Two of the women on our team, Big Kim and Jessie, could handle any situation, even those where men might be involved. I always felt perfectly comfortable entering a rowdy bar three counties away knowing that those two ladies had my back. Pool was a big deal in those parts and in a tight intra-tavern matchup, tempers could fly. Kim and Jessie were heavy-duty girls. I rarely had to take my earrings off around them.
As I said earlier, bartending is in my blood—it was the way my mom made the best money she ever made and the way I survived right up to the day I landed my first record deal. Having said that, it isn’t a life I would recommend to anyone except someone who needed quick money for a short time. Given my background, it’s hard for me to hate the bar life, but it’s got a very dark side. It’s a night culture and you become like a vampire—you only come out at night and only interact with other nighttime ghosts and goblins.
If I worked at it, I’d get to bed right before the sun came up. I’d wake up on most days around three or so in the afternoon and try to avoid the glare of direct sunlight until it was time to hit the Happy Hour at O’s. And I was usually a bear to be around because I had more than a drink or two before hitting the sack. Daytime, in other words, was a bit hazy. There are more than a couple of boyfriends who’ve seen me in this condition and felt that morning-after bitching and moaning coming from my mouth.
Besides being places where I could drink at will, bars are full of worry and stress and strange people. You’re working the third shift of life, filling customers full of alcohol and steering them away from trouble, while they are spending the rent money trying to forget about both the first and second shifts of life. In many ways, it’s easy to see the bar business as the root of all evil, or at least a hell of a lot of the evil that plagues the lives of people living in rural and small-town America.
Actually, the real evil is alcohol. You can love the socializing of a good bar and all the friends you can find there and at the same time hate what alcohol can do to many of those people, how it can breed unhappiness and hopelessness and ruin lives. I’ve seen it since I was five.
Alcohol was built into the fabric of the country life I know. Not to be unfair; there are plenty of dry towns in Southern Illinois, and a lot of good people who lead Christian lives and have no problems with drugs or alcohol, but most of the people I knew intimately, including my own family, were drinkers. For the most part they survived, thank God. Many, many others didn’t.
And running a bar can be as tough as seeing people drink their lives away. I watched Big O try to keep the doors open and it was always a struggle, especially given the fact that there was another bar within fifteen or twenty miles. As an owner, you have to watch every little thing, especially with a workforce that is constantly turning over. You have to watch the bartender who is pocketing a dollar or two of every drink before it reaches the cash register. You have to watch the cook taking fifteen meals a night home to feed his relatives while you’re trying to figure out why you’re losing so much on your food menu. And on top of that, you have the ATF and the cops breathing down your neck at the first sign of trouble, or the crazy drunk who pulls out a gun one night and ruins your business for a year. It never stops.
I’ve never owned a bar, and probably never will, but it is a life I know well and I have an attachment to it that will never go away. Bartending, after all, kept me alive until I could finally figure out what my true destiny was. And it taught me to stand on my own. In my life, places like Big O’s were my high school, my boot camp, and my entry point into the real world, all wrapped up in one endless night of serving drinks, cleaning tables, breaking up fights, and learning, over and over again, that this is not how I wanted to spend the rest of my days on earth.
CHAPTER 5
HITTING THE SMALL TIME
At fifteen I was tending Big O’s Bar
I’d sing till two AM for a half full tip jar
Spent my youth singing truth, paying dues
“Pocahontas Proud”
When I was tending bar at Big O’s and dragging my exhausted body home at three in the morning, I had no idea where all my dues-paying was leading me. After I got back from Springfield and recovered from the car accident, I was pretty sure I could sing just about anything, including doo-wop and Top 40, and I knew the lyrics by heart to dozens of both classic and popular songs. But I couldn’t play an instrument and had no clue about what to do next. I had a lot of local encouragement, from everyone from Aunt Brenda to Big O to a lot of people who heard me sing after closing time.
Big O was maybe my biggest fan. He says today that he never had a moment’s doubt that I’d make it big. He was so sure of my future success that he used to put up a big sign on my birthday that read: “Happy Birthday, Gretchen. She’s Special.” Special or not, I had no career-making moves plotted out. My one and only strategy was to find a local live band that could use a lead female singer and offer my services.
Big O booked a band every Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday night. Almost every band that showed up, I would end up singing a couple of songs with them and making as many local contacts as I could. Pretty soon, between stints at Big O’s, I was singing on a per-gig basis in three or four bands at a time—country or rock, it didn’t matter, as long as they played music I could relate to. One night I’d be booked with a band called Millennium at one bar in Edwardsville singing some R&B classic like “Knock on Wood,” and the next night I’d be on stage with another band called Deliverance singing Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”
I was so fortunate to live in an area where throw-together bands were both plentiful and in need of my services. And all the genres of music I was asked to sing—Top 40, R&B, even disco and doo-wop—gave me a chance to try out a thousand different ways of singing and in time craft a singing style I could call my own.
During that year or so after I got back to Pierron, I felt like I was doing nothing but drinking and biding my time. I was singing whenever I got the chance and working on my craft, I guess, but I wasn’t moving ahead in any real way and my dream was no closer to coming true than when I dropped out of high school. It was like the Credence Clearwater song, “Lodi,” about getting stuck there again. Change “Lodi” to “Pierron” and I could have written that song.
Whenever you read about music stars in People or see them interviewed on Entertainment Tonight, they never talk about the weeks and years before they made it where nothing is happening. Music careers, even ones like mine that look to outsiders like they happened overnight, don’t just move steadily upward. There are dead times where you are lost, confused, and just treading water to keep from going under and throwing in the towel. As restless as I’ve always been, I hated those times the worst.
I tried to keep moving to keep from going nuts. When I wasn’t singing or filling in at Big O’s, I took another bartending job in the funniest damn place in the world. It was called the Grantfork Bowl, located in, where else, Grantfork, another forgettable little town, current population, 254. The bowling alley and bar was about twenty feet by eighty feet, the twenty feet being exactly the width of four bowling lanes. Up front were the bar area, a couple of tables, and a series of automated poker machines. Beyond the every-night bowling leagues, the place handled a lot of cash because those poker machines occasionally paid off and the proprietor had to pay the winners in cash then and there. Sometimes old ladies would come in as soon as I opened the place for business. They’d sit for hours, smoking their Winston cigarettes and feeding those machines until they hit. If I wasn’t careful, they could empty out my cash drawer even before the bowlers arrived. I worked hard at that place—my workday was a twelve-hour shift a couple of days every week—I’d arrive at three in the afternoon and close up at three in the morning.
So one Monday night at the Grantfork Bowl, things were really slow and I was bored out of my mind. I guess there were no league bowlers or poker winners that night. Around eight, Big O comes stumbling in with a bun
ch of guys I’d never met before. “Hey, O,” I said, “what the hell’s going on?”
“Well,” he said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I had to go to court today in Edwardsville over a speeding ticket, and I ran into these old boys who I haven’t seen for a long time—and they’re a band!”
The men who arrived with Big O were all brothers—the Rolens brothers, Larry, Jimmy, Danny, and Bobby. They all had that long-haired, black-blue-jeaned kind of Alice Cooper rock and roll look. That night I hit it off with Larry Rolens, especially, and we exchanged phone numbers and began to hang out together. I went to see their band—Baywolfe—play a time or two and liked them. They’d already built a pretty big following in those parts.
A couple of months went by, then one day, everything changed. Danny, the drummer, decided to quit the band. His wife was about to have a baby and she didn’t want him leading an out-all-night-sleep-all-day musician’s life any longer. Bobby, then the front man, decided to go back and take over the drums. Now the band needed a replacement front person, someone to sing lead. Since Larry and I were pretty tight by then, he asked me to join the band. Instantly the all-male rock and roll band had a chick singer.
Baywolfe became my permanent gig for the next three years or so. I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with Baywolfe on stage somewhere. Larry and I started living together early in my Baywolfe stint, which drew me even closer to the band. Baywolfe was actually two bands—the rock version, the busier of the two groups, was Baywolfe, but we also booked ourselves as a country band called Midnight Flyer. Baywolfe might play three or four times a week for every one time for Midnight Flyer. Same group, different audience.
Over time, Baywolfe became one of the most sought-after bands in the greater St. Louis and Southern Illinois area. We played almost exclusively in bars and music clubs and never in arenas or on the lucrative state fair circuit. We had about a dozen places we played pretty regularly and made our own circuit going from one to another and back again. It was fun. We’d travel all over the region, as far east as Effingham, Illinois, near the Indiana border, and as far south as Sainte Genevieve and Bonne Terre in southern Missouri. We sometimes played rock clubs holding up to two thousand rowdy people. I had come a long way, at least in my own mind, from singing to playback at Happy Hour at the Hickory Daiquiri Dock. I was a certified bi-state, small-time rock star.
Well, kind of. Our principal mode of transportation was a big, old, beat-up, used yellow Ryder truck. Sometimes it would take an hour to start the thing before we went anywhere, and when we got to the venue, we all unloaded the truck together. We were our own roadies, except for Bobby, who was usually working a day job and got to the gig only minutes before we began. It was my job, among others, to set up Bobby’s drums every night. And string cable, wire amps, make patch cords, i.e., all the things that a crew would do. After the show, no matter how tired we were, we put all that equipment back on the truck and dragged ourselves back home. It was not a glamorous life.
But we loved to play. We would normally share a dressing room the size of a broom closet, put on our spandex outfits, apply some freakish makeup, spray our hair into Alice Cooper proportions, and hit the stage. This was the early 1990s and we were a badass rock and roll band, ready to blow you away.
The biggest place I think we ever played was called Pop’s, a twenty-four-hour bar in a town just over the river from St. Louis called Sauget (pronounced “So-jay”). It was a short drive from home, maybe thirty-five minutes. The town is all industrial, a few factories interrupted by strip clubs and nightclubs. Because of a local Monsanto chemical plant, there was a smell in the air in Sauget that was damn close to cat urine. I remember wearing my best leather jacket on stage at Pop’s one night and by the time I got home, it was ruined from that smell. I took it to the cleaners and they said, “Sorry, we can’t remove cat urine from leather.” I tried to explain that it wasn’t cat urine, but it didn’t really matter. Goodbye, jacket.
On a good night, Pop’s held 3,500 people, a lot of them dropping by after all the other bars along the Mississippi River landing had shut down. When we played at Pop’s, we played seven sets a night. We started around 10:30 and played until 5:30 in the morning. Pop’s was open all day and night, every day of the year. And people came late. Sometimes there would be maybe ten customers for the first set or two, which is like playing for the staff in a place that held 3,500. By the third set, the place was packed.
One night we were playing at a place called the Orris Theater in Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. It was an old movie theater where they removed the screen and erected a small stage for bands like us. Since we were rock and roll showmen, we had to have a little pyrotechnics, or fireworks. Our pyro man was a guy named Boone who pretty much taught himself how to put together small stage explosions. On that particular night, as most nights, some crowd-pleasing pyro was supposed to go off in the middle of the AC/DC song we played, “Thunderstruck.” The blast was cued to come right on the syllable “struck.” Very professional.
The blast came all right, but at about ten times the normal force. Apparently Boone had forgotten the pyro for the previous night hadn’t gone off and then double-packed this night’s pyro by mistake. It hit Bobby the drummer the hardest. The initial impact blew his hair straight out—he looked like a troll doll or maybe a white Don King—and he was completely knocked off his drum stand. The snare drum caught on fire and the rest of the drum kit flew off in six different directions.
After the initial shock waves, we just gathered up Bobby and what was left of his drum set, and continued with the show. We weren’t about to let a small atomic blast keep us from finishing the set and getting paid for the night.
As Baywolfe rolled along, Larry Rolens and I became engaged. It was like the brothers that I played with every night were a legitimate family and I wanted to join the clan. This didn’t always make things easier. One night as we were tearing down the stage after a show, Larry and I got into an argument. It got pretty heated and at one point Larry’s brother Jimmy, who is about six feet two and weighed well over 250 pounds in those days, decided to intercede. He walked up to me and said, “I ain’t gonna have you talking to my brother like that no more.” Hot-tempered country girl that I was, I turned around and slapped him. He stuck his arm out and grabbed my head to keep my fists from hitting him, but I got a couple of good licks in anyway. Of course, if he had felt the urge, he could have broken me like a stick. Good thing he let it pass.
But fights like that were rare and the gigs were plentiful. Looking back, I don’t know how I did all that singing, night after night. When we played at Pop’s, I was singing four times as much as I do in a single concert now, plus I was straining my voice just to hear myself over the guitar amps and other noise on stage. In those days we didn’t have ear monitors to modulate our performance. I could have easily damaged my voice pushing it like that, night after night, in places where the air was completely smoke-filled. Thank God I didn’t.
Today, I usually play a ninety-minute show, without intermission, plus another forty-five minutes or so during the sound check for that show. Compare that to the six or seven hours a night I used to sing at Pop’s. That was the singing equivalent of running a marathon nightly. But it was great training. Even today, I try to keep singing as constantly as I can so that my voice stays in shape. It’s the same as with hitting a baseball or throwing a football. If I have ten or eleven days off the road, my voice is going to suffer. It takes a performance or two to get it humming again.
In a purely athletic sense, my voice just got stronger and more flexible. I have tape recordings of my singing that go all the way back to fourteen. Boy, has my voice changed. In the beginning, I sounded like Michael Jackson—high-pitched with a really heavy vibrato, or quiver, in my voice. Over time, my voice dropped and the vibrato started to disappear. And that came from continuous vocal exercising and learning how to do new things while singing cover songs of every possible style and technique. When yo
u go from an Ann Wilson song to a Mariah Carey song to a Janis Joplin song in one set, you are covering a lot of musical ground. I sing what is known as country today, but my vocal education includes some lessons never taught by pure country singers, along with a whole lot of lessons taught only by pure country singers. Like a lot of performers starting out today, I learned to draw from whatever seemed right for my voice and the song.
My first assignment upon joining Baywolfe was to learn how to play something—guitar, piano, something—since the guy I was replacing—the front man—played everything—guitar, bass, piano, harmonica, even the fiddle. I had all of two weeks to try to learn how to play an entire set’s worth of rock and roll songs. I didn’t take too well to the piano, but I liked playing guitar and concentrated my energies on learning how to be a decent rhythm guitar player. I’m not a lead guitar player, then or now, but I’ve developed into a pretty solid rhythm player. Today I play guitar in about half of my show and of course use everything I learned about the guitar when I sit down to write a new song.
So the ex-front man—Bobby Rolens—sat down with me and started teaching me the relatively simple chord changes that make up most hard-core rock songs. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, both personal and musical. If you go to one of my shows today, you’ll see that Bobby is still right next to me up on that stage. An incredibly versatile musician, he now plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and mandolin in my touring band. Bobby and I started out in exactly the same place with exactly the same dreams. Often when I look over at Bobby in the middle of a show today in front of a big amphitheater crowd, I flashback on our whole musical history together.
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