As much as anywhere else, I grew up in bars. My mother was by profession a bartender, among other jobs, and by addiction an alcoholic. Pretty much everyone in my family drank, from Grandma’s “half a beer” to all the kinfolk gathered around the beer cooler or the Jack Daniel’s bottle during family gatherings. And at one time or another, many of my other relatives had worked in bars, including Grandma, Aunt Vickie, and Uncle Vern. Since I was a kid, one or another bar, especially those around Pocahontas, has been my home away from home.
If you haven’t gathered this by now, bars are the center of the social world where I was raised. It’s where all the local news and gossip gets passed along, where people play out their private domestic dramas in public, often with someone getting punched in the face or kicked in the head as a consequence, and it’s where a steady supply of nightly and weekend entertainment can be found. When you got bored, which was often, you could head to the bar for a little lighthearted company, a boilermaker, and a game of darts. It was like a recreational center for adults.
These little Southern Illinois taverns, dozens if not hundreds of them, just sit along the side of the country roads out there with nothing else around them but wide expanses of farmland. They were every twenty miles or so. All you have to do is get in your car, start driving, and you’re bound to find one where you least expect, on the loneliest, most desolate stretch of two-lane blacktop imaginable.
“Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going?” some suspicious spouse would yell to another at about 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening. “You know where the hell I’m going,” was the usual reply. “I’m goin’ down to . . .” (Fill in bar name here: Hoosier Daddy’s, or Flicks, or Lenjo’s, or the O-Zone, or the Leisure Lounge, or Mooch’s Pit Stop, or the Rail Shake Inn) over in Highland.” This last place was called the Rail Shake Inn because it sat right next to the railroad track and every time a train came through, the whole place shook and rattled. It scared the hell out of first-timers.
The bar of my particular youth, as I’ve mentioned in about every interview I’ve ever done, was a nondescript little roadside oasis situated on County Line Road in the metropolis of Pierron, Illinois. It was called Big O’s.
One of only two bars in Pierron, Big O’s was a perfectly square concrete building, maybe forty by forty in size. On a good night, when a favorite local band was playing or just a lot of people decided they wanted to get good and drunk, the place held maybe forty-five to fifty people. Pierron is even smaller than Pocahontas and the main activity there is drinking. There’s no stop sign, no stoplight, no gas station, and no grocery store. There are these two bars and a little cigarettes-and-pork-rinds convenience store with no gas. It’s not like you’d go to Pierron, catch a movie, do a little window-shopping, then hit the bar. You’d just hit the bar.
County Line Road runs through the middle of Pierron and separates the two drinking establishments. One bar is in Bond County and the other is in Madison County. This is significant because it means both of them are on the fringes of both counties, which means the police station in each county, located in the county seat, is a long ways away. The local cops or even the Illinois State Police rarely patrolled out that way. Pierron was close to being no-man’s-land, law-enforcement-wise, and underage drinking was not an uncommon sight. If a teenager dropped in with his dad to have a beer, the kid usually got his own mug. If the people there knew you and/or your folks, your chances of getting carded at Big O’s or any other such place were pretty slim. I mean, come on, you’re with your dad!
Of course, if there was trouble—a brawl, a car wreck, or, God forbid, something involving guns—the police came running. But that was a rarity. Mostly the trouble was one-on-one fights, and mostly those got settled without having to call the cops.
Big O’s was owned and operated by Mark “Big O” Obermark, a man who weighed in anywhere between four hundred and five hundred pounds, and a dear friend to this day. Nowadays Big O, in failing health, gets around in an electric wheelchair and lives behind another bar in the area. When he wants to hang out at the bar, he just wheels his way up a cement ramp, finds his spot in the room, and plugs the chair in to recharge the battery.
I was about thirteen or fourteen when we first met up with Big O. We got to know him down at the stock car races in Highland when Aunt Vickie’s husband, Eric, was down there tearing up the track in his favorite Chevy. Big O was a big race fan and a delightful guy to hang out with. We’d see him at the track—he was kind of hard to miss—then join up later at a bar to drink beer and tell jokes. After he opened Big O’s, my mom started working for him and we all just naturally gravitated there because Mark was so friendly and free-spirited. Soon he was like another member of the family.
Then, at fourteen, I started to work in the kitchen at Big O’s, fixing burgers and fries. It wasn’t long after that when I started bartending up front. Given the circumstances, you didn’t have to be twenty-one to get a drink at a place like that, and you didn’t even have to be twenty-one to serve that drink. It was just another way that I grew up fast.
Mark’s dad, Rudy, was also a fixture around Big O’s, but you’d never know he was his dad in a million years. He was a thin little guy, about five foot four, had a white beard and white hair, and always wore overalls and often a railroad hat. He was the spitting image of Papa Smurf. He also worked hard around the bar, doing anything that needed to be done, from serving up chicken strips and fries out of the tiny kitchen behind the bar to closing the place down. The menu at Big O’s was pretty much anything you could drop into a deep fryer.
My mom worked for Big O at one time or another, as had my Aunt Vickie and my Uncle Vern. Even my grandma worked in his kitchen a time or two; she and Rudy became good friends. At one point we lived in a trailer park where you could walk to Big O’s, so it was our neighborhood hangout. Kids in those parts didn’t have many places to go and waste time. There were no shopping malls or down-the-street pizza joints where you could meet your friends and goof off. Bars like Big O’s were great for that. You could go in one of them and shoot pool, throw darts, play an electronic poker machine, watch TV, play the jukebox, or eat a cheeseburger. Especially if your mom was working in a bar, you’d just wander over to the place and amuse yourself while you stayed out of everybody’s way.
I also learned at a pretty young age that it is a great place to watch people tell stories, complain about their lives, get into arguments, and just let their hair down and be themselves. Especially if you are a songwriter, you just soak up everything like this and are pleasantly surprised when some detail you observed—like a Skoal ring on the back pocket of every man who walked in the bar—shows up in a song fifteen years later.
I learned to be a pretty good country pool player from all those trips to Big O’s and later used that skill to make a little side money when on the road with local bands I joined up with. There were times, in fact, when I made more money hustling pool than singing in a band. Men everywhere hate to get beaten by a woman in anything, especially something like pool that they have played day in and day out for years. That always made taking their money extra sweet.
Live music was a staple in almost every bar in the greater Pierron/Pocahontas/Greenville/Highland area. Unless you wanted to drive into St. Louis and confront an alien urban culture, you got your music not from seeing Bob Seger or Ted Nugent in concert but from seeing the local Bob Seger or Ted Nugent wannabe who did a pretty damn good job playing and singing songs like “Night Moves.” The local musicians invariably had day jobs during the week and hooked up with their band mates to earn a little extra cash on the weekends. Even before I formally joined my first band, I would worm my way into sitting in with bands playing these local joints. I was only eleven or twelve at the time, but I’d be there at five o’clock when they were setting up and I’d slide up to the lead guitarist and say, “Hey, can I get up and sing one with you later?” He’d most likely ask, “I guess so, what songs do you know?” I’d answer, “Well, I kn
ow ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ in the key of G,” and two hours later I’d be on stage, singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in the key of G.
Not that Big O’s had much room for bands. If you packed people in like sardines, it was still a relatively small crowd, all of whom smoked, so the air was usually a wall-to-wall cloud of smoke. O had an ingenious way to make room for a stage performance. The pool table that dominated the back of the place was on wheels. A piece of the back wall flipped up and you could push the table into an empty storage room right behind that wall. The band would then set up where the table once was and when they were through for the night, we’d move that table back in place and commence a game of eight-ball.
Big O’s was a rowdy place. There are bullet holes in the back wall, but they didn’t come from some cowboy trying to even the score with his cheating spouse. It was just our way of letting off steam at quitting time. Big O always carried an automatic .25 pistol in his pocket and after the evening crowd left, we’d take turns shooting empty bottles and cans at twenty paces. If there was some drunk still there who refused to leave, O would fire off a few rounds into the ceiling as a wake-up call. It always got them moving.
The seven or eight regulars who held down the bar during the daylight hours were seldom any trouble. They’d just sit there all day, nursing their “mug of Busch,” with little piles of nickels, dimes, and quarters in front of them to pay for the next mug. You could tell how many beers they would consume that day by the change they had piled in front of them.
But at night and especially on the weekends, there was always something going on—a loudmouth drunk looking for trouble, an angry husband looking for his wife, or maybe the age-old rivalry between hard-asses from Greenville versus hard-asses from Highland. Even in an area as unpopulated as that one, there were cliques in the bar. The old guys hung together, as did the roughnecks, the women who dropped by, the Harley crowd, and the farmers. Not that any of us were much different from the rest. We all came from the same place and we all liked to listen to everything from Merle Haggard to AC/DC.
The men who called the place home were often just strange. One regular, named Herschel, drove a piece-of-crap old Cadillac with a big set of longhorns on the front grille and he talked in an eerie, robotic smoker’s voice. He’d mostly just laugh . . . “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh” . . . between ordering up another mug of Busch. Then there was Mark, a good friend of my Uncle Vern, who lived across the street from us. He’d walk in the front door of Big O’s, already drunk, go straight up to a wooden post in the middle of the bar, and start beating his head on it. He’d do that, methodically, until his head would start bleeding. Sometimes this could take a good twenty or thirty minutes. Then, as suddenly as he started, he’d stop, wipe the blood off, grab a seat at the bar, and order a beer.
None of us knew why he did it but we knew not to interrupt his head-pounding ritual. If you went over and tapped him on the shoulder during this event, he might turn on you like a rabid dog. Sometimes Big O would have to kick him out for some reason and he’d start beating his head on the door. O claims Mark went home one night, got his pistol, dressed in camouflage, and sat in a tree waiting for O to leave so he could take him out. O probably talked him out of it.
O claims that Mark was a madman when drunk and a sweetheart when sober. With people like Mark, you generally just let them alone to work out their problems in their own weird way. That’s the way you dealt with most people who frequented Big O’s. Whatever their personal pain—no job, a broken heart, a warrant for their arrest, the DTs, or just a psychotic tic like beating their head to a bloody pulp—if they didn’t bother you or some other patron, you didn’t bother them.
Bars are not the healthiest environment to be around, especially for someone barely in their teens, but I never much questioned that life at the time. I do think that being in such a place where people often came to escape from unsatisfying lives and bitch about their miseries, I picked up on their restlessness. I have always been restless. I’ve always felt like things could be better, that there was more to do, to see, to experience and learn from.
Even today, if I write a song, it takes a lot of convincing before I think it’s done and as good as it will get. My mom’s compulsion to keep looking for a new life around every corner probably has something to do with this. She let someone who mistreated her drag her all over the country so that she might find a better life for herself and her kids. In this respect, I’m a lot like my mom. I also knew that there was something better up ahead for me, and I was itching to find it.
Some of my restlessness came out as just pure teenage rebellion. By the time I was fourteen, I’d had more than a beer or two, smoked more than a couple of packs of cigarettes, and was already a dedicated dipper. I used to dip in class in school. During one study hall in Greenville, full of two hundred kids scared to death of the teacher, the football coach, I had a dip in my mouth and was spitting into a Coke can when he spotted me. He located my can of Skoal and announced to the whole class that I was chewing tobacco and since I seemed to like it so much, maybe I should have the whole can. He then proceeded to make me eat the whole can. And I ate it. Luckily I only had a half a can left.
Here’s where I showed the stubbornness that I had learned from years of dealing with my grandpa. I swallowed the whole thing and then sat there for another forty minutes as if gulping down a fistful of dipping tobacco was no big deal. I wasn’t going to let that bully see me get sick. I wasn’t going to let him think he really nailed me. Of course, as soon as class was over, I ran into the bathroom and puked my guts out, but I had made my point.
By the time I was about fifteen, the urge to get away from my mom and stepfather and try something totally new had become overwhelming. The restlessness finally took over. I had to get away from the craziness of their unstable life, for sure, but I also had to prove something to myself and anyone else who cared. I had to show the world that I could make it on my own.
CHAPTER 4
REBEL CHILD
I understand, why you do the things you do
There was a time, when I was just like you
I know right now, you think you know it all
There’s no way that you can break, no way you can fall
“Rebel Child”
One of the biggest decisions I made before coming to Nashville was the decision to drop out of school in the ninth grade and set out on my own. My mother had left home at fifteen to get married and have me, and I felt the same itch at virtually the same age. Dropping out of school is not something I would ever recommend to anyone—there are very, very few well-paying careers out there that don’t demand a high school education, and in most cases, a college education as well. In my own case, though, I had but one goal in life—to become a professional singer—and my gut instinct was to start pursuing that goal as soon as possible. The margin for error, of course, was nonexistent. If I had failed as a singer-songwriter, my only future would have been low-paying, low-skill jobs like waitressing and bartending, and a lifetime of regrets about never finding an Option B. I had pretty much shut off all other options at the bright age of fifteen.
Dropping out of school was not all that traumatic for me. In my mind, I didn’t need the education. I was going to be a singer. It didn’t really matter what I would learn in pre-algebra. I would have no use for it in my adult life. It’s not that I hated school or anything—I actually enjoyed subjects like history and literature. It’s just that I couldn’t see myself sitting around a schoolroom for four more years when I had something much more urgent to do.
Plus, I was never attached to any particular school. Because we moved around so much, I never felt any school was “my” school and never developed a longtime set of friends I loved to hang out with, year after year. My family was living in Miami for the fourth or fifth time when I decided to leave school. My mom had to tell the state of Florida that she approved of me quitting and in essence signed me out for good. On some level she understood m
y need to strike out on my own, but of course she had no assurance that I would actually survive and make something of myself.
My plan was simple. I decided to move back to Illinois, live with a way-too-old-for-me boyfriend I had at the time, find some work to keep me off welfare, and . . . well, that’s as far as I had thought things out. Some distant relatives found us a furnished apartment, I headed back to find work, and my boyfriend was soon to follow.
So, at all of fifteen, I bailed out of school, packed my bags, gave my mom a kiss on the cheek, and headed back to Illinois for my new life. I had a restricted driver’s license that required that I have someone eighteen or older riding with me, but I didn’t have time for such luxuries. I hopped into my Datsun 280 ZX 2x2 and drove solo from Miami to Collinsville. I wasn’t all that scared, just anxious to start over. I had learned to drive a stick-shift truck out on a gravel road in the country while living with my Aunt Vickie at age twelve. Maneuvering the Interstate in a 280 ZX was no great challenge.
I knew I could survive on my own. Long before I left home, I had worked for spending money at places like Burger King. I knew how to get a low-skilled job. When I arrived back in Illinois, I landed a job as a hostess at Denny’s for the breakfast and lunch shift, and settled into a new domestic life. I got my boyfriend a job with a roofing company and rushed home every day after work to straighten up the apartment and fix him dinner. If I had decided to get married about then and have a baby or two, I would have fallen into the life destined for eighty percent of the young girls I grew up with—a life of hard work, financial uncertainty, manufactured housing, and a future that looked pretty much like today, and yesterday, and the day before. I’m certainly not condemning that life—some people take it and turn it into something full of joy—but it wouldn’t have been a life I had dreamed about. It would have been a life that I had backed into without realizing it.
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