If you asked him about it today, Bobby might tell you that, at one point back then, he was pretty sure that life had passed him by. He married early, had three kids, and never could take the risk of moving to Nashville and trying to make the big move. Now he lives in Nashville, works with me, and has two new babies at home. He, too, has come a long way from those all-night musical marathons at Pop’s.
The three-year period that I sang with Baywolfe was a major drinking period for me. It took a hell of a lot of energy to consume alcohol at that rate and still do three, four, and even seven sets in one night. As my singing career unfolded, I started to get drinking and performing down to a science. If I was doing, say, three sets in one performance, I wouldn’t start drinking seriously until after the second set. By that point I knew I only had one more set to get through and even if I started to slip a little, I knew that the end was in sight. Plus, everyone in the audience was in the same state by that time, so it didn’t really much matter. My usual MO was to finish the last set, then join some of my drinking buddies and keep imbibing for another three or four hours. I’d have a long sleep well into the next afternoon, but that fit right into the schedule. Sleep it off during the day, eat something, and start all over again. It was almost the same pattern of life that the nightly drunks at Big O’s kept up, except I was also earning a living and having a great time doing it.
Larry Rolens was now my live-in companion and soon to be my husband. We didn’t get married until after we moved to Nashville together, but we were as good as married for the three years or so that we both were part of Baywolfe. He was twenty-two years older than me and in many ways a lot wiser about functioning in the world. And given my drinking, my mood swings, and my ever-increasing frustration about not moving ahead with my musical dream beyond the confines of Southern Illinois, I was not the easiest person in the world to live with. To be perfectly honest, I was often downright abusive. For reasons I’m not quite sure of to this day, Larry stuck by me and took care of me during one of the darkest and most confusing periods of my life. When I talk about men who let women down, I am not talking about him.
As much as I learned during those three years playing with Baywolfe, and the many good times we had along the way, I knew it wasn’t going to lead me to where I wanted to go. I knew it was very unlikely that Baywolfe would emerge as the next Alabama or Lynyrd Skynyrd. I just knew that a record deal was never going to find me in Pocahontas, Illinois. I had known for quite a while that if I wanted to get to the next level, I had to get off my ass, save up some money, pack my suitcase, leave my friends, and relocate in Nashville. I was only twenty-three at the time, but I felt like time was wasting and I had to get going.
It was very difficult to break away and start a new life from scratch. In fact, for quite a while after I moved to Nashville, I’d drive back on the weekends and play gigs with Baywolfe. It was a five-hour trip one way and I was making it every week. I did that for almost a year before I said to myself, “Hey, you moved to Nashville to be in Nashville. There’s no turning back now.” I knew it was time to leave Southern Illinois behind and see if I had the talent, the determination, and the luck—or all three—to make it on my own.
But I never really lost track of any of the Rolens brothers I met that Monday night at the bowling alley. Bobby, as I said, plays about six feet away from me every night on the road. Larry, my ex-husband, now remarried and living in Nashville, currently plays steel guitar with the Bellamy Brothers. Danny, the brother that quit the band, still lives in Southern Illinois, and Jimmy Rolens runs a bar outside Carlisle, Illinois, called Hoosier Daddy’s—formerly the O-Zone—that he leased from Big O and behind which Big O still lives. I’m not actually related to any of these guys anymore, but they still are definitely part of my family.
I didn’t just buy a bus ticket to Nashville, say goodbye to Mamma, and take off for the big city. I wasn’t that big of a rube. I actually made a series of preliminary trips to scout the location, so to speak, and plunk some money down for a house to rent. Of course I had no idea what I was going to do once I moved in and unpacked my bags. I knew no one in Nashville, not a soul, either in or out of the music business. I certainly had no strategic contacts inside the industry, no letters of recommendation, no point of entry, no inside moves. It took another four or five long, frustrating years for me to even start doing something remotely connected to the real business of country music.
Still, the first time I drove into Nashville, I knew it was the right move. I felt something that I had never really felt about any other place before, at least not for very long. This time, thinking back to my mother’s empty promise, I felt like things were going to be different from now on.
I felt like I was home.
CHAPTER 6
NASHVILLE SKYLINE
When it rains, I pour a couple more rounds,
Till the hurtin’ an’ the heartache start to drown.
I turn out the light; I turn up Dwight an’ I lock my door.
When it rains, when it rains, I pour.
“When It Rains”
It took me years to build up the courage to move to Nashville, but I knew I wasn’t the only aspiring singer in America that was so brazen, foolhardy, or maybe just addle-brained enough to make such a move. There is probably someone reading this book who is about to clear out their savings, kiss their sweetheart goodbye, and leave their hometown in the middle of Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Alabama for fame and fortune in Music City. If you’re aiming to be the next Steven Spielberg, you move to L.A. If you want to see your name in lights on Broadway, you move to New York. If you want to have a career as a country artist, Nashville is the only place to start. Once you make it, if you should be so lucky, you can live in Hawaii or the Virgin Islands and no one cares. To start out, though, you got to be here, smack dab in the middle of the Nashville Dream Factory.
But before you buy that plane ticket, know this: There is no tried-and-true formula for getting a record deal in Nashville. There’s no manual you can buy that will tell you the ten essential steps to get from winning your high school’s version of American Idol to hearing your song played on country radio. Anyone who tells you differently is conning you. Everybody’s story about how they got signed to a record deal or joined the legions of country stars at Fan Fair is different—very different. In almost every case, it rarely happens overnight and never as you planned.
The truth is, you’ve got to be a little crazy even to try. You first have to relocate to Nashville and figure it out for yourself. The rest is just insane persistence, and maybe a little luck. You’ve got to be determined, headstrong, and undeterred by naysayers, from your mother who wanted you to get married to your high school career counselor who wanted you to join the Army to the know-it-all record executive who tells you, as he says, “for your own good,” that you don’t have the right supermodel looks or the right sound or the right talent to make it in today’s business. You have to know how to take no for an answer, repeatedly, and keep on knocking on doors ever after they’ve been slammed in your face. And even when they say no, over and over again, you have to leave them with a smile and a “thank you so much for taking some of your valuable time to hear me sing.”
There’s a famous hangout in Nashville that most hard-core country fans have heard about for years. It’s called Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It’s on West Broadway downtown, a stone’s throw away from Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, the mother church of country music. If the walls of Tootsie’s could talk, they’d tell you a lot about the last fifty or sixty years of country music. Willie Nelson got his first songwriting job after singing at Tootsie’s. Roger Miller, or so the story goes, wrote “Dang Me” while hanging out at Tootsie’s. A scene from Coal Miner’s Daughter, the classic film about the life of Loretta Lynn, was shot at Tootsie’s. For aspiring country singers, Tootsie’s is a mythical place, the doorway to the Land of Oz where all your dreams will come true. “Hey, do everything you can to g
et on stage at Tootsie’s. Then one of the big record guys will see you and sign you right up!”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen that way in 2006. It might have happened in some fashion to Willie Nelson five or six decades ago, but nowadays, it’s about as sure a bet as winning the Tennessee Lottery. Those stories that will never die about sitting in the band at Tootsie’s and getting discovered by Mr. Big are best left unheard by newcomers. The actual guys—the high-powered corporate executives—who have the power to sign you to a recording contract don’t go to Tootsie’s. They hardly leave their desks down at the office. If they are really considering you as an artist on their label, more than likely, you go to them, not the other way around. They might send an underling to check you out in some kind of showcase performance, and if that guy likes you, then they ask you down to their office.
I figured out pretty quickly after arriving in Nashville that it wasn’t going to happen like a Hollywood movie, but it took me years to figure out my own particular “formula” for landing a deal. No matter what you’ve been told about the odds on making it in Nashville, you go there with high expectations. Things will be different for you, you think; all you have to do is believe in yourself and the rest will take care of itself. That may be true in the long run, but in the short run, you get a lot of rejection and it can be frustrating as hell. Get ready to be as stubborn as a mule.
My now new husband and I jumped right into the fray. We both went out on several auditions and came back empty-handed. We’d go to songwriters’ nights at clubs or check out some local band and try to make a connection, any connection, that might lead to a little more exposure or maybe the chance to rub elbows with a mover or a shaker. Nothing seemed to work. We were getting nowhere fast. Occasionally, I’d try to sit in at Tootsie’s and other well-known watering holes, but it was very odd and uncomfortable for me. In my mind, I was a lead singer in a hot regional band that could draw two or three thousand people in the St. Louis area, and now I was just another Nashville wannabe. On many nights, I was now trying to get an unsigned, run-of-the-mill bar band that was only working for tips to call me up on stage to sing a song or two. It was just too much for my fragile ego to take, I guess.
During that first year, I decided that someone around the house needed to earn some money for us to survive, so I went out and got the only kind of job I was highly qualified for. I became a bartender at a drinking and music establishment called the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar in an area of Nashville called Printers Alley. I was back to doing what I’d done since fifteen, pouring drinks, fending off amateur Romeos, and living for an evening of big tips.
After a while, I let the discouragement of too many slammed doors get to me and I stopped actively looking for my big break in show business. I said to myself, “The hell with it, I’m making $600 a week working in this bar and I ain’t gonna worry about it no more.” On the weekends I would get up and sing a couple of songs with the blues band that played regularly at Bourbon Street, songs like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” It was fun, a good break from long hours of filling beer glasses, but in my mind, it no longer meant I was on my way to stardom. I was just on my way to home and bed after a night of backbreaking work and one too many nightcaps.
I was terribly unhappy, needless to say, and considered myself a failure. During most of that transition period from Pocahontas to Nashville, I became as separated from music as I had in my whole life. I stopped trying to make up tunes while lying in bed at night or even keeping up with hot new performers. Except for the occasional song at Bourbon Street, there was very little music in my life. Little music and a lot of Jack Daniel’s. If I hadn’t hit rock bottom, I was close.
Then another life-changing event occurred, one probably as important as any before or after, with the obvious exception of the birth of my daughter, Grace. If I hadn’t gone through this change, though, I might never have gotten to the point where I had either a career or a loving family.
One bleary-eyed day, I woke up after another hard night, probably around two or three in the afternoon. Not for the first time, I couldn’t remember what I’d done the night before; I had blacked out. I knew that I had been very mean and verbally hurtful to my husband the previous evening, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why if you put a gun to my head. I just knew that he wouldn’t look at me or speak to me, a pretty good sign that I had stepped, or stumbled, over the line again.
It wasn’t a big, traumatic event like a car wreck or falling down a flight of stairs that made me come to my senses. It was a look in the mirror. I went into the bathroom, washed my face and brushed my teeth, then just kind of stared at myself in the mirror for probably two or three minutes. I was more than a little disgusted. I was fed up with myself and the sorry way my life was going, and decided then and there to do something about it.
I was going to quit drinking.
I got out the Nashville phone book and started looking for a place where I could get some help. I landed on a recovery center called the Serenity House. It had a kind of AA-type walk-in (or outpatient) program and it was not that far from my house. So I started going to a meeting there at seven o’clock every morning while still bartending at Bourbon Street at night and not getting home until three or after. Needless to say, after years of working and singing in bars, I was not used to rising before the Today show went on the air. It took some getting used to.
I knew I was playing a dangerous game—in fact, I was committing the unforgivable sin of AA. I was trying to get sober and stay sober while I still worked behind a bar! All the other recovering alcoholics in the room told me that I was crazy and would never stop drinking under the circumstances. I needed the job, desperately, and I needed to quit drinking, desperately, so I had no choice. I had to do both things at the same time.
I chose the early-morning meetings for a particular reason. Many of the later meetings would either get too religious for my tastes or would often turn into giant whine fests. Listening to someone else talk about their miserable life didn’t seem to give me much encouragement to turn mine around. If anything, it only brought home how messed up my own life had become.
The early-bird seven A.M. meetings were where the old guys, the lifelong recovering alcoholics, would congregate daily. It was a little like my grandpa and his group of old vets down at the VFW Hall in Greenville, except these were vets of the alcohol wars, not World War II. Some of these ex-drinkers had been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. Their whining days were long gone. They had turned their lives around and every day they didn’t drink was a day filled with joy and relief, or so it seemed to me. They would tell these great stories about their current lives. They’d talk about very simple things, like the gardens they were planting or someone they encountered on the bus coming to the meeting. They’d talk about how blessed they felt and how their life was so much better than it was when they were drunk every day twenty years before.
Those were the kind of stories that would give me genuine hope and fortify my own determination not to let alcohol continue to rule my life. Those were the stories I would hold on to when I walked into Bourbon Street every night and poured $3,000 worth of liquor. These old pros showed me, through their own experience, what life would be like after I stopped drinking.
And, in time, it worked. From the moment that I made the decision in front of the mirror to stop drinking, I didn’t drink again for two and a half years. I am not sober today; I drink, but I feel I have much more control over it. The period I stopped cold was the period where I began to find myself, and in turn, expand my range as a singer-songwriter, and lay the groundwork for the success that finally came to me.
Looking back, this was a massive turning point in my life. The lesson I learned then was a critical one. I was born an alcoholic, still have the capacity to be one, and it will always be that way. Especially now that I have a young child to care for, I am ever mindful of the damage alcohol can do to me, and as a result, her. I will do everything in
my power not to let that happen.
One change led to another. First I changed a fundamental ritual in my life—getting drunk every night. Once that took, I made a big leap and changed the color of my hair. My hair is naturally brown, but from the time I was fifteen, ready to tackle the world, until one day in Nashville, years later, I was a bleached blonde. I was blond for all of those years of drinking. Now I was ready to go back to plain-old brown-headed Gretchen.
I also stopped wearing gold jewelry, my standard for years, and went out and bought all silver stuff. I changed all the furniture in the house and even went through and repainted all the door, window, and baseboard trim in every room. It was very detailed work. I had learned by that point that one way I could deal with stress was to throw myself into something that demanded my undivided attention. Painting a delicate window trim with a really fine paintbrush can do that. You’re alone, completing the task on your own. It’s almost a form of meditation, like any repetitive household chore. That’s why I like to vacuum.
My Uncle Vern did the same thing when he was getting clean, only he did it outdoors. He cleared about six and a half acres of land by hand over the course of the two weeks or so when he was drying out. Bush-hogging, cutting trees, burning brush—it made a lot more sense than sitting around and staring at the wall, and he had six clean acres to show for it.
When I was twelve, I had seen my grandpa stop drinking overnight and cease to be the kind of mean-spirited tyrant he was during his drinking years. It was a wholesale change of personality. That was the same experience I was going through from the moment I walked through the front door of the Serenity House. I seemed to turn into a different person right before my own eyes.
Redneck Woman Page 9
