I realized early in my quest that there is no set of maps that can chart your course for you. There is only trial and error, growing some thick skin, getting up one more time than you get knocked down, and never ever giving up. And that requires some sacrifices.
You work while everybody else plays. You travel while everybody else sleeps. You miss family birthdays and anniversaries, and your kids grow and change while you’re gone.
Yes, there’s a price to be paid. I’ve seen strong men come apart on the road. What the public sees is the gilded tip of a very large iceberg. And that’s as it should be. It’s up to us who pursue the dream to cowboy up and walk onstage night after night as if we don’t have a care in the world. When it gets to the point that you can’t do that, it’s time to go home and look for another profession.
Hazel understood this, and as my son grew older, he did too. I tried to make up for my long absences by maximizing my off time with my family, spending every minute I could with them.
Shortly after Little Charlie was born, our sax player Vic left the band. We were down to a trio and decided to stay that way. It was Salty Loveland on drums, Taz on organ, and me on guitar, and we were versatile and tight.
One of the finest female vocalists around in the 1960s was a pretty young black lady from Louisville named Ruby Winters. She could belt out a funky R&B tune or just melt you with a ballad, and when she came to work with us, it added to the musical and also the entertainment capabilities of the band.
Our club circuit had expanded, and in 1966 we went up to spend five weeks entertaining the troops at the air base in Thule, Greenland. It was the most isolated place I’ve ever been—on the edge of the polar ice cap, without a single tree or even a sprig of grass, nothing but ice and desolation as far as the eye could see.
There were no women there except for a few nurses and the female entertainers, especially none as pretty and as talented as Ruby Winters, who attained superstar status immediately. For the five weeks we were there, Ruby was the undisputed queen of Thule Air Base.
We were there with two other bands. There were three service clubs on the base—officers, noncoms, and enlisted men—and we alternated between them, playing a different one each night.
It’s hard to even imagine the amount of alcohol consumed by the airmen, the civilian technical representatives, and the Danes who worked on the base. Denmark owns Greenland, and the Danes pride themselves as being able to hold their alcohol as well as anybody on the planet.
Guess it’s that Viking blood.
I was sitting in the bar at the enlisted men’s club one afternoon when this Danish guy walked in complaining that, although he had consumed copious amounts of alcohol, he hadn’t been able to get drunk. I hadn’t had any trouble and asked why he didn’t try one of the high-powered specialty drinks the bartenders in Thule prided themselves on that were potent enough to stun an elephant.
He replied, “Have you ever seen a Dane drink?” As a matter of fact, I had seen quite a number of them staggering around the base, but out of regard for our host country, I didn’t reply to his flippant put down.
There was this young American kid standing, or rather leaning, on the bar. He was already snockered, but nevertheless he alluded to how he could drink this Dane under the bar that was holding him up, eliciting a condescending scoff from the Dane. The kid was so drunk already that I figured if you hit him on the rear end with a rotten apple, he’d fall on the floor.
Well, one thing led to another, and it was agreed that there would be an American/Danish drinking contest, with each contestant consuming equal amounts of potent libations until one of them passed out or admitted defeat.
The first round went down rather smoothly, although the American kid appeared to get drunker and drunker while the Dane retained a smooth and debonair demeanor. By the time the second round was served up and consumed, the American kid looked like he had a weight on his head, his speech slurred and incoherent, while the Dane looked as if he’d had a glass of dinner wine.
They ordered the third round amid partisan concerns about our boy being able to hold up his end of the bargain. I was watching the American kid, who was in grave danger of toppling off his barstool, when I heard somebody holler, “Look at that Dane!” I did in time to watch him slowly slump to the barroom floor, out cold.
The American kid still had half his lethal concoction in his glass. He raised it to the ceiling, bellowed, “Here’s to the King and Queen of Denmark,” downed the rest of his liquid hangover, and joined the Dane on the floor. Of course, the Americans were ecstatic.
I saw glaciers, icebergs, huge Arctic rabbits, black Arctic foxes, and a polar bear in the wild in Greenland. I rode on a genuine Eskimo dog sled and saw a lot of sights I’ll never forget. It was my first trip to a foreign military base, and I learned about the loneliness and sacrifice our armed forces make to keep America free.
In the days before satellite technology, bases like Thule were our first line of defense. Right across the North Pole from Russia, they monitored the Russian military in the air on huge radar screens. If the Soviets had shot a missile toward the United States, the troops at Thule would have been able to tell where it was shot from, its trajectory, and how fast it was moving. Then they would spread the word, and the counterattack would begin.
It was rumored that there was a nuclear armed flight that constantly flew in the skies close to Thule that was ready to drop its load on Russia if the big one ever started. It was a highly strategic and state-of-the-art base at the time, and I’m glad I got to see it in full operation.
Bases like Thule have largely been replaced by satellite surveillance and other technological advances. But looking back, it’s frightening to think that the United States could have been moved to the edge of nuclear war by a blip on a radar screen. It took dedicated and responsible people to make split-second decisions to avert a catastrophe.
Thule was a hoot, but when our five weeks were over, we were all ready to see our families. I headed for Wilmington, where Hazel and Charlie were visiting my parents, stayed a couple of days, and pulled out for Toledo, Ohio, with my wife and baby in tow.
They would stay with me for a week or so. Then Hazel would go to Newport, Kentucky, to set up the apartment we had rented there, which would be our home for a year or so.
CHAPTER 17
OH THE JOYS OF LIVING THE HONKYTONK LIFE
It was a grinding, demanding kind of life playing the club circuit. It was six nights a week, five hours a night, and you played whatever the people wanted to hear. Some of the club owners were great people, and some of them were never satisfied. I got so tired of hearing, “You guys play too loud.” But the truth was, we probably did.
We worked them all, the slick lounges with low lights and intimate dance floors, the honkytonks and skull orchards where the air always smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer, where macho young predators roamed the shadows looking for a dance or a fight, whichever came first. We played the military bases, the roadhouses, and the occasional dance. We took on all comers and tried to give them their money’s worth, no matter where and no matter what.
Being away from home for long periods of time is a lonesome experience that constantly pulls on your heartstrings in the most ordinary of circumstances, but when it started getting close to Christmas, the feelings intensified. When the carols started playing on the radio, the decorations started coming out, and the Christmas shows started on television, it really got tough. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” could make me so homesick, I was almost reduced to tears.
I would always be at home for at least a couple of days for Christmas, especially after I had a family. Hook, crook, drought, or flood, I was going to find a way to be with Hazel and Little Charlie on Christmas.
In the days before I was married, I spent Christmas Day in Wichita, Kansas, at a movie with a couple of other musicians who couldn’t make it home for Christmas. I never wanted to do that again.
Bill Si
zemore, who I knew from the Capitol Talent Agency days in Baltimore, had gone on his own and opened a new agency in Newport, Kentucky, right across the river from Cincinnati, and offered me a partnership. That meant I could help out at the agency office, play gigs in the area, and spend more time at home with my wife and son. So, I broke up the band and moved my family into an apartment in Newport.
Tony Twist, an organ player from Tulsa, came to town, and we started a guitar and organ duo and got a long-term gig in a Holiday Inn lounge in Lexington, making the 150-mile round trip six nights a week. I had more family time than I’d had since Little Charlie had been born.
I had only been in Newport for a few months when I got a call from my old friend Bob Johnston. Bob had done well for himself in the past few years. He had gone to work for Columbia Records and produced highly successful albums by Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and others. Columbia had given him the job as head of A&R operations in Nashville, replacing the legendary Don Law, who was retiring. Not only would Bob continue to produce artists, he would be in charge of Columbia Record’s Nashville operation.
When he asked me if I’d like to move down there and try to get something going, I heard the subtle hand of opportunity knocking. It would basically mean starting over again, moving the family, and making a living in one of the most musically competitive towns in the country. But I had always wanted to live in Nashville, and it just felt right. It took Hazel all of five seconds to agree that it was a good move, so I started making arrangements to move to Music City, USA.
CHAPTER 18
MUSIC CITY, HERE I COME
Bob Johnston cosigned a thousand-dollar loan for me to move my family to Nashville and even let us rent a house he owned at a price we could afford. After paying my bills and buying a guitar I needed, I hit town on April 13, 1967, with a twenty-dollar bill, the clutch out on my car, and a busted water pipe in the house we were moving into.
I took everything of value we had left, got on a city bus, and went to a pawn shop in downtown Nashville. We had a baby to feed.
Cars were always a problem in those days. The first new car we managed to buy got repossessed, and I bought an old Opal from Tony Twist. By making regular trips to a local mechanic shop, it got us through for a while.
We wouldn’t have made it in those early days in Nashville if it hadn’t been for the generosity and friendship of Bob Johnston. He loaned me money and used me on recording sessions when he could. If there’s a human I owe a lot to professionally, it’s Bob. He’ll always have a place in my heart.
I got a job on the weekends with a band in Lexington, Kentucky, and drove up on Friday afternoon, worked Friday and Saturday nights, and got home early on Sunday. Hazel said she could hear that old Opal coming from blocks away on a quiet Sunday morning. But it was a welcome sound because Daddy was coming home with money to buy groceries for another week.
As I said, Bob would use me on recording sessions when he could, but I didn’t fit too well on Nashville sessions of that day. I was different. All of the Nashville pickers played like they were in a recording studio, and I played like I was slamming away in a beer joint. I was the proverbial square peg and just didn’t fit the gentile sounds of country music in the 1960s.
I did whatever I could to make a living for my family, playing occasional recording sessions, filling in for club musicians, and driving to Lexington, Kentucky, every weekend to play my regular Friday and Saturday night gigs.
Christmas of 1967 was rolling around, and no matter what our financial situation, Santa was going to come to see Little Charlie. Hazel put toys in layaway, and we paid for them in increments and picked them up at Christmas.
Hazel and I were not going to exchange gifts that Christmas. But I had a chance to make some extra money playing a Saturday afternoon jam session with another band in Lexington and used the money to buy a small electric train for Little Charlie and a bowling ball for Hazel.
She had joined a bowling league but didn’t have the money to buy her own ball. The surprise and happiness on her face when she saw it Christmas morning made all the extra work I’d done to get it seem trivial. To this day if you asked her what her favorite Christmas present of all time was, she’d tell you that sparkly green bowling ball I gave her in 1967.
A club owner I knew named Frank Duncan opened a new place called the Houndstooth on White Bridge Road in Nashville and offered me a job. It meant I would have a steady gig and wouldn’t have to drive to Lexington, Kentucky, every weekend. So, I took him up on it.
Frank already had a dance band; he wanted somebody to entertain his clientele. There was a strange law in Nashville at the time: although the club could serve liquor until 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, people had to stop dancing at midnight. It was just one of those archaic laws that had not been stricken from the books for some reason or another and put a serious crimp in one of the biggest club nights of the week. At midnight when the dancing stopped, people would start leaving.
That’s when I went into my act. I did impersonations, comedy bits, and a show-stopping version of “Malaguena” on my guitar, anything to keep the paying customers from walking out the door, and it worked.
I got up one morning in February 1968 coughing and with my chest and head full of congestion. After a several-decades-long period of denial and excuse making, I had to come face-to-face with the fact that what was actually wrong with me was caused by the out-of-control cigarette habit I had had for all of my adult life.
My nicotine dependency was so critical that if I got up during the night for one reason or another, I would have to have a cigarette before I went back to bed.
Any cold or bronchial infection I developed was exacerbated by my habit so that every bout would stretch into weeks of coughing and feeling fluey to the point that I basically kept a cold all winter long.
This particular morning when I got up, I felt so rotten and so stuffed up that I finally stepped over the line and admitted that my four-to-five-pack-a-day smoking habit was the cause of my misery. In a rush of honesty and enthusiasm, I blurted out, “I will never smoke another cigarette.”
At about ten o’clock in the morning, as my lungs loosened up and my breathing got easier, the intense craving began, and I sincerely regretted making that promise. But a vow is a vow, and with nine packs of cigarettes left in a carton, I stuck to my guns.
For about two or three weeks, I almost tore the pockets out of my shirts trying to locate the cigarette I so badly craved, and then it was over. I have neither smoked nor craved a cigarette since.
Praise God!
CHAPTER 19
OPPORTUNITY KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCKING ON MY FRONT DOOR
I had been at the Houndstooth for almost a year when Bob Dylan came to town to record another album with Bob Johnston and the Nashville pickers. I was and still am a big Dylan fan and admirer, so I asked Bob Johnston if there was any way he could let me play on just one session.
Sessions in Nashville are scheduled so you can fit four into a day: 10:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 10:00 p.m. As it happened, the guitar player they had scheduled for the 6:00 p.m. session couldn’t make it and wouldn’t show up until the 10:00 p.m. session, so Bob fit me in for 6:00 p.m.
I was the hungriest musician in the studio. I hung on every note that Bob Dylan sang and played on his guitar and did my best to interpret his music with feeling and passion. When the session was over, I was packing up my guitars to head to my club gig, and Bob Dylan asked Bob Johnston, “Where is Charlie going?” Bob told him I was leaving and that he had another guitar player coming in.
Then Bob Dylan said nine little words that would affect my life from that moment on. He said, “I don’t want another guitar player. I want him.”
And there it was. After all the put downs, condescension, and snide remarks, after all the times I’d driven to the hill above my house and shook my fist at Nashville and said, “You will not beat me.” After all that rejection, none other than the legendary Bob Dylan was saying that
I might be worth something after all. It’s bits of encouragement like that that keep you going. Once in a while something just lights you up and you say, “Yeah, I can do this.”
Needless to say, I called the Houndstooth and told them I wouldn’t be coming in that night.
The album turned out to be Nashville Skyline, and I went on to play on two more Bob Dylan albums, Self Portrait and New Morning. Since Dylan always listed the names of his recording musicians in his album credits, some people started noticing my name and I started to get some public recognition.
Bob Johnston quit the corporate side of Columbia, went on his own as an independent producer, and continued to add meaningful artists to his roster. One of the first things Bob had done when he came to town was record the first number-one hit Marty Robbins had had in a while, a song called “Carmella,” which helped him establish his bona fides in Music City.
Then he took Flatt and Scruggs to new levels of sales and brought Leonard Cohen to town for his Songs from a Room album. To top it all off, he recorded Johnny Cash’s blockbuster album Live at Folsom Prison, and the floodgate opened.
Johnny Cash was bigger than life in the music industry and in person. Since I worked with Bob Johnston, I had the opportunity to run into Johnny a couple of times. He was unfailingly nice to me every time I saw him. He had no reason to be except that it was just the kind of man he was, and it meant so much to me. I’ll always honor his memory.
After Flatt and Scruggs broke up, I played on some Earl Scruggs records. When he formed the Earl Scruggs Revue, he asked me to play with them. Earl’s sons Gary and Randy were young and talented, and we had a great time together.
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