Nashville Chrome (18 page)

He worshiped the music, not the self—he was a slave to a beautiful or compelling sound, and preferred the traditional to the experimental—and he was so much a creature of the auditory senses that the sound of a single quivering chord, a single plucked string, was for him almost a visual and tactile experience. He could discern the faintest sounds and harmonies that lay in wait beneath larger, quicker ones.

He could hear and see the small spaces between sounds, and he could hear and see also the collision of too much crowding of sound waves, rhythm, balance. With arpeggio and fortissimo governing his spirit, he moved carefully and quietly through the world, utterly without ego, wanting only the opportunity to serve music and musicians. He never gave up on his own music but stepped smoothly and directly into the producing business, was desired by all the record companies that were springing up at the time, but secured finally by the biggest and best, RCA—the place the star-dreaming Browns had first desired to be only a few short years earlier.

Working with RCA, Atkins got to have his hands on any album he chose, with the greatest performers of that age. After he stopped performing so much and spent more time producing, the public began to forget who he was, but the people who loved music never would.

Neither of those things mattered to him one way or the other. He was comfortable enough with silence, but he lived for his work, and for that point each day when he ultimately found himself suspended in music, in its midst and supported by sound, and considering how he might spread out certain strands while tightening others, deciding how to best populate that silence with all the motion and resonance and spirit and sound that would begin when it began, following its best and most natural and heroic course, and then—sometimes quietly, though other times with emphasis and verve—ending when it was time to end.

Suspended in such dreaming, such beauty and drama and spirit each day, as a creator might have been while considering an unformed world. Where to put the rivers, where to put the forests? Where to place the wild geese, and when?

Atkins ascended into this already prepared world—the world of record producing—as if it had been made exclusively for him, and in that ascension he embedded himself in the heart of the culture-to-come, became the nucleus from which most great American records of that era flowed.

His greatest joy lay in fixing or improving the slightest flaws or subtle imperfections in a performance, and he sought out the Browns, as did anyone who possessed even a thread of greatness. They were the lodestone, and everyone else possessed only bits and pieces of it, like iron filings, all of which turned and aligned themselves toward the Browns, and then began moving toward them.

In their first year with Chet Atkins, the Browns rolled out eight number one hits, and half a dozen others that went into the Top Ten. They had two albums that year. They actually made some money, and each bought a house, good houses: Maxine her house in West Memphis, and Bonnie her farm up in the Ozarks. They sent money to Birdie and Floyd, paid off their loan. They knew the lodestone within them would never go away, and so they assumed that the fame never would.

Everyone was drawn to them. Back before the Beatles had even decided to call themselves the Beatles—when Pete Best was still the drummer, before Ringo—they had declared the Browns their favorite American group and flew to Nashville to spend time with them, where they tried over the course of a week to learn how to produce a tempered harmony, but could never quite get it.
You have to be family,
the Browns told them.
The sound all has to come from the same piece of steel.

There was no other way. They helped the Beatles improve their harmonies, but the Beatles couldn't get the exact sound they wanted.

The Beatles lined up tours for the Browns in Europe, and when the Browns came to London, the Beatles were waiting there for them in the hotel lobby, carried all their bags upstairs for them, taking the steps in bounds, two at a time. They spent a month there with them, playing in little pubs together, the six of them harmonizing the best they could, while Jay Best drummed.

It was the last half of 1959, the eve of the most turbulent decade the country would know in nearly a century. In the last little window of sleep, then, that was all there was at the top: Elvis and the Browns, with the Beatles only beginning to stir over in Liverpool. The Browns did a song, "The Three Bells," an old French folk song told in three parts; a stoic and yet also sentimental story about little Jimmy Brown, whose life passes by in a rolling three minutes. He's born, married, and then, as an old man, buried, all in the same little mountain valley, with the greater and larger world unable to intrude on his charmed isolation.

"The Three Bells" outsold Elvis, and the Browns were up for a Grammy, though Elvis edged them out. That same year, the Browns recorded "Blue Christmas" with Chet Atkins—the song was perfect for their harmonies—but they found out just prior to releasing it that Elvis had also just recorded it and had his version scheduled for re-lease: a fluke, a confluence of spirit.

You go first,
the Browns said.
Maybe we'll release ours some other time.
It didn't matter. There was no competition, there was plenty of air in the room for all of them, the country was huge and the country's appetite for music was even larger. They were all in a great current, being carried forward.

Some were still falling out of the current. Betty Jack Davis, of the Davis Sisters, whom they had only just befriended, was killed in a car wreck on the way home from a concert.

The Browns themselves experienced a faltering in the current, like a shot fired across the bow—a reminder that although they had been selected to carry the immortality, the vessels of their bodies would not be allowed to exist forever. On their way back from a trip to Europe, ice began forming on the wings of their plane, so that the pilot had to descend to an altitude where the ice might melt. The plane was bucking and stalling. The stewardesses told everyone to put on their life jackets. They descended to within a hundred feet of the ocean, bumping along—a thousand miles from land, a thousand miles from anywhere, in the dead of night—but the ice melted, and they ascended again and continued on.

E
LVIS HAD TRANSCENDED
burning. Compared to him, the Browns were still down at ground level, burning brightly enough—flaming like tapered candles, or like individual trees in a forest, lightning-struck, crackling with flame, scorching and scalding everything and ultimately altering anything within their reach—but after coming in contact with them, Elvis had taken on a different kind of burning, a conflagration that was now his own. Elvis taking on as his own fuel the best or most primal of what was in each of the Browns, but also in himself, and rising in that burning like a sheet of paper—rising quickly on the heated updrafts created by the fire's own fast burning.

Anywhere he went now, there were reporters following him. If a town had a newspaper, it dispatched both a writer and a photographer to get a picture of him and a quote, and usually he was happy to oblige—but whenever he came back to Pine Bluff or Sparkman, he sought to do so unnoticed, unwilling to share any of his time that could otherwise be spent with Bonnie and the rest of the Browns. His secret family, secret refuge.

He slept out on the porch like a hound, with nothing but a pillow and bedroll; the most famous musician in America now, and maybe in the world. There was no way the bond could hold; he was burning, he was rising, lifting away like flaming flakes of cedar-shake shingles detaching from the roof of a burning cabin, but he was trying to hold on.

Rising at dawn to the roosters crowing and the sun strafing straight through the old forest. Birdie already up early and cooking. Bonnie dressed and ready for the day, bringing him a cup of coffee. Doves calling, and nothing ahead of the two of them that day but whatever they wanted; and the world's inability to find them, even if it had desired to—which it did—was a reassurance and refreshment to both of them, if not to Maxine.

Maxine wasn't living at home anymore, had her brutish life with Tommy, who envied her success and was frustrated by his inability to keep her where he wanted all the time, out of sight yet available to only him. She wasn't exactly turning out to be what he had envisioned in a wife—certainly not like the other wives on the block. He was drinking as much as Floyd had—as Floyd still did—in order to ensure in part that he was always part of any equation, an unpredictable factor to be reckoned with: central, and therefore determining as many of the reactions of others as possible, forcing them to adjust to his every slightest gesture—the tiniest inflection, the sudden stillness, or even the clearing of a throat. The difference between Floyd and Tommy was that Floyd supported Maxine's success while Tommy opposed it. This was not an insignificant difference.

Bonnie and Elvis lounged all day, lay in the fields after their picnics, having loved and reveled in how each could feel the world going past, as if the world was passing over and searching for them but not finding them. It occurred to each of them that there was nothing to prevent them from staying hidden forever.

One night they went canoeing. Maxine and Tommy were over at Floyd and Birdie's, all of them having dinner together, and after they had finished eating and had sat out on the porch and sung and played music for a while, Elvis and Bonnie decided to take a boat ride. Rather than using the old flatbottom jon boat, they chose the little wooden canoe Floyd stored leaning up against the side of the woodpile. They didn't know if it leaked or not, but Elvis was suddenly bright with joy at the prospect, almost manic, and Bonnie became excited, too.

Jim Ed and Floyd offered to run shuttle—to drive the old truck down and leave it at their usual take-out spot, and set off to do so, while Elvis dragged the canoe out and cleaned the leaves off it, and Bonnie lit a kerosene lantern.

Within ten minutes of having announced their intentions, Elvis and Bonnie were setting off on their journey. Birdie counseled them to be careful and watch out for water moccasins, while Tommy hoorahed them, called them foolish, guaranteed they would tip over or be snakebitten. "Maybe a panther will get you," he called out.

Maxine smiled, kept rocking in her chair, but was fuming. It was the single most romantic thing she'd ever seen, and she was surprised by the roar of jealousy, and something else—a disappointment, almost a despair—that was so powerful it made her feel faint. She gripped the arms of the rocker and kept her smile frozen and willed herself to keep rocking even as she felt her face growing taut and pale with something that was inexplicably like sorrow.

Bonnie carried the lantern and Elvis the canoe, hoisting it over his head as if it were but a single plank of lumber. His waist tiny, his shoulders strong enough, in his youth. They walked side by side, and as they proceeded through the forest in the domed glow of the lanternlight, following the rutted clay road down to the creek, frogs leapt across the trail in front of them, splashing through puddles. As the road narrowed closer to the creek, the limbs and branches of trees scraped against the underbelly of the uplifted canoe. In one such scraping a little green snake, as slender as a length of twine and the color of a jewel, fell from the branches above and wiggled briefly on the road in front of them before slithering off. They could hear the riffling sound of the creek's little current before they got there.

A half-moon hung in the tops of the trees. Owls were hooting, and Elvis and Bonnie embraced, then kissed, and then Elvis slid the boat into the water and held it while Bonnie, with the lantern and its swirling halo of moths, climbed in.

Elvis jumped in and shoved off.

They felt something severing between them and the world as the current caught them and the buoyancy of the boat asserted itself in the creek. As if something huge had happened, some change that was as powerful and final as the turning on or shutting off of a switch.

They got lost. It had been raining hard in the uplands, so that the water was higher and quicker. They took a wrong current, veered into a little oxbow that normally wouldn't have held enough water, and though still in the Poplar Creek drainage, they found themselves in a system of moonlit rippling threads, each and all of which would eventually flow back into the main stem of the creek, but which led them through new parts of the swamp they had never seen before.

The swollen side waters wandered excitedly through the trees. In places, the current carried them through the tops of willows, the green branches of which shook and thrashed as if seized below with some great electrical jolt, and they passed through and between the forks of leaning trees, not experienced enough to know the real danger of such a journey.

It was easy paddling, and they rode as if riding on revolving plates, shifting scales and lozenges of water that were alternately made bright by the half-moon and then dark by the shadows of the shuddering forest. Elvis and Bonnie barely had to paddle, and didn't even need to steer much; they needed only to flex the blade now and again as the swirling puzzle pieces of water coalesced, then separated, then merged again.

Soon Elvis and Bonnie were able to differentiate where the deeper and more enduring lines of current ran—the creek's true course—and which shining paths were merely temporary braids. The real creek ran steadier and faster even though it did not always have the most waves and riffles. The air above it was cooler, for some reason—perhaps there was simply less forest overstory, above the creek's center—and there was less acorn and soil scent and more of a clean-scrubbed, ionized kind of smell.

They tried to get back to Poplar Creek and to stay on it rather than getting off into those side channels, and sometimes they were successful, though other times off-course. Again, it didn't matter; in the end they had only to keep going forward.