by Bruce Feiler
The party started out unexceptionally enough. The four hundred or so regulars on the Music Row party circuit eased their Range Rovers and BMW 750iLs into the valet lane of Trilogy Restaurant, slid their cellular phones into their pockets, and slipped into their most practiced expression of casual self-importance. “Oh, hi!” Kiss, kiss. “How are you? Love those boots!” Step back and admire. “Hey, congratulations on your artist reaching the Top 20…” Lovingly touch the arm. “Yes, that’s right. We just went gold…” Demurely smile. “Sure, we sold double platinum last time, but you know how tough it is right now…” Raise the eyebrows, grimace a bit. “Oh, no. I’m not worried. For me, it’s all about the music…” Lean forward, put hand over the heart. “Well, then…” Peer around anxiously, pretend to spot a colleague, head directly for the bar.
The process of hyping a recording artist—to the media, to radio, and to the all-important industry buzz machine—is a tradition that goes back generations in Nashville. For much of that time, it was a fairly casual operation. “Tammy Wynette would have a gold record,” Bill Johnson at Sony told me, “and we’d decide to have a party. We’d call the producers, the managers, a few members of the press. We’d all gather in our conference room with a few beers and bottles of Jack. Tammy would come in, she’d know everybody, and we’d just sit around and talk.” Not surprisingly, the only party of any grandeur that anyone seems to remember was one held at the now-defunct Spence Manor Hotel when the Outlaws’ album became the first Nashville recording to receive platinum status.
The attention to hype slowly built in the 1980s when more money started flowing into Nashville and when labels started realizing that, when done properly, stroking works. More importantly, when everybody else is doing it, stroking is required. The first target for propaganda, of course, was radio. Labels began arranging so-called showcases—essentially aboveboard payola—in which they fly radio programmers to exotic locations (Lake Tahoe, Key Largo) and pay for them to play golf and get massaged during the day, then get drunk and listen to music at night. The second target for seduction were voters on award shows. In 1983, a minor scandal erupted when a Sony blitz to encourage members of the Academy of Country Music to vote for its artists actually resulted in a sweep of the show. A third target for promotion was the press. “I’m sorry to say this, but I started it,” said Susan Levy, formerly a publicist at MCA. She was speaking of the process of sending high-gloss, Hollywood-style mailings to reporters. One campaign she coordinated for the Mavericks, the hip, neotraditional band from Miami, was so successful with its mix of glitzy, four-color fold-outs and intentionally obscure photographs of naked baby bottoms that other labels soon followed. “Now I just wish I could stop it,” she said.
By the mid-nineties, these mailings had mushroomed to such a degree that any writer who had ever listened to a country song would receive buckets of unsolicited mail. In one week leading up to the CMA Awards, for example, I received a giant simulated restaurant menu from Vince Gill’s Lonesome Cafe; three mailings in brown envelopes from Tim McGraw printed with the words CONFIDENTIAL: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, the last containing a cassette, à la “Mission Impossible,” that included directions to a cocktail party and the warning “This tape will self destruct in ten seconds…”; and, finally, a giant pink hatbox from Reba McEntire, which, even in a town world-renowned for its tackiness, was widely considered to be the most outlandish thing ever mailed from a major record label. On top of the box was a photograph of Reba, prancing barefoot on a beach, showing off her recently shorn locks. Inside the box were a few postcards of Reba in various terry-cloth concoctions, the lyrics to her new single on a piece of fake parchment, and an invitation to an open house at her new $22 million office complex (nickname, “Vatican City”). And at the bottom of the box was a plump pillow of white cotton, on the edges of which were a few flakes of scented wax and in the center of which, like priceless artifacts from Cleopatra’s tomb, were four perfectly curled locks of Ms. McEntire’s hair.
And I don’t even vote for the CMA Awards.
The changes going on in country music mirrored the larger changes going on in Nashville. Even after tripling in size from a $700 million annual business in 1990 to $2.1 billion in 1995, country music was still only the third-largest industry in Nashville. The town’s two other economic behemoths, religious publishing and health care, grew just as quickly during this period. As a result, Nashville became a boomtown in the 1990s and the poster city for a back-to-roots movement that seemed to be taking hold in America. Nashville, as V. S. Naipaul wrote in A Turn in the South, was the home of a “new order leading no one knew where.”
Nashville has always been a city of the middle. It’s in the middle of a state considered to be in the middle of the Mid-South. Its local products have always been middle-oriented—Maxwell House Coffee, Shoney’s, Captain D’s, Cracker Barrel, Service Merchandise, Dollar General, Nissan pickup trucks, Ford windshields, and, of course, country music. On the right, Nashville did give rise to the reactionary manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, and on the left Reverend James Lawson of Fisk was a leader of the civil rights movement, but basically it’s a town of political pragmatism: Lamar Alexander on the “right,” Al Gore on the “left.” Both, of course, are radically middle. Dinah Shore came from Nashville, as did Oprah. John Tesh was a newscaster in town. Pat Sajak was a weathercaster. Today, just on the cusp of 1 million people, it’s a town that is large enough to have helicopter traffic reports during rush hour, but small enough so that most traffic lights start blinking at 11 P.M.
The sudden gold rush surrounding country music in the early 1990s would change Nashville forever—and not in ways anyone particularly anticipated. In the past, Hazel said, when hillbilly singers struck it rich, “the first thing they did was buy a Cadillac, the second thing they did was buy a diamond ring, and the third thing they did was leave their wives because as soon as they got money they had young chicks chasing their ass.” But in the new age of college-educated country, as soon as stars got money, they started to invest: Reba McEntire bought a fleet of trucks and airplanes, Travis Tritt became a coowner of an indoor football team, and Naomi Judd bought her old hangout of Maude’s, poured in $2 million to redecorate it as a “California-themed” eatery, and named it, after herself and her two daughters, Trilogy. As always, she was onto a trend. Though Nashville had never really been a food town (primarily because selling liquor by the drink had been outlawed until the 1960s), suddenly a spate of Hollywood-style restaurants opened up: Sunset Grill, Bound’ry, Cakewalk, Nashville Country Club. In 1994, drawn by the wave of tourists, Hard Rock itself opened its first restaurant in a city of under 1 million people, and, a year and a half later, Planet Hollywood followed.
These developments gave Nashville an air of hipness and excitement completely at odds with its “Hee Haw” image, but completely in sync, I came to believe, with the rapidly evolving South at the time. When I first moved to Nashville, I expected to find perhaps a few nouveau riche, but mostly swarms of WASP-like preppies. I dressed accordingly, in blazer and penny loafers. But in my first week of meetings on Music Row, the only necktie I saw was mine. In fact, in most of the conversations I had, I was the only Southerner in the room. While many music people dressed in country casual—boots, jeans, and polo shirts (no hats)—a surprisingly large number were decked out in three-button, free-hanging Armani suede and blunt-toed, high-heeled Manolo Blahnik leather. This trendiness only heightened in the years that followed. Vera Wang opened a boutique in Nashville. Hummers started popping up on the streets. And, most surprisingly of all, in a town once defined by Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, men started going to hairdressers. By my count, Nashville in the nineties had no fewer than four one-named hairdressers, including mine, Yon, from Iowa.
“Since when did men start getting hairdos?” asked the Nashville Scene, the hip alternative weekly, in its breathless bolded style. “Since when did men start having hair that even needed to get done?” The paper, which had recently report
ed on Nashvillians who leaked gossip to the tabloids, went on to report that the Caesar haircut, first made popular by George Clooney, had taken over Music City. “Brian Williams was the first one around here. Hard to believe a banker would do such a thing, even if he is on Music Row. Before long, it grew on everybody. MCA Head Tony Brown debuted his new clip job at the Masked Ball. Then the other day at Trilogy, there was RCA bigwig Joe Galante, at the head of the table, showing off his new head of hair. Nobody could pay attention to anything he was saying. They were just wondering, ‘Can you really ask a grown man about his haircut?’” I can think of no better example of what came to be called the New Nashville than the fact that Alan Jackson, one of the last bastions of tradition in country music, the man who still eats bologna sandwiches and insists on having a red velvet cake backstage at every concert, thanked his hairdresser, Riqué, on his new album. Perhaps this should have come as no surprise: Riqué, as I learned later, has his own publicist.
All this faux Hollywood glamour eventually started attracting actual Hollywood types who were eager to be a part of the excitement, but without the threat of earthquakes. In the span of just under five years in the early 1990s, an amazing and probably historically unrivaled transfer of musical power took place between Los Angeles (and, to a lesser degree, New York and London) and Nashville. This new class of immigrants included Steve Winwood, Peter Frampton, Kim Carries, Janis Ian, Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, Garry Tallent of the E Street band, Bernie Leadon of the Eagles, John Kay of Steppenwolf, Al Anderson of NRBQ, Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Welch of Fleetwood Mac, and Al Kooper, the deitific keyboard player on several of Bob Dylan’s albums in the 1960s, who was pictured in Nashville Life magazine in an article on eyewear makeovers wearing $240 Armani flip-top shades. “Kooper’s light-sensitive eyes are his valid excuse for rarely being seen without sunglasses,” the magazine said. “For what he’s doing, hearing is probably enough.” Nashville’s lingering stench of hay bales notwithstanding, the new cast of “Hee Haw” would sound distinctly like Woodstock.
Not only graying rockers, but real-live genuine movie stars started hanging out as well. “Notes from Hollywood on the Cumberland,” Herbert Fox, who used to write for “Hee Haw,” gushed in a local society rag. “That’s Bette Midler grabbing a bite to eat. Single Guy Jonathan Silverman is mistaken for Vince Gill on a hotel elevator. Luke Perry lives just up the road. Charlie Sheen drops in at Buddy Killen’s Easter Seal benefit…The rich and famous just keep popping by—Sharon Stone, Ben Vereen, Martin Sheen, Liza Minnelli. There’s one of the Beach Boys. Forgive me if I don’t know which one. I’m just getting used to living in Tinseltown.” Even Jay McInerney, the literary laureate of 1980s excess, married a Nashvillian who was, as Belle Meade wags pointed out, some years his senior and set about nesting in Music City. In a stunning expression of the glam-family values of the times, Jay and his wife Helen Bransford then participated in what will long be remembered as a brilliant metaphor for the bright-lights, gone-country nature of Nashville in the nineties: They procured human eggs from a friend, fertilized them with Jay’s sperm, hired a waitress to carry them to term, delivered healthy twins, and then, in their own modern version of a country song, wrote about it in Vogue.
Though transplants like Jay often had some difficulty adjusting (“Hey, Suze, the bagels suck down here. And they don’t have ‘Meet the Press’ either…”), at least they had themselves, all of which made for some singular evenings in what was still middle Tennessee after all. One night after watching a concert of standards by Raul Malo, the glib, genius Cuban-American lead singer of the Mavericks, I found myself at an impromptu party of recent Nashvillians around his (rectangular) swimming pool. Manuel was there, with his usual muchacha on his lap, along with James House, the roots-rock singer. Also Melanie, the zodiacally inspired makeup artist late of Paris, and Frank Callari, the Mavericks’ manager and a DJ during the cocaine days at Studio 54. For hours, the assembly writhed to the sounds of Cuban cocktail music, smoked hand-rolled contraband cigars, and finished off nearly a case of Veuve Cliquot, the champagne of choice for James Bond. At 3 A.M. Karen Essex, the former Hollywood film producer who had just written a book about 1950s pinup icon Bettie Page, who also turned out to be from Music City, turned to me and said, “Now, this is the New Nashville.”
Among country artists, few people encapsulated the glamification of Nashville—the mix of old-fashioned Appalachian roots with trendy L.A. style—better than Wynonna Judd. Wynonna was born in Kentucky, but grew up in Hollywood. She spent her teenage years in frilly dresses pitching lye soap on “The Ralph Emery Show,” then spent her twenties in red leather pantsuits blowing the roof off David Letterman. Her mother was pregnant and married before she left high school; her sister, before reaching thirty, had starred opposite Robert De Niro and had an affair with Matthew McConaughey, the last on the set of their film A Time to Kill. Wynonna was, above all else, a star. “I can walk into the offices of CAA with any artist on the Billboard 200 and nobody will give a damn,” John Huie, the head of the CAA office in Nashville, told me, “but if I walk in there with Wynonna, everybody’s on the phone in two seconds saying ‘Wynonna’s in the house, Wynonna’s in the house,’ and the next thing I know, they’re all pouring out of their offices and accidentally ‘bumping’ into us in the hall.”
The process of transforming Wynonna into her own free-standing artist began in earnest in 1991, even during the Judds’ Farewell Tour. Having moved to MCA from RCA for a better deal, Wynonna was in a delicate situation, trying to retain the tradition she had established with her mother while also trying to establish herself as a fresh new voice. To help, she chose as her producer Tony Brown, who was not only the president of MCA but also the public face of cool on Music Row. The son of a hellfire Baptist missionary who grew up to play backup piano for Elvis Presley in the seventies, then went on to get profiled in GQ in the nineties as the discoverer of hipsters Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and Steve Earle, Tony Brown was an anomaly in Nashville. Entertainment Weekly regularly placed him on its Power 101 list and he even made an appearance on the Newsweek 100. Closer to home, he was also the first person since Minnie Pearl to successfully bridge the chasm between the Grand Ole Opry, where he once played with Emmylou Harris, to Belle Meade, where he moved in 1994. “Tony Brown’s always the first person at the Swan Ball,” Catherine Darnell, The Tennessean’s society columnist, told me. “He’s also the one person on Music Row whom all the Belle Meade ladies wish they could get their claws into.”
Tony Brown was the perfect producer for Wynonna. If Allen Reynolds’s gentlemanly philosophical nature, mixed with his penchant for grandstanding, was ideally suited for Garth Brooks, Tony’s flamboyance, coupled with his own larger-than-life personality, was uniquely suited for Wynonna, the still-unrealized “Female Elvis.” Tony was a pert, dapper man in his forties who drove his Mercedes 600 SL a little too fast and ordered his wardrobe by the carton from Barneys. Forbidden from seeing movies as a child, he had always been fascinated by the excesses of celebrity, which is why he coveted the job with the real Elvis. “To have watched him in those late years, sometimes looking good, most times looking really bad and being pitiful…I wouldn’t have taken anything for it,” he told GQ. “I just wanted to be around Elvis.” After the band had been dismissed, Tony would wait around the house for a glimpse. “And, sure enough, at three or four in the morning, he’d walk through in his underwear, his hair sticking every which way, and get a drink of water. He’d stop and say two or three words. After he went back to the bedroom, I’d get up and go back to the hotel.” More than just basking in the nectar of fame, Tony went to school on Elvis, learning to bring rock grindings into country. As Don Was, the producer of Bonnie Raitt, said at the time: “The lines between rock ‘n’ roll and country are really starting to blur. Nobody understands that better than Tony. I don’t think of him as a country producer—I think of him as Elvis’s piano player. When you view him in that perspective, a lot of
things make sense. Because Elvis is the guy who really knocked down those walls.”
More than any other artist of her generation, Wynonna seemed to decimate those walls further in the seemingly open-ended years of the early nineties. Her debut solo album, Wynonna, released in early 1992, was a sweat-dripping, adrenaline-inspiring combination of unbearably painful pleas for strength and lustful declarations of independence—from jilting lovers, crippling memories, and, one can’t help thinking, her mother. Years later, it still stands as the most exciting album to come out of Nashville this decade, combining a genre-busting blend of bluesy wails, country caresses, and gospel stand-up-and-shout hallelujahs, all done in the most quixotic, unpredictable voice that seems impossibly suited to all three of its major styles. From its background musicians (Will Weeks on bass, the rare African American among Nashville musicians, to Don Potter, the born-again acoustic guitar player) to the songwriters (among them, Dave Loggins, the sweet-tongued writer of “Please Come to Boston”), the album is a chamber of commerce brochure for the maturing dimensions of country music. Considering Tennessee’s cross-state legacy of bluegrass, blues, and country, Wynonna is perhaps the best example of an artist who began in one tradition, Appalachian Mountain, expanded to incorporate the other pole, Mississippi Delta, and in the process redefined what could happen in the middle, a transcendent form of Mother Earth Southern music.
The biggest testament to the music’s power is that critics, who weeks earlier had been lining up to lampoon the excess of the Judds’ Farewell Tour, now scrambled to anoint Wynonna as the savior. Rolling Stone, in a rare lead review for country, called Wynonna “the most important release by a country artist this decade…powerful, stirring, ennobling.” The New York Times called it a “faultless nineties country album…without an extraneous note or languid moment.” Coming in early 1992, as the Garth-inspired media frenzy was just kicking in around Nashville, the album was received as heralding the arrival of the substantive, pop female superstar that the industry needed. “More than any record since Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam steered country music in a new direction in 1986,” James Hunter wrote in his Times review, Wynonna “demonstrates that a country performer can explore vibrant pop, deep gospel, and straightforward rock and still make sense even to country traditionalists. Taking neither the strict heritage of honky-tonk nor the relative freedom of singer-songwriter rock as her guide, Ms. Judd manages to say that, as the word about forty years of country music spreads, it can be something else as well.”
