Hillbilly Heart (26 page)

In the studio, Keith paired me with guitarist Dann Huff, who tore it up and became integral to my next album as well as a good friend. I thought the song “American Dream” should’ve been a hit, and I have no doubt “Under the Hood,” a groovy barn burner released as the first single, would’ve been a No. 1 if someone other than me would’ve cut it. Disappointingly, it failed to even chart.

We made a video and it went to No. 1 at CMT. But that wasn’t the single for radio. The single was a song called “Busy Man,” and it became a hit. The song was about a father who is too busy working and keeping up with his job and neglecting his family, until one day he wakes up and realizes what’s really important.

At concerts, I could see the looks on the faces of the dads in the audience as they sang along. That said it all. It was great to have a song out again that was touching people’s lives.

If it had sold only two copies, though, I would’ve considered it a success on account of a little girl named Jenny. Before we started, I came across a fan letter from her. Written in the flowing script of a young girl, she explained that she was a cancer patient and she’d always dreamed of meeting me. I made some calls. On the first night we were in the studio, I came out of the booth after singing “Give My Heart to You,” and Jenny was there in a wheelchair, waiting.

Her face lit up; so did mine. We visited, took photos, and had a good time. Her friendly spirit and love of music stayed with me throughout the recording of the album.

In the spring, Jenny’s grandmother sent me a letter saying that Jenny had passed away. At her funeral, the kids from her school said a prayer, and then, per Jenny’s own brave instructions, her friends and classmates played “Achy Breaky Heart” and danced and released hundreds of butterflies.

After reading that letter, I sat still for a long while in the workroom where I made my music. I pictured that brave little girl whose eyes had been filled with God’s light and love. Those are the special moments of being a recording star—and they are equal parts gift and responsibility.

I also heard from Raymond Bullock, the former Green Beret who used to come into Bronco’s Lounge to hear me play “Some Gave All.” Those days felt like ancient history. Now Raymond had heard I was hanging out in Tennessee, and he wondered if he could come by with his buddies.

So Raymond and a bunch of fellow veterans got in a van and
drove to my place. I took them to the top of the hill where my teepee was and we prayed for one of their guys who wasn’t doing well. We sat around, talked, and walked some of the trails.

I told them how the hill where we sat had been a sacred place for the Chickasaw tribe. At another point, I gestured to the south so we were looking toward Columbia and Spring Hill, where Civil War troops had massed before the bloody Battle of Franklin. The ground echoed with footsteps from the past. We could almost feel them. As the sun went down, we built a fire and talked more.

A few months later, I found a note on my gate from Raymond. It said, “Mr. Cyrus”—he always called me Mr. Cyrus—“It’s Raymond. I hate to bother you. I’m in town and I have a gift from the guys. I’d leave it by the gate if I could. But I can’t. I want to drop by if anyone is home.” He left a phone number.

He was at a little hotel nearby, the Goosecreek Inn. My brother Mick and I laugh about that place because the C in the sign often burns out so that it reads Goose reek Inn. Raymond came over shortly after I called him. I met him and his friends at the gate on my dirt bike, trailed by my one-eyed German shepherd, Spirit.

“Can we go back to the top of your hill?” Raymond asked. “I got something in the back and can’t really get it out here.”

I tried to look in the back of his van. What was back there—a live animal or something?

He followed me to the top of the hill, where he got out and pulled open the van’s side door, revealing a massive totem pole. It must’ve weighed four hundred pounds. The guys wrestled that thing out of there, dug a hole, and planted it. I thought it was pretty great. Then Raymond walked me around the back and pointed to where they had carved a message:

Thank you for the night we spent on Spirit Mountain. It may have been an evening for you, but it was a lifetime for us.

I was humbled and at a loss for words, which is pretty unusual for me.

“I feel inadequate,” I finally said, “compared to the gift you’ve
given me. The freedom to have a dream, to be a kid that dreamed of being the next Elvis: buy a guitar, start a band, go rock-and-roll. How come I can do that? Because you guys, and men like you and your dads and grandfathers, made a sacrifice so we can live in the greatest country in the world where freedom is the priority…”

Given experiences like that, my dad wondered why I beat myself up so badly over whether a song was No. 1, 3, or 39.

“Look around, Bo,” he’d say. “It’s all good.”

It was. It was better than good.

I knew that to be true. Like a lot of people, though, I had trouble remembering that life, as Carl Perkins had told me, was about the chase, not the chart. As I’d said numerous times, “Achy Breaky Heart” had been both a blessing and a curse. It had put me on top of a mountain
and
at the same time in a deep hole. With every album, I was trying to prove myself. Did I have to? Probably not.

But I did.

I tortured myself. I still do—and why that is remains a mystery.

However, my dad understood problems were all relative depending on who had them. One day he showed up at my house with a totem pole the Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains had made for me in appreciation of my song “Trail of Tears.” The totem was called Seven Hidden Eagles, he said, because there were, in fact, seven eagles hidden within the carving. The first few were easy to find; the rest got harder.

My dad drove it up to where I had my teepee and we spent a few hours digging a hole and wrestling it into the ground. I liked watching my dad work. He was six foot two and strong. He tore into the ground. And he knew how to do everything right.

Afterward, we rode horses for a while, and then returned to the teepee. We warmed up around the fire as the last bit of sun dropped behind the farthest mountain. Soon we were sitting in the dark, the big old flames dancing in front of us and casting a bit of light onto that new totem pole.

My dad chose that moment to zero in on me.

“You know, son, I’m not your manager, and I don’t know much of anything about the business you’re in,” he said. “But it looks to me like you’ve got all your eggs in one basket.”

“What do you mean, Dad?” I asked.

“Well, everything I hear you say revolves around whether radio stations are going to play your newest single,” he said. “It’s all one thing, and that limits you. I think you ought to branch out. Get one of those Kenny Rogers–Dolly Parton kind of careers. They do it all—film, television,
and
music.”

“Shoot, man, I’d love that,” I said. “But how? I’m not an actor.”

I’d done guest spots on
The Nanny
and
Diagnosis Murder,
but neither was a real acting gig. Now I decided to up the ante. My manager put out feelers in Hollywood and some scripts came in. Most were for Westerns and romances; none knocked me out. I was content to wait for something that felt right.

At the end of 1998, I agreed to do a guest spot on a reboot of
The Love Boat,
shooting in Los Angeles. I played a singer named Lasso Larry. On my last day on the set, I picked up a trade magazine someone had left on a table and read that director David Lynch was casting for a new project called
Mulholland Dr.

Whether
Mulholland Dr.
was going to be a TV series or a movie was still unclear at that point, but I didn’t care. I was a fan of David’s work. I loved both
Elephant Man
and
Blue Velvet,
so I called my agent and asked if he could get me an audition. Since we were leaving that afternoon, I knew the odds of David having time were small. Yet a short time later, I had an appointment that afternoon.

If only the rest of the day had been that easy. First off, I confirmed my meeting. Then I changed my plane ticket to a flight later that night. Tish, Miley, and Braison kept their seats on the early flight. As I helped them get into the car, we all remembered that we had two baby chickens living in the bathtub in our hotel room.

“Dad, we can’t leave ’em,” Miley said.

I looked at Tish. She was shaking her head, letting me know that she didn’t want to carry them home along with two little kids.

Earlier in the week, we’d taken the kids to a petting zoo near the beach in Topanga Canyon. As we looked around, we discovered some baby chickens that were being raised to be fed to the large snakes. After a quick family conference, we asked the people in charge if they’d sell us the baby chickens.

When they said no, we went to plan B. We snuck around the back and stole two of the chicks, one black and one white, and took them back to our hotel, where they lived in our bathtub.

“All right,” I said to Tish and the kids. “I’ll take them with me and bring them back home.”

So I had these guys with me when I showed up at my audition. I thought if anyone would appreciate this strange story, it would be David Lynch—and you know what? He did. But I had other concerns. My part had been sent to me less than an hour before, and I hadn’t begun to memorize it or even think much about the character, Gene the Pool Man.

However, David never asked me to read the lines. Somehow he knew about Mary Magdalene Pitts and my song about child abuse, “Enough Is Enough.” I told him about my dad’s neighbors Calvin and Jimmy, the fire at their house, and the voice I’d heard crying, “Help me. Help me, Mommy.”

When I finished, he said, “That’s great. I’ll have somebody get in touch with your people.” Sure, I thought, that was Hollywood talk. But before I got to the airport, my agent called and told me I had the job. Now if only I could get the birds through security… I told them they were rare African cockatoos. “They’re very nervous birds,” I told ’em. “They must remain in their cage with a towel over it to shield them from the light.” It worked. I got the chicks home… and the gig with David Lynch.

As I expected, there was a big learning curve once shooting began in February 1999. Most of it had to do with comfort and familiarity. The script was so dark, I expected David to show up dressed in black, wearing a cape, and burning candles. In reality, he wore blue jeans and a denim shirt and couldn’t have been more normal.
But that’s where normal ended on
Mulholland Dr.,
a psychological thriller about an actress who’s involved in a bizarre search for identity across Los Angeles after befriending a woman suffering from amnesia.

For my first scene, I was in bed with another man’s wife when he walks in and finds us. I lay there and said, “Forget you ever saw it. It’s better that way.” The husband reacts by pouring pink paint in his wife’s jewelry box. Then, in the next scene, he and I fight in the kitchen. That was more complicated, and I was unsure of my performance even though David said it was good and got ready to move on to the next scene.

“Should we try it again?” I asked. “Maybe just get one more take.”

“No, we’re all good,” he said, smiling. “Acting is about being real in the moment, and you gave me exactly what I want.”

“Really?”

“I’m not your manager or your agent or anything,” he said. “I’m talking to you as a director, and you’re what a director wants. You come in here and play it real. I think you can be quite an actor.”

Without that vote of confidence from David Lynch, I doubt I would’ve continued to act. After
Mulholland Dr.,
I felt like I had done something incredibly dark. My power came from wanting to share God’s light and love. It fueled my drive and passion. I feared I might’ve tampered with a force that I didn’t want in my life.

On a flight home from L.A., I prayed for guidance. If God wanted me to be an actor, he’d send me a project that he wanted me to act in. A couple of days later, I came home and found an envelope on the table from my manager. Inside was the script for
Doc,
a values-heavy family drama about a Montana doctor working in New York City.

Tish read the script first and, later that day, when I asked her what she thought, she said, “It’s so
you.
It’s about everything you represent.”

I sat down with the script and loved it more with each turn of the page.
Doc
made me think of
Brian’s Song,
a made-for-TV movie I’d loved as a kid. Although it was a very different story,
Doc
pulsed
with the same kind of heart: tons of emotion, sadness, and beauty that made you feel better—or inspired to be better.

“I can see you as Clint Cassidy,” Tish said that night after we’d put the kids to bed.

“Me, too,” I said. “He’s the underdog. He’s all about overcoming adversities. And that’s me.”

At that point,
Doc
was slated to be a movie for Pax TV, a new cable network. If ratings were good, it would get picked up as a series. Either way, I had mixed feelings. My intuition told me that I’d get the part if I auditioned. However, I didn’t know if I wanted to commit myself to the project. I had signed a new deal with Monument Records, and I was in the midst of making my
Southern Rain
album, which I loved. I also loved riding my horse, taking out my dirt bike, and playing with my kids. I loved my freedom.

My mind played this game of Ping-Pong until finally I called my manager, Al Schiltz, and said I wasn’t going to do
Doc.

“Call ’em and cancel,” I said.

“Man, I think you’re passing up a big opportunity here,” he said.

He knew me well enough to tell me to go up to my teepee and pray about things. “Call me back tonight before I cancel your flight,” he added.

I took his advice. I got down on my knees in that desperate man’s prayer pose by the fire, and said, “God, I’m confused. Do you want me to go to this audition? Do you want this to happen?”