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.”

Night of neon, Shel memories, smiling with squeezebox queen and savoring Don Kelley & Dave Roe while young cowboy dreams

The kid with the Brad Paisley Stetson caught up just as I stepped past the statue of Elvis on the sidewalk and kept going straight, glancing, as I usually do, up the hill at the Ryman and remembering when I used to sneak in the alley door into the Opry every week. “Man, they won’t run over both of us, I hope,” said the kid as he and I stepped --- with the little green-dude walk signals – in front of disobedient traffic and across Fifth Avenue. We both were bound uphill. He for the Masonic Lodge parking lot – where his band’s van was parked – and me to the old white Saab parked on Broadway in front of that monument. “Me and my band are playing at Cadillac Ranch and I gotta get the van with the instruments in it and pull down there for a minute,” said the kid. “We been playing together awhile. Mostly down in Alabama, but now we’re working hard to make it here,” said the kid. I stopped so I could turn to him and extend my hand, introducing myself. After all, he and I had just completed a death-defying act in the middle of lawless Nashville, where red lights are mere bothers. Stewart Halcomb laughed, easily, and met my firm handshake with his own. Sensing he might be a musician, though – although not just musicians wear cowboy hats on Lower Broad – I didn’t tighten the throttle on my hand-grip. I reserve a slightly softer shake for guys who use their hands to play guitars and for prizefighters. I remember one of the times I hung out with Muhammad Ali, he winched when I shook his hand. Course he’d spent the prior evening beating up Leon Spinks. All I’d done was write about it and hang out with Larry Holmes, Joe Frazier and the really pretty woman who’d stepped into the ring naked. The young cowboy and I began the gentle uphill stroll in front of the urban atrocity that is the convention center. If this one’s bad, what’s the next one gonna look like? Anyway, he went on to talk about the hard life he and his band mates in The Springs had chosen, but how they were chasing the dream that had lured so many country acts to Nashville over decades. Yep, Hank done it this way, after all, I shrugged. Stewart added that his band was still smoothing its edges and that, while there’s a CD out, I shouldn’t judge them by that. “We like to play live and we really don’t know yet how to record right,” said the affable kid, the leader and songwriter of a band that is aged 19-22 and that plays most nights down in Nashville’s Disney World. I call it “Nashville’s Disney World” because it’s not the Lower Broadway that I first fell in love with 40 years ago. Course I had dark hair and a less-firm grip on reality back then. This was going to be a town that I’d write about for life. The musicians, the dreamers, the whores. It was in a time when Roger Miller still could be found sipping coffee in an all-night diner and Shel Silverstein and Bobby Bare would stop to help a young guy rescue old bricks from a road that was being “resurfaced” to asphalt. I’ve told you about that. They even helped young guy load the bricks in the trunk of the ’65 Falcon. Same car took me all over the country for awhile. Spent a lot of time sleeping in it in the streets of New Orleans, San Francisco, San Antonio, Kerrville or next to it out at Joshua Tree. Course Wizard traveled with me. I wonder what happened to the Falcon after the engine blew? Sought out Wizard once on the internet a year or so ago and made contact. Realized then there was a plenty good reason we weren’t friends any more. No need to go into them here. Too many a--holes in the world would be offended. But then that’s a side story for another day. Right now, I’m talking about Stewart, the nice kid with the dream. He didn’t talk just about his dream, though. He asked about mine. Yes, I still have some, even though the booger-eating Ghadafis of Korporate Amerika tried to beat them out of me… but failed. Anyway, we talked about songwriting and people writing, about guitars and Tennessee Titans while we walked to our vehicles. I told him I’d hit his bar one night. I don’t drink nor do I ride mechanical (or even real-life) bulls anymore, but I’d like to see this kid. It’s nice when hope and optimism brighten a young guy’s face. I had gone to Lower Broadway as a part of a magazine assignment that has taken me to music venues all over the city in the last week or so. As I’m old and don’t drink beer, I tried to hit the places relatively early, before busy bartenders tired of offering up icy glasses of free water to the guy with the pony-tail and wearing a 25-year-old Bob Dylan concert T-shirt. That came from when he was touring with G.E. Smith. Horrible show, but I love Bob. I actually go to Lower Broad fairly frequently. Sometimes it’s just for a walk. Sometimes it’s to relive memories. Sometimes it’s simply to wonder where I been since the days when this was my turf. Back then it was sticky-floored peep shows and propositions from working women to join them “upstairs,” someplace above the row of neon buildings and souvenir shops that now offer up a G-rated version of Nashville for mass consumption by tourists and hockey fans. Before the city’s real flesh was covered by Chamber of Commerce boosters and the like, a cigarette smoking writer could easily jaywalk from the Wheel to Tootsie’s, as long as I didn’t trip across some stoned loser or Willie Nelson sprawled in the middle of the street. Tootsie’s back then was a favorite, because the Opry stars used to hang out upstairs, near the back door. I’d get there early enough to drink beer at the table next to Lefty, ET, Cash, Porter and even old Mooney. Now, of course, it’s different. City planners helped the once run-down area get “pasteurized.” Souvenir shops and Elvis statues. A huge hockey arena and a convention center. Family restaurants even. Wouldn’t have taken a family down here 40 years ago, I laughed as a group of Japanese smiled at me when I rubbed the nose of one of the Elvis statues. I wonder if anyone’s heard the news that Elvis actually was from Memphis? He just recorded here. His last few visits to Nashville, he stayed at the old Sheraton on Harding Place at Trousdale – about a mile from my house. What used to be a top-quality hotel and small convention center became a seedy Ramada before being torn down to make way for a CVS. “Nashville: Where there’s a church on every other corner. A CVS or a Walgreen’s is on the other.” A part of my mission the other night was to check out an old friend and his outfit. The Don Kelley Band is, for my money (freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…) the best country cover band in a city overpopulated by country cover bands. But while guys like Stewart in the Springs are busy writing their own material and trying to bust into the bigs and outlive Luke the Drifter, Don is not following that dream. Decades ago he began playing at Robert’s, not singing his own songs but the songs made famous by ET, Cash, Waylon, Tom T., Willie, Marty, Roger and even Patsy. A good soul, he always surrounds himself with the best musicians, many of whom advance into the ranks of elite touring bands or session pickers. Don’s not that kind of guy. He likes a steady job, a good girlfriend, his house way north of the city and his motorcycle (although he tells me he’s getting too old to ride it). “I’m not a great singer,” Don will say. “But people kind of like what I do. I can do those Tubb and Cash songs pretty good.” His current lineup … or really, the lineup during my visit, because it has changed … was him on the bulk of the vocals and rhythm, JD Simo on lead guitar, Dave Roe on slap bass and vocals (have you ever heard a better version of “Pretty Woman” since Roy Orbison died?) and Artie Alinkoff on drums and vocals. It was among Roe’s last performances with the band. “I’m going to start having the weekends off,” he said, between sets, after he passed the tip jar around the house and sold and autorgraphed CDs “I like this job, but it’s every Wednesday through Saturday, 6:30 til 10 and it’s time I did some other things. I’m gonna freelance. Like you, Tim,” said Roe, who used to play slap bass with John R. Cash. I first met him back then. I told him he’d probably have more luck in the freelance world than I, as he’s a much better bass player. But it was good for the ego – and I admit I enjoy a nice stroking now and then (but that’s another story, too) – when Artie, Don and Dave all bragged from the stage about my writing. “You’re brilliant man,” said Artie. “Really cool.” Kindred spirits, I’m sure. They must toil hard to make a living out of tips and CD sales – I did buy a copy of their "best of" album. It’s not John Lennon or Johnny Cash. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s a great cover band singing other people’s songs. It makes me smile while I sit here and think. After a couple of sets, I had to move on. I was going to a bar in East Nashville, where my favorite squeezebox player and Earl Scruggs’ grandson were playing with Paul Burch. Great show there too, though the highlight for me was – again between sets – standing out in the cold and semi-dark of East Nashville and talking to that squeezebox player. Very few people try as hard to stay solemn when playing, only to bob their heads and smile like Jen Gunderman, who handles accordion and keyboards by night and teaches rock ‘n’ roll at Vanderbilt by day. “I used to think I needed to be, you know, a surly rocker chick,” she said. “But I really love playing. I’m so lucky.” I wound my way out of East Nashville, trying not to run over crack dealers and prostitutes on Main Street, and pondered the evening. Pretty enjoyable, thanks to the kid with the musical dream and the band that never stops and the squeezebox queen And that’s despite the fact I spent a good part of the evening in Nashville’s Disney World, the now brightly lighted section of town that’s featured on Chamber postcards and marketed on "Monday Night Football" and the like. Tootsie’s long ago was a treasure. Now it’s just a joint. And Tootsie herself is long dead. (I’ve paid my respects at her suitably simple and modest grave before, as she was an interesting woman.) Sure, I love this new Nashville, even though I can’t find an orange neon glow proclaiming “Possum Holler” – Jones’ old club – anywhere on the skyline. But I guess I’m a relic. I kind of liked it better when a guy could buy coffee and chat with Roger Miller, turn down the advances of the whores and scoot past the peep shows for fear of catching some sort of air-transmitted sexual disease before dodging into a club where Tom T. Hall was singing for beer and laughs with the house band. Shel Silverstein’s dead and Bobby Bare is now one of my  best friends.  And the bricks, well they got displaced during the storms of life. Still I felt energized, by the kid. Stewart Halcomb. I don’t have his CD yet, as I haven’t been to Walmart since that night. But after a life of writing about those who chase dreams, whether as musicians, athletes, women and men of the cloth or just plain old church janitors, I’ve often had to chronicle how those dreams fell short or ended tragically. Here’s a kid who says, with a lot of work, he’ll make it. And Nashville’s Disney World will have a brand new star. I had the urge to go back down to the strip on my way home, buy a pack of smokes and go back into the bars. Course I didn’t . First of all, I quit smoking 11 years ago. Besides that, I think smoking is illegal down there in Nashville’s Disney World. It’s just running red lights and almost killing old guys with pony-tails and young cowboy singers that’s still legal. As long as  you don't get caught.