Kentucky Traveler (28 page)

I gave him the headphones and cued up “Don't Cheat in Our Hometown.” I think he liked it okay, but when he got to “Honey (Open That Door)” he was bopping in his seat, a big smile on his face. Here was one of the top dogs in the music business, and he looked like a groovin' teenager. He took off the headphones and went from silly to serious in a split second. He wanted to know who produced it.

“Well, I did.”

“Son,” he said. “This could get you a record deal.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but I kept listening, wondering,
Do I tell him I've already got a record deal with Sugar Hill?

He asked if I was staying in Nashville. I was supposed to get back home to Lexington, but I told him I sure could be. So we scheduled a meeting for the next day on Music Row. That's the place in Nashville where all the major record labels and song publishing companies have their headquarters.

When I got to Capitol Records the next day, the top brass were in the office and ready to hear my songs. Jim introduced me to Lynn Schults, the head of Capitol in Nashville. He was as friendly as could be and knew a lot about country music. “Don't Cheat in Our Hometown” was the first song played. I saw Lynn's eyes light up. Next was “Honey (Open that Door).” They all started bopping to the beat.

By the time a song called “Head over Heels in Love with You” started playing, everybody in the room was up dancing. This was too easy! Or so it seemed. They asked me if they could make a copy of the music and send it to the head of EMI. Their boss, Don Grierson, had to sign off on any new artist considered for Capitol or United Artist. I knew the music they were listening to belonged to Sugar Hill, but I kept on.

I said they could make a copy, and they sent it overnight to Mr. Grierson in Los Angeles. The fellows in Nashville told me to come back tomorrow. I was back in the Capitol office late in the afternoon the next day. Lynn was the only one there, and I thought,
This ain't a good sign
. “Ricky,” he said. “I'm as frustrated as I can be. Grierson passed on your music. Said it's ‘too country.' I think he's wrong. I can't do anything to sign you. But I've got an idea.” He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, Rick, gotta few minutes to listen to a new artist? It's good, you'll like it. Okay, I'll send him down.” Lynn told me where the CBS Records building was.

You know, I've often thought back on that day and how odd it was for the head of Capitol Records in Nashville to pick up the phone and call the head of CBS Records in Nashville. He basically gave away an artist to a rival. That sort of goodwill gesture would never happen today. It blows my mind. It was definitely a God thing. He closed one door and was about to open another. Lynn Schults played a huge part in my career, and I'll never forget what he did for me that afternoon. I was a total stranger, just a kid with a cassette.

Music Row is a small world. And it was a real small world thirty years ago. Everybody knew everybody, and every office was a stone's throw from the next. I went down the street, and fifteen minutes later I walked into Rick Blackburn's office. He was waiting for me.

Right from the start, I knew me and Rick were gonna get along fine. He was easy to talk to. We spoke the same language, and we loved the same things, especially when it came to music. He grew up on a farm. Early in his career, he played in a rock-and-roll group called The Sounds that was signed to King Records, the legendary label out of Cincinnati where the Stanley Brothers and James Brown made so many classic recordings.

Now, Rick loved old country, but he had studied trends, too, the way tastes change with every generation. To his thinking, the
Urban Cowboy
craze had worn out its welcome. He figured things were just about to cycle back to the classic country he and I grew up with. He put on the tape, and we listened to “Don't Cheat in Our Hometown.” He remembered the original by the Stanleys and liked what I'd done with it: polished off an old chestnut. He could tell I wasn't just a throwback or a revivalist. I was a carrier of an old tradition.

“That's a hit!” he said. “This can work.”

Then “Honey (Open That Door)” came on. This one really caught his attention.

“Oh, wow, that's a smash! It worked for Webb, and I think it could work for you, too. Who in the heck produced this stuff?”

“I did,” I said. “And by the way, if we get serious about a deal, I want to produce my music.”

Rick sorta winced, and I knew I'd hit a sore spot. He said that Larry Gatlin was the only artist at the label who produced his own records. “That's a tall order on your first album,” he said. “I've got to think about that.”

I didn't want it to be a deal-breaker. I just wanted him to know up front that it was important to me. “I know a lot more about Ricky Skaggs than anyone else here in town,” I said. “If you like what you hear, I can do it again. I know my limitations and what I do best. I know what I can sing and what I can't sing. I don't want to sound like Nashville. I want to sound like me.”

I told him I'd make a deal with him: If we didn't have any success with my first album, I'd be willing to take on a coproducer. “That's fair, ain't it?”

“Who owns this stuff?” he said.

“Sugar Hill does.”

He'd never heard of Sugar Hill Records. I explained that it was an independent label out of North Carolina, that I had already recorded one album for them, and that what he was listening to was for the second release.

“Well, it's great stuff, and I want to sign you,” he said. “You hungry?”

I wasn't sure if he meant hungry for a record deal or for lunch, and to tell the truth I was hungry for both. “Sure, I'm always ready to eat!”

So we drove over to Ireland's, a restaurant nearby that had steak and biscuits. It was a popular meeting place on Music Row. Before I knew it, Rick was scribbling a record deal on a table napkin. He was already mapping out my future, and we'd hadn't even had anything to eat yet.

I stayed firm on what I'd said about producing my own records. I didn't have the clout to be so stubborn, but I was young and naïve, and I really believed my main selling point was that I had my own sound. I told Rick about how the Sugar Hill single had gotten airplay in several cities with hardly any promotion. About how the deejays said callers were flooding the stations with requests to hear it, and how folks were dancing to it in Texas. Rick was listening.

Rick liked that I was willing to take a risk. There's a little bit of gambler in everybody, and he wanted to roll the dice on me. So we hammered out my first record deal right there at a table in Ireland's. That's how fast I signed up with Epic, a subsidiary of CBS. I guess it was my destiny, 'cause it sure wasn't on account of very much haggling!

To be honest, I wasn't the one taking a chance; I didn't have anything to lose. Rick did, and he went out on a limb for me. People in the promotions department thought he was out of his mind. Here I was, an unheard-of and unproven artist, and Rick was giving me free rein and a key to the studio. I felt like I couldn't let him down. I knew I had to make good records, and come in under budget and on time, too.

Meanwhile, I got word from Emmy. She was just about to deliver her second daughter. She told me she was going to take a year off and focus on being a full-time mama. She said the band was on hiatus. When I told her about my record deal, she was happy to hear the good news.

My career finally seemed to be taking off. The only problem was my personal life was falling apart.

Now the seven wonders of the world I've seen

It's many other different places I have been
.

—“Ramblin' Blues,” by Charlie Poole, 1929

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
.

I'm worried now but I won't be worried long
.

—“Worried Man Blues,” by the Carter Family, 1929

I
was laid off. On the horizon I had the chance for a whole new career, but in the meantime I was just trying to pay the bills. This was a very strange period of my life. I was so busy I didn't know where I was a lot of the time, but it was usually a studio somewhere. I was a picker for hire, doing all the session work I could. No job was too big or too small. I ain't never been shy of working.

I was burning it at both ends, going from the West Coast to the East Coast and back again, flying the friendly skies. Some jobs were in Los Angeles, back on Lania Lane with Brian. I helped out on albums by Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, and Tony Rice. I was always happy to get a paying gig, and I always did my best to lend a hand however I could.

There was a lot of work in Nashville, too. I've never been able to make my living as a songwriter, but I always found plenty of work picking and singing. Chet Atkins helped open some doors for me. There weren't many producers with more clout than Chet, and he hired me for a bunch of sessions.

I remember when Chet produced an album for Janie Fricke that I played fiddle and sang on. I had a ball watching the old master at work. He'd come out in between songs and grab his guitar and we'd play some old fiddle tunes. Chet also played fiddle. I asked him to play for me, he played “Arkansas Traveler.” I learned a lot from him about the Nashville way of recording, which was a little different from the way Brian recorded in LA. Nashville used the number system for their charts. For example, G, C, and D would be written 1, 4, and 5. If you started with 1 being G, you would count up to 4 and have C, and then count one more and have D. It's just a simple way to know where you are in any key instead of having to read sheet music as they do in LA.

What made a good session man back then was to play what was called for and not a note more. You needed to check your ego at the door and look at every job as being part of a team. It's a little different nowadays, especially in bluegrass. I want guys to play what they can when I have them in the studio. It shows off their talents, and it lets folks know that I like sharing the spotlight. I'd rather have a player with a good heart and a teachable spirit than one with all the talent in the world, yearning to be the star of the show.

Most of all, a session player has to be adaptable and go with the flow. Every job is different, and some are a whole lot different. One week I played fiddle on a superstar session for Bobby Bare, with a major label. The next week I was in a different studio, hired to help produce and arrange a “comeback” album by Jimmy Murphy, who hadn't cut a record for years. Murphy was totally unique, sort of a rockabilly Rip Van Winkle. A session like that, you do it for the love of the music, not for the money.

Jimmy Murphy was a character. Back in the '50s and early '60s, he'd cut dynamite records like “Sixteen Tons Rock and Roll” and “Baboon Boogie” in Nashville, and then he'd quit music and worked as a bricklayer. It was like he'd stepped out of a time machine, the way he looked and the way he played. He had this Hank Snow kind of hairpiece, for one thing, to make up for his middle-aged baldness, and he had this intense, religious demeanor like some guy you'd see in a snake-handling church. It was that explosive fusion of the spiritual and the worldly, that Pentecostal fervor you find in a lot of Southern musicians, like Jerry Lee Lewis, the gospel-bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, and Brother Claude Ely, the Holiness singing preacher from Kentucky.

It seemed to me Jimmy had this battle going on between the Pentecostal music and the hard-core rockabilly, like two sides of the same coin, Saturday night and Sunday morning. Holiness music and rockabilly are kin, really; it's the same groove and rhythm and raucousness. About the only thing different is the lyrics. Jimmy played both kinds, and you could tell he loved 'em both but couldn't quite reconcile those different worlds.

It was the first time I'd landed in a studio with somebody who was cut from that kind of cloth, with those two sides to it. It was also the first time I'd heard somebody play with an open-string tuning on guitar. There was a lot of blues in his guitar licks and a lot of church in his singing, which reminded me of those house-rockin' Holiness services I heard as a boy back in Brushy. I remember one song in particular, “Holy Ghost Millionaire,” that pretty much sums up Jimmy's music.

The album, called
Electricity
, was released in 1979 and earned rave reviews, but it didn't make Jimmy any richer, and me neither. I ain't complaining, though. I had loads of fun. If you can't have a good time on sessions with Bobby Bare and Jimmy Murphy, then something ain't right. You're probably taking yourself way too seriously!

But no matter how much fun I had, and no matter how much I worked, I sure wasn't earning much. Most sessions paid $150 to $200 back then. You had to work a whole lot of sessions and show dates to make it all add up. With Emmylou, I was on salary and had been getting a healthy paycheck every week. That was on hold. I had a house payment and a mailbox full of bills and a young family to support. To tell you the truth, I was happier at work than I was at home at that time. My marriage with Brenda was just about over. We had filed for divorce, but it wasn't final yet. Technically, I was still living in Lexington, but I was away more often than not. Whenever I was there, it was to see the kids and try to get some rest. “Try” being the key word there, because it was definitely not harmonious at home. There was a lot of fussin' and fumin' and hollerin', times when our language got a little too loud and the children could hear, so I'd try to stay gone to keep the peace. Seemed like the only time my marriage was on good terms was when I was away from home. That's another reason I stayed so busy. I felt sorry for Brenda and bad about the situation we were in. I was doing my best to keep the bills paid, and she was doing her best with the kids and keeping the house up. It was a tough situation for us both.