by Wayne, Jimmy
Jim asked me several times that week if I’d consider working with Chris Lindsey, maybe have Chris produce a few of these songs on me, which meant that Chris would record me performing the songs.
I declined because I had made an informal agreement to record with another producer in town. But I hadn’t heard from him since I parted ways with OMG, so I wasn’t sure if he still wanted to do it. I had called him repeatedly, but my calls always went to voice mail.
That same week I was stopped at the traffic light on 17th Avenue and Wedgewood, and I saw that producer sitting in his GMC Yukon at the light, facing me in oncoming traffic. I called him and watched him pick up his cell phone to see who was calling. He looked at the phone as it was ringing and laid his phone back down beside him. From the opposite side of the intersection, I watched him purposely not take my call.
That’s when I knew he was avoiding me. I called Jim and told him I was interested in working with Chris.
A FEW DAYS LATER I WAS IN JIM’S OFFICE WHEN CHRIS Lindsey walked in. We talked briefly, and Chris asked if I would walk upstairs and meet someone. I followed him up the steps to Scott Borchetta’s office.
I didn’t know who this guy was. I’d never even heard of him. He looked like a mad scientist, with his frizzy hair. He was standing behind his desk, wearing a headset and talking on the phone; it sounded as though he was talking with someone who worked in radio. Scott flipped the mouthpiece back away from his face and introduced himself.
“I really liked the demo you sang for Chris,” he said, between breaks in his phone conversation.
“Thank you,” I replied, trying not to speak too loudly, so as not to be heard on his headset mic.
I didn’t know why I was in his office. I assumed I was there to discuss a publishing deal since that’s what I told Jim Catino I needed. I figured the “Chris thing” was a long-term project and might never happen. My paramount thought was, I need a publishing deal so I can pay my rent.
When Scott got off the phone, he said, “Play me something.”
Instinctively, I played “Sara Smile,” despite the fact that I didn’t write it, which probably seemed odd. After all, why would a writer showcase someone else’s song if he were trying to get a songwriter’s publishing deal?
But when I finished, Scott said, “You can’t leave here until you sign with us.”
Hey, great! I thought, although I didn’t really understand what he meant because it didn’t sound as though he was offering me a standard publishing deal. I was too naive to realize that I had just been offered a recording deal with a major Nashville music company. It never even crossed my mind since that wasn’t why I was there. Nevertheless, Scott and I shook hands, and I left.
Later that afternoon Chris Lindsey called me and congratulated me. “Aren’t you excited, Jimmy?” he asked.
“About what? Why, what happened?
“You got a record deal! Aren’t you excited?”
“What?”
In that very moment, sitting in my four-door, beat-up, blue Honda Civic, I felt as though I had just won the lottery.
“What?” I asked again. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not joking. You just got a recording deal on DreamWorks,” Chris said.
I was all by myself; Tonia was working, and I had planned to eat at LongHorn Steakhouse, so that’s where I celebrated my first recording deal, with a large glass of sweet tea and a sweet potato.
I glanced up at a television screen in the restaurant and noticed the Atlanta Braves were playing baseball. The man on the pitcher’s mound looked vaguely familiar. When he turned to hurl his next pitch, I saw the name on the back of his uniform: Millwood. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was Kevin Millwood, pitching for the Atlanta Braves.
I thought back to when I was about twenty-one years old, and Kevin and I had once sat on the tailgate of an old pickup truck, talking about some of our dreams. “What do you want to do?” Kevin asked me.
“Man, I’d love to be a country music singer.” We both laughed. “What about you? What are your dreams? What do you want to do when you graduate from college?”
“Well, I’d like to be a Major League Baseball player,” Kevin said.
Now I was watching a ballgame on television, and Kevin Millwood was pitching for the Braves—and the other guy on the back of that pickup truck, a kid named Jimmy Wayne Barber, had just stepped into the world of country music, alongside some of the biggest names in the business.
CHRIS LINDSEY CALLED ME THE FOLLOWING DAY AND SAID that James Stroud, the president of DreamWorks Records, wanted to meet me. So on April 17, 2001, I met with James Stroud at DreamWorks. I sat on the couch in his office. James pulled a chair right up in front of me. He sat facing me, with his knees almost touching mine. And then it was as though he forgot I was there, ignoring me completely while talking shop to Chris. When I reached for my guitar, James laughed and said, “Oh, are you gonna play me something?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I immediately started picking “Sara Smile.”
As soon as I finished performing, James clapped his hands together once, stood up, and said, “Let’s get to work.” That was the end of our meeting. I packed up my guitar as fast as I could and exited the building.
A few days after the worst day in American history, September 11, 2001, I received both a recording contract and a publishing deal from DreamWorks. Thus began one of the most tumultuous rides of my life.
Thirty-five
WHO ME? A COUNTRY STAR?
JUST AFTER THANKSGIVING WEEKEND 2001, I BEGAN RECORDING my first album for DreamWorks at Ocean Way Studios in Nashville. The album was produced by Chris Lindsey along with James Stroud. The first song I recorded, while still looking for other songs for the album, was “Sara Smile.” That song, however, didn’t make it onto the first album, but another very special song did.
I HAD SUSPECTED TROUBLE IN PATRICIA’S MARRIAGE AS FAR back as when I was living with Bea. One time, Patricia and her husband were sitting in Bea’s driveway when I noticed a bruise on Patricia’s face.
“Hey, what happened to your face?” I asked.
“Oh, I just bumped it,” Patricia said.
I looked at her suspiciously. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she replied, but I knew she was unwilling to say more in front of Steven. I later learned that throughout their marriage, he had been violently hitting her. A few years after I moved to Nashville, I received a desperate call from Patricia. “I need some help,” she said.
She asked me to come and get her out. “Pack a bag,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When I learned that Patricia was being abused by her husband, I took the first flight to Charlotte. I had never before flown in an airplane, but I wanted to get there as fast as possible. After landing in Charlotte, I rented a car at the airport and drove like a madman to Patricia’s house.
When I walked in her house, my presence must have surprised her husband. He ran to the bedroom and came back out wielding a gun. “She’s not going anywhere!” he yelled.
“Oh, yes, she is,” I said, and walked Patricia out of the house. He had an easy shot if he wanted it, but fortunately, he didn’t shoot.
Patricia was petrified with fear as she and her son, Brian, got in the car, and I drove them away and set them up in an apartment. Following their divorce, Patricia moved farther away in an effort to keep some distance between her and her abuser, not an easy feat since her former husband was also the father of her son.
A number of months later I was driving through Nashville’s Green Hills area when I received a phone call from Patricia. “He’s found out where I live.”
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I wish he would just stay gone, and I’d be fine.” Her words ripped my heart out, yet they also resonated with me. I wanted to write a song that would encourage her. A songwriter, Billy Kirsch, had contacted me about writing together, so I pitched the id
ea for the song to him. I had little more than the idea and a melody line, and even on that, I was mimicking Michael McDonald. But Billy caught what I was trying to do, and he sat at the piano and came up with the hook, “Baby, baby, stay . . .” Billy and I wrote the song, and I sent it to Patricia. “I hope this helps,” I wrote in a note to her.
We turned in the song for my producers to consider, and the song tested high. “We’d like you to record it,” Scott Borchetta said. Even before we recorded the other songs on the album, Scott said, “This is going to be your first single.”
The record company released “Stay Gone” to radio in January 2003, and by February 10, it hit the charts, debuting at number thirty-four, with more radio stations adding it to their playlists every day.
Patricia called me, and she was whispering. “I was in the textile mill,” she said, “and the guy on the radio said they are going to play a new song by a hometown boy that he wrote for his sister. So I came out here to the car, and I’m lying down in the seat, hiding from the boss, to listen to it.” About that time, I heard the WSOC deejay’s voice on Patricia’s radio in the background. “Coming up next, we have ‘Stay Gone,’ by Jimmy Wayne.” What an experience! Listening to the song that I had written for Patricia along with her the first time she heard it on the radio—both of us were overcome with emotion, and our tears flowed freely.
“STAY GONE” WENT UP THE CHARTS, ALL THE WAY TO NUMBER three and remained there for three weeks. My music career took off like a bullet, following the song up the Billboard charts.
On March 21, 2003, I performed at the world-famous Grand Ole Opry for the first time. Adding to the excitement and my nervousness, the show was broadcast live on WSM radio. Before I began my first song, I stopped at center stage and said, “Excuse me for a moment, folks. I want to write this down in my journal.” And I did, writing the date and time I first played the world’s longest-running music-based radio show.
In May, I opened a show for Dwight Yoakam in Chicago one night and for Don Williams in Salt Lake City the next. A few weeks later, on June 3, 2003, I performed for the first time on the stage of Nashville’s famous Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. Playing the Ryman is a dream of every country musician, as well as bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, and the Doobie Brothers. That night I opened for a rising country superstar, Keith Urban.
On Sunday, June 15, 2003, I met Scott Borchetta at DreamWorks, and he handed me a copy of my very first CD. Tears welled in my eyes as I looked at some of my own song titles, which included “Stay Gone,” “After You,” and “Paper Angels,” a song based on a story about the paper angels on a mall Christmas tree, alluding to the Angel Tree program that provides gifts to needy children at Christmastime through the Salvation Army—the group that gave me my first guitar. On that same album was another special song, one that Don Sampson helped me to write: “I Love You This Much,” about a boy who sought love from his dad, and although he never found it, he eventually discovered that God’s constant love had been there all the time. As I thought about the unusual way this album of special songs had come together, I realized I was holding my first CD on Father’s Day.
THE EXCITEMENT CONTINUED FOR ME THROUGHOUT THE summer of 2003. In late June, I performed three shows in El Paso and received standing ovations at every show. Then on July 4, I performed again at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, this time backed by the Opry’s amazing musicians.
Midmonth, I opened for Patty Loveless in Atlanta. This was a special concert for me since Patty and I had grown up in the same area. Patty was doing her sound check but stopped right in the middle of it to give me a hug. I was blown away when she said, “Jimmy, I bought your record. It’s great!” We talked briefly about the old days, when she had lived in a brown trailer on Second Street. We had both come a long way.
The very next day, after the concert with Patty in Atlanta, I received word that “Stay Gone” had achieved number one status on the Country Music Television (CMT) network. Considering all the great songs and videos out there, to think that the song I had written for Patricia was the most requested song on CMT was truly humbling and fabulously exciting.
Of course, the music business has its own way of keeping a person humble. While “Stay Gone” was receiving a lot of airplay, I was driving in Nashville one day when a pretty young woman in a BMW convertible sitting at the traffic light glanced over at me in my banged up Honda Civic. Tonia and I had broken up months earlier, so I smiled real big at the woman in the convertible. She rolled her eyes and drove off while singing along to “Stay Gone” on her radio. So much for having a hit song!
With the excitement over the album and the success of “Stay Gone,” the record company scheduled a video shoot for “I Love You This Much” on July 18, 2003. About a week before the shoot, I walked outside my apartment on Music Row and saw a homeless guy in the alley, scavenging for food in one of the large trash bins. His arms were dirty, and I noticed his hands were cut from digging through the garbage. When I saw him, I tried not to make eye contact with him. Too late.
“Hey,” he called out. “Are you Jimmy Wayne?”
Oh, man, I thought. He’s going to ask me for money.
“Yeah, I am,” I answered reluctantly.
He was a large man but had a high-pitched, squeaky voice. “I saw some of your promo posters in the garbage can over there, so I recognized you,” he said. “Can I have your autograph? I heard your song ‘Stay Gone,’ and it really helped me.”
I was intrigued. “Really? How?”
“I lost my wife and kid in a car accident, and the song helped me get through it. You know, when you hurt like that, you want the pain to go away, to stay gone.”
His story touched my heart. “I have to tell you, I wasn’t expecting that from you,” I told him. “I thought you were going to ask me for money. I was trying to ignore you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
“No problem,” the big guy said.
“Stay right here a minute,” I said. “I want to get something.” I went into my apartment and grabbed my journal. I took it back outside and handed it to the homeless man. “Would you do me a favor? Would you sign my journal? I want your autograph.”
He signed my journal and filled an entire page with his musings. At the close, he signed his name, “John.”
I saw John every so often, and he never asked me for anything. One day I saw him outside again. “Hey, Jimmy,” he called. “I got you something,” John said. He pulled out a brand-new journal. “I noticed that the spine of your journal was broken, so I got you a new one.”
I couldn’t believe it. This guy was digging through garbage to survive, and he had gotten me a journal. I thanked him profusely then asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Digging in the dumpster,” he responded.
“Do you think you can get a suit somewhere, and maybe clean up just a bit?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, if you can, I’m shooting a new music video tomorrow, and I want you to be in it.” I gave him the shoot details.
The following day I was standing around a spread of food with a bunch of crew and publicists at the video location, when in walked John—wearing a suit. “Hey, John, great to see you,” I greeted him. “Hey, everybody, this is my friend John.”
“Hey, John,” they all went to great lengths to make him feel welcome, hugging him, blowing air kisses, and offering him food. Nobody knew that John was homeless, so they treated him like a star. John stood around eating finger foods from the same plates as everyone else. I chuckled to myself as I watched some of the “plastic people” hugging a homeless guy who had been digging in the dumpster the day before. We had a great time, and I made sure John was seen in the video of “I Love You This Much.” He did a good job.
Following his appearance in my video, John was asked by various producers to do other videos. Because of his large physical size, he made an appearance in the audience of the television show The Biggest
Loser. He actually started making some money.
A few months later I saw John again. “I got ya something,” he told me. “I was at the Johnny Cash estate sale, and I bought this for you.” He handed me an old suitcase. Unbelievable. The guy who had been digging in the dumpster handed me a suitcase that had once belonged to Johnny Cash. “I can’t believe you took a chance on me,” he said.
“John, I really didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Yes, you did. Being in your video gave me a new start in life,” he told me. “And I just want to say thanks.”
I WAS STILL ON A ROLL THROUGHOUT JULY AND AUGUST 2003. I opened for Vince Gill a couple of nights in Boston and received standing ovations both nights. Attending one of the shows was rock-and-roll icon Steven Tyler. He was obviously there to hear Vince, but I was thrilled to meet him.
A few weeks later the video for “I Love You This Much” debuted at number one on CMT, as the most requested song of the week. That was incredible, but even more meaningful to me was a letter I received from a fellow in Indianapolis. He wrote:
Jimmy,
I just want to let you know your music has made a difference in my life. I was down on life, my wife had left me for another man after 21 years together, and we have a 4-year-old son that means so much to me. I started thinking about suicide. I bought the gun, rope, pills, and so on to do this when I was alone, since nothing was stopping me. Not the thought of family, friends, my son—nothing.
On Sunday evening, November 9th, I had the plan to go ahead. I sat on my couch in the living room with my gun in my hand from 1:00 a.m. till Monday morning at 7:45, but I never did it. I turned my TV on, and your video came on: “I Love You This Much,” and I saw the little boy with his arms wide open, saying does my Daddy love me, and I just stopped and stared at my TV. I watched the whole thing and cried so hard, asking myself why I was even trying to do this. Really silly on my part, because he is a great kid, and smart. . . .
