In all, there are seven buses and seven semi-tractor-trailer trucks that haul us from concert to concert. There’s a bus for the band guys, all seven of them; a bus for David and the rest of the production people like Candy, my hair and makeup artist, and Crystal Dishmon, the tour coordinator; a bus for a whole video crew that comes with me to every concert; and then buses for all the lighting and stage people, including a full pyrotechnics crew in charge of the fireworks that are a part of my stage act. The semis are stuffed full of all the equipment necessary to set up and get going before I walk on stage.
A brief word about the pyro—there’s a lot of it. Someone recently told me we were carrying more pyro than Metallica. I don’t really know if that’s true, but I do know we’re blowing up so much stuff on stage every night that it’s unfathomable, but it’s an essential and dynamic part of the show. I don’t really think about it anymore. Unlike the days of homemade, do-it-yourself fireworks with Baywolfe, this nightly display of explosions is professionally tested, rigged, and controlled. Absolutely nothing is left to chance.
The reason I haul around all this stuff and employ all those people—something like forty or fifty—is because I’m now the headliner, and the headliner is usually responsible for all the staging and lights and sound for the concert. The current tour is called the Redneck Revolution Tour and includes Van Zant, led by brothers Donnie and Johnny Van Zant, and the youngster of the tour, a really great young singer-songwriter named Blaine Larsen.
Having the Van Zant brothers on stage with me every night is another sweet irony in my musical history. Donnie is synonymous with the group 38 Special, and Johnny still plays with Lynyrd Skynyrd. If my life were a TV movie, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, among a few others, would be the soundtrack for at least the first twenty years. They were more than just music—to many of us, they were a lifestyle. The words they sang and their attitude and way of thinking were a way of looking at life for us. In many ways, that music kept us going.
The two opening acts bring their own musical equipment but they set up in front of my stage set and they depend on my people to supply all the production and marketing elements like lighting, sound, video playback, promotion, and ticket sales. It’s a big responsibility, and since I’d only been recording and singing in concert situations for about two and a half years, it was something I had to learn fast.
After I toured with Brooks & Dunn and before I became the headliner, I spent almost a year as the second act on tour with Kenny Chesney. Watching Kenny and his people work is where I got my entire education about how to mount and run a large-scale concert performance. People like Brooks & Dunn and Kenny Chesney remain at the very top of country music because they turn out hit after hit and when you spend your hard-earned money to come see them in concert, you see a show you won’t soon forget. I’m a little greener than those guys, but I’m trying to catch up fast.
Marc Oswald has said I went from third act on the bill to headliner probably faster than any artist in the history of country music. Something that usually takes a performer five to ten years to do, I did in less than two years. This year I will do something like eighty-five major shows along with all the TV performances and PR appearances that are scheduled. When you add it all up, I will probably be out of town a total of 250 days this year. The rest of the year I also need for writing and recording. And—most importantly—Mom days.
The only way I could possibly spend that much time on the road and carry the responsibility of headlining arenas and amphitheaters is to surround myself with people I like. And that starts with the touring band. It took me quite a while to find the musicians who both fit me and fit together in a cohesive kick-ass band. Without the chemistry we have found together, both on and off the stage, I’d probably be miserable, everyone around me would be miserable, and the music would no doubt suck.
Dean Hall is the bandleader and electric lead guitarist. He’s hard to miss—he’s built like a linebacker, plays like a Kentucky version of Jimi Hendrix, and he’s got that hip all-bald look going for him. He’s also the son of country music legend Tom T. Hall, but he doesn’t go around advertising it. If someone gets real excited when he hears about his dad and blurts out something like, “You’re that Hall!,” he’ll likely reply, as a joke, “Well, I’d hoped to get the last name of Twitty but they were all booked up at the time.”
Georgia boy Gaylon Matthews plays steel guitar, besides being one of the funniest men alive. As I said, Bobby Rolens of Baywolfe fame plays second electric, mandolin, and whatever else we throw at him. Ron Gannaway, another hairless wonder, plays drums; Fiddlin’ Danny Hochhalter, all the way from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, plays the fiddle; Brandon Fraley is at the piano; and last but not least, J-Lo, aka Jeff Lockerman, is our bass player.
In the middle of all of this is David Haskell. He’s officially called the tour manager, but that doesn’t even begin to describe what he does. He controls my life, really, or at least helps me control it. He and I are like a married couple without the sex. He handles all the details of getting from one gig to another, then takes over as the sound engineer for every live show. The man is awesome.
When we started our current tour, David designated separate dressing rooms for me and the band, which is how it is usually done. I told him I didn’t want my own room. “How boring would life be for me,” I said, “if I walked into my dressing room and was in there by myself all the time?” There is now just one big multi-purpose dressing room at every stop, full of people coming and going, changing clothes, taking showers, and so forth. I grew up with chaos all around me and it’s comfortable to me. Nowadays it’s more like controlled chaos, but still crazy and unpredictable.
So, backstage one night, with all the band guys sitting around before a show, David exited the bathroom designated for the females of the group. “Hey, Haskell,” someone yelled, “that’s the girls’ bathroom!”
Everyone turned to me to see what I would say. I turned to David and blurted out, “Oh, I don’t look at you as a man or a woman. You’re just Haskell.”
“You’re just Haskell.” It brought the house down, but it’s true. David and I are very close and there is no weirdness of any kind between us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get along as well as we do and the whole show would suffer.
Whether I’m backstage with these guys, warming my voice up by harmonizing with them on an a cappella version of John Prine’s beautiful ballad “Paradise” or on stage jumping around like rock stars, it’s all about the music and not much else. Road families like ours play music—we don’t much worry about record sales or marketing plans or winning awards or all the other business of show business. We don’t feel competitive of other artists like Martina McBride when they have hit after hit. Personally, I think Martina is awesome and cheer every time she hits one out of the park. When we’re on the road, we just want to do a great show for the audience who comes to see us so that they will come see us again someday and we can keep doing this until we drop.
It’s a strange life led by almost everyone in the live entertainment business, and it demands getting used to. I eat breakfast on the road around three in the afternoon and am often up well past the end of the concert that night. If we have another concert the next day, we call that a “school night.” Some crew guys have to get up the next morning at five A.M. to unload equipment, and everyone else falls in line behind them. On school nights, we keep the after-show partying to a minimum, but we’re always up talking and playing for hours. When I think about it, I’ve never really had a day job, except maybe as a morning-shift waitress at Denny’s when I was fifteen. I’ve been training for the night shift my whole life. Anything else would be abnormal.
On a nonschool night, on the other hand, all bets are off. Especially at the end of a long tour run, things can get crazy in totally unexpected ways. The whole crew is upward of forty-five people and we like to get together and act up. One New Year’s Eve, for instance, a crowd gathered in my hotel room and before yo
u could say, “Who wants to arm wrestle?,” a major free-for-all broke out. It was a friendly free-for-all, of course, but we were lucky no one ended up in the hospital. The whole crowd became like gladiators—we went from arm wrestling to chicken wrestling to throwing each other in the pool to blindsiding whoever got in our path. We all became twelve-year-old heathen boys. Crystal Dishmon, one of the small band of chicks on our road crew, flat-out tackled me and bruised me up good for a week or two. It’s pretty cool when you can do that to the boss and not get fired.
But that’s after the show. The main focal point for everyone every night is the show itself. When I’m on stage, I often pretend that the audience is one big video camera. When you are on camera, the film is rolling and what you do is going to be recorded for all time. Given that, you are going to give that performance your one hundred percent, totally undivided attention. If you think of your audience in the same way—recording you in their memories forever—you’re going to give them the same kind of focus and concentration, and probably offer up the best performance you had in you that night.
And I try not to think. When I break my musical concentration to think, it usually throws me off. And it doesn’t take much—a bottle breaking near the stage is enough to freeze my brain. At a recent concert some fans threw a big banner on stage in the middle of a song. It probably said “Hell yeah!” or “Yee Haw!” I looked over at it, started to read it, and almost forgot the words of the song I was singing. I’ve never blanked on a lyric yet, but I know it’s going to happen one night—something’s going to break my concentration and I’ll end up humming the chorus of “Redneck Woman.”
Then there’s the problem of staying on my feet. I wear real high-heeled stiletto shoes on stage and am generally quite comfortable in them. I thought, “Hell, I could run a marathon in these things.” Then, one night at the House of Blues in Las Vegas, I tried something about as stupid as running a marathon in stilettos—I tried to jump over an amp and land on my feet, like some kind of whacked-out rock star. The stage was hardwood and when I came down after my daring leap, my stilettos slipped right out from underneath me and my butt hit that stage like a sack of cement.
It hurt like hell, needless to say, but what are you going to do? I jumped straight up, grabbed the mike, and began singing the opening to “Here for the Party”: “Well, I’m an eight-ball shootin’, fallin’ on my ass son of a gun . . .”
I made a joke out of it and got through it. If someone comes up with a little tiny rubber tip that I can put on my stilettos to prevent such a pratfall from happening in the future, please let me know. Not that I’ll be leaping over an amp anytime soon.
Between songs on stage, I observe the audience. It’s really important to me to see who comes to my shows. According to Josh and Amy, it’s mostly teenage girls who buy the merchandise out front, and I’m damn glad to see them. But I also look out and see a lot of young couples, old couples, and whole families out there. I love it when a middle-aged man holds up a handmade sign reading, “I’m a Redneck Woman, Too!”
I think perhaps the coolest sight of all is when I look down and see three generations of women who have come together to the show. There’s Grandma sitting next to her thirty-something daughter sitting next to her teenage granddaughter, all of them jamming to the music. They are all “redneck women,” at least in spirit, and all see the show from a different point of view.
Grandma knows all about Patsy Cline or classic country cheatin’ songs, so when she hears “When I Think About Cheatin’” or “The Bed,” she feels connected to a music she has loved for decades. The more rock-oriented material, with the flavoring of Led Zeppelin or Heart, is new to her, but her granddaughter is jumping up and down and singing along to the lyrics, so it must be okay. The granddaughter herself might be too young to remember Zeppelin, but she loves the energy of the music.
That’s where Mom, the generation in the middle, comes in. She’s about my age and she’s heard it all. She was probably raised like I was, hearing Tanya Tucker in one ear and Heart’s “Barracuda” in the other. She’s old enough to have been cheated on a time or two, but still young enough to hit a nightclub or tavern—or Gretchen Wilson concert—and get “all jacked up.” In any case, they are, all three of them, having a female family outing, one night where they can forget about the world.
Back home, “Gretchen Wilson” the performer turns back into Gretchen Wilson the private person, mom, and vacuumer. Many people raise their eyebrows in disbelief when I say this, but I really do shop at Wal-Mart, Target, and the grocery store down the street. And I rarely get noticed or bothered. All I need to do is put on a pair of khaki pants, some flip-flops, an old hat, and sunglasses, and I’m just another shopper thumbing through the half-price T-shirts, looking for one that fits. It’s what I did at fifteen and what I do today. It just seems like the normal, Illinois-country-girl thing to do.
Recently I hopped in my truck with a cooler in the back, heading to a local gas station to pick up sodas, beer, and ice. I got some money out of the ATM, like normal people, picked up my supplies, like normal people, and got carded on the beer, like I was a normal teenager trying to pull a fast one. I walked outside and a man with a sheriff’s badge walked up to me. It kind of scared me for a moment. What did I do this time?
He was a heavy guy, chewing on a candy bar. He goes, “What are you doing?” I reply, “What do you mean?” He said, “So you just come out like that?” I said, “Well, yeah. It hasn’t seemed to cause any problems so far.” He goes, “All right then,” and walks back to the sheriff’s car where his boss has been eyeing me the whole time.
I thought for a minute there I was going to be arrested for being a celebrity and not being surrounded by obnoxious paparazzi and screaming fans. Which is exactly why I live in the country where even the people who recognize me don’t make much of a fuss.
Wearing a baseball cap when I go out is pretty minor stuff compared to all that I have been blessed with. I have true riches—a beautiful, healthy little girl, a large, extended family to share my life with, and a career beyond my most outlandish dreams. There’s no better way to illustrate this than something that happened last summer. Right after appearing at Radio City Music Hall in New York, a milestone in itself, I was asked to perform at a big fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. I was very excited—the president would be there and I might get to shake his hand. Other country stars probably know presidents on a first name basis, but not me. I was like a schoolkid on her first trip to our nation’s capital. “This is cool,” I said to myself.
As I thought about meeting the president, I thought about the incredible distance I had come—from a little country girl singing in Kmarts or her grandma’s trailer in the backwoods of Illinois to dropping out of school, tending bar, and moving to Nashville, to overcoming all that rejection and frustration to finally land that first record deal, to this—performing before six thousand of the most powerful people in the world, including George W. Bush. What a long, strange trip it has been, I thought, and look how it turned out.
I know one thing for sure: It is impossible to express in words how grateful I am for the life I’ve been given.
So I sang a full fifty-minute concert set, beginning with “Here for the Party,” for the black-tie audience gathered for this big event, called the President’s Dinner. I was then escorted backstage to meet the president. He was in a little roped-off area smiling and making small talk with a line of VIPs. I can’t remember what I said to him, but as I walked away after our brief but memorable encounter, Marc Oswald asked me what it was like. I guess I was a little overwhelmed by it all. The only thing I could think of was that the president, the busiest man in the Western World, does handshaking “meet-and-greets” just like I do. He just has a hell of a lot more hands to shake.
From now on, every time I say hello to a line of fans backstage before a show, it’ll remind me of that once-in-a-lifetime “meet-and-greet” in Washington. Like standing in the Ryman Auditorium
that night and singing “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” this was another high-water mark in my life.
Oh, yeah. Do you know how much money they raised at that President’s Dinner that night? Twenty-seven million dollars. I repeat, twenty-seven million.
27.
My lucky number strikes again.
CHAPTER 11
THIS IS WHAT I KNOW
When I did that Ed Bradley piece for 60 Minutes at the end of the first year of becoming Gretchen Wilson the country singer, they used the following quote from me to end the whole segment:
“I’m just a simple, ordinary woman. And I think that’s what I’m trying to say—that it’s really cool to be that. I think that’s a lot of the reason why people have really connected to me. I am just like them. The only difference between me and a lot of women that come to my shows is that I can sing. That’s the only difference.”
I made this point throughout this book, but this is really why I wanted to write it in the first place. I wanted to tell people, especially those who like my music and especially women, about where I come from and some of the simple truths I’ve learned along the way. I don’t know all the answers, by a long shot—hell, I don’t even know all the questions—but a few things I do know, things I have learned from the hardest teacher of all—real life.
For me, I had to drop out of high school, grow up fast, develop a bulletproof exterior, and get out of small-town Illinois to realize my dream of being a professional singer and songwriter. As I said before, if you want to do what I wanted to do, you come to Nashville. Chances are extremely slim that Nashville is going to come to you. But that was my choice, or my destiny, and I was only doing the best I could with what I was given. By doing so, that didn’t magically solve all my problems. It doesn’t put me on some higher plane. It surely doesn’t make me any better than anyone else, or even any happier. It’s just the path I took.
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