Fate dealt me a different hand, and the messenger at the time was my stepdad’s cousin’s ex-wife, a woman we called Aunt Brenda, though she wasn’t really my aunt. She was around a lot when I was a kid and when I moved back at fifteen, she and her two sisters in Collinsville became a kind of a second family to me. My first family was still in Little Havana, living their version of “the good life.”
One afternoon Aunt Brenda dropped by to visit while I, the happy homemaker, was busy vacuuming the apartment. I had all the windows and doors open—it gets hot in Southern Illinois—and I didn’t hear her approach because of the noise of the vacuum. I was completely absorbed in the work and singing at full throttle while I worked, running through all those Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette songs I could by now sing in my sleep. Aunt Brenda stood at the back door and listened to me sing. She must have stood there ten or fifteen minutes. She was completely taken by my voice.
When I finally turned off the vacuum, she called out my name and it scared the bejesus out of me. I spun around real quickly and she just stood there with this dumbfounded look on her face. She said, “My God, Gretchen Wilson, I didn’t know you could sing like that. We’re going to book you a gig. I’m going to have you singing uptown by next weekend.”
And that was that. She in fact did have me singing uptown by the next weekend. She became my so-called manager and chief ego-booster in those early days. She talked to people I was too shy to talk to and hyped my talent to anyone who would listen. If she hadn’t been there to nudge me in the right direction, I don’t think I would have done it myself, at least not right away. We all need a little push every once in a while, and Aunt Brenda gave me that push, big time.
She went down to the Hickory Daiquiri Dock in Collinsville, cornered the owner, a woman named Donna Magac, and delivered her pitch. “I got this little niece,” she said, “and she can sing her ass off and I can bring her in here to sing just as soon as it can be arranged.” They negotiated the price—not a fortune, I guarantee—and Donna booked me right then and there. Now all I had to figure out was what I was going to do when I showed up for the first time at the tavern.
Brenda and I immediately took off for St. Louis and a music store called Shattinger Music Company. This was way before karaoke machines popped up in every drinking hole in America, and even before CDs. We were looking for something to back up my singing so I wouldn’t have to stand there and sing a cappella like I did while vacuuming. We found these cassette tracks recorded by a company called You Sing the Hits or something like that. On Side A, you had a song like Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” sung by an unknown demo singer, not Patsy Cline. On Side B you would have just an instrumental recording of “Crazy” so that you could sing along and think you were Patsy Cline.
I started with nine songs on two cassette tapes. All I had to do was punch playback on my little portable tape deck and I was ready for stardom. Brenda insisted that I perform that first night with a certain look—a blue evening gown, not unlike a prom dress, a curly-hair-style like early Dolly Parton, and plenty of eyeliner. Remember, this was a shotgun bar in a strip mall. The bar itself was right in the middle, the bathrooms were in the back, and there was a pool table and a dart board, like most bars in that area. A packed house in that place was probably forty people, tops, most of them old enough to be my grandparents. It was not the Grand Ole Opry.
The idea was for me to sit on the bar in my evening gown and belt out these country standards to the Happy Hour crowd from about four to seven. I remember that first night like it was yesterday. I threw up from sheer terror. I knew I could sing better than most people and had had the dream to become a singer since I was around five, but dreaming something and actually doing it are two different things. Looking back, I was probably a little too young and inexperienced to be performing in public, even if that public was three dozen inebriated barflies in a strip mall tavern on a Thursday night.
But I managed to pull it off, with Aunt Brenda cheering me on the whole way. I guess those old folks got a kick out of this fifteen-year-old belting out songs like “Stand by Your Man” and “Crazy.” I took the money I earned that night—$75, I think—and went back to St. Louis to buy more music. Soon I got smart enough to put together song sets on one cassette so I wouldn’t have to keep stopping the show to take one cassette out, put another one in, and cue up a new song. I would start a set with a Patsy song, then a Judds song like “Girls Night Out,” then maybe Tammy, Loretta, and back to Patsy for another song. I’d put together forty-five-minute sets like this and just roll the tape and sing. Then I’d take a break, load in a new forty-five-minute set, and do it again. Though I was singing other people’s music on prerecorded tracks, I started to feel like a real pro, right down to the curly hair and high-heeled shoes.
I was now a certified, bona fide “Kountry Kutie,” and started calling myself that as a sales gimmick. I began to play the Hickory Daiquiri Dock every other Thursday at Happy Hour. Soon Aunt Brenda booked me into another similar roadside tavern, and not long after that, this You Sing the Hits routine took on a life of its own. Soon I was singing three or four nights a week and often doing four forty-five-minute sets a night. Technically, I added an amplifier, a microphone, and a mike stand to my cassette recorder, and I graduated from sitting on bars to performing on little makeshift stages about the size of a picnic table. It was really all the room I needed, as long as I didn’t have a band playing behind me. And even though I often listened to AC/DC and other rock music in my car, on stage I stuck with country. Everything that came out of my mouth at that time in my life just sounded country, no matter what it was.
Soon this became my life—Denny’s in the morning, housewifery in the afternoon, and singing country classics to playback on stage at night. Aunt Brenda’s involvement faded as I became more confident of what I was doing and learned how to handle the business as well as the singing end of things. I concentrated on this kind of performance for almost two years, up until I was almost seventeen. That’s when I joined my first band, and as strange as it seems looking back, it wasn’t a country band. It was an oldies band—a modified doo-wop band—with the improbable name of Sam A. Lama and the Ding-Dongs.
These were local guys, trying to make money playing music any way they could, just like me. Now I belonged to a real band, not a karaoke band, and I was really cooking. I begin to sleep all day and play all night. At seventeen, I was a certified rock star, at least in my own mind. The Ding-Dongs brought a Top 40 repertoire to the party, the perfect all-purpose bar band music for any Saturday night drink-and-dance fest, wedding reception, funeral, or whatever else came along. Soon we got the offer of a lifetime: A place in Springfield, Missouri, called the Townhouse Lounge was looking for a permanent house band to play five nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year. We didn’t hesitate when they asked. We were headed for the big time!
By this point I had broken up with my boyfriend the roofer, so I moved to Springfield and rented a place on my own. I was making $500 a week, a fortune compared to a hostess job in those days, performing doo-wop five nights a week, and making a little money on the side playing pool in downtown Springfield. I was a real shark by this point, skillful at both the game and at hooking others into a friendly little wager. There was always some half-lit good ol’ boy who couldn’t imagine some smart-ass chick from Illinois beating him at pool. I loved the look on his face when I cleared the table.
I was also lonely as hell. I was a long ways from my friends and relatives back in Illinois and didn’t know anyone in Springfield. Big O remembers how I used to call him at 2:30 in the morning, right at his usual closing time, and talk for hours. I can’t imagine now what we talked about for so long, probably just who beat up whom at the stock car races that week. I was working and earning a little cash in those days, but I was far from grounded in a career. I was still anchored, at least by phone, to Pocahontas.
The Springfield engagement lasted an eternity from the perspective of a teenager who had mo
ved every three or four months for her whole life. We played the Townhouse Lounge for a year and a half before I returned to Southern Illinois. Actually what precipitated my return was not boredom or restlessness but a massive car accident that should have killed me.
At one point we took a two-week vacation from playing nightly at the Townhouse. The keyboard player and I decided we didn’t want to stop playing, so we went out and found a gig at the Lake of the Ozarks, a place about halfway between Springfield and St. Louis. Our act was playing Beatles-style pop music with just a keyboard and vocalist; he would play and sing harmony behind me. We did this for four nights a week for two weeks and then headed on back to Springfield to rejoin the rest of the Ding-Dongs.
I was driving my same Datsun 280 ZX down the Interstate in the middle of the day, and I was drinking. In my half-cocked state I reached down to grab something, lost control of the wheel, and veered into the center median. The car flipped over, then slid across the opposite lanes of oncoming traffic upside down. It didn’t hit any other vehicle, but it flipped again. The second flip took me maybe twenty feet in the air. The car then landed on all four tires on a frontage road next to the highway. It was no doubt the most horrifying fifteen to twenty seconds of my life. By all counts, I should have been seriously injured, maimed, or killed. By the grace of God, none of that happened.
The ambulance rushed me to the ER anticipating a concussion or brain damage or worse. The EMTs on hand couldn’t believe there wasn’t at least some internal bleeding. As it turned out, my only injuries were two black eyes from hitting my nose on the steering wheel and assorted bumps and bruises. I had to pry my eyes open every morning for a week or so. But I had no long-term injuries and I didn’t even get cited for a DUI. There was no sobriety test taken on the scene and I guess by the time I got to the hospital and went through a thorough exam, I was no longer intoxicated or at least it wasn’t a big issue with the staff.
I was, in every way, incredibly lucky. I was especially lucky that I hadn’t killed a small child in a school bus or a family of five in the middle of the day, and ruined dozens of lives, including my own.
The Datsun, the very same car that I drove from Miami back to Illinois at fifteen, was so mangled that I sold it to the wrecking company for the price of the towing bill. I probably could have parted it out and made more money. I had scoured a lot of junkyards looking for replacement parts for that car over the years. But at the time of the wreck, I just wanted it out of my life.
I was nineteen and stupid. I’d been living on my own since fifteen but I was still too immature not to know better than to drink and drive. Of course some forty-year-olds have yet to learn this lesson, but that didn’t let me off the hook. I had just cheated death.
And that lesson stayed with me, at least in song. One thing I slipped into the title track of album number two, “All Jacked Up”:
One thing I’ve learned when you get tore up
Don’t drive your truck when you’re all jacked up
My mom was back living in Illinois at the time of the accident and had finally gotten rid of her tormentor a year or so before. That made relating to her a whole lot easier. She came to Springfield and took me home, God love her. I moved back in to her place in Pierron to recuperate. In my mind, this was the worst twist of fate that could happen to me, because for a nineteen-year-old with ambitions to conquer the world, there was absolutely nothing to do in Pierron but go down to Big O’s Tavern and stare at the wall.
That accident brought home something that I had known for a while and didn’t have the courage or good sense or something to deal with—I had a drinking problem. I started drinking heavily when I was sixteen, about a year after I had decided to quit school and figure out my own path. As I said, showing an ID in the many bars I frequented was not a major concern. The drinking age in Illinois was twenty-one, but back then no kids there, like no kids anywhere, waited until their twenty-first birthday to knock back a Bud, or a dozen Buds, in the same way they didn’t wait until sixteen to learn to drive a truck. At sixteen I felt like an adult—I had my own place, at least part of the time, was working hard on a singing career, spent a lot of time in bars and had even worked in them by this point. I guess if I felt like an adult, I could drink like one, too.
There were long periods early on when I didn’t drink—I was never the kind of drinker who drank nonstop until they passed out and someone hauled them home—but when I did drink, I tended to overdrink and when that happened, I tended to black out. Alcohol, I soon learned, was like an upper to me. It didn’t quiet me down or get me tired or depressed. It got me going. Even during a blackout episode, where I couldn’t remember a thing the next day, I was highly functional. I would often drink, throw up, then drink some more, and still be reasonably capable of carrying on a conversation or even working.
Only many years later did I realize that I was a functioning alcoholic from about the time I got my first driver’s license. This was a theme in my life, and an ever-growing problem, for the next seven or eight years.
Meanwhile, I was back in Pierron, living with my mom. I wanted to keep singing, but I also needed some steady money and again went to Big O. Big O’s turned out to be my lifeline during this confusing period of my life. Having dealt with a lot of come-and-go help, he was very understanding when you had to quit and take off for whatever reason. Since I had worked there before I moved to Springfield with the Ding-Dongs, he knew I could do the job, even at my underaged age. When I got back and sufficiently recovered from the auto wreck, I really needed the work and he gave it to me. Working behind the bar at Big O’s gave me the chance to get back on my feet and start looking around for other bands to play with. Given my need to succeed, it didn’t take long.
You don’t get rich working in a bar. You usually get a small salary but your main income is found in the tip jar at the end of the evening. It’s hard to keep steady help in a bar because it’s a tough, often depressing life and attracts a workforce that is transitory, anxious to find a better deal around the corner. I was helpful to Big O because I could fill in just about anywhere. In the many off-and-on periods I was employed there, I tended bar, waited tables, fried burgers in the kitchen, did my karaoke routine in my early singing days, and sat in with the bands that Big O would book. I had my favorites, of course, like the Chapman Brothers, led by brothers Jerry and Jeff Chapman. They were the premier Southern-rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd–inspired band in the whole area. I couldn’t wait for them to show up at Big O’s.
The ratio of men to women at Big O’s was about five to one, which only increased the odds that two drunks would start arguing about the St. Louis Cardinals and end up duking it out. My Uncle Vern had a lot of jobs around Big O’s—bartending, cleaning up, moving the pool table back and forth—but on Saturday nights, he was the closest thing to security we had. He’d stand on a chair and watch the crowd and as soon as he spotted an angry word or a fist flying, he was right there to move it outside.
Working at O’s, I got into the middle of a few fights involving women but never thought of myself as the female equivalent to Vern. Once I was forced to eject one of Vern’s own girlfriends after she threw a big square glass ashtray at my head from about eight feet away. I had beaten her at pool and the drunker she became, the madder she got about losing that game. I proceeded to throw her out the front and locked the door.
Big O likes to tell the story about the time another bartender and I got into it one night after arguing about how best to dispense with an obnoxious drunk on the other side of the bar. A punch or two or three were thrown and I apparently broke the other girl’s glasses. The next day, O got a bill from my opponent’s father for $200 for a new pair of glasses. He naturally wanted me to pay up—he wasn’t even there at the time—but I didn’t have $20 to my name, let along $200. He went ahead and paid the man, but made me promise that the day I made it big in Nashville—Big O had more faith in me than almost anyone—I would pay him back the two hundred bucks.
> Cut ahead a few years to the making of the first video to my first single, “Redneck Woman.” I invited Big O to Nashville to be in the video and he remembers someone knocking on the door of his motel room and handing him $250 in cash. He’d completely forgotten about those glasses, but I hadn’t. The whole incident was indicative of Big O’s incredible generosity and I needed to repay it. The extra fifty was pocket money for roaming around Nashville.
I knew how to fight, that’s for sure, but I didn’t learn it at Big O’s. Growing up where I did, fighting between women wasn’t that unusual, especially when alcohol was involved, which was pretty much always. After once having my ear almost torn off when someone yanked an earring out of it, my setup line for a fight was often, “Don’t make me take my earrings out.” That was the signal that I was ready for a fight. It hurt like hell to have one of those earrings ripped out. Removing them was like ringing the bell for Round One.
A lot of the women who hung around a place like O’s were very troubled. They were usually on their own after freeing themselves from an abusive relationship. Some found good jobs, as I said, but a lot of them were on welfare and had three or four kids to provide for. Like my mom, they might work a bar or waitress job a couple of nights of week to earn tip money, but they had few job skills, few job prospects, and a lot of problems to weigh them down. They saw themselves as stuck in the Greenville or Carlyle or Pocahontas version of hell and they drank to forget about it.
You rarely see these kinds of women on the evening news or on TV entertainment shows. They are, like a lot of people in Middle America, invisible to the public at large. Their voice is completely drowned out by celebrities and other types of TV loudmouths. And these uncelebrated women are exactly the women who I hope my music connects with and perhaps inspires to work their way out of the often tough circumstances of their lives.
If you were smart around there, you would befriend the toughest women you knew so they’d be on your side in case some real trouble broke out. While working at O’s during this period, I played in an all-girl pool league called the Busch Pool League. All the taverns and honky-tonks over a four- or five-county area would put together pool teams to compete with each other for a trophy or just bragging rights. There were six women to a team. We were known as Big O’s Ladies.
Redneck Woman Page 7
