at 15 and a mother of three at 21; beaten by her first
husband, abandoned by her second and serially betrayed by her third (the
towering
songwriter Harlan Howard, coauthor of "I Fall to Pieces"); one son killed in
Vietnam, another a suicide. The writer V S. Naipaul happened on Jan's bleak
memoir,
Sunshine and Shadow, while he was in Nashville doing legwork for A Turn in the
South. "It was hard to believe that anyone could live through all that and
come up
singing," he observed.
Sitting with her at a Cracker Barrel restaurant one afternoon, I asked Jan,
still
trim and pretty, wearing a white turtleneck-if music had been a balm during her
ordeals.
Taking a drag off her Marlboro, she was all cold-eyed composure. "No,"she said
emphatically. Her music career had begun at the kitchen sink, where husband
Harlan
overheard her singing one afternoon. Impressed, he badgered her into a studio
date,
and one thing quickly led to another. Jan had no experience performing and
wasn't
terribly intersted in it, and she soon discovered that she suffered stage
fright as
a physical sickness. But she was nothing if not practical. "I was a bad
secretary,
and I made more money on the road in three days than I made in a month as a
secretary. Well, I couldn't turn that down."
PHOTO CAPTION: Just Plain Fulks. The author grabs a drink at Robert's Western
World, a boot store that also erves as a bar and performance venue.
When we enetered the haunted places, the rhythm of her speech skipped and
slowed. I
wanted to know what she thought could explain to Naipaul and the rest of us how
she
could come up singing. "My philosophy on life is a very deep faith," she said.
"I
don't go around preaching it, but I do have a deep faith. Everything happens
for a
reason, and ...I've gone through that period - yes, I have - of hate and
bitterness.
And I realized it was destroying me. It doesn't hurt the one you hate, because
they don't care. I just try to hold on to the good things and..." Her eyes
watered. "And put the bad things where they belong."
THE OPRY'S ASCENT, paralleling the country's, was fast and steady into the '50s,
then halted with the emergence of the ultimate hillbilly celebrity. A framed
photo
of the usurper, taken when he made a surprise visit one December night, hangs
on the
wall near the back door of the Ryman. "I was in the dressing room," recalls
Carole
Lee Cooper, who now leads the Opry's in-house vocal backup quartet, "when word
filtered in: 'Elvis is in the building, and some woman's already passed out in
the
hall!' Of course, being raised in the business, I wasn't as starstruck as
that."
In 1957, Cooper was a 15-year-old eyeful who sang with her parents, the great
Wilma
Lee and Stoney Cooper. "Elvis had come to town to deliver a Christmas gift to
Colonel Tom Parker, and Gordon Stoker from the Jordanaires suggested that they
visit
the Opry. Elvis thought he wasn't dressed for it, so he went out and bought a
tux.
I remember Bill Monroe was rehearsing when Elvis walked in and introduced
himself.
I remember him grabbing my hand and saying, 'Let's dance,' and the next thing I
knew
we were dancing to 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' He was very polite - he had a lot
of
manners. After we danced, he came over to my dad and shook his hand and said,
'May
I take her home?"
"What did you dad say to that?" I asked.
"He just smiled and said, 'Not this time.' And then Elvis shook his hand
again."
White rock 'n' roll decimated country's audience. In the '60x, the Opry
followed
Music Row to a softer musical paradigm and a more middle-aged demographic.
Gradually, the edema set in. By the '90s, the good-natured riot was mroe a
members-only gerontocracy.
Pete Fisher, the show's 40-year-old general manager, was hired in 1999 to turn
things around. He quickly undertook essential reforms such as modernizing the
decades-old set design and supplementing the show's distribution base with
Sirius
satellite radio and Internet coverage (opry.com). More controversially, Fisher
and
Steve Buchanan, then president of the Grand Ole Opry Group, moved to reverse the
Opry's artistic sclerosis by aggressively pursuing current hitmakers, booking
more O
BROTHER-style acoustic fare and opening the stage to cool, even cultish,
talents.
The controversy centers on the performers displaced by this agenda. Take
Elizabeth
Cook, a beautiful lond with stunning hard-country pipes and a single dud
major-label
CD to her credit. Each of the 130-plus times Fisher had booked her is seen by
the
show's second-rank veterans as a spot taken from them.
The bitterest of the old-timers is Stonewall Jackson. Formerly a chart-burning
hunk
of hillbilly sex drive - "like Garth Brooks," he told me - Stonewall is now a
stout
man of 71 with a wide, creased face. I met with him twice, once in his Ryman
dressing room and once at a Shoney's restaurant; both times he spoke of almost
nothing but the injustices done him by Fisher and Buchanan. They were eating
him
alive. "Buchanan told me a lot of hurtful things, like 'Stonewall, you're too
old
and too country, and you don't fit in here anymore. No one wants to see or
hear you
anymore.'" Moments after the phone call in which these verbal blows were
delivered,
Stonewall said, he suffered a heart attack.
PHOTO CAPTION: Toast of Champaign. Bluegrass vocalist and fiddler Alison
Krauss,
who grew up in southern Illinois, backstage at the Opry House.
I spent an hour with Fisher and found him affably low-key and emotionally
opaque.
On the question of the displaced verterans, though, he was forthright: The
model of
the Opry as a showcase for legends, as a repository of historical value, would
no
longer do. He continually stressed that the show's survival was at stake. "You
don't want to be the guy managing the Opry when the lights went out," he said.
"So
I have no shortage of motivation to do what I feel is necessary for the Opry.
This
is too important to screw up."
The ambitious young suit sticking it to the faithful old company man is a
squalid,
familiar scenario. But there is no questions that Fisher has, on balance, been
a
boon to the show. After twenty years, listenership is fianlly rising as word
spreads that the Opry is again reflecting country's full spectrum and taking
risks.
Truly, it is the best show in forty-five years. On a typical night, you might
hear
Porter Wagoner into Del McCoury into Alan Jackson into Gillian Welch; and if
there's
the occasional bit of cloying mass-appeal garbage, well, sorry, but that's
country,
too. The Opry's survival strategy is, finally simple. it is to maintain a
decent
balance of big sellers and deep talent: commerce plus sentiment.
All of which still doesn't explain what I was doing singing at Opryland. Maybe
a
good slogan for the new Opry is "Big Sellers, Deep Talent and Robbie Fulks".
While
I can't admire the club for inviting me in, I'll always remember by eight
minutes.
After Jean's introduction, I trotted to center stage and flashed a wide grin at
the
flock. They looked politely skeptical. The drummer counted off, and I sang
for all
I was worth, concentrating on pitch and trying to secure myself by ignoring the
scenic details - the screen behind me, grotesquely magnifying my pixelated
yawping
head, and the "sacred circle" beneath me, that patch of wood from the Ryman
stage
consecrated by the shoes of Roy Acuff and Hank Williams.
But when I was unexpectedly called back for an encore, I lifted anchor. The
band
broke into Webb Pierce's 1958 shuffle, "Tupelo County Jail," and Gail and Jean
joined me in three-part harmony. During the solo, I looked at Jean. She had
stood
here long ago, in gingham and marcelled blond hair, cleansed of her dirt-poor
Okie
past and looking unblinkingly ahead to all the bright wild days to come,
fast-flickering and over-shadowed by tawdriness and loss. Now those days were
done,
but the soulful music that adorned them still stood, and so did she, tiny and
smiling and silver-haired, bouncing in strick temp and clapping her left hand
against the mike in her right. Our voices swelled from the monitor wedges and
carried through the room, the crowd sang and clapped along, and I drifted off
somewhere far beyond the human burden, dreaming about dead times. Two minutes
later, I was headed back to the dressing room to get into my jeans.
---------
ROBBIE FULKS is an alternative-country musician whose tribute to Michael
Jackson,
DEAR MICHAEL, LOVE ROBBIE, will be out later this year.