by Bruce Feiler
In time the presence of all those pimply fans had an enormous impact on the music. The members of the Class of ’94, among them Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Bryan White, and Wade, routinely performed music that sounded more rocking (with heavier drums and electric guitar), but often involved softer-focused pop themes (fewer rodeo riders, more teenagers at the mall). Wade’s first song, for example, “Old Enough to Know Better” could not have been more different than Garth’s debut song, “Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old).” Though both were dominated by fiddles and steel guitars, Wade’s song had more spark to it, more rebellion. It’s about a working-class kid who parties so hard on the weekends he can barely ready himself for work on Monday, while Garth’s is about an aging cowboy succumbing to health problems. Their next songs showed the differences even more: Garth’s follow-up single, “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” is a classic evocation of a young father confronting his own mortality, while Wade’s second song (and second number one), “I’m Still Dancin’ with You,” is a sentimental ballad about a young man who can’t stop thinking of his ex-girlfriend: “Even when I’m holdin’ someone new / I’m still dancin’ with you.” Though both Wade and Garth were in their late twenties when these songs were released, the differences in their personalities—and their moments—were clear: Garth was speaking to fans as old as twice his age, while Wade was speaking to fans as young as half his.
Perhaps the most striking difference, though, came in their videos. Garth originally resisted the idea of making a video for “The Dance,” his fourth single, claiming that videos distract from the song. Once persuaded, though, he steered away from the straightforward imagery that had defined the genre. Abandoning the idea that Tony Arata’s song was about a romance that ended prematurely, Garth took the position that the song was about risking everything for a dream. “To a lot of people, I guess ‘The Dance’ is a love-gone-bad song,” he said at the start of the video. “To me, it’s always been a song about life—or maybe the loss of. Those people that have given the ultimate sacrifice for a dream that they believed in.” The video went on to include clips of famous Americans who had died prematurely: John F. Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; the members of the space shuttle Discovery; country singer Keith Whitley; rodeo champion Lane Frost; even John Wayne (who actually died of cancer at age seventy-two). Though the song and video were controversial, they worked within the confines of country because they spoke to those themes—early death, faded glory, tainted love—that Nashville has long embraced.
Five years later, the pendulum in country music had swung dramatically: Death was out, life was in. Age was downplayed, youth had prevailed. And love, though ever-present, now shared the stage with sex. The video for Wade Hayes’s third single, “Don’t Stop” was as seductive as any ever made in Nashville. In it, Wade and a scantily clad brunette (the “‘Don’t Stop’ babe,” as Wade and Don called her; she’d been imported from L.A.) prance around an empty house as Wade strums his Telecaster guitar, and the woman, nay temptress, tries to lure him to the couch. The guitar line itself has a jaunty, bump-and-grind feel to it. The lyrics—“I can’t keep holding back / When you keep doing things like that,”—suggest that “Don’t Stop” might be the first country song about oral sex. Even the video escalates from winks and nods, to shirts-off sweaty thrusts and grinds, to openly lustful fingers dribbling here and there. It climaxes with Wade’s amplifier bursting into flames, and the final image is of an ice cube sizzling into vapor on a silver platter. The video, twice as hot as anything Garth, Clint, Alan, or anyone else had done up to that point, was so overtly sexual that CMT originally threatened to ban it. Three months later, fan support pushed it to number one.
Which is not to say Wade was comfortable parading his sexuality. If anything, he was the opposite.
After about forty-five minutes in front of the window, Wade took a break for a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich still frozen from the cold. Momentarily he was ushered to a different setting, a table against a mirror. When that proved too dark, Bill opted to move to the far side of the cabin and to the most important pose so far—the one where he asked Wade to take off his hat. From day one of his career, the question of whether Wade should wear a cowboy hat had dominated discussions about his image. The issue was whether to align him with the more modern edge of his music by leaving off the hat or ground him in tradition by leaving it on. The decision was made more pressing by the almost smothering symbolism the cowboy hat had assumed in recent years. After the success of Garth, Alan, Clint, and Billy Ray, the cowboy hat made a cultural resurgence. Stetson sales soared, as did business at country bars and sales of Wrangler jeans. Jeep Cherokee drivers across the country suddenly thrust open their doors and paraded their sagebrush wreaths and flaming cowboy shirts for all the world to see. Nashville, predictably, responded by signing a rush of new acts and cramming cowboy hats onto their often citified heads. Eventually the tsunami of knock-off acts became so laughable that Marty Stuart, a former bluegrass prodigy, and Travis Tritt, a country rocker from suburban Atlanta, actually headlined a show called the No-Hats Tour. Overnight the hat had gone from a symbol of pride to a badge of banality, and the Stetson was immortalized on the Tritt and Stuart poster with a giant red REJECT label stamped across its brim. John Wayne, meet Beavis and Butt-head: Cynicism had come to country.
By the time Columbia Records got around to preparing Wade’s first album cover in 1994, the hat was considered so cliché that executives urged him to keep it off. “He is so handsome, his eyes have this incredible soulful depth to them,” Connie Baer, the marketing executive charged with making the decision, told me. “I knew women would find him incredibly attractive.” Wade would have none of it. Though he had shunned the hat when he first came to town for fear of melting in, by the time the album was finished he had decided to keep it on. “I just missed it,” he said. “It’s not something I just put on to sing country music. I’ve always worn one. I don’t want people to get confused about what I am.” The label pushed back as hard as it felt it could, but in the end, pleased that it had an artist who refused to be sandbagged, relented. The cover for Wade’s first album showed a boyish twenty-four-year-old with a Little Lord Fauntleroy curl of hair, a plaid collarless shirt that could have been bought at the Gap, and a beige T-shirt. On his lips is a dab of a little too much lipstick and on his head is a handsome tan hat. He looks country, friendly, and completely nonthreatening. Also, not particularly sexy.
His new album, though, showed a different side of him. The two best songs on the album, “The Room” and “Hurts, Don’t It,” were both dark ballads about a deeply sensitive man who had been hurt by a curdled love. Other songs, particularly “Our Time Is Coming” and “I Still Do,” were more openly romantic than his past material. He was growing up, in other words, and opening up, too. Bill Johnson had a plan to capture that on film. “I’m trying to develop the look in response to the songs,” he said as Tamara made the final adjustments to the faint light on the brick wall. “Just talking to Wade I get a feeling that he wants a stronger image. A little Marlboro-ish. What that suggests to me is a little more masculine. I’ll warm up the colors a bit. I think all in all I can be a little more artsy. I feel now I can bring in some mood and a lot more emotion.” For Bill that meant one thing, though: getting more expression from Wade’s face.
When Wade arrived in place for the new shot the mood was looser than it had been earlier, but still uncomfortably serious. He was still wearing his blue jeans, with a dark blue shirt now, and a black belt with silver trimming. His light tan hat appeared almost ghostly in the smoky setting. Wade positioned himself in front of a red door in the middle of the brick wall. Lit from head to toe, he appeared quietly menacing. When Marcia stuck his Telecaster in his right hand, he looked like a dueling gunfighter preparing to wield an ax in battle. “Good God, now I’m getting a hard-on,” Marcia said.
With everyone’s confidence soaring, Bill decided to act. He went and spoke quietly with Wade, leading hi
m through a series of poses. Wade continued posing once Bill backed away and Tamara, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, started shooting again, this time more tenderly. We had moved from groping foreplay to candlelit seduction. After several minutes, Bill made his move—gentle, reassuring, “Okay, now…”—and Wade removed his hat. He didn’t toss it aside, but held it, contemplatively, his disembodied self. The mood grew hushed. Melanie tiptoed forward and brushed his hair. She pulled a spritz of bangs over his forehead. The effect was transforming. Wade still stood tall, his broad shoulders starched, but suddenly his face invited closer inspection. As he pulled his hat just inches from his nose and ran his fingers over its crown, suddenly the music in its most mythic form seemed to come to life. A man stands in front of a wall, pausing at the door—coming in or going out?—and considers his hat, the symbol of himself. In Nashville, the music may be digitally enhanced, the images may be unabashedly manipulated, but when they come together—in one unexpected moment—they can still create something unambiguously real.
The crew broke for lunch after the no-hat setting, then moved outside before the sun disappeared. We were advancing to the more rugged, manly phase of the shoot, which would peak now, at sunset, with Wade standing in front of an abandoned toolshed with barren underbrush running out toward the horizon. The importance of this shot was underlined when Wade appeared in the blustery late-afternoon conditions dressed in a black hat, black jeans, a black collarless shirt, and a crisp bolero-cut caballero jacket made of rich black leather. “My God, my baby’s all grown up,” Marcia said. And he was: Wade was wearing his first Manuel.
Manuel Cuevas, known simply as Manuel, was one of the most colorful characters in Nashville history, an eccentric Mexican stylist-bon vivant with perpetual silver ponytail and brightly colored cravat who would have been at home in Robert Altman’s Nashville twenty years ago, but who seemed anachronistic in Edward Gaylord’s whitewashed version of Music City, U.S.A. Born in Coalcomán, Mexico, into a family of eleven children, Manuel emigrated to the United States in 1955, where he went to work for Hollywood tailor Sy Devore making suits for Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. Bored with what he called “regular clothes,” Manuel left to work for legendary designer Nudie, the nom de needle of Nudie Cohen, a former boxer from Brooklyn who parlayed an unsuccessful career making costumes for striptease acts into one of the most signature styles in American entertainment. Working out of his shop in Los Angeles, it was Nudie, a Brooklyn Jew, who defined what we now think of as traditional rhinestone cowboy imagery: dressing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers in the 1940s; Hank Williams and Tex Ritter in the 1950s. His model was the singing cowboy movies of the 1930s, which he accented with his flourishes drawn from the personalities (or even the names) of his celebrities. Nudie covered Porter Wagoner’s outfits with wagon wheels and Ferlin Husky’s with huskies. In 1957, Elvis Presley paid Nudie $10,000 for a twenty-four-carat gold lamé tuxedo.
Manuel, himself an outsider who shared Nudie’s vision of an idealized America, stayed with his mentor for twenty years, eventually marrying his daughter. It was a fruitful apprenticeship. Through Nudie, Manuel was able to help outfit an entire generation of musicians. In the 1950s, he put Johnny Cash in black; in the 1960s, he designed suits for the Beatles; and in the 1970s, he put Elvis in those famously gaudy wide-lapel white jumpsuits. Leaving Nudie in 1974 (“I divorced his daughter,” he told me, “I had no choice…”), Manuel moved to North Hollywood and continued on his own, always adjusting his clothes slightly to fit his times. In that way, Manuel became an ideal designer for country artists, a Zelig of cowboy couture, always tinkering but never abandoning the nostalgic ideal at the heart of Nashville’s appeal. In the early 1970s, when Gram Parsons was looking for a way to capture his blend of Music Row and Haight-Ashbury, Manuel embroidered rhinestone marijuana leaves and poppies onto his wardrobe. In 1980, he designed the costumes for Urban Cowboy. And five years after that, when Urban Cowboy had become passé and the term New Traditionalism was just emerging, Manuel gave that awkward expression a stunning face by putting Dwight Yoakam in gaudy retro-1950s jackets and dressing Dolly, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris in matching rhinestone roses on the cover of their Trio album. Finally, in 1989, in what was a dramatic statement at the time, he seemed to catch another trend when he left Hollywood after thirty-five years and moved to what he called the new “front porch” of American culture: Nashville. If Manuel had gone country, surely Hollywood would follow.
“I guess I did it at the right time,” Manuel said in his chuckling, heavily accented voice when he appeared that afternoon at Wade’s shoot. “I felt a little crowded in Los Angeles, a little too tight. I wanted to come to a place where I had visited for so many years and had always liked. I moved here to be silent, more trusting that I could just hold my pencil and draw without a fight breaking out in the streets.” Since that time, Manuel had added a sense of flair that Nashville admires, but has little of itself. Quiet by day; by night he became his jackets. Often as many as several times a week, I would run into Manuel at nightclubs or new artist showcases around town, jolly, looking a bit like Lee Trevino in a flamboyant cowboy jacket. Invariably he would be surrounded by a harem of impossibly beautiful women and would be running the longest tab at the bar. “Tequila?” he would query anyone who walked in, before turning, petulant, to some woman at the counter and asking why she wasn’t enjoying the view from his lap.
And through it all he continued to define Nashville style. “In any type of entertainment,” he explained, “sixty percent is imaging, twenty percent is packaging, and twenty percent is talent. That may sound surprising, but it’s true. It’s imaging that makes you spot an artist a mile away. If you get on a bus and a nun gets on, you’ll probably offer her your seat. You might find out later that she’s a prostitute, but imaging was the first thing that made you accept her.” For younger artists, like Wade, getting their first Manuel jacket (the one he was wearing cost $5,000) was a sign that they had made it, a postcard they could send home to Mama’s refrigerator. “What do you want to be?” he would ask them on their first visit, usually after their first album hit the charts. “A country boy or a star?” Usually, he said, they would answer, “Both.” “‘Well, you can’t be both,’ I tell them. ‘People don’t want to see themselves onstage. They want to see what they believe they would look like if they got all dressed up, like you.’” In Wade’s case, Manuel told him to appear more grown-up. (He tried “Lose the hat,” but that didn’t fly.) He told him he looked too much like a kid at the mall on his first album and not enough like a legend (too I-40, in other words, not enough Route 66). He told him to put on a jacket. Indeed, it was the jacket he had been commissioned to make in response to that comment that was the focal point of this final setting of the day.
With the lights finally focused, Bill positioned Wade on an exposed piece of rock. Wade hardly spoke as he got into position: straightening his shoulders, thrusting out his chest, and staring almost seductively into the camera. “Look at me, look at me,” Tamara urged. The fifteen or so people who had stayed through the day pushed in around Wade in an effort to block the wind. A smoldering intensity began to develop. “Imagine you’re a bathing suit model having to do this at this time of year in a see-through bikini,” Tamara said. “That would be embarrassing,” Wade said. The crowd laughed. Wade didn’t. “Look down again,” Tamara said. “Look down.”
Patchink, patchink, the camera snapped.
“Now move your head a little,” she said. “Look up. Look up.” Patchink. “Yes!”
She continued giving orders, steadily, firmly. Less desperate than before; quietly insistent. “I need you to move your foot backward.” “I need your hand there.” The attendants stayed, just watching the odd dance.
“A little lower with your chin. A little higher. Yes, I know I can get confusing.”
In fact, the longer the day went on, the relationship between the artist and the photographer had become notably more sexual, from the early morn
ing flirting in front of the window, through the candlelit romance of their midday encounter, to the increasingly erotic climax of sunset, with both sides standing in the cold, staring at each other.
“Ah, we’re seeing your eyes now,” Tamara said. “Sexy. Sexy. Bring your leg down. Ohhhh, that’s good…”
The temperature increased with every command. The patchinks got closer together. Tamara was holding her breath.
