Lovesick Blues Page 12
The fact is, practicing moderation was a concept totally foreign to Hank. He wanted everything now, not later, and he scooped it up in large doses. He couldn’t just go fishing: that required a dozen poles, enough bait to feed every fish in the lake, snacks and beer to last a couple of days, and if he anchored over a school of bream or crappie he might stay until midnight. He went hunting armed to the teeth, as though gone to war. One pony for Bocephus and Lycrecia wasn’t enough; soon he had collected a herd. Talk of guns led him to seek the help of local cops on the road so he could buy up virtual arsenals of antique pistols and blunderbusses. If he chanced upon a carnival while on tour and started winning stuffed animals to take home to the kids, the Cowboys wondered how they were going to find room for themselves and their instruments in the car. He couldn’t have just one Cadillac, one woman, one aspirin, or just one drink.
Don Helms became the expert on Hank and his drinking: “Nobody could have had that kind of career, drunk. He was sober ninety-eight percent of the time, but when he started drinking it was over. He wouldn’t cause us any trouble. We’d just ignore him. The thing is, he couldn’t just have a drink. A couple, and he was drunk. Everything he did, in fact, was bad for him: the drinking, the smoking, not eating. He wasn’t a pill-head or a junkie, but if he read on a label where it said to take one pill every four hours he’d take four pills every hour, figuring that’d work four times faster. The only thing he ever did about pills was overuse ’em. I never saw Hank drunk in the studio, and they usually managed to get him off the stage before he’d get into trouble.” Helms and Hank took up hunting and bowling together, but Hank’s favorite escape was to get in a boat and fish all day on the lakes north of the city. Audrey could find him anywhere, it seemed. Jerry Rivers remembered a day when they were out on Kentucky Lake, boys’ day off, and were startled to see a seaplane landing on the water; soon, here came Audrey in a motorboat, all excited, telling Hank there was a phone call he just had to return, and he obediently followed her home.
She never backed off; indeed, she turned up the heat after seeing her own hopes for celebrity crumble. “I don’t care what you do with the son of a bitch, just don’t bring him out here,” she would tell Helms or whoever called ahead to say they were bringing Hank home and he was drunk. Once she did call back, to ask where her money was, and got her comeuppance from the musician in charge of Hank on that particular excursion: “Lady, as far as I’m concerned you ain’t got no damned money. I gave Hank’s money to Jim Denny.” Only two weeks after her recording session for Decca, in fact, she locked the doors on him and he was forced to check into the Tulane Hotel, where he fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand, setting fire to the room, was arrested, and paid a fifteen-dollar fine. Their relationship was heading downhill fast, and in the most public of ways. The two daily newspapers in Nashville were fairly benign in those days, leaving the goings-on in the music business to take care of itself, but word-of-mouth was a factor. Members of the inbred Opry cast had learned to hold their breath when Audrey came through the stage-door entrance to the Ryman on a Saturday night with Hank, all suited up in her cowgirl outfit, and bets were made on whether he would ignore her or invite “Miss Ordrey” to join him to sing onstage. The Nashville police certainly didn’t have to ask directions anymore to 4916 Franklin Road. And by now the record-buying public was beginning to connect the dots and figure out the “inspiration,” if that was the word, for Hank’s torrent of hits dealing with love gone wrong.
When Hank threw a drunk, it could take bizarre turns. For whatever reasons, come that summer he had decided to dump Oscar Davis as his manager—Oscar wouldn’t get off his case about the booze, or else Hank simply didn’t like cutting someone in on his take—so he had made a deal for himself to star at one of the biggest annual events on the country music circuit: the July Fourth Watermelon Festival at a little outpost called DeLeon, smack in the middle of Texas. Many of the big stars were going to be there, none bigger than Hank, and all he had to do to earn his $3,000 guarantee was show up at ten o’clock in the morning and sing. Ten o’clock came, and noon, and there was still no Hank. The crowd of farmers and their families had swelled to eleven thousand people, and they were growing mutinous under the searing sun when Hank’s limo came slithering to a stop around two in the afternoon. Their excitement rose, and just as quickly plummeted. Hank was in there, but he wouldn’t get out. The promoter, who happened to be the town’s mayor, walked over to the limo to see what the problem was and found that Hank was royally drunk. A man identifying himself as his “personal manager” said Hank was too “sick” to go on. The chief of police was summoned. The “manager” was handcuffed to the steering wheel and Hank was pulled out of the car and dragged to the stage where two men held him up for inspection. “Hank Williams’s manager says he’s too sick to perform,” the mayor said, “but if you were standing as close to him as I am you’d know what he’s sick from.” Hank nearly fell to his knees when the men let him go, and he had to stagger back to the limo under a rain of boos. The Opry rushed in Hank Snow to take his place the next night at the auditorium in Dallas, and Hank was flown back to Nashville a step ahead of another booker ready to skin his hide: Jack Ruby—that Jack Ruby—a small-time mobster whose nightclub Hank had failed to grace during the same trip.
For Hank Williams, the recording star, these interludes were just that: little bumps in the road, things that came up, situations soon forgotten. Ever since his first recording session in 1946, when he curtly rejected the very idea of having so much as a beer beforehand, he had treated the studio as his church, his laboratory, his one true friend. This was where everything started. Without the records, there would be nothing—no Opry, no concerts, no clamoring crowds, no royalties, no career—and he knew it. Whatever might be happening in his personal life, he closed it behind him when he walked into the studio. Of the legions of Drunk Hank Stories that have amassed in his wake, not one of them takes place anywhere near a recording session. The studio was sacrosanct. There, within those cushioned walls, stone-cold sober, making music with his friends, you found the truest measure of Hank Williams. There, nothing mattered but the songs. There is where he took everything he knew—the pain, the regrets, the joys, the sorrows—and channeled it all into a microphone, to be recorded for posterity. Everything else, as far as he was concerned, was beside the point. Know me, know my music. How he got there was one thing, prurient gossip for the masses. What he put in the groove was everything.
By now, with his personal life beginning to unravel, he seemed to be making no pretensions about what mattered most. He had produced some “entertainments,” for lack of a better word—“Pan American” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “I’m a Long Gone Daddy”—but as he was nearing the end of his second year on the national stage he began going straight to the heart of the matter. What was expected from Hank Williams was a song about heartache, the gut-felt emotions of a man in a desperate search for love, and he was glad to oblige. The jukeboxes and the airwaves were beginning to fill with them, their titles being fair warning: “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” “Why Don’t You Love Me,” “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” “Why Should We Try Anymore,” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” The stuff was pure journalism, set to music, a journal of his life with Audrey. From now until his last recording session, when he cut “Your Cheatin’ Heart” with little more than three months left to live, that was the primary drive in his life.
Sobered up from the debacle in Texas, he had gone back to work as though nothing had happened—more touring, another recording session, still more touring—but in September of ’50 here came another chapter in the marriage. Unbeknownst to Hank, Audrey had gotten pregnant. Whether the father was her husband or one of her growing number of suitors will never be known. But she didn’t tell anybody about it, choosing instead to abort the fetus in an operation at home. An infection had set in, sending her to the hospital, and that’s where Hank was told he could find her w
hen he dragged in off the road to find her gone. He rounded up some flowers and jewelry and hustled off to the hospital to see her, but when he tried to kiss her and present the peace offerings she threw them in his face: “You sorry son of a bitch! It was you that caused me to suffer this.” When he skulked home, he remarked to the housekeeper, “That woman’s got a cold, cold heart.” It sounded like a song to Hank, when he got to thinking about it, and within three months he was in the Castle Studio recording the one that would throw him into an entirely new orbit.
Lonely at the Top
The song he wrote about this latest unpleasantness from Audrey was called “Cold, Cold Heart,” and the lyrics read like another page torn from Hank’s diary. Every time a man tries to show his love that “you’re my every dream” it backfires on him; she suspects that whatever he does is “just some evil scheme”; he can’t win for losing. Don Helms and Jerry Rivers were backing Hank in the studio on that night four days before Christmas (along with a new young guitarist in town by the name of Chet Atkins), and they felt a tingle that was becoming all too familiar, the feel of working on a record that was going to be around for a long time. The boss was at it again with some more of the Audrey stuff, something they knew more about than they cared to discuss. When Hank closed it out with his woeful lament—“How can I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart”—they knew he had another winner. They just didn’t know exactly how big this one would become.
For too long, country music had been regarded as the bastard child of American musical forms, unsophisticated wailings from the outback, primitive utterings best left to historians and sociologists, artifacts from some lost civilization to be studied by archaeologists. Even Billboard, the weekly magazine of record for commercial American music, had been slow in its recognition, first calling it “hillbilly” music, then “folk,” and only now “country.” The power of the music’s simplicity and its consequent appeal to the common folk was lost on Tin Pan Alley, the brotherhood of tunesmiths in New York City and Chicago, musical sophisticates busy churning out mindless little ditties like “Mairzy Doats,” which may have been the height of their folly: “mares eat oats and does eat oats . . .” On the occasions when big-name pop singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra deigned to play around with country material, as Crosby did in ’43 with “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” it was done with snickering condescension. They were slumming. It was country, they were telling their fans, but they’d get over it.
Fred Rose knew better, and it was because he had come out of Tin Pan Alley. Nobody had ever written lyrics like Hank and he knew it. This was what had led him to hire Mitch Miller, the goateed producer of pop music at Columbia Records, to see about expanding Hank’s audience beyond the country charts. (Miller had met Hank once and found him to be “shy. The only times he was at ease was when he was performing or writing.”) Both Rose and Miller knew there was a universality in Hank’s lyrics that spoke as clearly to a hardware salesman in Georgia as to a stockbroker on Wall Street—“In anger unkind words are said that make the teardrops start”—and so it was that Miller presented Hank’s demo of the new song to a promising young pop crooner named Tony Bennett, still looking for his first hit record. “Oh, no, don’t make me do cowboy songs,” Bennett said when he first heard the fiddle and the steel guitar and Hank’s backwoods pronunciations. “The words, Tony,” Miller told him, “listen to the words.” Miller put a full-blown philharmonic orchestra behind Bennett, and when his gussied-up version of “Cold, Cold Heart” came out it rocketed to the top of the pop charts. Other cover versions of Hank’s tunes began cropping up soon, by artists as varied as Louis Armstrong, Perry Como, and Dinah Washington, and a new day was born. Now all of the major labels were scrambling to find material that was basically country—Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” was among them—and it was the team of Williams/Rose/Miller that had made it so. The pop music crowd held to its patronizing mode, a Billboard story being headlined “There’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Tunes,” and a trade-magazine ad reading “Popcorn! A Top Corn Tune Gone Pop.” Personally, Hank didn’t much care for Bennett’s slick version of his “Cold, Cold Heart”—what he was hearing on the jukeboxes being a far cry from what he had felt that day at the hospital when Audrey threw his get-well gifts back in his face—but all of a sudden his songwriting royalties began doubling with the additional exposure.
After less than two years in Nashville, he had transcended the narrow confines of country music. Tony Bennett was only the first noncountry performer to capitalize on the broad appeal of songs written by Hank Williams. Fifty years after Hank’s death, an astonishing array of musicians from nearly every possible genre had recorded his work—such disparate singers and instrumentalists as the Bee Gees, James Brown, Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, Isaac Hayes, Lou Rawls, Elvis Presley, Guy Lombardo, Frankie Laine, even Lawrence Welk—a remarkable legacy for a man from nowhere, an uneducated country boy from the wilds of south Alabama, someone who lived on the dark side of the musical establishment. Just as Ernest Hemingway didn’t believe in similes (instead of writing that something is “like” something else, why not say precisely what it is?), Hank, who probably had never even heard of Hemingway, innately dealt with the rawest emotions in the simplest language. Mitch Miller was among those who ranked him with another natural American icon, Stephen Foster: “He had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time. No matter who you were, a country person or a sophisticate, the language hit home. Nobody I know could use basic English so effectively. Every song socks you in the gut.” Hank himself was damned if he could explain it the few times he was asked. “You got to have smelled a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly,” he once said, illuminating nothing except his playful predilection to play the aw-shucks game with the few reporters who came around.
With all of this money and celebrity going for him, he was finally gaining confidence in himself. Gone was the backwoods naïf content to stay close to home in somnolent Montgomery rather than go for the brass ring in Nashville, and in his place was a genuine superstar not above letting everybody know it. From the very beginning, when he arrived at the Opry to find “Candy Kisses” blocking his “Lovesick Blues” from the top of the country charts, he made fun of George Morgan’s “silly” lyrics. Whether on tour with other Opry stars or backstage at the Ryman, he was beginning to get on the nerves of his fellow singers with a routine that got old in a hurry: he would run a new tune by them, get a favorable response, and then say it was “too damned good for you,” that he would record it himself. He took a dismissive view about how pop musicians were suddenly discovering his country songs: “These pop bands will only play our hillbilly songs when they can’t eat any other way.” He even called Tony Bennett to needle him good-naturedly when “Cold, Cold Heart” made it big in the pop charts (“Hey, Tony, how come you ruined my song?”). Whenever he and the band stopped for a bite to eat in a diner, his first move was to pump nickels into the jukebox to play every Hank Williams song it had, taking particular pleasure now in punching the versions recorded by pop singers. Whether drunk or sober, he even began taking it out on any fan or artist who failed to genuflect properly: “How much money did you make today? When you’ve made a thousand dollars, then we can talk.” One night when he stumbled onstage in Lafayette, Louisiana, too drunk to perform, he waited until the catcalls had subsided before speaking into the microphone: “I bet y’all drove a long way to see ol’ Hank, didn’t you?” It was true and the crowd cheered. “Well, now you’ve seen him,” he said, laying his guitar on the floor, turning on his heels, and stalking off, leaving another mess for somebody else to clean up.
On the way to grossing some $150,000 in 1951, Hank began joining Audrey in spending money before he had it, to the extent that a personal manager he had hired swore that Hank often couldn’t cover a ten-dollar check. Their idea of a savings account was discovering some misplaced bills left in a coat pocket or coins spilled between th
e cushions of a sofa. They had both grown up in rural poverty, during the Depression, and now it seemed they were in competition to see who could spend the most the fastest. Together, they would set the standard for a caricature that would heap ridicule upon Nashville for many generations to come: country musicians with more money than taste, surrounding themselves with things, trying to buy their way into “acceptable” society with fleets of new cars, gaudy palaces, ornate swimming pools, and other play-things of the nouveau riche. Audrey had set the pace from the beginning of their life in Nashville, with her furs and her jewelry and her never-ending expansion of the house on Franklin Road—it now contained seven bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, a chandeliered ballroom, a garage expanded to include an upstairs “mother-in-law” apartment (no mothers-in-law invited, though, God forbid)—and Hank had begun to pitch in with a well-appointed bar, of all things, a fully equipped music room, and more Cadillacs: a coupe for him, a convertible for Audrey, and the spacious touring limousine. He would come in off the road with more trinkets and stuffed animals for Hank, Jr., and Lycrecia, and matched sets of expensive collectors’ pistols for himself, only to find that Audrey had been busy keeping up: more tasteless furniture, additions to her wardrobe, and new closets to put the stuff in.