The country music establishment had long ago embraced the nation’s arch-segregationist Wallace. In 1966, Roy Acuff welcomed him onto the Opry stage, and in 1972, George Jones and Tammy Wynette hosted a huge fund-raiser to support his campaign. “During the 1968 Presidential campaign, Music Row was practically a battlefield command post for George Wallace, who drew supporters there while he ran . . . and mourners when he lost,” noted Paul Hemphill in his classic 1970 meditation on country music, The Nashville Sound. Indeed, the stars merely reflected many in their southern audience, who plastered their cars with Wallace stickers and never failed to point out that his reported disdain of blacks was merely a newspaper exaggeration.
But Nixon? Yes, he won Nashville in 1972 and, yes, the town linked arms with his southern strategy. But in the spring of 1974, his presidency was in tatters. The Watergate scandal had become a national obsession and even Republican U.S. senator Howard Baker, from Huntsville, Tennessee, challenged the administration as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. Nixon was only months away from resigning when he showed up to christen the Opry House, but the city welcomed him as if it were 1972 all over again. And if the Opry still had an unwritten rule about politics and religion on its hallowed stage, it was thrown out the window. Skeeter Davis—still persona non grata on the broadcast—listened to the March 16 show in wonderment.
Before the night was over, Nixon banged out three songs on the piano, including “Happy Birthday” for his wife. Politicians in the front rows cheered him, fans pressed the stage as if he were Hank Williams come back, and wide-eyed cast members lingered in the wings watching his every move. The president couldn’t have paid for a more radiant backdrop, one that he surely hoped would communicate the resilience of his “solid South” constituency. “Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry can be proud they brought happiness to the Nixons,” gushed the Banner in a Monday morning editorial. “They can also be proud they gave the nation—and the world—an opportunity to see what’s right in America—a positive look at what Mr. Acuff termed ‘we working people’—the real America.”
On the prairies and in the cities and towns, debate roared over the meaning of “real America.” No doubt some decided that it didn’t live in Nashville.
IN THE 1960s, northern writers had parachuted into town to swipe their fingers across Nashville’s dusty surface. In 1974, the West Coast took its turn. Enter screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury and director Robert Altman, stage left.
A mother of two with some film school and stage appearances on her dossier, Tewkesbury had contributed to the screenplay of Altman’s most recent film, Thieves Like Us, starring Keith Carradine and Shelly Duvall. The movie rang of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and failed to impress the critics, but that didn’t stop Altman from tapping Tewkesbury for his movie about country music; he dispatched her twice to Nashville to research the script.
The screenwriter found two Music Cities: the slick corporate town of Music Row and Opryland and the hip West End scene, which made room for rock and folk. She observed Loretta Lynn perform and found in her the inspiration for her script’s Barbara Jean, the honey-sweet yet troubled singer whose negotiations with fame dominate the film. Tewkesbury hung out at the Exit/In, and wove into the script little scenes she observed there, including an encounter there with a man who was vamping on David Allan Coe’s death-row shtick. Jan Stuart, in her book about the film, described it: “As Tewkesbury cocked an ear to filter the music and chatter, a middle-aged black man sidled up to her . . . extending a hand. [He] told her that he had recently gotten out of jail, where he had served twenty-six years for murder. He said he killed the man his wife had been sleeping with, then studied law in jail to help himself get out.”
Harking back to John Frankenheimer’s work in The Manchurian Candidate, Tewkesbury and Altman’s characters indicted the nation’s blind embrace of Nixon-style conservatism, gaudy consumerism, violence, and superficiality. “Nashville is a place where people get off the bus like Hollywood was many years ago,” Altman told the Washington Post. “The money is generated and there’s a crudeness to the culture. It just seems like the proper place for me to be able to equate the analogy of our elected officials and politicians—which in many ways, I think is a popularity contest—with the success of country and western music. It’s a way of melding a whole view, my view, of that political climate in America today.”
Nashville comes to Woodland Sound Studio. Standing, left to right: Geraldine Chaplin, Robert Altman, recording engineer David McKinley, and Lily Tomlin. Seated is studio owner Glen Snoddy.
Courtesy of Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Room
Characters who seemed cribbed from a glossy Grand Ole Opry program mingled with cartoonish representations of West End hippies and National Life suits in various subplots who finally collided in Centennial Park, where a drifter shoots down Barbara Jean at a rally for the unseen political candidate Hal Philip Walker. It was the arrested promise of the Kennedys mashed with the cynicism of Nixon against the landscape of good ole American narcissism that no priest or politician can moderate. When the film opened in 1975, critics praised its allegorical message. “It’s about ambition, sentimentality, politics, emotional confusion, empty goals and very big business in a society whose citizens are firmly convinced that the use of deodorants is next to godliness,” observed Vincent Canby in the New York Times.
In Nashville, it became something of a parlor game to match the film’s characters with the country music personalities who inspired them: Haven Hamilton, the self-satisfied elder statesman of the industry, smacked of Hank Snow; Tom Frank, the sexy singer-songwriter, brought to mind Kristofferson; Tommy Brown, the black country singer, had similarities to Charley Pride; and Connie White, the ambitious second to Barbara Jean, recalled Tammy Wynette. Industry insiders spotted cameo appearances by session guitarists Harold Bradley and Lloyd Green, songwriter-manager Merle Kilgore, and Elvis Presley’s old drummer D. J. Fontana. Locals no doubt enjoyed seeing well-known spots around town, such as lower Broadway and the Parthenon in Centennial Park as well as the exteriors of the Old Time Picking Parlor and the Demon’s Den, both downtown clubs.
But the fun ended there. Many refused to let the familiar scenery and faces, not to mention Altman’s literary subtleties, excuse the ridiculing of their town and its industry. When it opened in Nashville on August 8, 1975—many weeks after its premiere in New York—the red-carpet audience rebelled. Spat Nashville’s hottest producer Billy Sherrill, “When you show the anatomy of a man you should try to show something besides his tail.”
AFTER THE SCREENING, partiers jammed the Exit/In for Paramount Pictures’ official reception, where the debate no doubt continued. The club’s interiors had been featured prominently by Altman, who cast it as Nashville’s hip place, a star magnet. His portrait mirrored the truth: in four short years, the Exit/In had gone from earnestly wooing Vanderbilt students with eclectic tastes to hosting Hollywood post-screening parties and national rock acts for Nashville people with money to burn. Indeed, the vibe was changing across the West End, as if the neighborhood were waiting for the last of Vanderbilt’s class of 1973 to leave town and corporate dollars to turn the seedy side streets and avenues into the music industry’s very own gated community.
Behind doors from Division Street to Elliston Place, the dull smell of pot gave way to the sleek, odorless jolt of cocaine. Rodney Crowell, the young songwriter from Texas with some songwriting dollars newly stashed in his pocket, saw the new lines forming. “There’s a famous drag race guy who was at the Exit/In with Guy Clark and me. And this guy says, ‘Hey, I got some coke out in the car.’ So we go out there, and the guy opens up his trunk and he’s got, like, two and a half pounds in his trunk. And Guy and I look at each other and go, ‘This guy’s a coke dealer, geesh. Thought he was a race car driver.’ Said, ‘Man, what are you doing with all this?’ And he says, ‘It’s my stash.’ So this guy had two and a half pounds of coke that he wasn’t even trying to sell.
It was just what he had in the back of his car to go around and hang out with people. I mean, Jesus, cocaine.”
CROWELL LEFT NASHVILLE in the wake of Nixon’s Opry visit and Altman’s filming to explore what he may have been missing down in Austin. The Willie Nelson phenomenon—not to mention the town’s fabulous hippie chicks—was too irresistible to ignore. “Willie was a poet,” he says. “He was a long-haired stoned hippie country-singing songwriter, but it was all the embodiment of poetry. Waylon was this long-haired outlaw, stoned poet. It was the embodiment of poetry that drew me. I went there and was going to be a poet. That’s what I was going to do.”
As it happens, Crowell was in Austin about one month when Emmylou Harris’s luxury liner purred into town and he was tapped to play in her band. The placid songstress had first met Crowell while he was still based in Nashville and hired him in Austin, he says, “strictly for poetic reasons. It wasn’t my musicianship at all. It was the conversation that Emmy and I were having about songs over and over again. We were having a dialogue on songs, and material. If I can claim any piece of that moment, it was that I was part of the discussion about the material that was being done. And that would go back to my early days in Nashville. My sensibility about that was formed, and Emmy was open to that, understood it.”
Interestingly, the willowy songbird who had come of age in Washington, D.C., was living Willie and Waylon’s dream to thrive artistically and commercially without Nashville interference. In 1975, her Pieces of the Sky LP, which included Crowell’s “Bluebird Wine,” floated near the top of the country music album charts and appeared on the pop side as well, without the benefit of Nashville’s studios. Working with outside producer Brian Ahern and an army of polished sidemen, she recorded the collection in Los Angeles. And her label—which was not a big player in Nashville—lavished big bucks on her promotion. “She was with Warner Bros. Records then,” says Crowell, “and they spent money to get her. That’s how I wound up going on the road with her. I was lowly. I was her pal and her songwriter and harmony singer. But they coughed up money for James Burton and Glen Hardin and Emory Gordy. Basically, they hired Elvis Presley’s backup band to go on the road with Emmy and kick people’s ass with this Hot Band,” as it was called.
Emmylou Harris with Mickey Raphael on harp.
Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
“The Nashville establishment started considering Emmylou when she started making money,” explains Crowell. “It’s always that way. That’s how that machine down there works. When money starts being generated, they cast an eye. I would say Emmy embodied the poet. She later became a songwriter, but in the beginning, her work embodied poetry. In some ways, you can look at Emmylou as coming from the female version of the Kris Kristofferson archetype. Which is poet makes market mainstream.”
Emmylou’s mainstream lifted Crowell’s songs like “You’re Supposed to Be Feeling Good” and “Till I Gain Control Again” to new prominence and cleared a way to his own recording contract. In time, he moved to Los Angeles, although connections remained strong in Nashville.
EMMYLOU MOVED SWIFTLY without the bonds of Nashville. And she was mostly without peers. Until Willie Nelson floated up from the dust cloud behind her.
Even while he was touring in the Austin-godfather glow and enjoying exuberant ink from the national press for his second go-round in Dripping Springs, his record sales remained moribund. Willie’s two Atlantic albums—although critically praised—slumped commercially, and a third album of inspirational music languished in the can as Atlantic prepared to abandon its country music house.
Neil Reshen negotiated a deal for Willie at CBS Records, which did business in Nashville via its Columbia and Epic labels and had become the distributor of Fred Foster’s Monument Records. Like the Atlantic contract, the deal gave Willie freedom to use his own musicians, but now he could record without the oversight of staff producers. It was like Waylon’s deal, and he tucked it under his arm and retreated to Austin. “It was the first time that I had quote artistic control endquote,” Willie told Chet Flippo in 2000. “So, I thought I would just start writing. And I was coming back from Denver to Austin. I had this song ‘Red Headed Stranger’ in my life for so long that I always felt it was a great story and, if I ever got the chance, I would try to create what happened up to the beginning of that and what happened afterwards. So, on that trip from Denver to Texas, I had time to think about it. And [my wife] Connie was there with me and sat and rode shotgun and kept me awake while I wrote it.”
CBS executive Rick Blackburn (left) and Neil Reshen.
Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
The song, written in the 1950s by Edith Lindeman Calisch and Carl Stutz, profiles a widowed man desperate in his grief who shoots a woman trying to take his deceased wife’s horse. Before Willie, John D. Loudermilk and Eddy Arnold had recorded it, but nobody thought to build an album around it. According to Connie Nelson, Willie hadn’t, either—until she suggested it on that ride from Denver to Austin.
In the days ahead, Willie tinkered with the story, adding his own songs and a smattering of country chestnuts, including Wally Fowler’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True” and Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” When he submitted Red Headed Stranger to Columbia, the instrumentation was so sparse and Willie’s guitar playing so splintered that officials assumed it was unfinished. Bruce Lundvall, the chief of CBS Records in New York, who had veto power over any recording in the organization, thought as much when Neil Reshen brought him the album to preview. Waylon, who was visiting Reshen in New York at the time, came along for the ride. “They played the record in my office,” he told Flippo. “And I said, ‘This is pretty fascinating.’ It’s not what I expected for the first record and it’s more like a collector’s piece in terms of its commercial potential, I thought, when I heard it. With that, Waylon jumped up and said, ‘That’s what this is all about. That’s what Willie’s music is all about. He doesn’t need a producer. This is the way it should go.’” Lundvall brought home the record and listened to it all weekend, wrote Flippo. On Monday, he conferred with Billy Sherrill, the head of CBS Nashville, who reluctantly endorsed it despite the absence of any mainstream hook.
In 1975, what counted as mainstream was the sleek child of Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley’s Nashville Sound. Highly produced outings by Charley Pride and Conway Twitty skipped up the charts holding hands with perky numbers by B. J. Thomas and Don Williams while big pop-country smashes in the form Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” and Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved” mingled with novelties such as Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” and C. W. McCall’s “Convoy.” All of which culminated in pop-country’s John Denver capturing the Country Music Association’s “Entertainer of the Year” honors in 1975, moving presenter Charlie Rich to burn the card announcing Denver’s win on national television. Indeed, measured against the sugary sounds of Denver, Campbell, Ronstadt, and even Rich, Willie’s new album seemed oblivious to the mainstream.
And oblivious to his RCA legacy. The lush background vocals, throbbing strings, and uneven song selection had disappeared in favor of economical instrumentation and ruddy vocals. And despite Yesterday’s Wine, the concept album Willie so adored from his RCA days, this new album was his first true concept album, composed of new songs and old, arranged in a coherent sequence that told a fiercely emotional story.
Dan Beck, head of promotion at CBS Nashville at the time, recalled that Red Headed Stranger seemed so off-market that Lundvall needed more than Sherrill’s assurances. Beck had first met Willie in the spring of 1973 at Glaser Sound Studios, when they, along with Waylon Jennings and Willie Fong Young, sang backup on Kinky Friedman’s daring “They’re Not Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” That summer, Beck saw the excitement and chaos Willie inspired when he jetted down to Willie’s second festival at Dripping Springs. “It was sex, drugs, and country music. You know, it was redneck rock, in a way. But a lot of pretty girls. It was a latter-
day Woodstock sensibility. It was kind of the Texas bar scene, and there were people that did come in from outside, like Kathy Cronkite, Walter Cronkite’s daughter. People were aware of something going on down there.”
Two years later, Beck stared at his test pressing of Red Headed Stranger and saw more problems than Lundvall’s comments to Chet Flippo revealed. “If you looked at [the album] from an A&R person’s perspective, it was kind of a hodgepodge,” says Beck. “It was completely stripped down at a time when these wall-of-sound country records were on the charts, ruling the charts!
“The record was delivered. And the one phrase I heard was ‘This sounds like it was recorded in Willie’s kitchen.’ Nick Hunter [whom Neil Reshen had hired to do promotion] called me and said, ‘Dan, you have to help me. Bruce has rejected Willie’s album. You got to call him and tell him it’s all right; you’ve seen the whole Texas thing!’ And Nick proceeded to tell me, ‘I think Bruce feels like Willie just gave up on Nashville, took the advance, cut something for a couple thousand bucks, and pocketed the rest and said, “The hell with my recording career! I’ll just play in Texas.” ’
“I said, ‘Nick, I wish I could help. If I can think of an idea, I’ll get back in touch with you.’ The next hour I got to thinking about the half a dozen press people in Nashville, and they had all been down to Texas, and they all kind of got it. So I called Nick back and said, ‘Hey Nick, what if we got those people together and got them to listen to it off the record?’ He said, ‘That sounds like a great idea!’ And Bruce said, ‘I’d love to hear that; I’d love to get some feedback like that.’
CBS executive Bruce Lundvall, Mark Rothbaum, and Willie.
Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
“We hustled this thing up to get everybody to come over to the Exit/In the next afternoon and listen to the record. I remember Ron Bledsoe came, who was VP of operations for CBS in Nashville. Bonnie Garner came, who was in A&R and a friend of Willie’s. There were about a dozen of us. We went in, and it still smelled of stale beer from the night before. It was dark in there. I don’t even think there was a waitress. When the first song finished, there was no comment. Nothing. Every band between songs, dead silence. You couldn’t get a read from what was going on in the room. We put on ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ After that song played, Bill Littleton from Performance Magazine stood up very slowly and started very slowly applauding. And within a few seconds, everybody broke in. It was like, ‘Oh my God, they love this record!’
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