Well, I arrived in Nashville about this exact same period of time, last
of September, first week of October, in 1962, my ’59 DeSoto reeking of
pig flop from the encounter with the herd of pigs that bedded down in the middle of Highway 60, meandering through
Southeastern Missouri open range, (yes folks that means no fences), and
going through them at 75 miles an hour at 1AM in the morning. Actually,
I had arrived on the hill on Highway 41, just West of Nashville,
looking down into the basin, formed by the mountains that surrounds it,
pulled over to the side of the road and just being awe struck with the
view, through the fog of the Cumberland and the smoke from the coal
furnaces. Yessir, there it was, the City called Music, and I had a song
to sing and I believed the world had an ear to listen. I was running mighty low on operating capital, having just about 40 dollars left from the original borrowed 50 dollars I left Springfield, Missouri with the day before. Boy, this .31 cent gas and .50 cent hamburgers in a greasy truck stop, not to mention the breakfast at a roadside restaurant in Mayfield, Kentucky that cost a total of $1.50, with only three eggs, hash browns, three slices of bacon, biscuits and gravy, a large glass of milk and a cup of coffee to go. Man, this traveling is getting expensive!
Well, I had an ace in the hole that was gonna make it all work out….my long time friend Jimmy Gateley, who was raised just over the hill from our farm where I grew up, and who went to Pleasant Hope High School just five years ahead of me, had invited me to come sleep on his couch when I got to town. Jimmy had become a local music legend around Springfield when he teamed up with Harold Morrison to form their duo, and toured all over the Midwest until they landed a regular spot on the Nationwide TV Show, Ozark Jubilee, and enjoyed renewed popularity. Jimmy and Harold had then moved to Nashville where Jimmy landed a job with Bill Anderson, writing hit songs and touring with the show. Harold worked with the Wilburn Brothers for awhile and then went with the Tammy Wynette/George Jones Show. Both Jimmy and Harold remained my lifelong friends until both of them passed away several years later.
Jimmy had written my first Epic Records recording, “Somebody Had To Lose” which came out in 1961, and had issued the invitation to couch sleeping when he heard I was moving to Nashville. Jimmy and Esther Gateley lived in the suburb of Nashville called Madison and I found their house and was welcomed home just like family. So, with Esther being one of the best cooks in the world, the immediate problem of eating and sleeping was taken care of and my weekly paycheck of $50 for running Si Siman’s Publishing Company, Earl Barton Music started the next week, and I figured the big money should start rolling in with my big record deal. Uh huh, that’s how much I knew. Anyway, I stayed on Jimmy and Esther’s couch for the first week of my triumphant entry to the big city and the second week I crashed on Leo Taylor’s couch for a few days. Leo was the drummer for the Johnny Wright/Kitty Wells Show and another good friend in need that came through when I really needed it. The third week I got a bed at Mom Upchurch’s Boarding House for Pickers, Pluckers, Fiddlers and Shuckers, a mix of the greats and near greats that inhabited this wonderful woman’s home on Boscobel Street is just legendary. So many of the stars had lived with Mom Upchurch when they first came to town, and a sweeter woman never lived I don’t reckon. So now I felt established in the City of Music, having found a semi-permanent bed, two drawers in a dresser to put my pitiful collection of clothes, , a 59 DeSoto cleaned up and shiny again and one room office right on 16th Ave, don’t that sound rich to you?
The picture above is of me, kneeling on the sidewalk on 16th Avenue in the year 1963. In those years Music Row was like a small community within the city, a world of its own that was inhabited by some very special people, different from any I had known back in the Ozarks. On 16th Avenue, just down from the old Bradley’s Quonset Hut Studios was an old two story house that had been changed into a private club. The name was “The Professional Club” and it was music industry only. It was a dark, smoky bar and hamburger joint that only catered to the music set. It was the local hangout for stars, songwriters, music publisher reps, starving artists, con men, con women, drifters, snuff dippers, groupies, television evangelists (yes, that is where I first met Jimmy Swaggert) session pickers, session arrangers, session disarrangers, straight men, crooks, good ole boys, fine ole girls and other folks that you might, or might not, want to hang around with. Well, naturally, that place drew me like a magnet. You remember the bar in Star Wars with all the weird characters and aliens? Well The Professional Club was kinda like that except the characters were a lot weirder. Not really, of course, but I sure met some interesting characters there in those years. By the way, they had a great hamburger.
At the Professional Club you could sit at one of the old beat up tables, the oil cloth eat up with cigarette burns, and listen to Hank Cochran talk up a song idea with Harlan Howard, while Wayne Walker ordered one more round for Mickey Newbury and Kris Kristofferson-having to shout over the noise that Faron Young was making in his argument with Webb Pierce, threatening to kick ass and take names, with Mel Tillis trying to get a word in edgewise, all the while listening to Glenn Sutton tell another funny happening of his convoluted past, as some unknown songwriter was quietly sitting in the corner, writing down some of the hook lines that these geniuses were throwing around like they were throwaways. I just sat there and took it all in, and, ya’know, it seemed perfectly normal at the time, but how can a crowd of heroes like that be normal? I mean there was such an abundance of talent and genius that the spectacular was the norm. And then, into this heady mix, Roger Miller would walk in, trailed by Red Lane, and the Creative Electricity in the room would go out of sight. On, this particular occasion, Roger and Red walked over and sat down at the table with Glenn and I. Roger put his big metal briefcase on top of the table with a flourish.….and Eureka! It started ringing! Roger, calmly snapped open the brief case and inside was a Mobile Phone….my gosh, who ever heard of such? Roger had just got back from California and had found this contraption and bought it. He had someone call him at the exact time he sat down…and it just blew everyone's mind. What won’t they think of next? It was so astounding that Faron and Webb actually stopped their lifelong argument, one that I figure must have started when they were both at the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport in the 50’s, and carried on from there. The phone was big enough to fill the entire belly of the big brief case…we’re not talking cell phones here, and no one on Music Row had ever seen one. This happened about 1966 or so and we were still pretty much out of the tech loop.
One day the cops decided to raid the Professional Club and when they started pounding on the front door, Faron ran up stairs to the second story, jerked open the door of a bedroom, where another musician/songwriter was lying in bed with a friendly young lady, pulled the covers back and jumped in bed with them, clothes and all. The cops, who had seen Faron run up the stairs came pounding after him, jerked open the door, and stood there laughing at the sight of him hiding in the bed with the other two folks, who just held up their hands in bewilderment as if to say, “We don’t know nothing about this, officer!” After a good laugh the cops left and the party continued. I think the cops just did that about every six months or so, mostly as a joke, because they all were buddies with the music people. Nashville, at that time was a strict Bring Your Own Bottle town. No mixed drinks were allowed in the bars and private clubs, you were supposed to have your own bottle, with your name on it, on the shelf behind the bar, and they would raid places whenever the mood struck them. Funny, thing about Nashville at the time of the early sixties, the City Of Music was really a city of big time gambling and corruption. City officials were bought off on a regular basis, the bars in the Printers Alley area downtown had wide open gambling casinos upstairs over the bars and supper clubs. My first week in town, Red Foley took me out to dinner at the Captain’s Table in the Alley, bought me a fine steak with all the trimmings, and then said, “Well, let’s go upstairs and play awhile.” At that time I had no idea what he was talking about. We went up the narrow stairs, Red knocked on the door at the top of the stairs, a peep hole in the door served to identify Red to the hood in the black suit and gun bulging shoulder holster, and we went into one of the most elaborate gambling rooms I had ever seen at that time. Red rolled the dice awhile, made a little, lost a lot, and finally we headed outside. I was just astounded that something like that was going on. A few years later a new Governor, with the help of the Feds, closed all the illegal gambling down, but not before several fortunes changed hands.
Well, it was really a close knit community of music makers in the 60’s, those years before our National Music Heritage was bought up by Foreign National companies, which started happening early in the 70’s. Just think of it this way; all of Hank Williams historic country songs, which he wrote in the 40’s and 50’s were bought by the Japanese, when Sony purchased Acuff-Rose Publishing Co from Gaylord. All of the Master Tapes of Columbia Records are now owned by the same group while the Masters of RCA Victor and the other Major Record Labels are now gone from American ownership…..I just believe that our music is a sacred trust of a country, and should be protected and cherished by the people that the songs are written about, not by somebody that may or may not even understand the message of the song.
The songwriters were busy writing the classic masterpieces of music art, the recording studios were going full blast, the A Team working around the clock until they would crash and have to sleep for about 24 hours and then come back and do it again, the singers were free to experiment with different ways to shift and turn a phrase, making the songs all theirs in the finished piece of vinyl that created a record. Yes, it was good to be in music and alive to perform it. -Stan
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