After playing rock music through much of the early 70’s, I suddenly found myself between bands and bored. My customary response to this state is to relentlessly pursue the first interesting impulse that flits across my consciousness. I decided to become a country singer.
Though I had never listened to much country music, I remembered how much the Beatles had revered such artists as Buck Owens and Carl Perkins. I had preferred the Beatles’ odd English distillation to the real thing, but I was curious to see what attracted my musical heroes to an art form I considered important but unknown. There also seemed to be boundless opportunity for satire. I began my transformation.
The local radio stations afforded me plenty of music to sample, which I did while waiting for customers to visit the sleepy little music store that had foolishly hired me as a salesman. The owner would eventually realize that I wanted to repair rather than sell musical equipment (and would start me on the path to do just that), but in the meantime I sat alone for hours on a stool behind the sales counter as I held a bass guitar and listened to the radio, learning country music in real time—that is, picking up the songs as they were playing.
Charlie Pride, Charlie Rich, Johnny Paycheck, Roy Clark. Conway Twitty and George Jones ruled the airwaves. Kenny Rogers, whom I’d liked during the 60’s, had hit bottom earlier with TV commercials for guitar lessons (“The quick-pickin, fun-strummin’ guitar course!”) and was now riding the country charts with “Lucille” and other tunes. There was plenty of contrived music, but rock ‘n’ roll had had its share of offal in the 70’s, and I had my own list of guilty pleasures.
The bass guitar parts bored me immediately. Going from the incredible, melodic lines of Paul McCartney and Motown’s James Jamerson to the dull, plodding root/fifth, root/fifth bass pattern of most country songs was like being sent to kindergarten. McCartney and Jamerson had moved the bass guitar into a new era; it was still a foundation instrument, but in the right hands it could lift a song.
The more I listened, however, the more respect I felt. I began to find treasures that showed me why country music was so popular with both Americans and Liverpudlians—why it was appreciated worldwide.
I discovered the poetry of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. The velvet tone of “Gentleman” Jim Reeves. That slight catch in Patsy Clines’s voice that could break my heart every time I heard it. Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings” made me pull over to the side of the road, coming back from a light night gig—I couldn’t drive and listen at the same time. Any thoughts of satire vanished, and I began to see the complexity of crafting a simple, beautiful song.
Eventually I landed a gig playing weekends at a small club in South Carolina. I’ve long forgotten the name, only that it ended in “Corrall,” with an extra “l” for emphasis.
The one thing that will stay burned into my brain forever is the smell of the textile plant, which spewed a horrid and caustic fume that coated the inside of my mouth and burned my eyes the moment I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car. It was a cloying chemical taste that I could feel oozing down my throat in search of DNA strands to mutate. The locals were apparently used to it and were continually curious why my eyes were filled with tears every time I walked in the place.
The club was a standard-issue beer joint: a Wurlitzer jukebox honking in the corner, rough wooden walls with a few lonely lariats suggesting a western theme, and a ceiling festooned with an assortment of beer signs—sparkling waterfalls, rotating horse-drawn wagons, and large-breasted women, wooing palates so damaged by industrial chemicals that even American beer could taste fine.
The small stage was covered in miniature-golf-course green. A Fender bass guitar was propped in the corner, sporting a sawed-off broomstick stuck to the bottom and five slanted, shiny gold mailbox letters pasted to the guitar top spelling “Dixie,” not for the song but rather the owner of the bass, who played with the band Monday through Thursday. The broomstick transformed the bass into an upright position—a crude version of the type of basses favored by jazz players. The guitar was too long to fit into a case, so it lived perpetually on stage.
A female bass player was unusual enough to grab the audience’s attention immediately, but Dixie was arresting enough without the guitar. She was a tall woman to begin with, and her assisted blonde hair added a mass the size and shape of a second head. Below the hair, the sweet, smiling face of a kindergarten teacher gave way to the tight, blue dress of a buxom cocktail waitress, all balanced precariously on stiletto heels.
She would stand onstage delicately holding the battered Fender bass slightly away from her pneumatic body as she plucked the strings like a harpist, waving her right hand in the air after each note. Her serene smile never faltered; the song could be about love, drinking, fighting, or all three, and Dixie would look lovingly at her guitar, pass her gaze around the bar and repeat the routine for the entire set.
I had my own routine: every Friday I’d arrive about 8 o’clock and load my equipment in. The drummer, a rawboned guy with shoulder length hair, lived in a mobile home behind the bar and woke each day around 6 PM, fortifying himself with cigarettes and Jack Daniels until show time.
“When you gonna take the Monday through Thursday shift?” he’d say, glancing toward Dixie’s bass. “She’s drivin’ me nuts with her bass playin.”
“Got a full-time day job,” I’d say. “Can’t.” He’d sigh, take a sip of Jack Daniels and move toward the pinball machine.
Around 8:30 the guitar player–a dwarf who played an enormous Gibson electric guitar–arrived and we took the stage, calling songs at random. The drummer and the guitarist were phenomenal musicians, each able to play or sing anything thrown our way, no matter the style or artist. The drummer had an amazing vocal range that neither cigarettes, whisky or staying up all night couldn’t diminish. The guitarist would whisper jokes to me about the songs, the club and the patrons without flubbing a note, expertly caressing his huge guitar and playing different improvised solos each night.
The club owner was an older country singer who enjoyed the privilege of sitting in with band for a few numbers each evening. I suspect it’s why he’d opened the club in the first place.
Almost every musician or singer has a stage move, calculated or not, and the owner’s was a back-and-forth weaving motion. He’d start slowly, moving a bit on the balls of his feet to the beat of the song; by the end he was swaying so much I was afraid he’d topple off the side of the stage. As he stood in front of the band, we occasionally would start weaving back and forth behind him—even the drummer would join in—and the crowd would start laughing and pointing.
The singer’s head would snap around, but never in time to catch us. We’d be standing perfectly still, neutral smiles on our faces as he murdered us with a swift glare, then turned back to face the audience; I was positioned perfectly to watch, fascinated, as his face morphed from contorted rage to the entertainer’s plastic smile as he spun and faced the crowd, whose adoration he constantly overestimated.
It wasn’t long before the long commute and the never-changing crowd began to bore me, and I said goodbye to the ? Corrall, Dixie, the dwarf, and I waited for the next impulse to grab my attention.
My dream band was still several years away, and my path would lead me to lots of different styles and groups before I finally found my musical life mates, but each change made me a bit better, which was fortunate. I would need an abundance of talent to be tall enough to play with the three guys I ended up with.
Steve Stoeckel