Hillbilly Heart (25 page)

He begins to cry

And says, “Daddy, I miss you.”

Call me daddy, I’m feelin’ blue

Call me daddy, I need to talk to you

Call me daddy, help me through

And then he bowed his head to pray

Call me dad.

Terry and I referred to the album as Project MDSSE—or Most Disrespected Singer-Songwriter Since Elvis. Jack McFadden and I split up over the album. He couldn’t understand why I was “wasting time on that bluegrass thing.” After hearing of Jack’s and my falling out, the record company wanted to know what was going on with me, and one day Luke Lewis drove out to Terry’s. He wanted to hear the album.

“It’s homegrown,” I said as a prelude before playing him several songs.

Afterward, he kept nodding his head as if the music was still coming out of the speakers.

“Oh, man, keep doing this,” he said. “This is so refreshing. Nobody is ever going to think that Billy Ray Cyrus is out here making these rootsy-bluegrass-rock records. It’s cool.”

“So you like it?”

“It sounds great,” he said. “You’re probably not going to get a lot of airplay with this. You’re probably not going to sell a lot of albums. But you will get the acclaim you deserve. The critics will love it.”

I understood, and I was relieved the boss had just given me the go-ahead to make the music I was feeling.

CHAPTER 22

“It’s About the Chase”

I
T WAS DECEMBER 13, 1994,
and I was all geared up and excited for a big night of strange happenings and weird stuff. Tish was making fun of me, an easy and popular pastime in our house. She and our nanny A.J. had put the kids to bed upstairs and the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table. I was venting my frustrations. My single “Trail of Tears” had been released and peaked at No. 39, the same exact spot where “Some Gave All” and “Storm in the Heartland” got to before they reversed course.

“What is it with me and the number thirty-nine?” I said.

Knowing my obsession with numbers and my efforts to find connections between the twists and turns of my life and various dates—like May 9, the day of Keith Whitley’s death and also the day Braison was born—Tish wondered if I might be a little OCD. As she said that, I noticed the calendar and exclaimed, “Oh my God!”

“What?” she asked.

“Do you know what date it is today?”

“December 13,” she said.

“Exactly!”

Exactly a year earlier, on December 13, 1994, the very same day, I had been in my teepee on top of the hill late at night and seen the
lights outside the house go on and off about a dozen times. When I told Tish about it the next morning, she’d asked, “What were you smoking in that peace pipe of yours?”

Now, I reminded her of what had happened.

“So?” she said.

“You just wait,” I said.

She laughed and looked around the room. “Yeah, where’s your ghost? Where’s your poltergeist?”

As soon as she said that, the kitchen lights blinked on and off several times, before the whole frickin’ house went dark. The temperature dropped until we could see our breath. Spooked, Tish and A.J. woke the kids, loaded them in the car, and checked into the nearby Best Western.

I stayed at the house that night. I lit candles and went around and checked on things. It was cold, but I loved it.

It took three days to get the power back on. It turned out that Bill Cambron had buried all the power lines underground so they wouldn’t spoil his views of the land. One of them had snapped halfway between the road and the house.

The next year, on December 13, 1995, I decided to take Judy, my old Chrysler, out for a drive at about eleven o’clock at night. My brother Mick had gotten her engine running, but this was the first time I’d tried to take her for a drive. After some priming, I got the engine to turn over and started down the driveway. Soon my farm disappeared in my rearview mirror and I found myself crossing some old train tracks at Thompson’s Station, within sight of the actual old train station dating back to the Civil War that gave the town its name.

Once I crossed the tracks, Judy died, leaving me stuck surrounded by darkness in the middle of nowhere. I got out and did all the things you’re supposed to do when your car stops. I opened the hood, fiddled around with this and that, kicked the tires, and finally cursed out that old machine. It turned out, the fault was mine: I was out of gas.

I started to shiver. I needed more protection from the cold than
the flannel shirt I was wearing. A fog set in. It began to look as though Dracula might jump out of the woods. By now it was about midnight, and I was debating whether to jog back to my place when I saw a car winding down the road toward me. When it was close enough, I waved and the driver stopped.

“Aren’t you Billy Ray Cyrus?” he asked.

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “My car’s out of gas, I think.”

He gave me a lift to my house, where I had a gas pump and a can I could fill up and take back to get Judy running again.

“You bought Bill Cambron’s place, right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I’m the preacher that Bill came to when he had the vision.”

“I heard about that,” I replied. “Is it true he saw an angel?”

The preacher nodded. Apparently, Bill Cambron, whose designs had helped shape the look of downtown Nashville, including the original Country Music Hall of Fame, was enjoying life at the place I now owned. That is, until a fateful day in December 1991 when an angel came to him and said he needed to get saved because he was going to die.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Bill died a year later.”

A few minutes later, he dropped me off next to Judy. As I filled her up with gas, I wondered what were the chances of that preacher having picked me up in the middle of the night. I realized how everything is connected in some strange way or another. Either that or Tish had been right: I needed to lay off the peace pipe.

Well, life went on and soon after that my
Trail of Tears
album, released on January 1, 1996, debuted at No. 20 on the country charts, 125 on
Billboard
’s album chart, and sold only 125,000 copies, making it my lowest-selling album yet. Ordinarily I would’ve been crushed by disappointment, but
Trail of Tears
earned me the one thing my platinum and gold albums hadn’t: recognition from critics. Good reviews streamed in from
People, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly,
newspapers in Dallas, Miami, and Memphis, as well
as
Music City News
and
Billboard,
whose headline declared,
BILLY RAY DESERVES RESPECT
.

With a renewed sense of confidence, as well as a new manager (Al Schiltz, my road manager since 1992), I embarked on an acoustic tour. Instead of the lights and special effects of previous tours, my show was toned down.

My next album,
The Best of Billy Ray Cyrus: Cover to Cover
completed my contractual obligation with the record company and showed the evolution of my songwriting. I also laid the foundation for the future by including three new tunes, “Cover to Cover,” “Bluegrass State of Mind,” and “It’s All the Same to Me,” which became a surprise hit on country radio. “It’s good to see Billy Ray Cyrus back in country music, where I think he belongs,” the esteemed critic Chet Flippo wrote.

Others agreed with him. In June, I was the big winner at the TNN Music City News Country Awards, which were voted on by fans. So it meant even more when I accepted trophies for Best Song, Best Single, Best Video, Best Album, and Male Artist of the Year.

But not all the news was happy. Jack McFadden had died the day before the awards show, from cirrhosis of the liver, following a long decline.

I saw him for the last time about a week before the awards show. I showed him a video of a new song called “Under the Hood” from my next album,
Shot Full of Love.
After, he pounded his fist on the bed and insisted on seeing it again and again. Even in the best of health, Jack wasn’t a demonstrative person, and now he was frail and weak, so his reaction was really something.

I tried to reminisce about old times, but Jack wanted to talk about my future, knowing full well he wouldn’t be around to see it. Both of us had tears in our eyes. Before I left, Jack reached out his hand and asked if we could pray. He was not much of a religious man, but that was OK. You find it when you need it. As I held his hand, I felt the power of a pioneer, a man who’d had the vision and the wisdom and pure love of country music, which he’d shared
with the world. He’d worked with Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Keith Whitley, and I had been fortunate to have him take me under his wing at a time when I needed his guidance. I squeezed his hand and let him know he’d been essential in my rise. Then, the following week, at the awards show, I thanked the fans over and over again, and I thanked Jack, and Carl Perkins, who’d passed away six months earlier after losing his battle with cancer.

That was a lot of loss to deal with all at once, but Carl’s death was something of a relief from the suffering he’d endured at the end. Even so, I missed our friendship, those walks and our talks when he taught me so much. He’d even passed some of his wisdom on to Miley.

Once, when she was five years old, we were walking with Carl through the field. His dogs were out in front of us and they had lit onto the trail of a rabbit. As they began to yap, Carl noticed Miley’s concern for the bunnies and told her she needn’t worry.

“Honey, you see me and your daddy don’t carry guns,” he said. “We aren’t going to kill the rabbits. Hunting isn’t about killing anything. It’s about the chase.”

About twelve years later, Miley would have a massive hit song called “The Climb,” and it was basically about what Carl had said to her out in the field—namely, life is more about the adventure you have while living it than it is about getting any one place.

Merle Haggard once told me the same. I asked him if getting to the top was the best part of his career, and he said, “Hell no. Once you get to the top of the mountain, there’s only one way to go.” He smiled and pointed down. “Gettin’ there’s the best part.”

At Carl’s funeral, I sang an original song called “Goodbye,” which I’d written for him. Ricky Skaggs joined me on the mandolin. We rehearsed in the church with Carl lying right in front of us, and we sounded great.

When we performed it for real, though, in front of Carl’s family, George Harrison, Garth Brooks, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wynonna Judd, and Sam Phillips, among others in the standing-room-only church, Ricky’s amplifier broke and he spent the whole time messing with
the knobs. I was playing with the greatest picker in the world, only his gear didn’t work.

I thought, Man, Carl wanted one more joke, didn’t he? It was his last chance to remind me not to take myself too seriously. And I didn’t. Because really it was about sharing that song. This was the one and only time I’d sung “Goodbye.” I wanted it to belong to Carl, to be his, and to be my way of saying a final thank-you for being my friend.

CHAPTER 23

What’s Meant to Be Will Be

I
THOUGHT MERCURY BLEW
a major opportunity to capitalize on my big night at the TNN Awards by waiting almost six months to release my next album,
Shot Full of Love.
With my contract up and our relationship all but officially over, I’d made the album their way. The executives wanted me to toss aside my original songs and use “radio friendly” material from Nashville’s top songwriters, with the town’s No. 1 hit-maker, Keith Stegall, pulling it all together as the producer. I even had Sly Dog sit it out in favor of session musicians.

Although I made no secret that I was fulfilling a contract and trying to make everyone happy, I have to say, I loved the finished product. I had a blast making the title track, “Shot Full of Love,” a remake of Juice Newton’s 1981 song, though my version was inspired by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s killer take.