Composed (3 page)

If Magritte had painted my childhood, it would be a chaos of floating snakes, white oxfords, dead Chihuahuas, and pink hair rollers. Bolts of gold lamé and chiffon would be draped over everything, stained with coffee and burned with cigarettes, and garden hoes would be wielded by drunks with guitars. Glass jars full of spiders and amphetamines would line the walls behind the sliding mirrored doors. The landscape would be barren and steep and full of animal treachery. There is nothing green. There is no oxygen. I am a foreigner in this painting. I look at it as if in a museum. I can talk about the color of the oils and the depth of field, how the two dimensions feel like three when I know there are four, but I cannot be a line drawing or even an abstract smudge in the center and survive to describe it.

Sometimes, in my present life, when I am lying awake in the night with the Nameless Dread, if I can trace it back to the school on the hill, the house on the hill, the car lights wandering up the long drive to park at our door and ring our bell, to the sound of pouring coffee, the smell of cigarettes, the rattlesnakes who lived just beyond the fence, the dead Chihuahuas in the shoebox on the roof, the tarantulas and scorpions in mayonnaise jars, the scythe and the waist-high weeds which I whacked so hard that I swung around and whacked myself in the forearm, if I can conjure these pictures to attach to the dread, then I can free myself from the present moment and I sleep. But most of the time I avoid such conjuring. Most of the time I don’t go back at all. Most of the time I stand next to Magritte.

O
f the many delivery vehicles that made their way up the steep hill to our Casitas Springs home, the Helms Bakery truck was my favorite, and I would always run outside when I heard it bump across the cattle grate at the top of the drive. One day I bolted out through the garage to greet the driver just as he flung open the back doors as if he were revealing the mysteries of a gypsy wagon. I practically swooned at the sight of hundreds of cakes, pies, tarts, and breads.

“Do you take the truck home at night?” I asked.

“Yes.” He smiled at me.

“How do you keep from eating all this stuff when you get home?”

“Well, if you’re around it all day, you want to get away from it when you go home at night. Does your daddy sit around and sing all day when he comes home off the road?”

I pondered for a moment. “Well, no.”

It was the answer he expected, and so I gave it, but what I was thinking then, and what I understand more clearly now, is that it’s not just the singing you bring home with you. It’s the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter, and the daily handling of your instrument if you are a musician, and the humming and scratching and pushing and testing of the voice, the reveling in the melodies if you are a singer. More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace. My father did all of those, as a habit of being. He provided a template for me, of how to live with integrity as an artist day to day.

I belong to an extended family of musicians whose members sprawl across generations. Some occupy positions of great acclaim (my father and my stepmother’s family, the Carters), some have modest but respectable careers marked by persistence and hard work (my uncle Tommy Cash), while others never made it much further than anecdotal obscurity (my maternal uncle “Wildman” Ray Liberto, a onetime raucous honky-tonk piano player with a handlebar mustache), and some are just embarking (my daughter Chelsea). At sixteen I did not intend to take my place among them. Tradition was anathema to me; I understood that any real rebellion in which I could engage would involve taking a nondomestic, or artistic but nonmusical, path. My mother had had a strict Italian Catholic upbringing, which pretty much defined her views about a woman’s place in the world, and my father was an enormously visible performer. I had a fierce though silent desire to live a different life. I would not be a housewife, nor would I seek fame as a singer. I would be an archaeologist and move to a kibbutz. (An odd choice for a Catholic girl, perhaps, but so much the better.) I would go to medical school and write poetry. Change and newness: They would define my life.

Then, when I was a day out of high school, my father took me on the road. It was something of a graduation gift, and a chance to catch up on some of the time we had lost. Traveling the world, watching him perform, and singing on the bus were also the basis for a serious education. Early on he made a list of a hundred essential country songs, which he instructed me to learn, a wide-ranging selection that ran from old history-lesson songs like “The Battle of New Orleans” to classics like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” As I was ushered into this treasury of song, it was thrilling to learn more about my father through his great love for the music. I learned to play guitar from my stepmother’s sister Helen, from Mother Maybelle Carter, and from Carl Perkins, all of whom were on the road with Dad at the time. Each day I spent many hours in dressing rooms, practicing chords and the old songs they taught me. I discovered a passion for songwriting that remains undiminished to this day and that led me into my life as a writer and singer—into my family’s vocation.

At the heart of all real country music lies family, lies a devotion to exploring the bonds of blood ties, both in performance and in songwriting. Of course, there have been notable families in pop music—the Jacksons, the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers—and parents and children have sung all manner of music together or in succession—Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, Tim Buckley and Jeff Buckley, Hank Williams and his progeny, Loudon Wainwright III and his children. But the community of country music has always emphasized the family connection, reveling in it, and there seems to be both less rivalry among its members and less need for its children to break away on their own musical terms. (Although that was an impulse that I struggled with mightily for the first fifteen years of my own career.) Country and roots music treat family as a rich and fascinating source of material for its songs.

As a teenager, I saw the Earl Scruggs Revue perform perhaps twenty times and held my breath for those moments when laconic Earl would glance at one of his sons, who had just performed a phenomenal solo, in a fleeting moment of approbation. Doc and Merle Watson also had a special resonance for me as performers in that they were so close—in their genetic gifts, in their attitudes, and in their quiet respect for each other—that it was a privilege to be in their audience. I was certain that they treated each other the same offstage as on. When Merle died in 1985, it was painful to imagine the enormity of the loss for Doc. He lost not only his son but his musical soul mate. It is comforting to know that Doc now plays music with his grandson, Merle’s son.

It was riveting in a different respect to watch the Judds at the height of their career work out their mother-daughter tensions onstage. Every subtle gesture—Naomi stroking Wynonna’s hair and the almost imperceptible flinch it provoked, or the intense glances from one to the other that were ignored—spoke volumes, and every adult daughter in the audience could relate. In my own performing, I’ve found it impossible to stay mad at anyone I love when I’m onstage with him or her. Arguments and grudges melt away under the spotlights and the audience’s gaze. I feel that I should somehow be better onstage, more magnanimous, and sometimes I
am
better. One of the sweetest moments of my life occurred the last time my dad played Carnegie Hall. I had been a little angry with him the day before the show and had brought up some old grievances, which he listened to with patient grace. After hearing me out, he invited me to sing “I Still Miss Someone” with him the next night. I demurred. The day of the performance, he asked me if I had changed my mind and would join him onstage. I had a fierce headache and told him again that I could not do it. I went to his hotel that evening before the performance, and for the third time, he asked me to join him during the show. I declined once more, but as I watched him walk out of the room, there was something about the look of his back, and the look of him walking away, and the memory of the thousands of times I had seen his strong back from the wings as he faced an audience, that made me suddenly realize what it meant to him. I called after him. “Dad. I’ll do it,” I said. That night, as we sang together, all the old pain dissolved. I felt the longing to connect completely satisfied. Under the lights, in the safety of a few thousand people who loved us like crazy just then, I got something from my dad that I’d been trying to get since I was about six years old. Oddly, I don’t think we’d ever been as close.

Performed by families and often about family, traditional country music spares nothing and no one in its gaze. In the deeply morbid early country songs about topics like dead babies, for example, lie the hard truths about mountain life. The best in this tragic genre—according to my dad, anyway—is an old tune called “The Engineer’s Dying Child.” The engineer’s baby is sick, but he has to go to work and drive ol’ No. 9, or whatever number it is, and so bids his wife:

Just hang a light when I pass tonight—
Hang it so it can be seen.
If the baby’s dead, then show the red;
If it’s better, then show the green.

Happily the engineer sees green, but most infants did not fare so well in early Appalachian songs, which provided a way to take account of the losses and gather comfort.

A mother is the most revered member of the family in traditional country music, a figure whose mention holds the greatest emotional charge. The “country classic of them all” (again, according to Dad) is “Sweeter Than the Flowers,” cowritten by Ervin Rouse, who also wrote “Orange Blossom Special.” It begins:

Yes, as far as I can remember
She’ll remain the rose of my heart.
Mom took sick along in December;
February brought us broken hearts.
The reason we’ve not called a fam’ly reunion,
We knew that she wouldn’t be there,
But since we’ve thought it all over, Mama,
We know that your spirit is there.

If this is not wrenching enough, the song continues (with a line that boasts one of the all-time great rhymes):

No, no, there’s no need to bother;
To speak of you now would only hurt father.

This couplet just kills me, so to speak.

Modern country music speaks less of such desperate loss, and has become shiny and rich and rather shallow as a result. The dead have all but disappeared, though they do occasionally surface. Back in the eighties, George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” had everyone swooning with morbid joy.

The family has likewise faded in country, as sexual heat has begun to obsess most singers and songwriters, just as it does in pop music. Anyone who has listened to old honky-tonk knows that pairing up and breaking up has always been a theme of country, but today it is
the
theme: The airwaves are soggy with songs about romance, desire, longing for love, love that got away, love gone wrong, standing up to or by your man or woman, loneliness, frustration, carnal passion, lovers’ quarrels, and on and on. It’s all legitimate subject matter, certainly, and good fodder for song, but the hormonal flushes of love affairs are not the only thing going on in a life. Mostly hidden from view are the other potent relationships, forged of blood and shared history, rich with emotional content, ripe for exploration. As Bruce Springsteen—one of the most family-inspired songwriters of the last two decades—said in “Highway Patrolman,” “Nothing feels better than blood on blood.”

I lasted for two and a half years on the bus with my father until, feeling the constraint a young girl feels in the constant presence of a parent, I moved to London. But an important part of my heart and soul was given form and expression on that bus, and I came to realize how a shared passion forges deep bonds between people, defining a family more deeply than blood connection alone could do. Years later I called my dad to ask him about the old songs—particularly songs about mothers, babies, brothers and sisters, fathers and grandparents. He gave me titles, years, and the names of the recording artists, and then sang them to me over the phone, verse by verse, growing more excited with each new recollection. As he had an appointment to keep, he told me to call back the following day so we could continue to talk about the songs “for a long time.”

“I know
all
of them!” he boasted happily.

I thought about those old songs all night long and called him back first thing the next morning so he could sing the entirety of “Sweeter Than the Flowers” to me. He paused at the end as I scribbled down the lyrics.

“There’s a whole other group of songs, if you’re interested,” he said.

“About what?” I asked.

“Dead dogs,” he answered solemnly, and proceeded to rattle off a list of titles.

I laughed, but what I was really thinking about was that bakery truck back in Casitas Springs and how I had lied to the driver. We do take our deliveries home at night, and everything comes inside, and we’re not shy about getting our fill.

T
here have been very few times when I could say with certainty that my life would change irrevocably in the course of a day. In fact, there may have been only this one occasion. I am more accustomed to lethargy and emotional sputtering when working up to a life transition, but January 5, 1976, was different. I was twenty years old. At around midnight I was sitting on a beach near Montego Bay. I had been in Jamaica for about a month with my dad and stepmother at their house, Cinnamon Hill, an eighteenth-century sugar plantation great house, originally built and owned for over two hundred years by the family of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (She never visited Cinnamon Hill herself, due to fragile health, but many of her ancestors and their descendants are buried just down the hill from the house in the Barrett family cemetery.)

In the three years before that January night, I had spent many weeks at Cinnamon Hill. Though the house was haunted—a fact freely acknowledged by skeptics and believers alike—and creaky and a bit damp, I loved it beyond reason. Its battered stone walls, two feet thick in some places, had withstood a hundred hurricanes. Massive mahogany beams crossed the fourteen-foot ceilings of the drawing room, and its floors were of the same wood, polished to a high cherry gloss. Growing on the property were wild orchids, palms, bougainvillea, and every variety of fern and Caribbean broad-leafed plant, and from checkerboard-tiled porches on three sides of the house one could enjoy the aromatic breezes and middle-distance view of the ocean. In the front yard, near the palm-lined white stone drive, were two cannons from the old town of Port Royal, which had sunk completely into the sea after an earthquake in the seventeenth century, and an enormous corroded lead basin that had been used to stir the boiling sugar in Cinnamon Hill’s eighteenth-century heyday. (On a trip to Jamaica many years later, Bill Murray, who was filming a comedy special with his brothers on the Cinnamon Hill golf course, came by for a visit. When he saw the giant basin in the yard, now overflowing with vines and blossoms, he remarked, “I love what you’ve done with your wok.”)

The whole estate was resonant with the lives and deaths of Barretts, the history of the Jamaican sugarcane industry, and the rich and languid temper of island life.

We had massive bonfires on the beach over Christmas and New Year’s holidays with our close friends the Rollinses, candlelit dinners with the shutters thrown wide open on the deep-set windows, and a Southern black-eyed pea lunch at the Rollinses’ on New Year’s Day, where every pea consumed represented a dollar to be made in the coming year.

My father and John Rollins, two very large and charismatic men, presided over all the holiday events with tremendous humor, generosity, intelligence, and largeness of spirit. Although they were best friends, my father tended to defer to John Rollins in subtle ways in conversation, due to John’s greater age and vaster wealth and his ability to genially command the world around him to bend to his ideas and plans. I cannot think of another person, apart from his own father, to whom my father responded in that particular way. I adored John Rollins, who was a superb raconteur with a refined sense of irony, and truly a self-made man. As a boy, he had studied obituaries in the newspaper to find when a funeral was taking place so he could unobtrusively slip into the family wake and get a free meal. Although by 1976 he was one of the richest men in the country, he and my father would try to “out-poor” each other at the dinner table with stories of their childhoods of abject poverty.

Now the holiday festivities were over, and I was at the precipice of a new life. I had been on the road with my dad for two and a half years, I had managed to get in a year’s college credits, and I was restless. I was moving to London the very next day and I had gone down to the beach to ritualize this event, if only to myself. I was nursing a broken heart, and I wanted to put the Atlantic Ocean between myself and Randy Scruggs. This was not the only reason I was moving to England, but it was a good enough one at the time. Randy and I had never had a relationship, beyond a few awkward dates where he sat in my dad’s living room and played his guitar while I listened rapturously. But I had a longing, both for him and even more for the idea of him. I had been nurturing a fantasy of joining our two families, musically and personally, and I was riveted by Randy’s quiet but intense demeanor, both in person and onstage. I went to see him play with his dad and brothers in the Earl Scruggs Revue so many times—just about every place they played in the South. I had held out hope for a year or so that Randy was my destiny, but I had recently learned that he was going to marry. The thought of London had been in the back of my mind for years, and this seemed like the perfect time to go.

Jeff and Ted Rollins, John’s sons, a few years younger than I, had followed me down to the beach. They tended to follow me around a lot in Jamaica. The boys sat very quietly on the sand as I stared at the sky and listened to the waves. More than an hour went by in this reverie, with the boys just waiting for me, never saying a word. I cannot remember the specifics of any epiphanies, only that I was overcome with a vague but grand sense of limitless possibility for my life, and an almost painful feeling of excitement and happiness. It seems impossible now to think of being so full of feelings that were utterly unambiguous. I don’t believe I have felt so strong a rush of unadulterated optimism and joy since that night. I was happy without the slightest tinge of poignancy, or underlying anxiety, about how my plans for the future might affect anyone else. Anything could happen to me, and whatever it might be could only be magnificent.

I was about to go through immigration at the Montego Bay airport the following day when I realized that I had left my coat at Cinnamon Hill. I was going to step off the plane in London into a winter day, and I was wearing only a girlish, almost infantile sundress of pale blue, with short puff sleeves and a modest square neck, that came just to my knees. Ted Rollins, ever present and so eager to please, immediately volunteered to have Dad’s security guard drive him at top speed to Cinnamon Hill to retrieve the coat. He brought it to me minutes before my flight took off, and I hurled thank-yous at him as I sprinted happily out onto the tarmac. I took my seat in first class—Dad treated me very well in those years I spent with him after high school—next to a distinguished-looking English gentleman. After quizzically looking me up and down, he leaned over and said with a smile, “Pardon me, but could you sign this paper for my daughter? I’m sure you are a very famous rock star, and I don’t know who you are, but she will know.”

Embarrassed, I said, “No, sir, I’m not. She wouldn’t know who I am.”

He shoved the paper at me. “Please,” he said, and smiled again. I signed the paper, flushed, guilty, and excited. My new life was in full swing, and the plane hadn’t even taken off.

I arrived in London with the sheen of anticipatory greatness worn a bit dull due to exhaustion and creeping uncertainty. From the view in Jamaica, London was nothing less than Oz. Emerging from customs, it was just a big, crowded airport. Hundreds of people, looking for other travelers, fixed their eyes on me momentarily as I came through the automatic doors into the terminal. I was alarmed and started to turn around. A throng of tired new arrivals were at my heels, and I swung back around and pushed my cart forward, red faced and grim.

In 1976 I was, despite my grand plans and bravado, a timid girl. I had asked a member of the sound crew from my father’s last European tour with whom I had become friendly to meet me at the airport and drop me at my hotel. I passed the crowd and the length of the barricade without seeing him. I waited near the front doors to the terminal until he showed up, nearly half an hour later. He seemed distracted and not terribly happy to see me and quickly ushered me into his car, where we rode in silence to my hotel. When I mentioned getting together later, he mumbled that he had plans. It was the only time I saw him during the six months I lived in England.

I had sent my trunk ahead of me, which had been retrieved by the copresidents of my father’s fan club in Britain, a kind and devoted couple who were very gracious and solicitous of my welfare as a young girl on my own in a foreign country. They had shown up at the airport unannounced just as my other ride arrived, but I was eager to go off with the young man, who held the promise of excitement and fun and new friends, and I politely declined their offer of a ride. They invited me to their house for dinner several times over the next few months, but I had decided that they were probably dull and conservative and imagined strained conversations about my father over glasses of sherry. I always found an excuse not to go. To this day I feel twinges of guilt about my lack of appreciation and courtesy.

I stayed at the Portman Hotel for three weeks while I looked for an apartment. Dreary Portman Square was full of sullen businessmen passing through in gray suits, but it was the only hotel I knew, as I had stayed there on my last trip to London, and I did not have imagination enough to search out a better place.

My dad had arranged a job for me at his label, CBS Records. I had begun a major in music theory at the community college I’d attended, but I had no real understanding of how the music business worked and no office skills whatsoever.

Maurice Oberstein, the president of the UK division of the label, met with me in his office and asked about my interests and abilities, graciously treating me as if I were a valuable new asset to the company rather than a favor to be done for the child of one of his top artists.

I was nervous and subdued, but I gamely tried to present myself as a young woman who would bring a fresh perspective to the company. At the end of the conversation, Obie told me that he would pay me forty pounds a week, under the table, and assigned me to the position of assistant in the artist relations department under the supervision of Derek Witt, über-publicist and the first outright queen I ever knew. Derek’s codirector in the artist relations department was Anthea Joseph, legendary cofounder of the Troubadour in London. When Bob Dylan arrived in London in 1963, he brought a note with him from Pete Seeger: “Find the Troubadour. Ask for Anthea.” She was the first person to put him on a London stage, and she is immortalized in one scene of the epic 1967 Dylan documentary
Don’t Look Back
, in which she is being reassured by Bob after a hotel glass-breaking incident. Her main job at CBS seemed to be smoking heavily and having lengthy and intense phone conversations and lunches with musicians, artists, Communists, and intellectuals of all sorts.

Anthea had a tremendous influence on me. Her intellectual rigor, combined with an eccentric personality and a passion for music, was absolutely riveting—as was her own oddness. Tall and angular, with a great gap between her two front teeth, stringy brown hair, and social service wire-rimmed glasses, she wore narrow jeans and low-heeled boots as a virtual uniform, which in 1976 I read as sartorial code for an anarchist. It was thrilling. Her perpetual expression was one of bemusement at some private joke combined with an intense, piercing gaze. At the same time she had a permanent air of exasperation because she knew no one could ever meet her intensity head-on. She was the subject of an inordinate amount of gossip and resentment from people in the department who complained that she didn’t actually do any work, but I thought we were incredibly lucky that she deigned to show up at all. I longed to know what Anthea knew. I wanted to listen in on her conversations, and I wanted her experience and her biting tongue. My own intellectual rigor was nonexistent and my sophistication was nascent at best, but Anthea was extraordinarily tolerant of me, even congenial, and I knew her feelings were genuine, because she never hesitated to take me to task when she felt it was warranted.

I developed a friendship, and a terrible crush, on Malcolm Eade, a young man whose office was at the opposite end of the floor from mine on the way to the coffee room. I managed to make myself available to fetch coffee for everyone in the department, several times a day, so that I could stop by Malcolm’s office for a chat, or just peer in at him soulfully as I went by. He was fair-haired and boyish, well mannered and shy, which at the time seemed to me to be a great deal to recommend any man my age. I spent so much time in his office that it’s hard to believe I didn’t get him fired. I myself could not be fired, as I did not have a real job, but Malcolm, in his kindness, allowed me to test the parameters of my newly formed and awkward notions of enticement as I sat in the chair opposite his desk. Nothing ever happened between us, not even a kiss, but I had never felt so perfectly accepted by any man. I tried out all sorts of personalities and opinions in front of Malcolm, and if I tested his patience, he never once let on. If Anthea was a slightly terrifying but endlessly compelling role model, Malcolm was a seductive and innocent dream.

I was given a desk that was crammed into the corner of the office of a department staff member, David, and it somehow never managed to cross my mind that he might well have considered me an intruder: Johnny Cash’s kid on a lark in London, taking up a good deal of his space for the purpose of absolutely nothing that he could ascertain. Still, he was kind, and did not even resent his orders from Derek to take me around to find a flat. David did suggest that we tell prospective landlords that I was his secretary, “to make things smoother.” I self-importantly balked at this, as he was not senior enough to have a secretary, and the plan felt strangely lascivious to me, but I see now that that little ego stroke was the very least I could give him in return. Eventually, he did help me locate a flat, a small, lovely third-floor walk-up at No. 3 Carlingford Road, in Hampstead. (Later, I met David’s fiancée, an immaculately put-together and aggressive blonde who favored shiny suits in shades of steel gray with matching stiletto-heeled boots, had perfectly straight and sleek almost-white hair, and wore near-Kabuki-style makeup. She scared me to death, though she dripped honey when she spoke. One evening shortly after my arrival, as we were having drinks after work at a wine bar, she thoroughly looked me over and said thoughtfully, and not unkindly, “You aren’t very glamorous, are you?” I didn’t answer, in part because I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted, and in part because I wasn’t sure what the answer was. After many years of wrestling with that question, I decided that she was partly correct. I like a little glamour, just not so obvious, and a bit more rock and roll than business dominatrix.