Read Devil Sent the Rain Online
Authors: Tom Piazza
Farther west, along Broadway, lies Music Row, the heart and soul, if you can call it a soul, of New Nashville, where you find the big music publishers, record companies, ASCAP headquarters, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and gift shops owned by Barbara Mandrell, George Jones, and other luminaries. Music Row can be a little rough on you if you think country music is still about deep, soulful expression from the hills and honky-tonks. The Country Music Hall of Fame, for example, is a lot of fun for anybody with an interest in country music, full of great artifacts and video installations. But most of the Hall of Fame's visitors waltz past the rare Hank Williams photos and Uncle Dave Macon videos vacant-eyed and clueless, in order to gape at the Reba McIntyre and Garth Brooks exhibits. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, but it is a clue to the sensibility of the New Nashville's bread-and-butter constituency.
Music Row contains no shadowy cubbyholes full of interesting stuff, the way old downtown does. The senior citizens who get off the tour buses in matching warm-up suits don't want shadowy and interesting; they want bright and aggressively heartwarming. They graze happily among the T-shirts and souvenir spoon rests and coffee mugs at Barbara Mandrell's store, where a Christmas-sale sign reads,
SPECIAL: NATIVITIES 25% OFF
, which just about says it all, and at the George Jones Gift Shop, where rows and rows of glass display shelves under bright fluorescent lights are crammed with frilly dolls, little ceramic figurines, souvenir spoons, salt and pepper shakers, coffee mugs reading “I'm not grouchyâI'm constipated . . .”
All of which, I thought, helps explain why Jimmy Martin might be anathema to New Nashville. Imagine the souvenir-spoon crowd listening to him sing “Steal Away Somewhere and Die.” Not likely. Yet all the garishness and bad taste is no aberration; it's part of the fiber of the world that country music serves. You can't really separate one from the other, any more than you can just forget about Martin performances like “I'd Rather Have America” and “Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?”
That night I had dinner with a friend, a well-known songwriter and performer who has lived in Nashville for almost thirty years and was part of the so-called New Breed of younger figures who shook up the town in the late 1960s. My friend is actually something of a connoisseur of Jimmy Martin stories, and he added a few to my stockpile, including one about a trip, involving Martin and a couple other musicians, to see Clint Eastwood's movie
Unforgiven
. At one point in the movie a small country shack came on the screen, and Martin supposedly stood up at his seat and hollered, “That shack there is just like the one Jimmy Martin grew up in, back in Sneedville, Tennessee, that y'all been asking me about, folks.” Everybody in the theater turned around wondering what the hell was going on, while Martin's companions sank low into their seats.
After we laughed about this, my friend went on, “But, at the same time, I'll never forget once we were having this benefit concert for a local band who had had an accident on the road and needed money. The whole bluegrass community had rallied to their support and held a benefit concert, which Jimmy hadn't been invited to appear on. Late in the evening, though, he showed up backstage anyway, real quiet, with a big jar, like a Mason jar, full of coins and bills. He had had a show earlier that night and he had collected all that money from his audience himself, and he wanted to contribute it. It wasn't a showy thing at all; he just gave it and left quietly.
“Another time,” my friend went on, “the son of some dear mutual friends of Jimmy's and mine had died under extremely tragic circumstances, and one of the visitors during the worst of this episode was Jimmy. He walked in and he had obviously been crying beforehand. He had some little plaster statue he had bought for them, maybe it was a Madonna, and as soon as he got in, he just let it all out, crying and saying how sorry he was that it had happened and how much he loved them . . .” My friend stopped talking for a moment, and I realized he was trying to keep from crying himself. “He only stayed for about five minutes,” he went on. “But of all the visits during those days, that's the one that was maybe the most moving.”
He kind of shook his head. I could relate; even in the short time I had spent with Martin I could see those disproportionsâthe deep loneliness and the huge ego, the self-assertion and the sensitivity and the defensiveness. When I mentioned the possibility that I might go to the Opry with Martin, my friend looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “If there's any chance of doing that,” he said, “don't miss it. Something interesting will happen.”
“I know,” I said. “That's what I'm afraid of.”
2.
That was last night. Earlier today Martin and I talked on the phone and he said he wanted to go; he told me to get dressed up (“not like what you come to see me in yesterday”) and meet him at his house at six o'clock. My first stab at doing that, ten minutes ago, was unsuccessful, and I had to call him from the gas station to get him to let me in. From the sound of his voice he's in no shape to go anywhere, but he insists he wants to go.
Now, as I pull up to his house again, I finally see him, in my headlights, struggling to open the screen door, and I turn my lights and motor off. He's yelling at the dogs, and they quiet down. I get out of the car, but he has already disappeared back into the house. I follow, groping my way through his den in the dark.
The only light on in the house appears to be the overhead one in the kitchen. As I enter the room Martin is sitting down in his chair at the kitchen table. He's wearing his blue jumpsuit, and his eyes are unfocused.
“I'm higher than a Georgia . . . kite,” he says. “I know what they'll say . . . âJimmy Martin's been drinkin' again . . .' But I don't owe them anything.” He looks up at me. “Do I?”
I can see his eyes pull into focus. “Where's your Jimmy Martin cap?” he says, squinting at me.
“I left it back at the hotel,” I say. His eyes narrow into slits. “I can borrow one of yours,” I offer, “if you want me to wear one.”
“You got one of your own, didn't you?”
“You said on the phone you wanted me to get a little dressed up, soâ”
“So it's fuck Jimmy Martin.”
Silence.
“Listen,” he says, steadying himself with his forearm on the table. “If I give you the keys to the limo . . . will you drive? Can you drive the limo?”
The
limo
?
“Jimmy,” I say, “why don't we just take my carâ”
“
NO
,” he says, his voice rising. “We're takin' the
limo
, with âSunny Side of the Mountain' along the back and everything. They'll recognize it. They
know
me. Can you drive it?”
“Why don't weâ”
“
We're takin' the limo
,” he says. “We can drive right inside. Whoever says hello says hello.” He stands up, unsteadily. “Me and you are goin' to the Opry,” he says. “Did you get you a drink?” he says.
“No,” I say.
“Well, go and git you one. Right there.”
“Where, Jimmy?”
“
In the cabinet
,” he says. I find the cabinet he's indicating, and inside it the bottle of Knob Creek I gave him yesterday, with about an inch and a half of bourbon left in it.
“Me and you are goin' to the Opry,” he says, shuffling past me and leaving the room. “Don't drink too much.”
I'm standing here and I don't know what to do. I'm almost overwhelmed by a feeling of not wanting to be here. The single overhead light, this chaos, the malevolent magnetic field he generates. I want to get out. But at the same time, it's
Jimmy Martin
. . .
Now I hear a grunting sound coming from a small room off the kitchen. I say, “Are you okay, Jimmy?”
“Come see what I'm doin'.”
I walk back to the garage end of the kitchen and look in the doorway to where he is, and it's his bedroom, small, barely enough room for the double bed on which Martin is sitting, utterly transformed. His hair is neat and he is wearing black slacks, a fire-engine-red shirt buttoned at the neck, and white leather boots with little multicolored jewels sewn on.
“Wait a minute, now,” he says. He gets a black Western jacket out of the closet and puts it on, then a clip-on tie, white leather with little tassels at the bottom. “All right, hold on,” he says, and from a chair in the corner he grabs a white straw cowboy hat with feathers arranged as a hat band.
“How do I look?” he says, now, presenting himself to me. “Huh?”
“You look great,” I tell him. I'm not lying. Getting dressed up for these guys is a form of warfare, total plumage warfare, and Martin hasn't been a pro for forty-eight years for nothing.
It is not quite 6:30 by the time we leave the house. The night outside is cold, cloudless, and moonless. Just outside the carport, the limo is a long, sleek, indistinct presence in the darkness. Opening the driver's door is a small project in itself; the seat is cold through my slacks, and when I pull the door shut it closes like the lid of a tomb. Martin is next to me in the passenger seat.
I turn the ignition and the limo grumbles to life while I fish around for the lights. The rear window, way back there, is about the size and shape of a business envelope, so I lower my window to look out behind. I slide her into reverse, a hard shift, and ease off the brake.
“Cut her back and to the right as hard as you kin,” Martin says. “Cut her.”
I'm cutting her and hoping I'm not going to hit the tree that I know is back there. When I get what I think is far enough back I shift into drive and it stalls out immediately.
“Oh boy,” Martin says. “Go ahead and start her up again.”
I start her, pull her into gear, and move forward until the front bumper is almost against the Dodge van's rear bumper, where it stalls again. My own car is sitting halfway under the carport, boxed in now by the limo, and I look at it nostalgically in the headlights. I try to start the limo again; Martin is saying, “Cut the lights! Cut the lights!”
I cut the lights and try again quickly, but it won't even turn over.
“We done it now,” Martin says.
I try to get it going another time or two, but the limo is dead. “Son of a bitch,” Martin says, opening the passenger door. “Crack the hood.”
Martin disappears into the house. I get out and open the gigantic hood; I can hear the dogs moving back and forth somewhere in the darkness. My car is completely blocked in by the dead limousine.
Now Martin reappears; he's carrying something about the size of a shoebox, and trailing a long, heavy-duty orange extension cord. He hands me the plug from the box and the end of the extension cord.
“Plug this in there,” he says.
The end of the extension cord seems like it's been melted, and the plug tines won't fit into it easily. I'm struggling with the fit, and I feel it start to slide in when I'm blinded by a bright shower of sparks in my face. I drop the cord and the plug on the ground and stand there trying to get my sight back.
“Which one of these is red?” I hear him asking me. I blink my eyes a few times; he's holding out the charger clamps. I squint, but it's hard to see them; it's too dark . . .
“
Can't you tell which one of these is red?
” he says.
I look at him for a second. I breathe slowly through my nose. “Why don't you turn on a light?” I say.
He heads off someplace again, and I try the plug again and get it in this time. Martin comes back and gets the clamps attached, and I go and turn the ignition and it zooms to life. While it is charging, Martin tells me to get the jumper cables out of his Ford pickup and throw them in the back of the limo. He disconnects the clamps and puts the charger away and we get back into the limo, and I maneuver it through its turn, and we head out, slowly, down the driveway and out onto the road. I'm trying to breathe nice and slowly.
“Me and you are goin' to the Grand Ole Opry,” he says now. “And your name is
what
?”
“Tom Piazza,” I say.
“Tom,” he repeats, as if going over a set of difficult instructions. “And you're doin' a article.”
“Right.”
“Okay.”
We pull onto I-40 West, heading toward Nashville. We need to get to Briley Parkway and go north to Opryland. Outside the car, the Tennessee hills pass in the dark like huge, slumbering animals. I'm holding the limo steady right around fifty, and most cars are passing me, but that's okay. I'm in no hurry. This is an island of tranquility here. God only knows what's going to happen when we get to the Opry. I know Martin has feuds with various members of the Opry; he's not crazy about the Osborne Brothers, and I've heard that he especially has a problem with Ricky Skaggs, one of the younger generation of bluegrass stars. Evidently Skaggs was a guest on Martin's latest CD and wouldn't sing the tenor part that Martin wanted him to sing because it was too high. Martin feels that Skaggs's refusal was a form of attempted sabotage, motivated by professional jealousy, although Skaggs, of course, is the one with the spot on the Opry.
Now Briley Parkway comes up, with the sign for Opryland, and this is the last definite turn I know; from here on I have to rely on Martin. I take the exit and follow the curve along to the right.
“Do I look all right?” he asks.
I tell him he looks great.
“When we go down here I want you to be close to me now, and everything,” he says.
“I'll be right next to you the whole time,” I say.
“Tell 'em who you are.”
“Okay.”
“You a magazine manâTom, right?”
“Right.”
Now, off to the left, Opryland appears, a city of lights in the darkness. Big tour buses pass us as we make our way along in the right lane; the traffic is much denser now. We go under a bridge, exit, and curl up and back around over Briley Parkway, and there, ahead of us, are the gates to Opryland. I'm happy to be somewhere near civilization. I follow the line of traffic through the entrance. “When's the last time you came to the Opry?” I ask, breathing a little easier now that we've found the place.