Luck or Something Like It (15 page)

The first thing she said when she came in the control booth, even before saying hello, was “I want to sing with you!”

What made this meeting such a twist of fate was that Larry was producing both Dottie and me in the same studio, virtually at the same time. Her session was supposed to have ended at eight
P.M.
and mine was to start at nine.

After she sat down, she said, “Larry, we have to find a song we can sing together.” I was more than flattered. No one had ever come out and said anything like that to me before. That’s a usual invitation in this business. But then managers, agents, record companies, or someone else get involved and screw things up. More creativity is lost with technicalities than you can imagine. Sometimes you’ve just got to do it and let the chips fall where they may.

Of course in this case, Larry had a lot of juice with the company, and I was starting to have some of my own. I had loved so much hearing what she sang that while I was sitting there, I had subconsciously begun singing along with her. So without fear of repercussion and convinced I could sing in that key, I suggested: “How about
this
song?”

Dottie and Larry were shocked, as was I, at my eagerness to hear us together. I brazenly walked into the studio, put on her headphones, and started singing:

You lay the blame on me

And I the blame on you.

Why do we keep finding fault

With everything we do?

How long can we keep right and wrong

So cut and dry?

And who picks up the pieces

Every time two fools collide?

You have no idea how great that felt. Here were two people who had never met before, knew nothing about each other’s personal lives, and yet were about to sing a song that wasn’t actually written as a duet. But it was a perfect duet: each of us could understand the pain of the couple from our own perspective and experience.

My session was put on hold for the night so we could finish the song. This was less like doing a song than sharing an experience with a new friend.

I want to tell you the history of that song, because it is a good story—and I love hearing about how songs come about. “Every Time Two Fools Collide” was written by Jan Dyer and Jeff Tweel and was one of those accidental cowrites, where luck or magic shows up and takes charge. Jan was working as a secretary at United Artists Publishing, typing up song contracts and handling general office duties. But like so many people with day jobs in Nashville, Jan was also a songwriter. On one particular day when a lot of the company writers were standing around in the office, someone knocked over a little cactus plant on Jan’s desk, spilling dirt all over the contracts and lyrics Jan had just finished.

“See what happens”—she laughed, looking at Jeff Tweel—“when two fools collide?”

It was a line of Jan’s that she had used for years, but somehow she hadn’t used it in a room filled with songwriters. Jan remembers a hush coming over the room, the same kind of hush that happens when a hook line is spoken. You could hear a pin drop as the writers snapped to attention. Every writer glanced at the next one, but Jeff spoke first.

“That is Jan’s and mine!” Jeff announced. The other writers moaned and wandered back to their desks. Jan and Jeff worked on the song all that afternoon and evening, then polished it up and took it to UA’s publisher, Jimmy Gilmer. Jimmy, in turn, took it to Larry Butler.

Can you imagine? A cactus gets knocked over and gives Dottie West and me a No. 1 hit!

Dottie and I went on in that post-“Lucille” period to have several huge records: “What Are We Doin’ in Love?,” written by Randy Goodrum; “All I Ever Need Is You,” written by Jimmy Holiday and Eddie Reeves; and “Anyone Who Isn’t Me Tonight,” written by Julie Didier and Casey Kelly. Along with our buddies the Oak Ridge Boys, we did—for three years in a row—the highest-grossing tours in the music business.

Dottie and I just had this great connection. Part of it might have been that we were both raised in a poor family and yearned for something more. Dottie was raised in Tennessee, the oldest of ten kids. Although we both were raised in poverty, there was one big difference in our upbringing. Dottie was sexually abused by her father until she was seventeen years old. He used fists on her and the rest of the family on a regular basis. Finally, at age seventeen, she reported the abuse to the sheriff. Her father was sentenced to forty years in prison, giving Dottie and her family a respite from years of terror and pain.

She wanted success and she deserved success. She had something to prove, to herself, if no one else.

Jump forward to backstage at the Country Music Association Awards in 1978. That young girl who had endured so much at the hands of her father was now standing beside me, looking like a million bucks, waiting to see if the announcer called our names. Dottie and I were nominated for Duo of the Year and she wanted it so badly. She couldn’t get over the fact that I was so nonchalant about it. Finally she turned to me and said, “I gotta have you want this as bad as I do, because I
really
want it!”

She was a nervous wreck, and I found myself now wanting it just as much for her as for me. When we did, in fact, win, I have never seen anyone so excited. I think her feet were two feet off the ground. And I have to say, I saw no sign of the scared seventeen-year-old girl in the woman who graciously thanked the CMA for her award that night.

Dottie was unique in her kindness and generosity. We would go out on tour and get back into Nashville at four o’clock in the morning and she would insist that everybody, crew and all, come into her house so that she could serve up breakfast. She would put out a spread of biscuits and gravy and just about anything else you could possibly want. But that was Dottie—simply one of the sweetest ladies you could ever hope to meet.

I loved performing the song “Anyone Who Isn’t Me Tonight” with her onstage. This is a really sexy song and was a favorite of ours to sing together. I would start out by singing to her:

You’ve got the kind of body

That was made to give a man a lot of pleasure.

As we sang, Dottie would start on one side of the stage and I would start on the other. Then we’d finally come together in the middle. Her lines to me were equally sexy.

When you made love to me tonight

I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven . . .

And Dottie knew how to sell a song, let me tell you. I would often joke to the audience after we finished that song: “Look for this in the
Enquirer
next week!”

Nineteen seventy-nine proved to be a banner year for Dottie and me, and for me personally. I was hosting the CMA Awards that year and was nominated in five categories, including Duo of the Year again with Dottie. We won, and once again Dottie was beside herself with excitement. I was nominated for Entertainer of the Year, but that award went to some guy named Willie Nelson! Of course, Dottie and I got a kick out of it when the newspapers started calling us “the hottest country duo around, closing in on Waylon and Willie.” Notice they said, “Closing in.”

Dottie had made more money on those tours than she had in years. She had rekindled her career, and she and her very talented family were doing well. Everyone in country music was happy for her. Shelly West, her daughter, had an outstanding career in country music. She had Dottie’s unmistakable beautiful red hair and looked and sounded so much like her mom. And then there was her son, Mo West, who was a brilliant musician and engineer.

Dottie lived the life of a sad country ballad to the end. Many years after our record-breaking tours, she came to the attention of the IRS. Due to some shady bookkeeping by her (and Larry Butler’s) business manager, she didn’t have the money to pay her tax bill. She
thought
she did. She thought it had been paid. But it hadn’t.

As usual, to the IRS none of that mattered. Agency bureaucrats didn’t care how happy she had been and how hard she was trying. They wanted their money, and they wanted it now. If Dottie didn’t have it, they would take her house, her car, her bus—anything of value, or, what seemed to be a new standard, whatever made her comfortable or brought her joy.

Dottie told me IRS agents would show up at any time of the day or night, stripping her house. Right in front of her, they took her awards and broke them down, throwing the statues in one box, and the bases in another. I think they even took her platinum records and auctioned them off. But the worst thing they did, the thing that really broke Dottie’s heart, was they took her mother’s old china dishes. They were all she had left from her mother, and though they probably weren’t worth much monetarily, she treasured those dishes. She begged the guys to let her keep them, but they literally ripped them from her hands. It was ugly.

In all fairness, it wasn’t just the IRS. It was everybody—her ex-husband, a couple of ex-managers—who seemed to want a piece of Dottie West’s soul. Eventually, though, Dottie pulled herself together and planned a comeback. Some of her friends were going to do an album with her, people like Roger Miller, Tanya Tucker, Tammy Wynette, and me. It was in the works, but we never got to do that album.

Dottie had just been in a car wreck in her Corvette, and because of all the injunctions, she couldn’t buy or own anything of value for fear of losing it. I had a car at my house in Athens, Georgia, that was not being used, a 1985 Chrysler New Yorker, so I loaned it to her. That way she would have some form of transportation the debtors couldn’t touch. It was the car she was to drive to her appearance on the Grand Ole Opry on August 30, 1991.

For whatever reason, on August 30, 1991, the Chrysler wouldn’t start, and once it did, it apparently stalled en route to the Opry. Dottie, the ultimate professional, hated to be late and asked for a ride from her eighty-one-year-old neighbor who just happened to be passing by on the freeway. In an effort to get her there on time, he was speeding. He lost control of his vehicle on the Briley Parkway exit in Nashville and became airborne, hitting the middle divider.

Dottie survived and didn’t originally think she was hurt that bad. She insisted her elderly friend be treated first. It turned out that Dottie had a ruptured spleen and a lacerated liver.

I hurried to the hospital from Athens, Georgia, to be with my friend, having no idea how badly she was hurt. When I got there, she had just gotten out of surgery, and I swear, she was virtually unrecognizable. Her eyes were swollen shut. They had put what looked like swimming goggles on her eyes to contain the pressure. It broke my heart to see her like this. She had gone from being this incredibly vibrant, joyful person who could fill the room with her “country sunshine” to someone struggling with every breath she took to survive. When I went in to see her, her family had advised me not to be shocked and said she hadn’t spoken for some time.

As I stood by her bed holding her hand, I told her: “When you get out of here, we need to do another duet.”

They say when someone is dying, you can read a lot of false information from things you think they say or do, so who really knows, but I swear she smiled and squeezed my hand. Even if it’s not true, I choose to believe it was. She was my dear, dear friend and I couldn’t help but remember all the good times we had had together, and how innocently it had all started: “I want to sing with you!”

Looking back on this period,
I guess I could map my life by the stuff that happened between hits. “Lucille” was released in January 1977. My first hit with Dottie, “Every Time Two Fools Collide,” came out in January 1978. “Sweet Music Man” was released in October 1977, between “Lucille” and “Every Time Two Fools Collide.” During those first two “country” years, I was constantly on the road, and in many ways, those road adventures were as memorable to me as the songs I was singing onstage. You meet a lot of interesting and strange people on the road.

I now had a lot of opening acts for my shows, and probably the ones I liked best were the comedians. I love comedians—there is no greater gift in this world than the gift of making people laugh. I have, in my career, worked with some of the funniest people in the business, like my friend of thirty years, Lonnie Shorr, a comedian who would go onstage having no idea what he was going to say. “I’ll just go out and talk about things that make me laugh. That should work,” he would say—and it did.

Lonnie was a bit of a dichotomy. He was this little Jewish guy from, of all places, North Carolina. He had a thick southern accent, which sounded strange coming from his body. But he was genuinely funny. Between Glen Campbell and me, we kept him working every night, and he kept us and our audiences laughing for the better part of five years. He made us both feel and look better. As I’ve said before, and I don’t think you can appreciate this until you’ve tried and failed, people will clap to be nice but they will not laugh to be nice; trying and failing at comedy is a process worse than death.

At one time, at different stages of their careers, I have worked with the likes of Andy Andrews, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, Harry Anderson, and Gallagher. All are totally different in their approach, and all are truly funny.

Jerry Seinfeld was managed by the same managers who booked Lonnie Shorr, so that was a natural transition for us.

Jerry’s first concert with us was to be in Florida at the Sunrise Theatre. There was a sold-out audience of about fifteen thousand people. Jerry would open the show, followed by the Oak Ridge Boys and then me.

It was an eight o’clock show and I would go on at about nine thirty. My brother Lelan, who was my road manager at that time, and I came down from our hotel rooms to head over to the venue at about seven thirty and there was Jerry waiting in the lobby. “What are you doing here?” we asked.

“Waiting for my ride?” he said.

“There’s only one road into that place. You were supposed to be over there with the band two hours ago,” Lelan told him.