by Wayne, Jimmy
I bought your CD, and it is great. All the music on it hits my heart and soul. You really did save my life that day. And when I get that thought, I play that song over and over, and it keeps me here with him . . . so Jimmy, keep up the good songwriting and singing. You really did save my life.
That letter reminded me why I wanted to become a musician, and it really helped put the business in perspective for me.
NEVERTHELESS, NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO MAINTAIN perspective, the music business will change you, and success in the music business will change you even more. Before I knew it, I got caught up in it, as do so many others. After a while I started believing my own press and thinking I really was something special. The label didn’t mind; I was selling about ten thousand units a week, and it was making money, which seemed to be all that mattered. But God had some interesting ways of keeping me humble.
For instance, when I appeared at an event sponsored by WQYK, featuring Charlie Daniels, in Tampa Bay, people in the crowd were screaming their heads off, and I was eating it up. Then I looked over and saw a Jumbotron showing a replay of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers scoring a touchdown. I thought the fans had been cheering for me!
To add to my swelling ego, in September 2003, I was selected to team up with world-class photographer Russ Harrington to do a photo shoot for People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue. Russ is known as a photographer to the stars and has photographed everyone, from Faith Hill to Loretta Lynn to Reba McEntire to Alan Jackson to Alison Krauss to Brooks and Dunn. I never had considered myself sexy, so I felt awkward and wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to look. But Russ’s professionalism helped ease my concerns, and instead of looking silly, by trying to pose in some provocative way, Russ posed me fully clothed, in a tasteful manner, and the photos turned out fairly well. When the issue came out in December that year, I was surprised to see myself in the same magazine as George Clooney, Johnny Depp, and others.
The week the magazine hit the stands, I was on a flight and seated right next to an attractive woman who was looking at a copy of the issue. She was flipping through the magazine, and when she came to George Clooney’s photo, it appeared that she was almost salivating. She stared at George for what seemed like five minutes. I wondered how she might respond when she realized that she was sitting right next to one of the so-called sexiest men in America. I thought, Any minute now, the oxygen mask is going to fall from the ceiling, and I’m going to have to resuscitate this lady. She’s almost kissing the pages. She caressed the photos of George Clooney and Johnny Depp, and I continued watching her, thinking, Any second now, she’s going to turn the page and get to me. She finally flipped to my picture, barely gave it a quick glance, and quickly turned the page. No need for any mouth-to-mouth. That was a much-needed reality check for me.
2003 WAS A GREAT YEAR FOR ME. “STAY GONE” WON AN award for being the most played song in the music business that year, in all genres. “I Love You This Much” was also a top ten hit, while two other songs on my first album, “Paper Angels” and “You Are,” made the top twenty.
The following year, “Paper Angels” was one of the most played songs during the Christmas season. The song was the highest charting seasonal track in country music history, surpassing the record set by Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” in 1982. The video we made depicting the storyline of the song was so helpful in promoting the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program that I was honored by the Salvation Army as the youngest person ever to receive the William Booth Award for my efforts to help needy children.
Life was looking good for me. Like a kite darting ever higher in the sky, my career continued to rise; but what I didn’t know, and was about to find out, was that the people holding the strings were coming down.
Thirty-six
HOUSE OF CARDS
AS EARLY AS NOVEMBER 2003, I BEGAN HEARING RUMORS that my record label, DreamWorks Nashville, might disappear, merging into Mercury and MCA record companies, two labels owned by Universal Music Group. DreamWorks was originally the brainchild of Hollywood movie magnates Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen. While Geffen also enjoyed success in the film business, producing hits such as Little Shop of Horrors, Risky Business, and other envelope-pushing movies, he is best known for founding Asylum Records, where he recorded artists such as Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. He went on to form Geffen Records, which released John Lennon’s album Double Fantasy the same month he was shot and killed. Geffen later released albums by Elton John, Nirvana, Cher, Aerosmith, Peter Gabriel, and a host of other highly successful artists. If anyone could make DreamWorks work, the three communications wizards should have been able to do it. Yet for some reason, the label was floundering.
At the time of the merger, the label’s biggest artist was Toby Keith, whose career had been revived with the help of Scott Borchetta’s promotional abilities, resulting in albums such as How Do You Like Me Now? and three other hugely successful projects. Other artists on the label were Darryl Worley, Emerson Drive, and Jessica Andrews. I was busy writing songs and getting my career on a solid foundation, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the reshuffling going on all around me, and it hadn’t really affected me—yet.
I was excited because I was about to go out on the road as part of a major tour, opening for the popular band Lonestar. With the success of my first album, Scott Borchetta had suggested, “Jimmy, you really need to get a manager.” I interviewed a number of potential management companies and decided to sign on with Borman Entertainment in Nashville and, in particular, with Joni Foraker, who also managed Faith Hill, Trace Adkins, Keith Urban, James Taylor, and Lonestar. So when Lonestar was going out on their Front Porch Looking In Tour, Joni put me on it.
Touring as a musical artist was a whole new experience for me. Joni arranged a deal in which I could rent Faith Hill’s tour bus. I didn’t have a band, so it was just the bus driver and one other person on the bus—a former member of the pop-rock group Dakota, Rick Manwiller, who served as my road manager and sound engineer. The bus was gorgeous, replete with a shower, televisions, refrigerator, and living and sleeping areas. It had everything I could possibly need. Rick had most of the front of the bus, and I lived in the back for several months.
I had grown up in trailer parks and had spent several weeks in Uncle Austin’s freezing cold trailer with no electricity, heat, or water. Now, here I was in the ultimate rolling trailer home, a million-dollar motor coach with all the comforts of a luxury hotel. Except for going onstage, I could live in the bus and not come out!
I was nervous performing my first few concerts. I had sung at writers’ nights and small-town events, but now I was stepping onstage in auditoriums, where people were paying money to see and hear a good show. My song selection wasn’t the best at first. I performed songs that I liked rather than appealing to the crowd. It didn’t take me long, however, to discover that the audiences were interested in hearing about Bea and how she and Russell had saved my life. They liked my stories that set up my songs, and the songs that illustrated the stories. Naturally, some people in the business said, “Jimmy, don’t talk so much. You need to play more and talk less.” I tried it. I went out and simply played some songs. But for me, that didn’t work. Sharing my heart with the audience was a major part of what I wanted to do.
The guys in Lonestar treated me like a younger brother, and we got along great. They were young guys with good-old-boy attitudes and strong work ethics. They were kind to me and made me feel welcome. They also knew when to keep things lighthearted, and they were good pranksters. One night I took the stage to open the show only to discover that one of the Lonestar guys had coated my microphone in hot sauce. I started coughing and sputtering so badly I couldn’t even sing. For the first ten minutes of my thirty-minute set, I was choking and wiping tears out of my eyes. The audience could tell something was up. Meanwhile the guys were laughing hysterically offstage.
I got even, though,
later that night, when Lonestar gathered at the front of the stage to sing one of their biggest hits, “Amazed.” Since it was the Front Porch Looking In Tour, they had a mock cabin and front porch as part of the stage set. So at one of the most serious parts of “Amazed,” the audience saw some crazy guy in the doorway of the set, dressed in nothing but his underwear and cowboy boots. The audience started laughing and pointing at the figure in the doorway. I heard that the guy in his underwear looked a lot like me. I can tell you this much: it sure is hard to run in cowboy boots!
I was so green as an artist that I didn’t even know I was able to sell merchandise. Midway through the tour, Lonestar’s merchandise manager said to me, “Jimmy, if you want to put some CDs or other product out here on the tables, I can sell them for you, and you can just pay me a commission on whatever I sell.”
“Really? Hey, that’s a great idea.” I bought some CDs, and from then on the merch guy made money for me every night.
Nobody from DreamWorks seemed interested in participating in the tour support. What I didn’t know was the merger details had sent everyone scrambling. Although nobody verbalized it, the attitude was, The company is closing, so why worry about trying to sell product? We’re concerned about our jobs.
Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more caught up in the new world of big-time music. I truly believed that I could do anything I wanted, that I was Superman, and that I couldn’t fail. Everyone was telling me how great I was, so it quickly went to my head. I was street-smart, so maybe that’s why I didn’t drink or do drugs, but I wasn’t prepared for all the female attention I received. Every teenage male fantasy became available to me. I had grown up in small towns in North Carolina; I’d had only two serious relationships with girls, so I was relatively naive regarding the temptations of women throwing themselves at me, and I’m sorry to say that I made some serious mistakes in that regard.
Before I knew it, I had fallen headfirst into the pig trough. I learned the hard way that if a person is going to be involved in the entertainment business, he or she better be spiritually strong and take every precaution to avoid the evil and choose the good. It’s possible to do that, but it takes more than mere human willpower. It takes God’s power. And it requires some common sense to surround yourself with good people, to avoid compromising situations, to call your friends or family after the show, and to position yourself for success rather than failure. I’m ashamed to say that at the time, I didn’t do any of that.
At my weakest points, people always came up to me, pouring their hearts out, telling me how God was using my music and stories to touch their lives.
One night a muscular, tough-looking guy came up to the merchandise table after a show and slammed his fist on the table. “I just want to tell you something,” he said loudly.
“Yes, sir?” I said, as I noticed my road manager easing closer, just in case.
“That song you sing, ‘I Love You This Much’ . . . I have a daughter, and she’s never going to have to live without a dad.” Suddenly the enormous man started crying and spilling his guts to me. I understood that his daughter meant everything to him, and I realized that some of the girls I had been messing around with could easily be his daughter. I felt convicted and knew I needed to get right.
By the time I finished the Lonestar tour, the DreamWorks merger was complete, and my career was jammed into neutral. I thought that since I had already signed with the label and had several hit songs, I would be welcomed into a thriving relationship with the new label heads. That proved unrealistic on my part, and reality soon punctured the balloons of my idealism.
ON MAY 7, 2004, DREAMWORKS MERGED WITH UNIVERSAL, Mercury, and MCA Records. Universal’s chairman and CEO, Luke Lewis, and DreamWorks Nashville’s president, James Stroud, were to serve as cochairmen of the company, with artists such as Toby Keith, George Strait, Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Lee Ann Womack, Trisha Yearwood, Gary Allan, Josh Turner, Shania Twain, and others now all under one roof.
I called James Stroud and asked him about my future. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Where am I going to be? What label do you think will be a good match for me?”
James was uncharacteristically vague. “We don’t know yet, Jimmy. We’ll just have to wait and see.” Worse yet, shortly after the new year, in the middle of working on the follow-up album to my initial effort with four hit songs on it, James Stroud fired Chris Lindsey as producer of my second album. That should have told me something, but I was still optimistic about my future with the new music consortium. I appealed to Stroud to have Chris reinstated as my producer, and James acquiesced, but I sensed trouble.
Scott Borchetta became head of promotions for both labels, so that made me feel a little better. I trusted Scott. He and I were more than business colleagues; we were friends. I knew that Scott believed in me. But Scott’s future with the label was soon in jeopardy as well.
In March 2005, I met with Scott and played him a new song, “Whatever Makes You Happy.” He loved it. “I’m going to get Luke Lewis,” he said excitedly. “I want him to hear this.” Scott came back without Luke. The look on his face was telling. Something wasn’t right.
Two days later I called Scott at home, and he sounded as though his world had collapsed. “I got fired this morning,” he told me. Scott didn’t say so, but I couldn’t imagine the new label keeping me around either, now that Scott was gone.
Despite all the turmoil in the music company, I continued writing songs for my new album and performing at every opportunity throughout the spring and summer.
Spurred on, and with Chris Lindsey back on the project, I rerecorded “Sara Smile” at Ocean Way Studios in June. In August, I was still waiting on answers from Stroud as to whether we were moving forward or not. I was set to record tracks on several new songs within two weeks. But with DreamWorks now officially dissolved, I was an artist without a home.
In early September I finally called Stroud again. “Am I in or out?” I asked.
“You’re in,” he answered brusquely.
“Where? What label?”
“Maybe MCA. We’re not sure yet.”
In early October I was sitting in a restaurant when Mike Robertson, from my new management company, walked in and sat down across from me. “I have some bad news, Jimmy,” he said. “I just received a call from the label saying they’ve dropped you.”
“What?” I could hardly believe my ears. Just a few days earlier, Universal had indicated we were moving forward. Now they were dumping me? I called Scott Borchetta and told him the news. His response was simple. “Come home, Jimmy. Come home.”
Following his dismissal from DreamWorks, Scott had been working throughout the summer to obtain funding for a new record company, a little label he called Big Machine Records. Toby Keith partnered with Scott for a while and then moved on to another label. Unfortunately for Scott, when Toby pulled out, so did potential investors.
While I was still wondering where I was going to land, Scott occasionally called me with an odd request. “Jimmy, I need you to come over and do a few songs for some friends. I just want you to come in and sing, and then leave. Don’t talk, just sing.” I was glad to help Scott any way that I could. After all, he was one of the first guys to help me. So I dutifully responded any time he called. I’d go in, meet his friends from Albany or New York or Pittsburgh, sing a few songs, and leave. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Scott was scrambling for investors, and his time was running out. It takes a lot of money to build a new record label from scratch, and even a guy as talented as Scott couldn’t do it without somebody putting up some major money.
In May 2006, I signed a recording contract with Big Machine Records, Scott’s new label. Although I had reunited with the best promotions guy in Nashville, reviving my career was not a sure thing. I met with Scott and Mark Bright, my new producer, and we decided that once we had the songs we wanted, we’d go into the studio and record them.
During this time, Scott was extremely stresse
d. I could tell something was really bothering him. He’d come to my apartment on Music Row, and we’d sit in his Porsche, listening to songs he was pitching me to record. We finally settled on four songs, so in June 2006, I began tracking sessions at Starstruck Studios, the recording complex on Music Row originally built for Reba McEntire.
In mid-July I wrote a new song called “That’s All I’ll Ever Need,” did a rough demo of the song, and took it in to Scott’s office so he could hear it. The demo was recorded one step too high for my voice, so it was hard to sing in that key, but I figured if Scott liked the demo, Mark and I could recut it in the correct key, and it would sound even better. Scott liked the song. “That should be your next single, Jimmy,” he said.
I tried to convince Scott to let me recut the song since the demo was too high for me to sing onstage every night, but Scott seemed convinced the song was a hit, just as we had recorded it. “That song is like lightning in a bottle,” Scott said, “and we may not be able to capture it twice.”
I trusted Scott. We were inseparable buddies, working together all over Nashville; we talked by phone or communicated by text messages nearly every day. But for the first time in our friendship and business relationship, I sensed trouble, something about Scott I hadn’t seen before. It was as if he was operating in survival mode.
I’d been there, and I knew that feeling very well. I recognized that look.
Over the next few days Scott informed the label about my first single and arranged for me to meet fashion designer Sandi Spika Borchetta and the label’s website guy for a photo shoot. Things were moving rapidly. Within a week the CD was out the door. The label moved forward with its efforts to promote the song, but it flopped as soon as it shipped.
