One less finger to count on: The death of a News Brother

Scott “Badger” Shelton is dead.
Anyway, it seems like only the other day that he and I – remember I am “Flapjacks” -- were, with my big brother, Eric, and my pal Rob “Death” Dollar hanging out with the Lone Ranger. And it was Scott who was egging me on to head for the Kentucky-Tennessee border when Trooper Rudy tried his best to shut down the fun. I got a ticket, but I think even Trooper Rudy liked the damn nice guys who were riding in

the old Plymouth Duster.
After all, we were not only friends of the Lone Ranger, we were The News Brothers..
That was 30 years before Jan. 23, 2012, when Badger died.
Damn cancer. I’d like to use the ”F” word instead of “damn,” but it might offend. I mean I only use that in anger and in private, like when someone cuts me off in traffic and I figure I’m going to die. Or, I’d guess, when Trooper Rudy’s lights flashed as I pulled over on U.S. 41A, just south of Hopkinsville, Ky., where we’d been befriended by Mr. Lone Ranger.
Hold it, I know Mr. Lone Ranger is dead. But not Scott… He couldn’t be… . I mean how long ago was it that he joined Rob and me to ride the notorious newsroom shark back at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper, where I spent my early years and flavored my soul? The shark ride was a News Brothers’ protest of everything and nothing. Mostly we were laughing and being friends who shared a peculiar trade, gathering news, him for the local radio station, WJZM, me and Rob for a newspaper for which we bled in effort to serve “our city” … the beautiful still in my heart Clarksville, Tenn.
Screw cancer. Yeah. Still wanted to let the “F-bomb” fly.
But he’s still here, isn’t he? Wasn’t it just the other day, give or take 30 years, that he stood there, with his lab coat covered with Beatles badges – that’s how he became Badger -- and applauded as I almost fell off the roof of The Leaf-Chronicle?
We were filming a second movie to the first one Rob and I did with a few other friends. The original -- “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” – had been in our minds a huge success, as we raised money for charity and enjoyed our relatively minor celebrity. We did a little Christmas short subject, but never finished near-legendary “Flapjacks II: Revenge of The Big Guy” feature film because life – personal and professional lives – got in the way.
Another close friend of mine once said “Life’s what happens when you’re busy making plans” … or something similar. Course that guy’s dead now too. And all he had wanted to do was give peace a chance. Course that’s not a part of this story, really.
Our nearly fatal News Brothers roof scene – which almost had me going head first onto Commerce Street -- was going to be kind of like The Beatles on the roof of Apple Records. Flapjacks (me) was – by temperament and philosophy – the Lennon figure of the group. Death was the kinda-McCartney. Badger was Ringo – he has the drum kit in his basement as evidence. Jerry “Chuckles” Manley was a sort of George, although much thicker and with an accent that’s much more heavily Petersburg, Tenn., country boy than Liverpudlian Scouse.
Anyway, I didn’t fall off the roof and laugh my way to my death that day. It would have made good film footage. But Badger was glad I regained my balance. Death and Chuckles and a fellow I’ll just call “Tennessee” and a little bald-headed guy named “Danny” joined in the wondrous wall of applause. Then we shot another scene before climbing down through the roof and into the newspaper composing room, getting ready for another day at work.
Still got that Super 8mm film and at times have thought about having it developed to see what’s there. Then maybe film a grand finale with some much older guys. Heck, even my old pal, film editing wiz Robert Smith, could have taken it and spliced it together like he did with our first feature 30 or so years ago.
Course the rooftop scene film’s probably no good. Wouldn’t matter now, anyway, because Badger died Monday, so who would repeat that feverishly bored applause?
To hell with cancer.
Almost all of the true News Brothers made our annual reunion trek to Clarksville a couple months ago. We stopped for our customary plates of flapjacks, of course, at G’s on Riverside Drive. Even Badger made it out of his home off Memorial Drive, thanks to his beloved wife, Elise, also a former colleague, and his own determination.
We went by the Badger residence afterward. He was tired and weak. But he laughed. When I hugged him goodbye, I knew it could be the last time. But I didn’t want to believe it. I mean after the “goodbyes” “I’ll pray for yous” shared by all of The real News Brothers, we laughed.
Maybe, we figured, Badger was going to bounce back from his cancer. He’d tricked it before. Maybe this wasn’t goodbye, but instead “see ya later,” and we’d reunite again, with Scott getting the last laugh. That full-bellied laugh that he tried to punctuate the air with as we shared that lovely November night in Badger’s basement. The laughter wore on him, though.
Vile cancer.
My life now is into its fourth score or something like that. I’m 60, so I’ve completed three score and two months. There’s a lot of stuff muddled and muddied in my mind, but then there are the big Kodachrome images from back when we all thought the world was a sunny day, Oh yeah…
So many of the snapshots are from Clarksville, where I spent 14 years of my newspaper career. I believe that’s 42 in human years, as the lifestyle takes its toll. Everything looks worse in black and white, and the cost on a newsman’s soul has been demonstrated by many other friends as being potentially mortal.
But I’m still alive. Scott’s not. He died Monday.
Damn cancer.
Still as I searched out the details of my friend’s death, as I talked with my pal, Rob, and with the wonderful widow, Elise, I kept lighting on crystal clear and Kodachrome images.
There I was, scrambling up the stairs of the old WJZM radio station in downtown Clarksville – very near the church where Badger now will be memorialized.
I’d become his friend because journalists in a small city have to lean on each other sometimes. Besides that, we liked to laugh. I’d go up to the WJZM newsroom and talk about what’s going on. Maybe I’d get a guest spot on Jimmy in the Morning’s program – complete with the news breaks by the fine Scott Shelton reporting. He was no Les Nesman, that’s for damn sure.
Maybe I’d even get a chance to spin some discs, some stacks of wax. I remember both Scott and Jimmy looking in wonderment when I played “Helter Skelter” on the 23 watt AM station … not your common 6 a.m. wakeup fare on pop radio. When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide….
There are other times, like when Scott would drop in at the newspaper to stir up trouble or just visit with kindred souls. Almost everyone I knew in Clarksville knew Scott, so he was almost everywhere I went.
I moved from Clarksville 23 years ago or so. Over the years we’ve gotten together occasionally. But even when we were apart, Scott, well all the fellows in the News Brothers, owned a piece of my heart. If I really needed help or prayers – some think I need them – I knew I could always reach out to one of them. When so many of my so-called friends seemingly were frightened to be associated with me, Scott would shoot me an e-mail. Just encouragement. A very spiritual man, he offered up prayers that I’d have “a long and lucrative freelance career.” Getting there Scott. Thanks for the faith in me.
Damn cancer.
I’m not going to say Badger couldn’t get ornery. But that’s OK. Friends know friends have faults. Hell, look at me…. And some people still love me.
One less now, unfortunately.
There really is no need to go into a long and melancholy tribute or to replay my friend’s battle. All I can say is he had guts. His wife, Elise, had and has guts. So do their boys. It was a family affair, good and bad. Hell, just last Christmas Badger’s wife got him a nice HD TV, so he could watch the bowl games.
As the cancer seemed to slow, I’ll bet he was already waiting for the Vols next football season…. But he’ll get better reception where he is now. Course I heard God’s an Alabama fan – just look at the record for proof – and doesn’t let folks watch UT games. That’s not to say an angel can’t slip away to Neyland Stadium, though.
Another great friend, Tony Durr, who died many years ago in some lonesome and desolate Alaskan outpost once told me that “you’re lucky if by the time you get to the other end of life you’ll be able to count your true friends on the fingers of one hand.”
And then before I knew it I had “his” finger suddenly and mortally available.
I’m not sure if the “one hand” philosophy is correct. Seems I still have (yessir, yessir) two hands full.
Most of them are News Brothers, a strange and endearing fraternity of guys who came of age telling tales of bloodshed and of county fair chicken pot pie winners.
In recent years, I’ve even added fingers, because I’ve been in need of help or encouragement and there are those who have stepped forward, as I would for them.
But there is something so special about the News Brothers.
And now there is one less of us. Rest in Peace, Badger. I love you.
Fucking cancer....

My pal Vince Gill talks about how much fun it is to make sweet music with lovely Amy Grant

OK, so it's Christmastime. I guess it was three years ago I wrote this piece for the Nashville Symphony. They didn't use this version because I mention that Vince Gill enjoys sleeping with Amy Grant and other light-hearted things. I was proud of the version that was used, but figured you might like to read this one. By the way, I'll be back in full bloom soon.


“Earthy elegance” is how Amy Grant describes her husband’s cross-genre appeal.
Country icon George Jones says the man he nicknamed “Sweet Pea” has “the kind of voice for just any type of music,” whether sung in a high lonesome saloon or the grandest of symphony halls.
The guy in question, Vince Gill, says he’s just a “hillbilly” who respects his surroundings and audiences.
“I always try to play what’s appropriate,” he says. During his three nights at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, “I’m not going to do the crying-in-your-beer, cheating songs. I want to do what’s beautiful for the room, honor the room for its integrity and honesty.”
Some argue country music is best when played in a barroom. If so, for three nights, Turner Hall in the Schermerhorn Symphony Center will become the most acoustically pure honky-tonk in the business.
Grant points out her beloved is at home in the most-reckless joints as well as in the elegance of the Schermerhorn. “I’ll say this about Vince Gill: The one thing I’ve always loved about him is he’s such a combination of elegance and rough around the edges.
“His voice, the way he carries himself can be absolutely down-home. He could get along comfortably in the roughest barroom – that’s his roots – and he can put on a tux jacket and walk out with the symphony.”
She notes, though, that playing with a world-class symphony offers challenges not found in the smoke-filled roadhouses where Gill honed his pure-tenor voice and guitar-playing skills. For example, the music must be orchestrated and the singer must resist any whim to call out set list shifts. Plus there’s a certain pomp, or at least propriety, when playing to the tie, gown and Chardonnay crowd.
Gill admits the challenge, but mostly he simply relishes playing the venue he says will become “Nashville’s Carnegie Hall.”
While he is a heralded artist – 19 Grammys, 18 Country Music Association Awards and six Academy of Country Music Awards are just some of his hardware – he also is the music world’s “class clown.” As showcased during his dozen years as CMA Awards host, Gill’s self-effacing, roll-your-eyes charm allows him to tip-toe the line that defines good behavior.
Again, he tries to fit his tongue to the circumstances. Perhaps he tuned up – or toned down -- for his symphony stand during a three-week Christmas tour with his wife.
“It’s always a lot of pressure performing with Amy,” he says. “I mean, I’ll say just about anything between songs. But I’ve always got to be on my best behavior with Amy.”
Regardless, this funny man -- who jabs at himself for being “calorically challenged” -- says the “awesome” thing about touring with his wife is not just that he’s traveling with his best friend: “I get to sleep with the other act,” he deadpans.
That “other act” isn’t on the Schermerhorn bill (“But I’m in town and I’m available,” she teases), but her remarkable passion for the Nashville Symphony might apply a dose of musical performance anxiety to Gill.
Beginning in 1993, when the symphony was in dire fiscal straits and perhaps facing extinction, Grant began performing with them in a series of fund-raising concerts that helped retire the debt. Beginning in 1996, she and the symphony barnstormed the land with Christmas concerts, raising the orchestra’s profile.
The Nashville Symphony arose with flourish to become a world-class, Grammy-winning, Carnegie Hall-playing outfit beneath the baton of late Maestro Kenneth Schermerhorn.
Instead of fading to black, the orchestra now performs at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, a monument which meshes the best of the world’s great halls with modern technology.
Gill hardly takes performing in the Schermerhorn’s Laura Turner Hall for granted.
“I want to honor the room in its most glorious state,” he says.
Gill remains mindful of his surroundings and audiences wherever he plays.
This modern-day soul of the Grand Ole Opry inserts vitality into that institution by performing regularly there and by challenging younger country artists to take that venerable stage. He stays true to principles nurtured by Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe. “I never play the electric guitar out there. I like the way acoustic music plays there. I play bluegrass. I try to honor the tradition of the place where I’m doing the music.”
One might argue the Schermerhorn is too young for traditions, but Gill uses his career’s fail-safe tool to scour the songbook for tunes suitable for the hear-a-pin-drop confines.
“I follow my ears,” he says. “My ears are my greatest asset. It’s not my hands. It’s not my voice. It’s my ability to hear.
“And if I can hear what’s appropriate to sing or play, that’s what I point toward.
“My ears haven’t let me down in a long time. I just trust them and try to do what they tell me is the right thing for me. And I still hear pretty good.”
His symphony choices are songs that “orchestrate well.”
“I hope I can keep it fairly organic and try to honor the symphony and honor the room.”
Don’t expect the electric guitar wizardry that long-ago earned him an invitation to join Mark Knopfler’s Dire Straits (“Money for Nothing”).
He’ll keep it acoustic. “I’ll be trying to do the things that are beautiful, do ballads. There’s no
point in trying to rock the crowd.
“It’ll be more in the jazz or subtle blues world. I don’t see a lot of flash and dash.”
Expect the “Go Rest High On That Mountain” vocal purity that earned him legions of admirers, among them country icon Jones, whose own voice turned many a barroom ballad into a thing of beauty.
It is said that Jones, in his prime, possessed the best voice in the history of country music.
Jones, the man they call “Possum,” disagrees: “I think Vince has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. He’s the man and the singer that everyone would like to be like. He just overwhelms me.”
Jones, who worked package tours with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn and Gill, adds “I don’t think there’s a nicer person in country music or any music.”
Jones says “He Stopped Lovin’ Her Today” and the like never belonged in a symphony hall. “I don’t have the type of voice that fits in, but Vince does.”
Gill has played the Schermerhorn before. And while he takes his job seriously, he is, after all the impish Vince Gill…. So to the genteel souls in the audience: Be forewarned ….
One night, while dazzling a Turner Hall crowd, he got it in his head that he really, really wanted
to sing a tongue-in-cheeker he’d recorded with The Notorious Cherry Bombs, a country super group that included, among others, pals Rodney Crowell and Tony Brown.
That song: “It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long.”
“I looked at Amy and I told her: ‘I’m sorry, dear, but I’m going to have to do this.’ ”
Christian-pop star Grant, who’d signed on for the better and the worse, didn’t stop him.
While he doesn’t rule out a repeat performance this month, he says it would have to occur during his solo segments. “I would have the good taste, at least, not to ask the symphony to play along on that one.”
Once again, his mind turns to the special environment. “I’ve been to Carnegie Hall. And I heard the symphony at the Schermerhorn the first night. I have not heard rooms that respond to the music the way the Schermerhorn did.
“The sound of the instruments, when played lightly, it was beautiful. When they bear down on the violins, you could hear the actual wood of the instrument.
“That’s a testament to how great the room sounds. It’s magical.”

A reflection of Christmas lights and birthdays with Little Jimmy Dickens, a giant of a human being

Little Jimmy Dickens is one of my favorite people, deservingly loved for his charm and personality. People sometimes forget he's one hell of an artist. But that's an aside. Saw him Saturday night at the Preds game and we all sang Happy Birthday to Little Jim. Anyway, in appreciation of a great man's 91 years -- his birthday is today -- I thought I'd resurrect a story I wrote for my friend, Susan Leathers, and her Brentwoood Home Page last Christmas. Remember,this story is a year old, so it doesn't reflect anything happening today. I haven't been out to see if Jimmy has his lights back. In any case, the story you are about to read is true.

Little Jimmy Dickens sits in his house on West Concord Road in Brentwood and chirps, softly, about the activity on his one-acre lot.
“I’m just kicking back and watching the birds,” says the Grand Ole Opry legend, adding quickly that something is missing from his yard this year.
For the first time in more than two decades, the homestead in Brentwood Hills is absent the elaborate light display that has raised children’s smiles and bedazzled holiday sightseers.
Closing in on his 90th birthday, he simply decided not to partake in the elaborate decorating this year. You see, he’s not one to hire yard decorators. This salt-of-the-earth soul always has done it himself.
“It’s such a struggle to put them up by myself. I just let it go this year,” says Dickens on a blustery Williamson County afternoon.
Then he pauses. “I miss it. A lot. I been doing it for so long.”
He explains that this year he and his wife, Mona, and their two daughters and their families – “I’ve got two granddaughters and a great-grandbaby, a girl. I’m surrounded by pretty girls” – are going to spend Christmas away from Brentwood.
“We have a chalet up on the mountain in Gatlinburg that we’re being given to use,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
While up there, they’ll celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Christmas Eve marriage to Mona. “We’ll just be with everybody,” he says, of that celebration.
Because of the plans to Christmas in the mountains rather than home in Brentwood, the genial heart of the Opry figured he’d limit the decorating to a lonely wreath or two.
He doesn’t blame age, although he could, of course. He was a mere youth, perhaps not even 70, when he began turning his home place into a holiday showplace.
It sounds like even he has a hard time believing it when he says: “I’ll be 90 Dec. 19.”
That birthday, by the way, will be celebrated at home. But Dickens doesn’t know yet what’s in store for him.
“My wife is full of secrets. She don’t tell me much, but I’ll be in the middle of it,” he says, breaking into the laughter that has delighted Opry fans since he joined that historic broadcast family in 1948.
“Tater” – as his pal Hank Williams dubbed Dickens after the 4-foot-11 performer’s song “Take an Old Cold ’Tater (And Wait)” --reckons that since his birthday is on a Sunday, at least it will be one of his days off. He still works the Opry regularly, performing Tuesday, Friday and Saturday nights as well as being available whenever the show needs him.
“They keep me busy,” he says. “But I don’t do any recording or any touring much anymore. Oh, I’ll do a few things with Bill Anderson and the casinos here and there.”
Other than that, he’s content with his work for the Opry. He also admits delight at the newest generation of fans hatched after he began appearing in videos and televised appearances with reigning CMA entertainer of the year Brad Paisley, who as a teenager opened for Dickens and who still regards the older, smaller man as a mentor.
“Brad’s been so very kind to me to use me in his videos and stuff. He’s just a prince,” says Dickens, who began his show biz career in 1938 on the radio in West Virginia.
For the next decade, he plied his musical trade for radio stations throughout the Midwest, where in addition to singing and picking “I was selling anything from baby chicks to trees.”
He found his permanent home in 1948, when “Mr. (Roy) Acuff brought me to the Opry.”
That King of Country Music died in 1992, but this firecracker of an entertainer continues to thrive.
When Dickens isn’t at the Opry, there’s a good chance he’s talking about it. “I do a lot of interviews and things like that. I enjoy talking to people. I appreciate their interest. I worry when they don’t call me.”
When he’s not engaged in Opry pursuits, he keeps busy taking care of the house and his acre yard in Brentwood Hills.
“There’s always something to do around here daily,” he says, of the chores he’s tended to in the four decades or so spent in “the third house built on this hill.”
As noted earlier, the wildlife rank pretty highly on his list of passions. “We feed a lot of birds,” he says, pointing out “at least a dozen” feeders within eyeshot.
“We have those little bitty wrens and whatever you call them. They’re beautiful. Got a lot of redbirds, too.”
He also tends to the pond filled with “big Japanese coy. They go to the bottom, though, this time of year.”
But on this cold and gray December day, he admits regrets about not putting the lights up this year.
“Oh it’s a lot of work. It takes me about a week to put them up,” says this lively nonagenarian.
He’s unlike many holiday decorating enthusiasts, in that he can’t quantify his work by rattling off the number of lights he has put up in years past.
“Golly, I have no idea. I just kept putting them up until I ran out.”
And there are some special reasons he laments not taking the effort to get his yard decorated and lighted up by the day after Thanksgiving, as has been his tradition.
“I like it when the kids in the neighborhood come by and look at them. And down at the Orphans Home, well, they bring the children by and see them lights. That was worth it.
“They would just bring them buses by. That’s the part I miss more than anything. The people in the neighborhood thanking me for putting them up and the kids enjoying them.
“That meant a lot to me.”
There is a long pause and a twinkle. “I think I’ll probably do them again next year.”

It's a damn wonderful life ... aka 'The Big Guy got run over by a reindeer and some wise guys from not afar '

As you know, old Flapjacks is working on a longer project that is sure to delight. But can't let this holiday season pass without revisiting one of my favorite damn Christmases ever.


“Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”

Makes you feel like breaking out the hot chocolate and singing about that Wenceslaus fellow feasting on Stephen or whatever.
That Damn Nice holiday sentiment nearly cost me my job back in the winter of 1982. Fortunately, I was able to make The Big Guy, our publisher blink. Perhaps the dollar signs I’d help him earn blinded him temporarily, long enough for me to back out his door, put on my yellow fedora and fire up a smoke.
Hell, for all I remember, and sometimes that isn’t much, The Big Guy maybe even smiled. At the very least he jangled the change in his pockets and nodded, blankly, thinking “How in the world can I get back to Carolina and out of this institution....” He was from that state populated by basketball and Biltmore and his prize, upon retirement, was to get back to the mountains and drool.
Call me naive or innocent (few do, you know), but I was surprised by the fuming anger of The Big Guy, as I didn’t understand what was so wrong with this sentimental greeting. I even sent one of the cards to my mom, and she didn’t object. She was willing always to have a Damn Nice Christmas right up til she died. I think she hung the card on the Christmas Tree. Still she had been a journalist, so I suppose she got it.
That greeting that was broadcast around Clarksville came during the heady early days of the fraternity of nicotine-stained journalists who came together with purpose and pride and along the way became known as the News Brothers. Blue-collar journalists, telling blue-collar stories to a blue-collar (and Army-drab-collar) town.
Most people liked it when we wished them a “Damn Nice Christmas” 28 years ago.
After all, wasn’t that the last line from It’s A Wonderful Life? Jimmy Stewart looks into the camera, eyes twinkle as the bell tinkles and says: “Attaboy, Clarence: Have a Damn Nice Christmas!” Listen closer next time, as that part of the line gets drowned out by all the joyous singing.
In the weeks and months leading up to delivering the holiday greeting to The Big Guy, our publisher, I’d been helping to guide what came to be prize-winning coverage involving the deaths of two beautiful and innocent young people. Of course, we weren’t looking for recognition. We just were looking for the truth. And justice. And, when the adrenaline and nicotine wore off, perhaps some sleep.
Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long still stir nightmares in sections of my soul scarred and raw by their monstrous murders almost three decades ago. There still are the sweats on cold nights.
Children, really. Promise extinguished. Forever frozen as “mug shots” that ran daily on the front page with eerily parallel dispatches about the mysteries, searches, chases, savagery and mourning.
The newspaper wasn’t large in staff, but the staff was large in heart. We were pretty young ourselves, though our own innocence had been washed away by years of covering trailer-trash murders and gunfights involving prostitutes, transvestites, serial killers and soldiers. Our photographer would show us some of the not-ready for prime-time shots he got of bodies and bullet holes. Even I was shocked by one of a fatal wound right below a guy’s testicles. He not only bled out, but his once-proud – to him I’m sure -- private parts were making the photographic rounds of police departments and newsrooms.
Sure there was gallows humor. When you are making $150 a week and aswirl in bodies, sometimes you just had to laugh when you saw the photograph. Sorry. But it’s true.
The Kathy Jane and Rodney stories touched us and I’ll tell you much more about them some other time.
Suffice it to say that for the most part, we worked around the clock to tell those stories, to cover the deaths and the get to know the families of the teen-age victims and the killers. Some of the finest police coverage ever by my dear friend, Rob “Death” Dollar, with the occasional assist by me and by our vigilant Baptist wordsmith, the near-legendary Frank “Wuhm” White, a successful businessman and downtown roof owner. Another story. Another night. For this is Christmas.
Long-time copy desk pal Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, a semi-portly boy with a reddish beard, edited the copy with expertise and with at least one keen eye while Virginia Slims smoke made the other eye run. His sidekick, “Flash” – a fresh-from-school news virgin – aged every time he helped copy-edit those stories and write a headline about a body found or a gleeful, boasting killer.
My boss Tony Durr – whom I still love and miss a couple of decades after he died, alone and perhaps in mortal remorse, in a lonely Alaska Coast Guard barracks after washing out of journalism and a half-dozen marriages -- pranced around the newsroom, excited by the grisly coverage and his occasional assist and /or attempt at deflecting the slings and arrows of upper management .
Sure, great coverage of two murders that occurred at about the same time in the same Southern town. “Things like that aren’t supposed to happen here in Clarksville,” barked one police officer who enjoyed back-shooting dope-smugglers, pimps, throat-slicers, chicken thieves, father rapers and other everyday perpetrators and predators.
Sixteen-hour work days could be punctuated by cigarettes exploding in the newsroom. Yep, we booby-trapped the open packs on our desks with “loaded” cigarettes. There were those who never wanted to admit they smoked by buying their own. Wives would object if they openly indulged. So they bummed and as a result I loved watching them jerk around in their chairs, gasping when the smoke cleared, the frayed cigarette pursed between Lee Oswald lips.
Seems pretty juvenile, but then again, so does rubber vomit.
But this is a story about Christmas 1982 and the card. You remember the Christmas card, don’t you?
It actually seemed like a great idea, guaranteed to raise a smile, in the wake of all that had gone on in the news. And besides that, Rob and I were coming off the success of the movie we’d produced and directed, written, whatever the word might be, and even starred in ... along with “Flash” and “Chuckles” as co-stars and others who occasionally dropped in to take part. Half the town’s police force and firefighters and charitable organizations were involved to some extent. Even the mayor and the first American to circle the globe participated.
“Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” -- with its intricate plot revolving around news events, along with its slapstick and satire poking fun at journalism (we didn’t realize we were the last generation of practitioners of that profession at the time), law enforcement, pop culture and current events -- holds up to this day.
With all the pie-throwing, gun-slappping, confetti-flying, car-chasing and finger-flipping scenes, it also really is a portrait of my life at the time. I could have called it “Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine,” after the Doors album, because it came out of my head – and out of Rob’s – as we went along, coping with the disaster and death we’d been covering.
We’d meet for coffee at 7 a.m. on Saturdays with a “script” for the day’s shoot, film for a few hours, then wash the shaving cream from the pies or the sideshow elephants turds off our sneakers, go to the newsroom with a couple fresh packs of smokes and put out prize-winning newspapers well into the night and next morning.
OK, you may be wondering what this all has to do with a Christmas.
You see, the movie played until dawn in an abandoned theater in the city and raised a few hundred bucks that went to a homeless agency, the fire department’s Christmas toy drive and the Police Department’s children and widows’ fund.
Even the newspaper hierarchy was pleased by the movie that came a month before Christmas ... some young staffers, after all, had done this on their own time, made headlines in Clarksville and in the corporation for raising money for charity ... and at the same time won journalism awards.
Of course, with all this holiday cheer floating around, Rob and I decided the best thing a group of guys can do is put together a Christmas card to thank our friends and to express our belief in peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind .
It in turn would reappear the following December on our planned News Brothers calendar, again a fund-raising proposition. More on that too another day, as I’m sure you are anxious to get out and shop for some children who really don’t care what you give them, as long as they get something. See the loaded cigarettes or rubber vomit section above for last-minute ideas.
When we weren’t immersed in the most heinous of murders, driven to drink (and sometimes getting a ride home) by the human carnage we’d witnessed, we got further involved in charity.
We wore our shades to give blood and to visit dying children. . There even were plans under way for a News Brother Basketball Tournament, that we were going to host at one of the local high schools, again to raise money for charity.
There was nothing complex about the Christmas Card. We’d wear our News Brothers’ best – bits and pieces of the tuxedoes we’d worn in the days of the “Flapjacks” premiere.
Rob, Chuckles, Flash and I showed up in our finery. Our clerk, a pretty woman named Neesa, was good enough sport to show up to don the top half of a Santa costume and expose what were and likely still are damn nice legs.
Fresh from the photo shoot, Rob and I dashed to our favorite printer and ordered a few dozen postcard-sized copies of that picture, with the phrase “Have a Damn Nice Christmas” printed below the picture.
Delighted by the result, Rob, in his white top-hat and I in my yellow fedora immediately distributed these cards around town.
We started out in the old Royal York Hotel, a high-rise former swank joint that had degenerated into a flop for widows, widowers, lovable losers, liars and murderous drifters. Many of them were our closest friends. “I was so tough my spit would bounce,” one of my friends told me when I wished him a happy 83rd birthday. Again, another story.
We went up the elevator – it was one of those you drove yourself – and stopped at each floor, sliding a card beneath each door. “Gunsmoke” reruns blared from the TV sets in 90 percent of those rooms.
We then left a stack at the desk to be distributed in the lobby.
In the next hours, we wandered the streets of the city, handing them out, sliding them into the mail slots for county and city officials. It was sort of a Charlie Dickens scene we were creating in the cold, snowy Clarksville night.
We even saved one in case Chico the Monkey ever came back from the dead. I still have that one. Just in case. That too is another story and it actually took place later. I have told you about that tragedy before and likely will again, as Chico’s death haunts and delights me to this day.
Then, spreading Christmas cheer, we went to the newspaper complex, going from the press room to the advertising offices, to the camera room, to the job shop, sliding cards beneath doors and leaving them on desks.
The last one, and we didn’t hesitate, went beneath the office door of The Big Guy, our publisher.
“He’ll like this,” said Rob.
“Yeah,” I said. We didn’t really think he’d mind one way or another, as long as he could jangle the change in his pockets as loudly as possible.
Perhaps he was angry by the Chico coverage. Maybe it was my long interview with a drifter named W. Robert Cameron. I’d caught him while he was resting along a railroad siding, taking a breather from his mission of hitchhiking to Austria.
Maybe it was Rob’s steady stream of stories about death and destruction –”No more wreck stories” we were commanded after about the 24th traffic fatality involving a drunken soldier in six months. Not good for the Chamber image, I suppose, in hindsight. Especially at Christmastime.
“Tim, uhh, this is The Big Guy, uhhhh,” was the voice the next morning when I picked up the Flap phone, one of those blue plastic contraptions that I kept next to the Mr. Potato Head collection on my desk. “Could you come down here and see me.”
I still didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t sound angry. Just self-important.
“Uhh, Tim, uhh, could you close the door and, uhh, sit down.” I noticed he was jangling his change harder and faster. I wondered if I should offer him a loaded cigarette.
He held up the card. “This is wrong,” he said, sounding like a sinister Bobby Knight. “You do not put ‘Damn’ and ‘Christmas’ in the same sentence. You guys have gone too far. Do not give any more of these out.”
Once I explained that half the town had them, he stood up and walked across the room. He was jangling wildly. The rosewater scent of his hair spritz filled the tiny confines.
“Tim, uhh, you are a great newspaperman, uhh, but this is too much. Do you have any of them left?”
I nodded. “Sure. How many more do you want? And I can order more”
He stood there, in silence, nodded to the door and then said “don’t do this again.”
I looked at him and smiled.
“What?” he said, in a benign bark.
“Big Guy, Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”
He shook his head. “You too,” he muttered. “You too.”
I ambled back upstairs to the newsroom, where Rob greeted me. He put on his top-hat, fired up a Kool and we went for coffee.
A dozen hours later, about five blocks from the newspaper, a house caught fire. A guy dressed like Santa Claus, apparently en route to a party, stopped.
By the time Rob and the Fire Department got there, a soot-covered Santa Claus, with a handicapped woman slung over his shoulders, walked from the fiery house.
He handed her over to the rescuers and anonymously disappeared into the night.
I can’t remember if we ever identified the Good Samaritan with the jiggling belly and the soot-covered white beard. I’d like to say there were flying reindeer involved, but if so, they all vanished without a trace.
All I know is it was a great lead story on a holiday that should revolve around generosity, love and peace. As papers rolled off the press early the next morning, I carried one outside, onto Third Street, where a little snow was falling. Rob was standing out there, with our old friend, Skipper, the old carny and merchant marine who once served spaghetti to Al Capone. Rob had rousted him from his room at the old hotel. It was cold. Boy was it cold.
We shared nips of cheap brandy and wished each other a great holiday: “Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”
Skipper looked up as Tony, Jerry and Jim arrived. He handed them the bottle of cheap brandy.
Skipper, who wasn’t wearing his teeth, looked up to the sky and began singing “Silent Night” in his amazing Irish tenor.
With that beautiful voice echoing off the old buildings around us, I looked to Rob and the others and smiled. “God Bless us every one.”

Life beneath the scoreboard: 'I don't have time to be sad'

All the talk about the "new" Sounds stadium at different locations sent me mentally trekking back to a day spent in the old neighborhood beneath the Greer Stadium scoreboard. It is a neighborhood that should be revitalized, but Metro powers-that-be look instead always at downtown and the riverfront for their showpieces. Anyway, here's the chronicle of an afternoon spent with one of the now-vacant neighborhood residents when I was writing for the Tennessean, Nashville's morning daily.


Monica Bender's dad was only 32 when he collapsed and died while jogging. His daughter, on this day shooting hoops on a South Nashville hard court, is that exact age.
Her mom also died way too young. Breast cancer claimed her four years ago, at age 57.
The young woman's 85-year-old grandmother has diabetes and needs considerable attention. Grandma also worries that heavy winds will blow Greer Stadium's guitar-shaped scoreboard onto the family home, almost directly below it on Chestnut Street.
"She also is afraid the fireworks noise will hurt the house," says Monica, who lives with grandma Ellen Taylor and tends to her medications.
Heavy load? Perhaps. But Monica is happy.
"I don't have time to be sad." She stops dribbling her well-worn basketball.
"You can hardly read what it says." Monica rolls the ball forward in her hands to expose the almost invisible Rawlings logo. "It's so smooth now, sometimes it's hard to control."
I had been driving through the Greer Stadium neighborhood when I spotted her. It was midday, and here was a grown woman attempting a jump shot from the top of what would approximate the key, if there was such a marking on the asphalt parking lot. As the shot echoed off the rim, she snagged the rebound and delivered a tidy layup. It was time to park my car.
"Basketball's my hobby," Monica explains after I interrupt her solitary game outside the old SNAP Neighborhood Center at Martin and Humphreys.
"I like to come out here for an hour or so when I'm not working." Seldom are games - or even other people - involved.
"I just like to shoot," she says. "Do my own strategy."
This is Monica's serene oasis. Warehouses, office buildings, the Sounds ballpark and her grandmother's home pretty much fill her horizons.
"I like the scenery," she says, running her right hand over the almost cue-ball-smooth basketball's skin.
Monica grew up in Mt. Juliet, but her heart forever has been tied to the house behind the scoreboard.
"My mother was raised right down there," she says, looking toward the white house beneath the giant guitar. "It always was home. We came here every weekend when I was growing up. Never missed a weekend."
Monica physically moved here just three years ago. Her mother had died, and her grandmother's health woes became a concern for the whole family.
"Somebody needed to take care of her, make sure she got her shots," Monica says.
She has two brothers and three sisters, but she volunteered for this role.
"I've never been married. Got no children, not that there's anything wrong with being married and having children. I just never thought about it. I just have been busy being my own self."
Monica never thought twice about moving here to help her grandmother.
"It was home anyway. It's been rough sometimes, but, hey, Jesus is going to help me out. That's my source. I do what he says to do."
Besides that, she enjoys living with her grandmother. She can't say the same for Blackie, the poodle.
"Old, black poodle. Little dog. Little ornery, too," she says, the sunshine catching her bright smile. "Blackie's my grandmother's dog. If it was up to me, I'd do fine without him. But it's her entertainment."
Tending to medical needs of her dying mother, and now her feisty grandmother has sparked her to change her career focus.
A Donelson Kroger cashier by day, she's taking night classes to become a medical assistant. "I want to help people," she says.
Regardless of her career path, her nights will be spent on Chestnut Street.
"I'm staying here with my grandmother until God calls her home. That's the plan.
"Taking care of your family is just what you do."
The 5-foot-5 woman fingers the basketball logo again. "I made the high school team, but since I just had one parent, I couldn't get to practice.
"I love all sports, except golf. I don't understand it. And car racing. Who wants to watch cars go around and around all day? But I like the rest of them. Hockey's pretty good, got those fights."
And baseball? After all, her life's home is beneath the Greer Stadium outfield wall.
"I like it. I like the lights and the fireworks. I guess I've only been to two games in my life. We just sit on the porch and look at the people going in, and we listen."
Her preference is obvious as she dribbles the ball twice, stops and sends it toward the hoop.
"God's given me life," she says. "You should be sad when you don't have it."

Jesse McReynolds talks about how his mandolin-playing and Jerry Garcia led to his long, strange, musical trip

Those of you who care know that I'm working on a book or two containing my own back pages while trying to carve out an income. Just so you don't think I've forgotten about you, here's a story that appeared a bit over a year ago in The Westview, the paper that became the Nashville Ledger. If you want to read this, I'd also suggest you sample some of the music.


The 81-year-old mandolin-playing, iconic country traditionalist doesn’t feel at all out of place playing songs embedded in fans’ hearts by Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead.
Doesn’t sound out of place either, reckons Jesse McReynolds, noting that he and his late brother, Jim, and their Virginia Boys were a source of inspiration for Garcia and his band mates.
“I think the whole thing is that Jerry would have liked to have been a bluegrass picker,” says Grand Ole Opry star and bluegrass legend McReynolds, relaxing at his home in Gallatin.
“He liked doing the old songs like the ones I grew up listening to,” says the mandolin player who has carved out a unique niche in American music by implementing his adventurous spirit.
That spirit is on full display in his newest album Songs of the Grateful Dead: A Tribute to Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter.
Hunter, who put the words to Garcia’s melodies for decades, even contributed an original to this collection, in large part because he was taken with the tribute project, credited to “Jesse McReynolds & Friends with David Nelson and Stu Allen.”
The latter two have deep ties within the Grateful Dead universe. Nelson is a member of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, a band he founded with Garcia and John “Marmaduke” Dawson. Allen is a former member of Dark Star Orchestra – a Dead tribute outfit -- and is a member of JGB (formerly the Jerry Garcia Band, the late Dead leader’s primary outside outlet.)
“I got to know Robert (Hunter) some through Sandy,” says McReynolds. Sandy Rothman and Garcia took a pilgrimage to the South back in 1964, the idea being to capture on tape traditional country and bluegrass acts. A particular favorite of Garcia’s was Jim & Jesse’s band.
McReynolds and Rothman became friends when the bluegrass star began pondering a Dead tribute record. “Sandy told me the story about how he and Jerry used to travel in the 1960s, before the Grateful Dead.
“They followed us around. But he was too shy to talk to us. Jerry was a bluegrass fan and he was interested in our music. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t get the chance to meet him. But I do listen to their music. My wife is a big Deadhead.’’
Actually, it was due to that “Deadhead” – “Joy ‘n me are 15 years married. She’s 50-something” – that McReynolds seriously began to select the Dead songs he’d like to replicate in his own special fashion.
“She knows every song that the Dead ever done,” says McReynolds. “She was such a big help on me playing this project. She’d tell me how it goes.”
McReynolds met his current wife in the mid-1990s, when he was touring as one half of Jim & Jesse.
And what started as a business meeting – she was interviewing the McReynolds brothers for a New Jersey country publication – developed into something much more for Jesse, whose first wife, Darlene, died in 1993.
“We didn’t see each other for a long time, but….” laughs McReynolds, adding that his wife brought her Grateful Dead albums with her to Gallatin.
Listening to that music, much of which is built on traditional American music’s shoulders, convinced him that he could do a tribute record and stay true to the sound of that iconic rock band.
After all, it’s not that Jesse McReynolds and his late brother (Jim died of throat cancer in 2002) had ever been afraid of taking risks.
“I’ve recorded for a lot of different groups,” says the mandolin star. Of course, many were just studio tracks he was laying down in Nashville and neither knew nor particularly cared on whose album they would end up.
But he was hand-picked by Jim Morrison, the erratic genius behind The Doors, to play mandolin on The Soft Parade album. While “Touch Me” was the big hit from that 1969 album, “Runnin’ Blue,” with its lonely intro “Poor Otis dead and gone, left me here to sing his song,” is a Doors fan favorite. And Jesse McReynolds’ mandolin provides just the effect Morrison was seeking.
It also should be noted that Berry Pickin’ in the Country -- a 1965 tribute to rock ‘n’ roll workingman’s poet Chuck Berry – remains atop the stack of McReynolds fan favorites.
“That was one of the highlights of my recording career,” says McReynolds. “No bluegrass group had ever tried anything like that before.”
Bluegrass pickers always have shared some of the free spirit of rockers, but the musical forms seldom intersected, a notable exception being Elvis’ reworking of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
“I just was one who would never turn my back on any type of music,” says McReynolds. “I am surprised when people say ‘Wow, I’m surprised you listen to that kind of music.’
“But the Chuck Berry record is one of the most requested albums Jim and I ever done.”
Berry didn’t play on the album. But he did appreciate it. ”Chuck wrote the liner notes. I wish we could have got him to play on the project.”
Of course Garcia, who died in August 1995 after years of struggles with health and substance problems, does not appear on this album either.
But his spirit is here, according to McReynolds.
And so is his lyricist.
Hunter, a country music enthusiast, has been known to visit the Grand Ole Opry. He also paid a couple of visits to Nashville while McReynolds was recording the Grateful Dead album.
“I told him I was so impressed with all the words he wrote on those songs,” recalls McReynolds.
“So he said to me: ‘I’ll send you some words if you want to put some music to them.” That was the genesis of “Day by Day,” the album-closing track in which McReynolds channels Garcia.
Filling in for Garcia in interpreting Hunter’s lyrics wasn’t easy.
“It’s just a little hard for me to put music to words that somebody already wrote. But Robert was pretty happy with it. I’m just glad I got my name on a song with Robert Hunter.”
The only other song on the album that was not a Grateful Dead original is “Deep Elem Blues,” a traditional song that captivated Garcia when he first explored American roots music.
The song that details the perils and pleasures of the African-American red-light district in Dallas is of unknown origin, but it dates at least back to the 1920s. It was a Garcia staple in his coffee-house, pre-Grateful Dead days. And it was a regular part of Dead sets beginning at least by 1966, having both traditional acoustic and electric incarnations.
“Jerry liked things like ‘Deep Elem Blues.’ He liked some of the Carter Family recordings. There is a big connection on him and bluegrass music,” says McReynolds.
“I did ‘Deep Elem Blues’ because Jerry liked to do that one,” he adds.
While exploring Garcia and Hunter’s massive songbook, “I picked the songs that I figured I could do in my own way pretty much, ones that fit my voice.
“But it’s Grateful Dead music and I wanted to do it in a way that Jerry Garcia fans and Grateful Dead fans would accept it,” he continues.
“I didn’t want to copy the Grateful Dead, but I wanted to get the same arrangements, the same timing. I tried to get as close to the way it was originally done and then do it my way too,” he says.
Of course he knows the image of an 81-year-old mandolin master, a veteran bluegrass star, doing Grateful Dead tunes catches some people off-guard.
“When I tell people I’ve got a tribute to the Grateful Dead out, they look at each other and start laughing,” he says. What they don’t realize is that while they have been sitting in their seats at the Grand Ole Opry listening to the traditional-sounding “Black Muddy River” or “Ripple,” they’ve been listening to pure Dead.
And, of course, the jam band circuit, sprung from the Dead’s performance style and fan base, also has discovered this cutting-edge album by an 81-year-old bluegrass picker.
“It’s already accomplished more than I ever figured it would,” McReynolds says. “I’m thankful I’ve found an audience I didn’t know existed, as far as accepting me doing music like this.
“Nobody can come close to capturing the original version of the way they done them, but to know that the Grateful Dead fans accept me, well….”
Dennis McNally, publicist and official Grateful Dead historian, says the way the music comes from the picker’s soul is reminiscent of the work of his old friend.
“If Jerry Garcia had been born in the South and if he’d been permitted to live to be 80 he’d sound like Jesse McReynolds,” says McNally, whose A Long Strange Trip is considered the definitive history of the band.
Yes, his brother has been gone for eight years. Garcia’s been gone 15. But at 81 years of age, Jesse McReynolds, well, to borrow a phrase, plans to just keep on truckin’.
“I usually play 40 or 50 dates a year, but with this record I might be working a lot more in the next year. I’ll do as many as I can.”
He’s clearly enamored with the man and the band that first brought this batch of intricate music to the people.
“Back then, when this was going on, with the Grateful Dead and Woodstock and rock ‘n’ roll, we was so busy then doing our own roadwork, we was pretty busy doing our own thing.”
He laughs at the lifestyle differences, while celebrating the musical kinship.
“I’ve never smoked or drunk very little. And I know very little about smoking marijuana, although I smelt marijuana a few times,” he says.
“But the way they lived their lives has no bearing on me as far as doing their material. That was their way of doing things. They done things their way; we done things our way.”

Baseball season's over, but it's never too late to read about guitars that tune good and firm-feeliin' women

With baseball season over and -- who knows what will happen in the future with the Nashville Outlaws? -- I thought I'd share this piece I wrote for their inaugural season, 2010, in which I was asked by then-club honcho Jason Bennett to talk about the Outlaws who inspired the name, men I knew and loved or still know and love. This was in the ballclub's old program, but I thought it was pretty darned good. Maybe you'd enjoy reading it. Thanks. By the way, I love baseball. But I love Midnight, Tompall, Bare, Willie, Billy Joe and Waylon, "my" Outlaws and friends a helluva lot more.

The guy who started Nashville’s Outlaws movement with a tear-jerking duet with his son laughs when asked what the connection might be between those musicians of the 1970s and the new Prospect League baseball club which is borrowing that name.
”I guess the way the music business correlates with baseball is, well: Do what you do and do it as good as you can,” says Bobby Bare. “Let the scoreboard tell you how well you did. Our scoreboard is always the charts and how many you sell.”
The Nashville Outlaws ballclub will be keeping track of how well they do this summer by watching the scoreboard at Vanderbilt University’s Hawkins Field.
Outlaws co-founders Brandon Vonderharr (general manager), Jason Bennett (vice president) and Chris Snyder (also vice president) – whose friendship was formed during a decade spent in Nashville’s professional baseball world -- deliberately chose the club’s name out of reverence for that most irreverent and loosely allied group of music-makers and windmill tilters.
“We wanted to select a name that was reflective of Nashville’s music background and the guys that had a vision that made them find their own path, their own voice and along the way found a place with the public,” says Bennett, referring to the folks often referred to in shorthand as “Waylon and Willie and the Boys,” after a line in the movement’s most-iconic song.
It is a fitting symbolic affiliation for the ballclub comprised of college players who hope to follow Bare’s advice and hit, pitch, catch and run “as good as you can” to get noticed.
Perhaps they’ve got Big Apple pinstripe dreams. The most important way for a guy to get noticed in this league is with the crack of wooden bats on rawhide. This will be a new sensation for these young men, most of whom have spent their careers creating that heretical “ping” when contacting the ball with aluminum bats.
Like Bare and his cohorts, the team also will be swinging for mainstream acceptance.
One plus toward developing fan loyalty is the team makeup of scholarship players from Vanderbilt, Austin Peay, Belmont, Western Kentucky and hometown players attending college elsewhere.
“When you come to Hawkins Field to cheer for the Outlaws, you really will be cheering for the home team, for Nashville,” says Bennett, saying that is a difference this club has with the Class AAA Sounds, playing just blocks away. The Sounds are tied to a Major League club and their professional dreams are to at least get their cups of coffee in the Bigs. Perhaps they’ve already had that sip and are on their way back down. They don’t consider Nashville home. Former Sounds star Prince Fielder will forever be labeled a Milwaukee Brewer. Don Mattingly is remembered as a New York Yankee … Nashville was a rung on the ladder to the top, albeit one where people sure liked guitars.
And then there are the entertainment value and values.
The Outlaws’ premise is to offer low-cost -- $8 a ticket plus free parking – entertainment in a setting where families, Little Leaguers and church groups can get up close and personal to the action.
The hope is to change the way the game is perceived and appreciated in Nashville. “We are excited that we can provide a great alcohol-free environment that would be safe to bring your family to. It’s more of a wholesome environment where you don’t have to worry about who’s sitting behind your kids,” says Bennett.
The musical Outlaws founded their own loosely linked team in Bare’s Music Row office, a gathering place for dreamers, schemers, guitar-pickers, pinball players and knife throwers: Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser, Captain Midnight, Billy Ray Reynolds and the lot.
Nashville treasure Hazel Smith -- writer, TV host, publicity producer and all-around sweetheart – actually gave the movement its name.
“I was doing mostly PR at Glaser Sound Studio, 916 19th Avenue South,” she says. “It was Waylon’s and Tompall’s office. It was like Bare’s in that inside those walls they could say what they wanted to do and do what they wanted to do.”
She was pressed to come up with a way to describe the music, so she reached for her blue Collegiate Edition of Webster’s Dictionary and began scouting out words.
“I looked up a lot of different names like Mustangs, and you know different things but nothing really fit the music they were doing. Then I came on ‘outlaws’ and it said ‘living on the outside of the written law.’
“I thought for a minute. They certainly are not doing music the way that Music Row is doing right now, so maybe that might fit,” she recalls, going through her thought process of settling on the musical moniker.
Romanticized history has it that the Outlaws movement was all about Nashville reclaiming its rootsy, “Your Cheatin’ Heart” heritage from the Countrypolitan strings, crooning and wall-of-sound style that reigned over the charts. Bare laughs at that notion.
“It didn’t have a helluva lot to do with anything except it was a bunch of free-spirited guys who didn’t care what anybody said. They just didn’t want to do the same thing over and over again.”
In Bare’s case, established record company wisdom would have him reprising his classic sounds, i.e. “Detroit City” or “500 Miles Away from Home.” He understood why the companies wanted more of the same: Who wouldn’t? How many “Detroit City”-quality songs are on the charts nowadays?
Bare possessed neither temperament nor need to repeat himself. “I just was having some fun with new stuff.”
That new stuff that launched the Outlaws movement was Bare’s recording of a collection of songs penned by the late Shel Silverstein. Lullabys, Legends and Lies was filled with wit, heartache and story songs.
“Gather round fellows I'll tell you some tales about murder and blueberry pies
And heroes and hells and bottomless wells and lullabys, legends and lies
And gather round ladies come sit at my feet I'll sing about warm sunny skies
There's mermaids and beans and lovin' machines in my lullabys legends and lies….” goes the track introducing this double-vinyl-disc song cycle. (It is available on remastered CD and is an essential element of any music collection.)
“I produced it and nobody knew what I was doing,” Bare recalls. The record company was expecting something like Ride Me Down Easy – his previous effort.
“When I got that project finished, everybody was happy knowing I wasn’t going to go nuts,” he says, with a laugh. So he got the go-ahead to proceed and “I immediately went nuts and worked with Shel” on Lullabys, Legends and Lies.
Bare says the record company was skeptical about releasing this aberration. But after a smuggled acetate of “Daddy, What If?” -- featuring Bare singing with his son, Bobby Jr. -- hit Atlanta’s air waves, RCA simply ignore what it had.
“Here was this cute little boy singing with his daddy. It heated up the radio big time.”
While the album is a monumental work, its true importance is that it opened the door for artist-produced albums out of Nashville. The first one to follow Bare’s efforts showed with a flourish that the floodgates were open.
“Waylon and I have always been really close,” reflects Bare. “He went to Chet (RCA honcho, guitar wizard and my late friend Chet Atkins) and said ‘Bare’s doing that. Let me do it, too.’
“Of course, they were really worried about what Waylon would do. But they let him, and he went ahead and produced Honky Tonk Heroes,” a collection written for the most part by fellow Texas renegade Billy Joe Shaver.
Suddenly, this “different’’ musical vision was corporate-approved, executives let their hair and beards grow, swapped polyester for denim and began counting money while cashing in on the Outlaws.
Ironically, the movement proved so successful that it helped pay for the glass corporate towers, banks and foreclosed office suites that have supplanted the rowdy rooming houses, honky-tonks and semi-derelict offices of the 1970s.
“It pretty much was a promotional gimmick,” says Bare, reflecting on the next big step. Wanted: The Outlaws was really just a sampler of music from Jennings, Willie Nelson (a former Bare roommate), Jessi Colter (Waylon’s wife and a pop success for her “I’m not Lisa”) and Glaser. (When approached for this story, Glaser, though kind, politely said “I’m retired,” and set the phone down.)
The big-name Outlaws --Waylon and Willie – became country music’s Glimmer Twins, and they stormed the country, drawing rock fans into the world of steel and heartache. Their shows were loosely constructed and could include walk-ons by Cash, Charlie Daniels, Kris Kristofferson and country traditionalists like Jack Greene and Jeannie Seely.
Regardless of the stamp of corporate approval that “legalized” the Outlaws, they gained notoriety by dreaming their dreams and acting on them, creating a new, artist-centric version and vision.
The young men who comprise baseball’s Outlaws and the businessmen who are footing the per diem and expenses are similarly dreaming of gaining wider recognition. It’s not that they hope to topple the Sounds and Ozzie as that team builds toward a more big-time future. But they do hope to offer a fun alternative.
It should be emphasized again that the musical Outlaws’ game of choice wasn’t baseball, but pinball. And it wasn’t that flippers and flashers and sirens game played by The Who’s famous ”deaf, dumb and blind kid.”
This was serious, quarter-a-play stuff, in which you beat the sides of the machine to get the ball-bearings to line up, bingo style, with payoffs based on how many were lined up. Five in a row brought $100, if memory serves.
Bare says “Waylon, Tompall, Midnight, we all were addicted to them.” (Midnight was Roger Schutt, a wannabe songwriter, knife-tosser and oft-fired disc jockey who was a friend to everyone from Bare to Jennings to Roger Miller to Kinky Friedman to this writer … but that’s a story for another time.)
Of all the parallels between the base-running and bass-playing Outlaws, probably the most basic is that they share the philosophy of going against the grain to get back to the thing that’s most important: whether it’s a guitar line or a line drive.
Instead of going in a direction that takes them away from their roots, they are steering dead on toward that destination.
As Waylon sings in Luckenbach, Texas, the biggest-selling record of the Outlaws movement:
“There's only two things in life that make it worth livin'
That's guitars that tune good and firm feelin' women
I don't need my name in the marquee lights
I got my song and I got you with me tonight
Maybe it's time we got back to the basics of love….”
In this case, it’s time we got back to the basics of baseball.
“It’s a grassroots movement,” says Outlaws VP Bennett. “There’s something to be said for being able to play and watch baseball in its purest form.”