Country Music Broke My Brain (21 page)

I knew John Ims, who had two hits—one for Trisha Yearwood (her first) and one for Reba. I saw him while he was taking that glorious “hit songwriter” ride, and he told me, “Ger, I am moving to the Rockies. With my lifestyle, I can make enough now to last me for thirty years. Gonna take it easy.” And he left. Couple of homers, and he's going to the showers. Good for him.

I know a gentle soul who was constantly at the bar I inhabited. Of course,
I
was there
all
the time, but I always thought,
He is here
all
the time.
It's like going to a country club and seeing the same golfers. Don't you people have homes? Bud (yes, another Buddy) was there drinking and telling stories and laughing. He was the sweetest man in the world. That afternoon, a producer friend of mine (Ron Chancey) said, “Come up to my office. I wanna play you something.” I was pretty interested. Ron then proceeded to tell me, “I just paid off Bud's bar bill at Maude's” (a famous Music Row watering hole). “In return, he gave me his publishing share on this song.” (I'll explain publishing sometime, but basically the publisher makes the same amount of money as the songwriter.)

Ron said, “Tell me what you think. Did I just blow a thousand dollars?” (I guess Bud had run up a good tab over a few weeks.) Wow. A thousand bucks for some song some guy wrote that I didn't know. Pretty risky stuff.

Ron started the tape and a demo singer began, “Blame it all on my roots. I showed up in boots and ruined your black tie affair.” For the price of a set of radials, Ron now owned half the publishing to “Friends in Low Places.” I can't imagine the millions that song made. In many ways, it started a wave of new country artists led by a singer named Garth Brooks.

Nobody got ripped off. Nobody strong-armed nobody into that deal. Willie Nelson had sold the rights to “Crazy,” the Patsy Cline masterpiece, for fifty dollars, so Bud actually got about the same, adjusted for inflation. It's just the way the town is—the game that is Music Row. Songs are like magic floating in the air and talked about and rumored and BANG! Hits are born, and lives are changed. Fortunes are made, and some guy walks in style up 16th Avenue.

You can, it's hoped, now see why some people get wacky from country music. I've known people who hit the jackpot and lost it all. One guy had an enormous hit and spent his first big check on a tricked-out Winnebago, left to explore America, and never came back. It's that wildcatting thing that does it to everyone.

It's sort of calmed down a bit nowadays. This is a factory town, with guys going to little song mills and hammering out a piece of art and hoping someone will like it. It's not a coincidence that Willie knew, early on, enough about songwriting to write “Crazy.”

Songwriting is a mystery to a lot of people, including me. It can be joyful, and it can be a total slog. It's both magic and mundane. Songwriters are the same way. I've written with guys who have plopped down in the chair opposite me, fired up a doobie the size of an ear of corn, and then announced, “I'll be with ya in a minute.”

I once wrote with a guy who never looked at me. He sat at the piano with his back to me for three hours playing what he called “Danny” chords (i.e., chords he was making up). He then suddenly stood and said, “This don't work for me today.” And he walked out the door.

I once wrote with a tall, blonde babe who showed up at my office braless in a tank top with low-cut jeans that were tattooed on and a purple thong showing in the back. I didn't write anything like what I was thinking that day.

Songwriters also have their own schedules—not
your
schedule usually, but
a
schedule. To be honest, quite often sitting down in a room with somebody when it's beautiful outside is tough. You don't want to be there. They don't want to be there. You could be golfing or fishing, so it's sometimes painful. That's why songwriters jump at any excuse to be late or not show up. They also use the “check in” as a surrogate for the actual appointment time. If your songwriting appointment is for 10:30
A.M
., they will
call
at 10:29
A.M
. and say they are running a little late. They “checked in,” so they get credit for being on time. Others you just plan on being an hour and a half late, and you show up accordingly. And others never show up at all. You wait, you pluck, you hum, you think, and, finally, you call, and they laugh and say, “Man, I'm in the Everglades. I can't write today!” As if to say, “You idiot, didn't you know I was going out of town to go bonefishing? How lame are you to bother me now?”

At one time or another, every songwriter has said, “I am gonna quit this stupid business.” This means other people's lousy, crappy, tuneless melodies and words are being recorded and yours aren't.

Songwriters lie and smile and say, “I'd love to hear your new song.” They really don't. It's either gonna be terrible or so good they get jealous. It's true. I'm that way. Everybody is that way.

Perhaps Layng Martine is the only songwriter in America who is truly happy for you when you get a song recorded. Layng wrote “Rub It In,” which has been a hit record and used in commercials for years. He's a special person and probably under some medication to make him so nice. I appreciate a great song, I really do, but I don't want to hear it before
we
start writing
our
song together. That's like going on a date and the girl says, “Before we start, here's a picture of the hunk I went out with yesterday.” Great. I want to go home now.

What keeps me from saying, “I'm gonna quit this stupid business” to nearly everyone I talk to is the response from my friend Wayland Holyfield. When I told him I was gonna quit, he just said, “You may already be out. They don't send letters, you know.”

The greatest part of songwriting is having somebody look up across a table or a room and say something just brilliant. That gleam in their eye says, “I've got an idea that's amazeballs.” It happens. And then you get folks who will say something so confusing or ridiculous you just sort of ignore it, and life goes on.

Then there are the comedy songwriters. (I learned early on
not
to do this 'cause it really drives some folks nutty.) In the middle of writing a heartbreaking love ballad, there's always the guy who sings a fake line that's funny and inappropriate. Usually you laugh and sometimes join in, but mostly you just try to get back to the business at hand.

Songwriters are also the gossip kings of the western world.
Any
excuse to not write and talk about other songs and other songwriters and how the music business is going to hell on a runaway train is always fair game. I have several friends I've met for a songwriting session and gabbed the entire morning away without writing one note of a song.

Some songwriters are
serious.
I'm talkin' stern nun/state trooper/librarian serious. They are poets and “there ain't no room for cuttin' up while we're writin'” serious.

Then there are the guys who used to fax lyrics (remember faxing?) and call and have an intern stand beside the fax machine to make sure nobody stole their genius out of the fax machine.

Where you write is also interesting. It's usually in a small office in an old house on Music Row—two streets just outside of downtown Nashville, filled with the ant-like writers who move from hill to hill, office to office, studio to studio, making the songs that part of the world sings.

There is a major publishing company that has a writer's room with no chairs, just an old, grungy couch and a broken piano. Then there are the rooms with coffee machines and snacks put out for the kings of melody waltzing in around 10:30
A.M
.

I can't write if I can hear the duo in the next room also struggling to wrestle a song to the ground. A lot of these old houses have ductwork and heat registers in the floor so you can actually hear everybody in the building. One time we started at 10
A.M
., and so did three or four other groups in the building. By 2
P.M
., we were all writing basically the same song through the heating system.

I've never done it, but some writers do what's called “chasing the hillbillies,” where a star/artist/singer takes writers on the road with them. You ride the road and the bus and hope to catch lightning in a bottle when the artist is not drinking from the bottle or playing “spin the bottle” with some “friends” he met at his last concert. It always sounded dreadful to me and, from what I hear, I'm right. One great “chaser” told me he rode in a bunk for six days, and when he got back to Nashville, all he had to show for it was a killer hangover and a misspelled tattoo that read “Born Too Loose.”

Probably a thousand people have told me they'd like to do a radio show called “The Story Behind the Song.” I did it when I started out 'cause every hit has a funny/sad/movie plot story for how that song was born.

And there are some good ones . . . maybe five in history. What you then get is, “Well, me and ol' Harley hooked up about ten that morning, and he had this idea, and I had this melody thing, and it sorta fell out.” End of “The Story Behind the Song.”

I also really love to hear people say, “I didn't write it. It came from God or Jesus or someplace other than me.” That's fine, of course, but I think it's funny that rather than say, “Yep, I wrote that one. Good, huh?” they give God cowriting credit. I always want to ask if they send half the royalty check to one of the Lord's helpers. Maybe they do.

Guy Clark is one of the Texas songwriting greats. He's also a luthier. He told me that at a New Year's Eve party, and I thought,
Why would a man announce his religious affiliation while wearing a party hat?
Turns out that a luthier is a guy who makes his own guitars. Guy's theory is that most great songs are written by one person.

I know, I know. You can instantly name twenty-five great songwriting teams, but if you think about
all
songs, a lot of the truly great ones were from the mind of one solitary man. Or if it came from a “team,” most of the song was written by one guy. That's why we know the McCartney songs from the Lennon songs. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin did it all by their little lonesome and that's why those songs are so distinctive.

Cowriting is just odd to begin with. Who wrote which part? Who gets the credit for what? Who gets the money for what? It's usually understood that if you cowrite, you split it in half or in thirds, etc. There are, however, famous stories of one particular guy who counted the words he'd contributed.
Counted the words.
He kept track during the session and then announced, “I wrote 54.5 percent of this song, and that's what I am claiming credit for.” Of course, this is the same guy who handed out copies of his new album in the reception line at his own wedding, so go figure.

Some writers can hear what others can't. Particularly rhymes. They create a masterpiece of a rhyme with the words stove and horse. “Hey, sing it,” they argue. “It works. I'm telling you, it's fine.”

Others are more exacting. Top songwriter Gary Burr says, “If you want to be certain it rhymes, use the same word.” Gary didn't do that—he's brilliant—but I hear songs all the time that do that.

I wrote several songs with Clint Black. Clint is funny and smart. He's also from the Planet Igmo. He has written some of my favorites and some I have no clue what he's talking about. That's Clint. If you get the chance, write with Clint. Do
not
play golf with Clint. He does not understand the concept of “picking up.” When you are out of the hole, or when you're on your fifteenth whack at the little white pill on the same hole, Clint stays with it. If he's on his way to a record-breaking 19 on No. 4, he's gonna make his 19! He's the same way when writing. He's gonna stay with it no matter what.

My favorite Clint Black moment (and there are many) was when we wrote for one of his later albums. Clint lived across the field from my house. He and his fabulous wife, Lisa, were neighbors. When we met for dinner one night at a restaurant, I told her she looked much different in person than she did through a telescope at night. She kinda laughed.

But back to Clint. We wrote a song and he said he was gonna cut it for his album. One sunny day he called and said, “Wanna hear our hit?” Of course, I was thrilled, and damn right I wanna hear it. He drove the few feet to my driveway in his little black Porsche. I walked out and got into the passenger seat.

He then said, “I only have the track. I haven't put my vocals on it yet. But it goes like this.” So he started the track and put his vocal to it “live and in person.” It was fabulous, and I gave him a “bro” hug and said I'd see him later. When I got back inside my house, I told my wife about the song. She ooohed and ahhhed and then said, “By the way, did you realize to people driving by it looked like Clint Black was singing to you at the top of his lungs in a car in the driveway, and then you hugged?”

Songwriting as a career is painful, exhilarating, and hardly like any other. It's wildcatting. Punching a hole in the ground and hoping to strike oil. Everybody has a song in them. Most of the time, it's not anything anybody wants to hear. Buddy Killen, a great music publisher, told me, “In thirty-five years, I've only had one good song come in through the mail. I always listen, thinking and hoping it's gonna be great. It ain't never.”

Songwriters, for the most part, live on hope. They dream and they take even the faintest of a hint of a connection to a “cut” as their comfort. Getting a cut is like a drug. My friend Bob DiPiero has written numerous No. 1 records, but it's always the “next one” that he really wants. Here's how songwriters really are:

Will Robinson is a great songwriter. We wrote one for Reba. Will wrote many hits for Alabama. He said he was standing in a hallway at a publishing house when the receptionist told him, “Tony Brown is on the line for you.”