Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  “It’s a wonderful day,” Trish Hayes was saying. Several years shy of her fiftieth birthday, Trish, a trim hairdresser and amateur watercolorist, was having the kind of day about which most mothers dream, but often come to dread. She had gotten up early and done her hair. “It’s short, layered, bleached-blonde hair,” she explained with professional precision. “I change it every month.” Then she went out to feed winter wheat to the small herd of cattle that a friend had given her husband as barter for a carpentry job. “This is the first time we’ve ever had cows,” she said. “Our original purpose was that we didn’t have any kids at home and we needed a tax break.” Then she set out cleaning the house and baking Wade’s favorite dessert.

  “It’s a wonderful day because he’s coming home,” she continued. Her voice had an upbeat, knowing tone like Jessica Lange in one of her beleaguered Midwestern heroine roles. She had little of Colleen Brooks’s buoyant optimism to her or Naomi Judd’s sculpted sincerity. Trish Hayes had lived through several heatless winters as the wife of a ruined musician and the mother of three hungry kids. “This is the first time the town’s recognized him,” she said. “The mayor’s going to be there. All his friends from school. I don’t think Wal-Mart’s prepared for what’s going to happen. People are already standing in line—have been since seven o’clock this morning. Heck, we have an unlisted number, and in the last few days it’s just rang and rang and rang and rang.” And just as she said that, it rang again. Across the room, her elder daughter, Stacey, put down her four-year-old son and went to answer it. “You see, people are so excited!” Trish said. “Wade’s put Bethel Acres on the map.”

  And in the process, she believed, culminated a journey that had been under way for generations. “All my husband’s family were musicians,” she explained. (Her husband Don was off at work.) His father played fiddle. His two brothers played guitar. Don played guitar and sang. “He’s almost as good a picker as Wade,” Trish said. “Singing, though, they sound exactly the same. Wade was on the radio last night promoting the album and a friend called and said, ‘Trish, he sounds just like his daddy talkin’.’”

  “And what did that feel like?” I asked.

  Trish pulled her hands from the sticky cinnamon batter. “It’s like watching your destiny unfold,” she said. “I’m kind of awed by it. It’s like we’ve been on a path, and I’m finally getting to see where we’re going and why. When you travel through life, you get confused a lot of time, especially if you have a faith in God, which I do, strongly. But when things go so badly, you whine, ‘Well, what did I do wrong?’ But then years pass and you see why you had to go through that. I’ve told people, ‘You pay for your kids to go through college. We paid for Wade’s education in music.’”

  Don Hayes and Trish Snow met in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1966. Though both had roots in the state, their path to Shawnee, the “Crossroads of Oklahoma,” had been circuitous. Don was born in 1948 in Early Mart, California, on the grounds of a labor camp. His mother, a native of Oklahoma, had been raised on Cherokee Territory, though she denied being part Native American. Don’s father was born in Arkansas and met his wife when he moved to Oklahoma to become a farmer. The two married, had two sons, then lost everything in the Dust Bowl. In a story taken right out of The Grapes of Wrath, the family then fled to California, where they found more hardship than opportunity. While living in a camp, they had a third son, Don. “Again, this is where music comes in,” Trish said. “Don and I always loved Merle Haggard’s music because it touched so many things in our lives. Merle had a song—‘Working Our Way Back Home One Row at a Time’—and that’s exactly what his family did. They worked their way back home to Oklahoma by being migrant workers.” (Later, when Wade opened for Merle at the Ryman, Merle said to him, “Son, where’d you learn to pick a guitar like that?” “Sir, from listenin’ to your music”)

  Back in Oklahoma, Don met Trish at the local Sonic hamburger drive-in when both were in high school. Trish had been born in Hugo, a small town south of Oklahoma City, but moved to Shawnee when her father got a job at nearby Tinker Airfield. Shawnee was a boom-and-bust oil town of thirty-five thousand that was home to both Jim Thorpe, the famed Native American athlete, and Dr. Brewster Higley, the writer of “Home on the Range.” With little diversion, teenagers spent their afternoons cruising the drive-ins. During one such session, Don, a shy, lanky musician, told his friend Specks, “There’s the girl I told you about. I’m gonna marry her someday.” “Her?” Specks said. “That’s my sister.” The two were married the following year, in February 1967, when both were eighteen. They went to work as his-and-hers hairdressers and moved in with his mother in nearby Bethel Acres. Within months, Trish was pregnant. “We were so poor and so stupid,” she said. “I stayed pregnant for two years.” Stacey was born in 1968, Wade in 1969, Charity in 1973. By then, Don had given up cutting hair (“He just couldn’t take the gripey women,” Trish said) and went to work in construction.

  Don had always played music and, even after getting married, would pick at locals bars once a month. After Merle Haggard won CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1970, Don sat Trish down and said, “What do you think of us trying to do this more seriously?” She was agreeable. “I think we can do that,” she said. Trish extended her hours at the salon, and Don formed a band: Don Hayes and the Country Heritage. It included two guitar players, a bass player, and a drummer. In no time, the band was playing four nights a week, opened for Nashville acts who played the area, and eventually cut an independent album, which they sold at their shows. When a small label in Nashville released a single from the album in the late 1970s it briefly grazed the playlists of a few local radio stations. Soon the head of the company promised Don even greater fortune if he left his band and came to Nashville. In 1982, Trish and Don Hayes sold their house in Oklahoma, packed up their three kids, his mother, and their cat, and moved to Tennessee. As soon as they got there, they realized they’d been had: The company didn’t exist; the man had been a fraud.

  “It was scary,” Trish said. “Nashville hadn’t boomed yet. It was the worst winter in a hundred years. We couldn’t even afford to heat the house. The only thing we had was a rack of wood that the previous owner had left us. Stacey had to get her first job. Wade had to go without clothes. I went to work in a beauty shop.” Though the pressure was great on the whole family, Wade, thirteen, still caught the music business bug. “The whole episode was bizarre,” Wade said, “but still, it was probably easier on me than it was on my two sisters. First, I’m a boy, and those kinds of things are always easier on boys. And second, I was eager to get in and learn about the music business because country music had always been such an important part of my life.” Trish, though, was fed up with music. “I felt it was over,” she said. “We shot for it. It didn’t work. Let’s go home. My kids were falling apart. They were having race riots in the school. Wade was freezing. Stacey had become ill with mono. It was just awful.” Finally she told Don, “I’m going home.” “Not without me,” he responded.

  Still, they didn’t have enough money to move, so while Trish was in Washington, D.C., visiting her sister-in-law, Don sold the family van for $2,000. He also gave the buyer, a gospel musician, the title. By the time Trish returned, the check had bounced. The musician turned out to be a con artist. And the Hayeses had suffered their second disaster in ten months. This time, though, they were desperate. With the help of a policeman, Don tracked down the con artist, burst into his house, and took the van from his garage while he was in the process of stripping it. The next morning they loaded the kids, the cat, and the grandmother into the van and headed back to Oklahoma. When they got there, Trish sank into a depression, and Don abandoned his dream. “Moving down there in some ways was a bad decision,” he said later, “but in other ways, it was something we had to do. We had to find out if I could make it.” Also, he added, “it was a real learning experience for Wade.”

  Once back in Oklahoma, Wade, shy and lanky like his father, couldn’t shak
e the idea of a career in the music business. He’d been fascinated with music since childhood. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a musician,” he told me. “I’d drive my parents absolutely crazy, walking around all day singing those country songs.” Trish agreed. “Sometimes his veins would almost burst, he sang so hard. But he was always very talented. He learned. He would absorb. Don would play music and Wade would just listen.” At ten, Don bought him his first mandolin. “I was furious,” Trish said. “It was winter. There wasn’t much work, we didn’t know how we were going to keep the electricity on, and Don brought this mandolin in. It was the first time I went to my mother’s. Went there for two or three days.” Wade, though, was transformed. He’d set his alarm an hour before he had to get up, just so he could practice. Returning from school, he’d head straight to his room. The following year he switched to guitar. “We’d never fuss at him,” she said, “but he’d drive you crazy. He’d be sitting on the couch next to you watching TV and doing runs on the guitar. You just wanted to bop him on the head. But I thought this would all be worth it someday.”

  Eventually Wade followed his father’s lead and put together a band. “Anything I did, Wade wanted to do,” Don said. “If I was building houses, he wanted to do that too. If I was playing in clubs, he wanted to do that.” “He was always in tune with his daddy,” Trish agreed. “He knew the ins and outs of what we had been through. I didn’t have to tell him how hard it was. He knew. But I knew that he was a real gifted person who could survive.” Wade, though, was scared. “That whole episode in Nashville put such a fear of people in me,” he told me. “I’m not a trusting person anyway, but because of that I didn’t trust anybody. It’s kind of unhealthy.” After graduating, he went to college for a few years, worked a few odd jobs, but seemed haunted by the idea of a career in music. “I don’t feel like this was something I chose to do,” he said. “I think it kind of chose me. I tried for a lot of years to get it out of my system and get those thoughts out of my head. I tried to get through college. I tried to get a regular job and be happy and comfortable. But as I got older, I kept realizing that that wasn’t me.”

  “I think he wanted something secure in life,” Trish said. “When you’re older, you know that nothing is secure, but when you’re young—” She shrugged. “Wade grew up knowing that everybody’s parents worked at Tinker Airfield or at GM and had those good paychecks coming in every week, and he thought he wanted that kind of security. But in college, he was becoming more and more unhappy and hard to live with. He went and did a show with a friend in Nashville and they talked him into moving down there.” The week he was supposed to leave, though, his grandmother passed away. “So of course he couldn’t leave that week,” Trish said. “Then he didn’t want to leave the week after that. The longer he waited, the scarier it got. Finally I sat him down and said, ‘Wade, if you keep putting it off, these people are going to forget they ever saw you. You’re young. Your dad has given you the tools to survive. It’s in you to try it. I’ve lived with your dad. And I know you. Someday you’re going to try. It’s better now while you don’t have a wife and kids.’”

  It was 1992. That month Ricky Skaggs stood at the podium of the CMA Awards and said, “All of you young musicians that are struggling with your art, you need to go ahead and pursue it because that’s what you’re called to do.” This time Wade got the message. “His dad gave him his best guitar,” Trish said. “Wade had saved up four hundred dollars. We had a bedroom suite his grandmother had left him. He loaded that up in his pickup and we cried watching him go down the road. But there was just no doubt in my mind. He’d call me and say, ‘Mama, I don’t know.’ I’d say, ‘Wade, you’re a Christmas package that’s come to this town. You can do it all. You can write. You can sing. You can play. You’ve been to college. You’ve got the looks. It’s all there. You just hang in there. It’s going to happen.’”

  And, of course, it did. Within weeks, he was playing guitar at Gilleys’. Within months, he was writing songs with Chick Rains, a veteran songwriter from Oklahoma. And within a year, Chick introduced him to Don Cook. “I remember the first time we went to see him in Nashville,” Trish said. “We wanted to see what kind of people he was meeting. Wade introduced us to Chick and Don. They took us to breakfast at the Shoney’s on Music Row, and I knew immediately that they were good people. Wade got up to go to the bathroom, and I said, ‘I just want to thank you guys for being so good to my boy.’ They looked at each other, smiled. ‘Oh, we think your boy’s gonna be real good to us.’” Heading back to Oklahoma that evening, Trish and Don were giddy. “I just kept saying to my husband, ‘It’s really gonna happen. It’s really gonna happen for him.’ And Don said, ‘It really is.’ It was like getting something for Christmas that you really wanted, but you never thought you’d get.”

  But what exactly were they getting? Today, three years after Trish and Don Hayes first visited Wade and a year and a half after the song he played for them during that trip reached number one, Wade’s career seemed, by all measures, to be skyrocketing. He had two number ones, a gold album, was Billboard’s reigning Debut Artist of the Year, and was returning home as a conquering hero. But from Music Row’s perspective, Wade’s career was in a surprisingly perilous position. His new album was turned in two months late. His first single from that album was mortally wounded at radio. And while that was happening, Bryan White, his altar boy competition from just up the road in Oklahoma City, had scored his fourth number one, had seen his first album go platinum, and had leapfrogged over Wade into the position of “It Boy” of the moment. As a result, Wade was actually under greater pressures now than he had been at the start of his career. The reason: Having shown he could make money, Wade was no longer the little boy who could, but had become a corporation’s chief economic asset. This was the backside of the Nashville dream in the 1990s. We can take you to unexpected heights, Music Row whispers, but in doing so we will put you under unspeakable stress. For Wade in particular, the financial expectations of his company, coupled with his craving to regain his momentum, had conspired to undermine the one thing he most desired from his career: security.

  How Wade coped with this new state of affairs was fast becoming the unspoken drama surrounding the release of On a Good Night. On the one hand, the signs coming out of Sony Records were universally positive. Sony believed in Wade Hayes and, because of the label’s lackluster performance in recent years, deeply needed him to succeed. As a result, even though the album’s first single was not performing well at radio, Sony still pushed ahead with its strategy to launch the album in stores with a major marketing onslaught. “Without putting any of my team’s butts on the line,” Allen Butler, the head of the label, said at a luncheon several weeks earlier touting Wade’s “gold-plus” debut, “I think they would all stand up and commit to this on the spot: His new album will be a platinum-plus album.” Mike Kraski, the vice president of sales and the man charged with selling as many albums as possible in the all-important first week, was even more blunt in a conversation we had just days before the release. “We have to go out and make a major statement that Wade Hayes is still the king of the crop of new and upcoming artists,” he declared. “Basically we have to kick Bryan White’s ass.” Bryan had sold 14,000 units in the first week of his second album, Mike noted. “We need to exceed that.”

  The plan he concocted to achieve that goal reflected not only the new marketing clout of Nashville, but also the increasingly high stakes of competing in the music marketplace. Country, for all its inroads into the mainstream, is still an extremely price-sensitive commodity. Fully two thirds of country music is sold at a discount merchandiser, with half of that coming from either a Kmart or a Wal-Mart. For Wade, who sold particularly well in the Southeast and Southwest, the figure was closer to 80 percent. Anderson Merchandisers, the company responsible for stocking (the industry term is “rack jobbing”) most of the two thousand plus Wal-Marts, controls 60 percent of country music sales in man
y parts of the country. This concentration of power has made these wholesalers some of the most powerful players in country music. As a result, even before an artist goes into the studio, he or she is whisked off on a corporate jet to meet, schmooze, and often perform for distributors. Such performances can be life or death. Garth Brooks is famous for advancing his nice-guy reputation by tirelessly seeking out factory workers and distributors. “He’s the only artist I’ve ever worked with who uses the term ‘rack jobber’ in conversation,” one Capitol executive told me. Vince Gill, by contrast, though considered one of the nicest men on Music Row, nearly torpedoed his reputation at one wholesaler party several years back by cursing employees who weren’t listening to him perform, then storming off the stage. Even Wade, certainly a “yes sir, no sir” kind of artist, nearly stifled his nascent career by having too much to drink at his first appearance at such an event.

  He recovered, though, and the relationship he developed with major retailers around the country proved critical to his success. Such relationships matter because retailers often rent prime shelf space to labels for a monthly fee. Endcaps (the prime area at the end of display cases), counter space, even floor space—painting an artist’s face on the tile—all come at a price, as high as $50,000 a month, which labels happily pay since surveys show that 60 percent of purchases in these stores are unplanned.

  Mike wanted to do something that would make Wade stand out in Wal-Marts in particular. “We went down to Anderson’s laboratory store,” he explained, “and told them, ‘All your space is already allocated. If we gave you an opportunity to make an aggressive statement on Wade Hayes without using up any existing space, would you say yes.’” They laughed. “What are you going to do?” they said. “Hang it by the ceiling?” With that, Mike unveiled a special cardboard display case he had designed. Called a “wing bin,” the case, about the size of an ironing board, had a picture of Wade at the top and two shelves for CDs. It was designed to fit in one of the vertical slots normally reserved for the section sign saying COUNTRY. “We slid it in the slot and they fell in love with it,” Mike recalled. Within weeks, three thousand such bins, which Sony manufactured at a cost of nine dollars apiece, were slid into place in every Wal-Mart in North America.