Within a couple of months after this drastic change, I realized that my husband and I didn’t have the same relationship that we had had during all those years I’d been under a cloud of alcohol. We seemed to grow apart, very quickly, and it became clear that our marriage, for whatever reason, had come to an end. Larry was, and is, an awesome person and God knows he put up with a lot of stupid and abusive behavior from me over the four years we were together. He showed me incredible support when I probably didn’t deserve any. During a really bad period in my life, he gave me a safe place to land. For that I will always be incredibly grateful.
So I was now back on my own. I was working at Bourbon Street, going to morning meetings, reverting to the way I looked and felt before I became a serious drinker at sixteen. My dream was still light-years away and I thought about it less and less. I had a demo tape to hand out if anyone cared. They weren’t exactly lining up for a copy.
I guess the reality of making it in Nashville was starting to set in at that point. I knew the odds were long. If I were asked to calculate those odds, I’d have to say that out of every hundred people who come to town like I did—no money, no contacts, just some talent and a dream that won’t die—probably seventy of them finally get discouraged enough to go back home and try to find a different life. The three or four months they spent in Nashville trying to be a big star are just something they’ll tell their grandkids. Twenty of the initial hundred probably stick around town and find some kind of job—just like I did—to make a living, to “maintain,” while they keep looking for a way into the business. There are probably people in town who have been teaching, or working in an office, or tending bar for twenty or thirty years and still harbor the fantasy that the next country song they write in their spare time, or the next showcase they do for free, is going to be the one that does it for them. You’ve got to admire their tenacity, but their real-world chances of turning that corner are pretty slim. Nevertheless, it’s usually from this group, the stubborn ones, that someone breaks through and makes it.
The last ten of the original hundred probably lose everything they have in chasing their dream. They often get hooked on drugs or alcohol, lose touch with the people they left behind in Alabama or Texas, and find the wrong loser crowd in Nashville to drag them further and further into the gutter. They may be able to sing or play a little, but they have no real money-making skills to get them by. In the worst cases, they pawn their guitar to pay for their addiction and end up homeless on the streets, telling some other wino about the time George Strait came up to him and told him he sang just like Hank Williams. There are a lot of these hopeless dreamers out there walking the streets of Nashville right now.
For a long time I was part of the “maintaining” group who were neither ready to give it up nor would allow themselves to wallow in depression and despair. I had a steady job, I had gotten a firm handle on my alcohol problem, and I had become a little more honest about the way I presented myself to the world. Despite the cynicism I often felt, on some deeper level I continued to believe in myself. I continued to believe that I had the talent and the passion to succeed. All I needed was to meet the right people, and after more time than I ever thought it would take, that finally happened.
CHAPTER 7
THE MUZIK MAFIA
You know I’m here for the party
And I aint leavin’ til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun, gonna get me some
You know I’m here, I’m here for the party
“Here for the Party”
The minute I stopped looking for a way into the business, it seems, things started happening.
The bar I tended at the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar was upstairs; the bandstand where I occasionally sat in was downstairs. On a typical Saturday night in March of 1999, Stacy Michart, the lead singer in the house band downstairs, Blues U Can Use, called on me to come down and sing a couple of songs. It was about 1:30 in the morning and the bar was set to close at two. This was an end-of-the-evening routine that I was very familiar with at this point.
I’ll let John Rich pick the story up from there:
“Big Kenny and I dropped into Bourbon Street for a drink because the band there was so good. We heard this woman being called to the stage and we thought, ‘Oh, okay, the bartender’s going to get up and sing.’ Neither of us, truthfully, was paying a whole lot of attention.
“So this little brunette comes trotting down the stairs and hops on stage. Her hair is in a ponytail and she’s wearing a little cutoff half-shirt and shorts. The first song she sang was ‘Lady Marmalade,’ and she just laid into it.”
(“Lady Marmalade” was a big disco hit for the group Labelle in 1975, around the time I was born, and another smash hit for Christina Aguilera and others in 2000. The chorus translates: “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” I prefer the French version.)
John goes on: “It was like somebody had sucked the oxygen right out of the room. All of a sudden all you could focus on was her. You didn’t care about your drink, your drinking buddy, the crowd, nothing—you were completely mesmerized, or at least Kenny and I were.
“When the song ended, I looked at Kenny and said, ‘Was that as good as I think it was?’ His considered reply: ‘I don’t know, but maybe we should pay more attention when she sings the next one.’
“She then sang her second song, an Aretha Franklin ballad entitled ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).’ Again, she just obliterated it. Kenny and I both realized, then and there, that she had this incredibly powerful voice that she had almost total control over. It was as clear as day—this woman had the goods.
“So when the set was over, she went back to the bar upstairs, and I kind of followed her. I was probably half-lit at this point. I was wearing a cowboy hat and a duster, or long coat, and probably looked to her like the typical wannabe cowboy lounge lizard/con artist with not a whole lot going for him. So I ambled up to the bar, got her attention, and said, ‘So when are you gonna get yourself a record deal, darlin’?’
“She looked back at me with those kind of sharp, darty eyes of hers—a look that says, unmistakably, ‘I could whip your ass’—and she said, ‘Why? Do you think you can f**kin’ get me one?’
“I said, ‘Well, I can’t get you one, but I might be able to help you get one.’
“Without skipping a beat, she reached into her purse, grabbed a homemade CD, and slid it across the bar to me. ‘Listen to that,’ she said. ‘But I’m busy and can’t talk right now. So either order a drink or get out of my face.’ She then looked right past me at the guy standing behind me, and said, ‘Hey, you want another beer?’ In other words, she completely blew me off.”
John is right. I did blow him off exactly for the reasons he said. He did look like a cowboy Romeo trying to hit on me, and in my job, I got that maybe fifty times a night. Plus, I had no idea who he was. At that point, John Rich was already a well-known and highly respected singer-songwriter in Nashville. He was a member of the group Lonestar and had just recently hooked up with Big Kenny—who he saw performing with the group LuvjOi—to form the soon-to-be breakthrough duo Big & Rich. John thought Kenny was a wacko when he first saw him and probably thought I was a surly bitch with a permanent chip on my shoulder. Of course John was someone I should have jumped at the chance of meeting and even working with, but what did I know? I was just a bartender with a good voice who hadn’t gotten a nibble after two years in Nashville.
John listened to my demo and liked it enough to call me to figure out something to do together. I didn’t call him back. I thought he was full of crap. He claims he kept calling every three days for close to a month. Finally, he talked to another waitress at the bar who knew who he was and she came to me and said, “Call John Rich back. He’s legit. He wants to work with you. He’s not trying to pick you up and he’s not a stalker.”
I finally called back, we got together, and there was the start of a long and fruitful friendship with bo
th Big & Rich and a whole lot of other talented singers and songwriters.
John and Kenny were like a lot of promising but unsigned talent in Nashville at the time—they were disillusioned by the way the business was run and frustrated by the fact that safe, mainstream choices seemed to dominate every record deal. John had just been dropped by a label as a solo artist and Kenny was $140,000 in debt on his credit card. But unlike most singer-songwriters in the cold, hard world of Music City, they decided to do something about it.
Together with two other local troublemakers—Jon Nicholson and Cory Gierman—they formed a loose association called the Muzik Mafia. “Mafia” stood for “Musically Artistic Friends in Alliance.” The idea was that a group of like-minded souls would get together on a regular basis, bounce ideas off each other, play original songs for each other, and get honest, sometimes brutal, feedback. If the record companies wouldn’t pay attention to them, at least at the moment, they would pay attention to themselves. And the idea took off. What started out as just a circle of talented and ambitious friends—a kind of musical support group—soon became a legitimate Nashville scene. Early on there were maybe ten strange people who showed up at a Muzik Mafia gig. A year later the place we played was a fire hazard. The “Godfathers” of music staked out a unique territory in the country music biz.
Soon after I met John Rich and Big Kenny and started to hang out with them, they asked me to join the group. Other women occasionally sat in or wrote songs with the others, but I became the only official Mafia “Godmother.” Just like when I joined Baywolfe five or six years before, now the Muzik Mafia had a chick singer.
I can distinctly remember when John Rich first started introducing me to his friends. He’d say things like, “You’ve got to listen to this girl. You just got to listen to her. She’s twenty-seven, she’s skinny, she’s this, she’s that . . .” and then he’d always end with “. . . and she ain’t ugly.” Not “beautiful” or “good-looking” or even “attractive”—just, “she ain’t ugly.” He would tell people that I was just about the only chick tough enough to be in the Mafia. The truth is, we were pretty hard-core with each other. In a business where people lie constantly, we thought the best service we could provide each other was to tell the truth, especially about our music. If someone didn’t like a song that someone else had written, he or she just said so without mincing words. “That song sucks.”
Cory Gierman, the only nonmusician in the group, did a lot of the planning and strategizing for the Mafia. He was actually a song plugger for Universal Publishing. A song plugger is a guy who pitches new songs to established artists in the hope that they will record them, and thus make the publisher, and maybe the songwriter, rich. It’s a huge business in Nashville. Anyway, Cory had the brilliant idea of taking the Mafia into a public arena so that like-minded music lovers had a chance to hear some new and often outrageous music. On top of that, if the Mafia could create a good buzz about what they were up to, maybe even a few progressive decision-makers in the industry might take notice.
Soon the Muzik Mafia had a standing showtime and showplace—every Tuesday night at a little bar called the Pub of Love. I had to get someone to take over my Tuesday night shift at Bourbon Street, but I tried never to miss a single get-together. The Pub had two stories—a bar downstairs and a wide-open hardwood-floor room upstairs, more like an empty rehearsal hall than a barroom. Every Tuesday we’d transform the place into a funky living-room-type setting. We’d bring in couches, lava lamps, carpets, rugs, and other such bric-a-brac, and do a little home-decorating. We’d vibe it out, so to speak, so it would fit our style and mood.
If you came backstage at one on my concerts today and came into the group dressing and lounging room we hang out in before a show, you’d see much of the same decor—old furniture, candles, and as a constant reminder of my grandma’s presence in my life, old ceramic owls. Throw in a little Jack Daniel’s and hard salami and it’s just like home.
We’d make the Pub of Love equally homey, then we’d sit down and start playing. We’d just trade off each other’s original songs, and everyone would chime in on some level as the song unfolded. Someone would add a second guitar, someone else would sing background. Not only was I the only chick at a lot of these sessions, early on I didn’t have any original songs to contribute. Because of that, I felt kind of inferior, like I was more of a tag-a-long than a fully contributing member of the group.
The one thing I could add to the proceedings was my voice. I sang a lot of cover songs, but more importantly, by the second chorus of a brand-new tune, I could come in and sing harmony. Doing that, I could support almost anyone’s new song even if I was only hearing it for the first time. Until I started writing or co-writing my own material and singing it in front of the group, background harmony was what I did a lot of the time.
Onlookers and other participants wandered into the Pub by word of mouth and soon that Tuesday night jam session felt more like a house party. I was second-generation Muzik Mafia—along with a guy named James Otto—but because of the free-spirited, open-ended nature of the enterprise, soon there was what seemed like another player or songwriter on stage every Tuesday. At some point, Cowboy Troy—a shoe salesman by day—joined up and became closely identified with the group.
The informal motto of the Muzik Mafia was: Everybody is welcome, but nobody takes the stage unless he or she is good enough to be up there. Everyone was welcomed and a lot of talented people doing all kinds of creative work showed up. You could come on stage and play whether you were a singer, a saxophone player, a harmonica player, a drummer, or a rapper, as long as you were accomplished and had something to say. It wasn’t Amateur Night as much as it was Talented Misfits Night. As John Rich once put it, “It’s about people who are unique and are not afraid to express their uniqueness.” In retrospect, I fit right into this band of misfits.
And it wasn’t just musicians. You might come to the show and see someone in one corner of the pub painting. Or a fire-breather or a juggler or some other kind of circus performer. It was crazy, for sure, but it all seemed to fit. On most Tuesdays, it was a strange and ever-changing mix of artists and mavericks and freaks for any city, from L.A. to New York. For Nashville, it was a whole different reality.
Imagine something like this: In a room stuffed with secondhand furniture and lit by lava lamps and candles, there are twenty or thirty people standing or sitting around singing one of Big Kenny’s crazy, out-there songs. We’re singing together, arm in arm, in three-part harmony, loving each other at that moment. It was almost like a flashback to the 1960s, though none of us happened to be around in the 1960s. It had that communal vibe, though, the sense that you were surrounded by people who loved you, thought like you, and made you feel part of a real creative community.
Compare this to the way most people in Nashville have to conduct their lives as they struggle to find a foothold in the music industry. They might work with a co-writer or another musician friend or perhaps a manager, but they often feel isolated, frustrated, and forgotten. It can get awfully lonely in Nashville when you’re trying to make it on your own. Lonely and discouraging. During some very unstable and confusing times in our lives, the Muzik Mafia kept us all going. Because we were all in the same boat at the time, we were naturally inclined to support each other and help each other through the rough spots. I think it’s fair to say that if each of us had had to make it on our own, only a few would have survived.
There are a thousand reasons why people succeed or fail in Nashville, some of them legitimate and some of them as silly as the wrong hairstyle or waistline. Mutual support from your peers can often make the difference between giving up and carrying on. John Rich remembers more than one conversation where I became discouraged and he felt it was his duty to pump me back up and reiterate that he and a lot of others were behind me.
“Just look at me, Gretchen, look at me,” he recalls saying. “You know what I am? I am a rabid pit bull dog. I am not letting this thin
g go until you at least get your shot.”
I remember, between pep talks like that, lying in bed and thinking to myself, “You know what? I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going out there and take a beating anymore.” Everyone who comes to Nashville has those thoughts early on. Not everyone, unfortunately, has a team of like-minded supporters like I had with the Mafia.
We knew we were all good and we kept hoping that someone was going to walk through the front door of the Pub of Love one fine day and take some serious notice. We didn’t really care who got signed out of those sessions. We just hoped one of us got offered a deal and then, maybe magically, the rest of us would get our turn, too.
To make a long story short, the Muzik Mafia turned out to be a big success and things started to happen for a lot of us. First Big & Rich got a record deal, then I got mine, and others soon followed in our footsteps. Jon Nicholson’s debut album, A Little Sump’m Sump’m, was released in 2005. The Mafia established their own record label with Warner Bros. Records called Raybaw Records. “Raybaw” stands for “red and yellow, black and white.” The Raybaw release of Cowboy Troy’s first record, Loco Motive, is nearing gold, quite a feat for a black rapping country artist. In fact, Troy is the first black country performer since Charley Pride to sell this many records. Cowboy Troy’s second album, along with James Otto’s first, will soon be released by Raybaw.
The Muzik Mafia still tries to get together on occasional Tuesdays to play, but we now have to pick various bars and give our fans little or no notice of the occasion. Otherwise, it would be a mob scene. When we officially perform together as the Muzik Mafia, often to raise funds for a worthy cause, we can fill an arena or stadium. The organization’s mantra of “Love Everybody” extends to all kinds of charitable efforts, from Katrina relief to arranging Internet access for inner-city schools. What once was a slapdash gathering of diehard maverick artists has now become an enduring Nashville institution.
Redneck Woman Page 10
