Country Music Broke My Brain (25 page)

I think Burl was about 100 when he was on my
Saturday Night House Party,
a middling effort I hosted for several years to rev up radio on a Saturday evening. I had Burl on as a guest, on the phone from Los Angeles. I could hear his wife prompting him about my name and what he was plugging. We were ready.

I did quite a lovely and glowing introduction of Burl for the audience. I mentioned the movies and the writing and the singing. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Burl Ives.”

Ten seconds of silence were followed by one of those snorts you give when you're so asleep you forget to breathe. You wanna get to sleep? Listen to me on the radio.

Ol' Burl had no sleep problems at all.

Who actually said this to me: “I ain't scared. I once made love in a canoe standing up”?

A)
  
Trace Adkins

B)
  
Betty White

C)
  
Carrie Underwood

Why Don't We Do It in the Road?

I
WORKED, AND I USE that term loosely, for a couple of years on the biggest country station in Los Angeles. It was tough, a real slog. I won't go into detail, but some of the folks I worked with were great, and some were a royal pain. It was always fun, however, seeing the stars out buying groceries and having their teeth fixed. In Nashville, you are likely to see Keith Urban driving through Fatburger or Martina McBride buying asparagus at Kroger's. Betty White is one of the national treasures I saw several times in L.A. She was and still is a huge animal lover. Our little peezers who live with us, Lucy and Desi, are part of the family. Betty always turned up at any event to help a little stray.

I agreed to do my show live from the Palamino, one of the few “country” venues in L.A. It shut down a few years ago, but at one time, it was
the
place for up-and-coming country acts to visit. So, here I stood
behind
the bar at the Palamino at five forty-five in the morning. It was obviously a bar and smelled like it. I saw a little figure making her way toward the bar through the tables full of upturned chairs. She hopped up on a bar stool and grinned at everybody. It was Betty White.

All those TV shows, games, series, movies, interviews, and appearances sat on that little bar stool. We might raise a few bucks for the Adopt-a-Pet Foundation. She absolutely glowed. I handed her a microphone and said, “We're going live in a few seconds, are you scared?” Her reply was hilarious; it was vintage Betty White, and wasn't for anybody but me. As she said during the show, “I love dogs because they are just as excited to see you coming back from getting the paper as they are when you come back from Europe.”

I jump up and down whenever I see Betty White.

The Woods and the Sticks

I
LOVE THE WOODS. Heck, I grew up in the woods. OK, technically, I grew up in the sticks. The difference is that the woods are where chipmunks hop and frolic. You can smell honeysuckle and jasmine in the air. Soft modern jazz plays in the woods. Snow falls gently in the woods. The rain caresses the lovely green canopy of the woods. It's what you see in Disney films. Rabbits kiss and fawns nuzzle while bluebirds sing overhead.

The sticks are the rednecks of woods. The sticks are great but usually populated with guys pointing guns while takin' a chaw of tobacco. The sticks smell faintly of old socks. Nothing good happens in the sticks. That thing from
Alien
won't go into the sticks by himself.

You get slightly lost in the woods. In the sticks, you step into an old well or a huntin' trap. If the sticks were people, they would be that guy who catches turtles with his bare hands. The sticks have that same grin. Wild hogs come flying out at ya in the sticks. You never hear banjo music in the woods. Quite often while crashing through the sticks, you can hear the faint sound of
Deliverance.
Ba-da-BUM-Bah-BUM.

Here is the main difference between the woods and the sticks: in the woods, a young girl dressed in an L.L. Bean outfit, wearing a ponytail and ball cap, walks hand in hand with a guy wearing chinos and a white shirt. They pause at a stream. They can walk gazing into each other's eyes for miles and meander past a pond with lilies. In the background, you can hear “Wind Beneath My Wings.” The woods are where you picnic. The woods are nature's theme park. Mary Poppins has a summer house here.

When you enter the sticks, on the other hand, you are immediately, almost magically, covered in burrs—those things that stick on you like Velcro that you can't pull off your clothes. Ticks, which sit waiting patiently like people waiting on the five o'clock bus, find places on your body you've never seen. Chiggers, God's revenge on the sticks, begin their work. Chiggers have something in their jaws that can cause misery for weeks. Thorns the size of ten-penny nails reach out at you and draw first blood, or whatever's left after the ticks and chiggers have done their work. Poison ivy grows like kudzu, and kudzu grows like kudzu. It's a scientific fact that nearly all of Alabama is covered in kudzu. If you fly over Alabama, it looks like green shag carpeting was installed overnight.

It usually starts raining when you are in the sticks. Actually, it starts
pouring
—what they call a real “frog choker.” I've been in the sticks and actually heard frogs choking. It's not pretty.

The usual trip in the sticks, for whatever purpose—hiking, hunting, or looking for Sasquatch—begins at the end of a country road. Off the country road is a gravel road. The gravel road leads to a dirt road. The dirt road leads to a path. The path then leads to the sticks. You hear a banjo strum. Another frog chokes. You are now 100 miles from the nearest Stuckey's. Your phone doesn't work. You hear Ned Beatty scream somewhere in the distance. There is nothing now . . . nothing but the fierce wilderness of the sticks surrounding you like Indians on Custer.

You wander aimlessly through blackberry brambles and poke sallet. Civilization is just a rumor. You crash and turn and search for even the most remote clearing. Stumbling forward into the green, itchy oblivion, you are now officially classified as a missing person. No one has ever been here. Not Lewis. Not Clark. Not even an Indian. This is untouched land. Then, as you feel the overwhelming remoteness rise up from the kudzu, you see it.

A stove. Probably something from Sears. Not an ancient, wood-burning wonder, but a stove like you saw in your Aunt Velma's kitchen last Thanksgiving. Somebody carried a
stove
into the heart of darkness and dumped it there, along with some bald tires and a half-filled garbage bag of drywall.

No, you are not in the woods, you are in the sticks. As man asks, “Is there life on Mars?” and as we ponder the building of the pyramids and formations of crop circles, why has no one solved the mystery of the stove in the sticks? (Where is Stephen King when we need him?) The truth is that it's why country people go to the sticks. When you hear them announce they're going hunting, they are really not after squirrels or wild turkey; they are really hoping to find another Kenmore. And if they are lucky and go far enough, a fridge.

My agent, Frank, asked me, “What does this have to do with country music?” It has
everything
to do with country music, although you wouldn't know it if I didn't explain as follows:

All the artists in the Country & Western world fall into one of those two categories. Jason Aldean, Gretchen Wilson, and Brantley Gilbert are from the sticks. Keith Urban, Ronnie Dunn, and Carrie Underwood are from the woods. One is not any better than the other, just different.

Do not make the mistake of noticing “sticks” rhymes with “hicks.” Just because somebody is really, really country doesn't mean they ain't smart. Conversely (I love saying that), the more sophisticated-looking, “woodsy” type could easily be a hidden dullard. The difference is that one of them might collect beaver pelts and the other has a house filled with Louis XIV antiques.

I made that mistake early on by insinuating to Conway Twitty that he probably didn't know what I was talking about. Conway, to be honest, probably wouldn't have done all that well on
Jeopardy
, but he knew what was going on. He shot back, “Son, you know we get CNN at our house just like you do.” It was a little lesson. Just because someone is standing in front of you in tiny running shorts, a skin-tight T-shirt, and a polyester ball cap perched on his head doesn't mean he don't know
some
things. After all, Mr. Twitty had recorded some of the most “woods”-like songs in country history: “Love to Lay You Down,” “That's My Job,” and “You've Never Been This Far Before.” I never mentioned to him that he also recorded “You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly” with Loretta Lynn. That song is from the sticks. I hope, Frank, you now understand.

Waylon Jennings

WAYLON
JENNINGS WAS AN OUTLAW. I knew Waylon. He was Lonesome, On'ry & Mean, as one of his albums was titled. He took country to CBGB's in New York City and flattened them. He had quite a life story that's been told several times, but now I get to tell my Waylon story.

First of all, he was hilarious. He was kind and intelligent and very friendly, but most of all, to me, he was a total stitch. He didn't care one gnat's ass what anybody thought of what he said. You had to be prepared for an answer if you asked his opinion. He also held court on a variety of other subjects that floated through his mind, and it was always a hoot.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Learning moment alert!

It was Ol' Hoss (a name my father had also called me) who taught me to stop worrying about others' opinions of me and just have fun and live it up. He also had a way of saying things that summed up the situation like no one else could.

John Lennon liked Waylon, and I always pestered Waylon about their relationship because I am a Beatles fan. Waylon was in the Crickets with Buddy Holly. John Lennon named his band the Beatles because he loved the Crickets so much—there's a lot of stuff going on there.