by Rick Bass
Best of all, of course, the stages: in London and Frankfurt, in Hot Springs and Nacogdoches, in Memphis, New Orleans, Knoxville, Nashville, Savannah, and Jackson. The particular pleasure of a new stage, the flooring unfamiliar, and the curve of walls and arc of roof likewise not yet known. The strangest details impressing themselves upon her, in that heightened state of awareness, that hyperacuity, as the adrenaline began to burn and the pupils constricted. Noticing a bat-shaped swirl in the growth rings of the oak flooring beneath her feet, or a dent in the steel mesh of the waiting microphone. The usher in Fayetteville who looked so much like Floyd, with his red jacket and slicked-back white hair. The WPA mural of John Henry on the high wall of the Cactus Theater in Lubbock. Her heart terrified, beating a million times a minute as she wondered what the audience would be like, wondering, Will they love us? Terrified, and grateful to her brother and sister beside her, as she stepped forward to find out.
Of the time that ensued once the lights came on her and the applause began all memory leaves her, if ever it was in her in the first place. Unconscious, owned, possessed, they sang, moved through their repertoire unthinking, giving themselves over to the audience with a complete selflessness.
What she does remember, beyond the first shine of the lights, is the end: the thing she lived for, the moment of perfect stillness when, after the last note had fallen upon the audience and was still settling over them, loosening, spreading out and then disappearing, there was the sweet and hallowed space in which the audience, saturated and bewitched, realized the songs were over but, entranced as they were, could not yet quite lift their hands to clap.
It was almost like a moment of confusion, as if the audience had been caught deep in some middle place between the dreaming and the waking and did not want to leave, though finally, like divers surfacing, came back up to the top, reluctantly at first, but gradually and—as if realizing only then where they were—enthusiastically.
Those full three or four seconds of silence, and the delight of her terror— What if they do not clap at all? What if they do not rise to their feet? —were more powerful than anything she had ever known.
Only when it did come—the first few waves of applause, then the sea roar, and then the rising—would she relax a tiny bit, and glance over at her brother and sister. The three of them somehow closer, out there on the stage, than they ever were in so-called real life. Relaxing, finally, after so long a wait and so long a journey, for a short period, before winding up tight all over again on their way to the next show, next audience, next state.
She remembers too the parties afterward. The ones she remembers most are those that took place in winter: the warmth, the heat of so many gathered together inside on a cold night; the post-performance excitement, the echo of it lingering. There was nowhere near as much as there had been in that perfect, single shining moment at the end of the song, but still, some of that same lingering.
She understood that it would go away—was going away—but she stood there at the parties, or moved through their midst, keen-eyed, determined to milk every last bit of it. A trawler far at sea with an immense net, never stopping, pushing farther.
THE MOVIE
FOR AS LONG as she can remember—which is to say, since she stopped drinking almost thirty years ago—she has been wanting a movie. It is a desire that burns in her every bit as intensely as did once her ambition for making music, for getting her voice out into the world, but she doesn't have any idea how to go about it. Mostly, she thinks, she has to just sit quietly, desiring it, burning, and wait for it to come to her. Waiting for her old contract with the world to reassert itself.
The silver screen, she calls it, whenever she talks to Bonnie on the phone. Wouldn't it make a marvelous movie? She fantasizes about the three of them being at the premiere, imagines various outfits she might wear, and is certain that at such a gala there would be a request for the three of them to sing again. She's certain they would comply, and certain, also, that it, the tempered harmony—this otherworldly phenomenon—would excite an entire new generation, and that once again, as always before, the audience—a thousand, two thousand, all in evening dresses and tuxedos—would leap to their feet, leaping as if summoned by violent jerks of invisible strings from above, and that the waves of applause, of love, would roll over and through her again: always, one more time.
Everyone else has a movie. Johnny Cash had a couple. Charley Pride had one, Loretta Lynn had a couple; the Beatles had twenty or more. Patsy Cline had one, Hank Williams had one. Elvis had maybe half a hundred, which, though she understands it, gnaws at her; for when they first started out, they were bigger than he was, and then—for a while—even when he was big, they stayed even with him on all the charts, for a while.
Even their best friend, Jim Reeves—Gentleman Jim Reeves—had a movie made about him, as did their record producer, Chet Atkins, with The Chet Atkins Story. A movie at or near the end of one's career or life is simply de rigueur in country music. Where's her movie? It's like going out onstage without shoes, or like the recurring nightmare in which, while playing in a huge and elegant venue, her voice comes out but the microphone isn't working, so that only the audience in the first few rows can hear her.
This is how it was in the old days, this fever, this feeling that something immense had entered the world and was shoving her, pushing her from behind, urging her toward a life of great consequence, with the wind at her back; and now, as then, she is eager to accept that assignation.
That the fame has been gone fifty years now does not register in her. In her mind it has only been gone one day. Sometimes she imagines the actors and actresses she would like to see in her movie. They change, decade by decade. In such imaginings, she tries to stay current.
How can fame not equal a movie? The fame came so quickly. Almost everything they touched went to number one. After having lived through a World War, then a Depression, then another World War, and finally an economic expansion, and the ascent from poverty into middle class—after all that, there was an excitement and a yearning to feel sophisticated, and a dissatisfaction or even embarrassment about those earlier days and generations. The Browns' voices were shiny and elegant, and utterly controlled; the spirit of their voices had the Appalachian hillbilly music as its rootstock, but without the nasal whine and twang. People had never heard anything like it and could not get enough of it. Every song the Browns released in 1955 and 1956 hit the top ten. Never in the history of music has any group had as many Top Ten hits over a two-year period, nor as many number ones.
It was a smaller world—fewer radio stations, and smaller audiences—and television had not yet assumed full primacy in the culture. Radio was still king. Companies such as RCA were only just beginning to merge the two media, using variety shows as a bridge. It was still an aural rather than visual culture with regard to how people entertained themselves and how they relaxed after a long day at work in the factory—exhausted from having trudged a day closer to a relief if not an affluence that finally was beginning to seem possible. They sat down on their couch, opened a beer, turned the music on, and listened to whatever was playing, as if awaiting instruction on how to live the rest of their lives, or to be encouraged to get up and keep going—to live more engaged lives, heroic lives—though sometimes, too, they sat there after work just listening.
The Browns flooded the market with their songs, which were written mostly by Maxine: stories of small-town growing-up, cruising the drag, dressing up for boys, cruel betrayals, longings for love—the standard fare of what would become American music. Jim Ed penned some of the drinking songs, and within about an eighteen-month period, they had essentially created the country music market, had provided both a template and a path for all the other musicians, many almost exactly like themselves but lacking only the strange assignation.
It could have happened to anyone; it could only have happened to them. The Browns—led largely by the firstborn and fiercest and hungriest—broke trail, and q
uickly, like escapees; all the others poured through right behind them.
And as if creating or colonizing all that new territory—the idea of country music—wasn't enough, the Browns spilled over, within that same short time period, into other adjacent markets: pop, rock, folk.
And just as quickly, Fabor became a multimillionaire, one nickel at a time, and whenever the Browns had the temerity to inquire about royalties, he scolded them for even thinking of such matters and told them that the greats—Hank Snow, Roy Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens—never bothered with such matters but focused instead on holding on to the special thing they had, and that consideration of monetary advancement—indeed, considerations of anything other than the purity of their sound—were a distraction, and would over time create fractures through which their magic would slowly drain away.
Their window of opportunity for stardom was, Fabor warned them, very small, and he worked them like mules. On this count, he was right; it was the sole piece of truth he ever gave them.
It cost him, Fabor told them, to send them on all their tours and to develop the market they were building. Hell, Fabor said, you're still in hock to me for all that, you haven't even paid out yet. I'm taking a chance on you, he told them, I'm taking a big gamble.
The most money the Browns ever got paid during that two-year period of their first blossoming, their incredible incandescence—the same years that, like a fire's backdraft sucking oxygen, they pulled Elvis along behind them, and into the fire—was $13,000, in 1957. The check looked like a lot when they got it, but it didn't go very far, split three ways and across two years. It seems so easy now to cry foul and to counsel lawsuit or litigation. But it was not easy then, for a man's or a woman's signature meant more. It was a raw deal for the Browns, but it was a deal.
What Maxine remembers from those times, however—the beginning, if not the middle and the end—is not the wrongdoings, betrayals, and chicanery, but the high points.
In the beginning it seemed that was all there was. She realizes now that there must have been an undercurrent of lows running slow and deep beneath the surface, but she could not hear them or chose not to acknowledge their existence, though she is beginning to understand now that those very undercurrents—the lows straining to rise and attach themselves to, and bring down, the highs—might well have been among the many intangibles that gave them their temper, their meter. The promise implicit in such a sound that everything would eventually meet in the middle; and a bittersweetness, yet for some maybe a comfort in that promise, that contract.
Restricted to the downstairs section of her house as she is, Maxine longs for the day when she can climb the steps again and shower in her own bathroom, can select clothes from her bedroom closet, rather than sleeping on the couch and living out of the cardboard box that Bonnie brought downstairs for her. No one ever thinks they will end up this way; yet neither are there any plans that can be laid to prevent such steady approach of darkness, when it is darkness's time to come.
She fixes tea with hands that always shake now. She looks out the window. She tries not to make too many phone calls. Jim Ed, over in Nashville, is always on the road, and Bonnie, in the Ozarks, is always out in the garden with her husband, Brownie. Floyd and Birdie are long gone, and her children have moved as far away, it seems, as possible. Her relationships with them are neither sour nor severed, but instead, just never took full root. She did raise them, did provide for them; there is that bond, that gratitude, at least.
It seems strange to her, given that for all its stresses, her attachment to her own parents, and home, and childhood, was significant, and remains with her still.
Sometimes she goes into her tiny office, where all her memorabilia is stored neatly in cedar chests, and where framed photographs cover every inch of wall and occupy every portion of desk space: photos of her and her brother and sister with all of the old greats: Ernest Tubb, Vassar Clements, Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner. Elvis, of course, and the Beatles, and the Mamas and the Papas, even Dylan. Pictures of her with senators, governors, and presidents. A newspaper from London that reported them to be the number one musical act in all of England. Pictures of her throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in 1956, when the Browns were at the top of both the country and pop charts simultaneously, the first time that had ever been done, and also the last. She was dating the Washington Senators' third baseman, who was playing in the game; they were a couple in the era before the proliferation of tabloids dedicated to chronicling such movements. He suggested that she throw out the first pitch, and that the Browns sing the national anthem, which they did.
A clock somewhere ticking, melting away, back then, but they had no idea.
She doesn't go into that back room often, but instead keeps it sealed off from the rest of the house—ready to display to a visitor, or perhaps an archivist, should one ever appear—but it spooks her and depresses her to go in there alone. Too many ghosts, and, strangely enough, too much hope, for she cannot look at a single one of those pictures—her youthful glitter, her shimmer—without thinking, I can still do that.
None of the ghosts have had to face what she faces. They are all frozen in fame, still and forever reveling in it. Johnny Horton ("North to Alaska" and "The Battle of New Orleans"), whom she dated briefly, prior to meeting Tommy, gone by the age of forty.
Bill Black, Elvis's bass player, whom she also dated before meeting Tommy, dying of a brain tumor at thirty-nine. Johnny Cash, with whom she had a fling, during the waning horrors of her years with Tommy. They were all drawn straight to her, stars circling her, for a couple of years, maybe three. They came to her, heard something that spurred them on and that somehow etched new pathways in their creativities, and then they went on, while she remained.
Her sound altered them. Her sound remains, but they went away. It was more of her pioneering: often the only girl in an all-boys' club, Maxine, lonely and on the road, up for anything, not always making the best choices, all in the name of entertainment, hunger, fire.
It's lonely in that room. The historical footnotes, the photos and yellowed clippings, mean nothing. The only thing that ever mattered, and that still matters, was and is the applause.
The sealed-off back room is a Fort Knox of country music history, but it means less than nothing, is a kind of black hole that threatens to suck away even the last and faintest dying embers of her once bright vitality.
It confuses her, why going into the room depresses her so much. As if what is on the walls is not proof but a mockery, and an indictment of something—though of what, she cannot say. How can such a full life add up to nothing? How can such fullness yield emptiness?
How can such a feast increase, rather than sate, a hunger? Day by day, though still only dimly, the nature of it becomes more apparent to her. As if some incomplete accounting yet remains, some awful and immense cost commensurate with all that momentary bliss.
Far more often, rather than going in to look at her memorabilia, she goes into the front room and sits on her couch and watches old home movies of her and her family. She doesn't have cable or satellite, but has half a dozen old VCR tapes that she transferred from the silent sixteen-millimeter reels, gotten from the camera that Birdie bought for the Browns back when their career was first taking off and they were traveling to so many places—places that Floyd and Birdie had never seen, and never would.
For some reason the old movies don't discourage her the way the museum room does. The celluloid seems to possess a different power—as if in the flickering light and the grainy, jerky movements of the young people in those frames, time has not yet gotten the upper hand. There's no sound, but watching some of the footage of their early shows, and seeing their mouths move, she remembers what it was like, and imagines that she can still hear it. She watches the camera pan to the small audiences back then, hands clapping wildly, as if in fast motion, and imagines she can hear that, too.
Sequences of Elvis mugging for the camera, and of him r
unning up behind Bonnie at a swimming pool, the summer light so brilliant, and pushing her into the pool with a giant splash. Maxine remembers the heat of the day, Bonnie's shrieks, the smell of chlorine. She remembers how time wasn't moving, back then.
Frames of Jim and Mary Reeves, the one time they all five went on an extended tour together, traveling out to the Pacific Northwest, a two-week journey, and the mountains and plains and dense rainforests as exotic to them as if they had traveled to Mongolia. Maxine did all the filming, and there are long stretches where she filmed the era's myriad construction projects—dams being built, gaping dry reservoirs not yet filled, and roadbeds excavated but with their foundations not yet poured—Maxine filming such things to show Floyd, who could never have imagined such industry. Though the footage is incredibly boring now, she watches it all and marvels at, and tries to recall, the enthusiasm she had back then for everything—even the sight of a bulldozer digging a ditch—and of how everything was new and unfamiliar.
There was not a trace of her depression, back then, and not a trace of weakness; and again the clock of the world was utterly frozen: for herself, surely, and yet also, she thinks, for everyone else, or at least everyone with whom they came in contact—even if only for a very short while. For two or three beats, maybe; for the amount of time it takes to draw a deep breath.
It was frozen, for a few moments, she is certain of this. The old movies remind her of this, they are her proof.
