Reba: My Story (18 page)

At fourteen, when other boys his age were going to sleep in their rooms, Narvel was dozing in the back of a touring bus, listening to the roar of an old engine and the snoring of men twice his age. And that bus wasn’t air-conditioned in a climate where the nighttime temperature was often in the middle nineties. The steel exterior of the bus only made it hotter inside.

The entire group regularly rented one hotel room, not always daily, for showers. They were modern gypsies in a caravan powered by diesel fuel.

For all of the above, Narvel was paid $25 a day, and was occasionally given trousers and a shirt. The price of the clothes was deducted from his salary.

Those early experiences would be great training for the life he would be facing in my band.

N
ARVEL
’
S INITIAL GIGS WITH ME SHOW A PRETTY CLEAR PICTURE
of my performing life in those years. Even though I had a Top Ten hit, you might call my operation somewhat less than professional.

On his first day, he pulled up in an Oldsmobile 98 to meet us at the Chockie Shack. Charlie and I had just moved to Stringtown, so Preecher was living there and using the place as a sometime rehearsal hall for my band. Narvel must not have slammed the door when he entered. The ceiling didn’t collapse.

Beer cans, ashtrays, and various other litter was scattered all over the place. A bullet hole punctured the sagging ceiling, from the time Preecher fired a gun into the air to get the guys in the band to quit arguing about who would sleep where inside the shack.

As an agent for Prudential, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, Narvel had grown accustomed to offices with central heating and air-conditioning and fluorescent lights. In his office, the furniture was comfortable. At the Chockie Shack, it was collapsible.

“I was so shocked at the sight of the place,” he recalls.

Narvel had also grown accustomed to structure and organization. But though he had arrived on time for his appointment with Pake, Pake was nowhere to be found. And he certainly didn’t expect that Pake, the band leader for a recording artist on a major label, would show up in a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer.

Things got stranger, Narvel remembers. “We loaded our equipment in the back of the horse trailer. We arrived in Nowata at four in the afternoon, where we were going to set up the equipment and rehearse for a couple of hours. Here we are, supposed to play this show that night, and we had never played a note together. Reba had bought a new Peavey Sound System, but nobody in the band knew how to hook it up. They finally got the PA system hooked up about
the time the people starting coming into the hall. We still hadn’t rehearsed, and I still hadn’t seen Reba.”

Narvel would learn later that I hate to rehearse. I prefer for the band to get the song down pat, and then I come in to learn my part. My voice gets tired if I try to sing with each run-through, so I want to save it as much as possible for actual performing. I guess you could say I’m pretty lazy in that respect.

Finally, I arrived with Charlie and Susie right before the show, and Narvel swears that we all just walked into the hall and never spoke to him. I don’t remember.

“It wasn’t that they were being rude,” Narvel explains. “It’s just that they didn’t realize what a big deal this was for me. I was making a lot more out of it than they were. It wasn’t that big of a gig to them.”

Our guitar player that night was Charkie Christian, a guy I had grown up with, who was filling in until Kelly Rhyne began the next weekend. His parents and mine had rodeoed together when we were kids. Charkie had some peculiar rules: He was willing to play anything except fills, kickoffs, and turnarounds. That’s like a baseball player saying he’ll do anything except throw, catch, and hit.

Actually, Charkie did play the beginning and instrumental break on “Johnny B. Goode.” That was his only solo of the night.

So Narvel, who had never rehearsed with the band and who barely knew any of my recorded material, had to lead the introduction, instrumental break, and ending to every song I sang that night. We did three sets spread over four hours. Narvel says it was five hours, but I think it just seemed that long to him. Fortunately, most of the songs I sang back then were covers, hit songs by other artists, so he was familiar with some of the tunes. Otherwise, he might not have been able to improvise so well.

When the show ended, Narvel recalls that Susie, Charlie, and I left without ever saying more to him than hello.

“By that time,” he says, “I was really sucking wind. I sure wondered what kind of a deal I had got myself into. So we start back home and Pake says, ‘Look, I know it was weird, but don’t worry about a thing. I’m going to get everything under control. The next gig is about ten days away, and by that time there is going to be some new guys joining the band, and things are going to be a lot different. I’m going to get things under control.’

“The next thing I know, I got a call from Preecher saying Pake had quit.”

Amazingly, Narvel came back. Our next job was at a rodeo outside of Houston. This was Roger Wills’s (on bass, who is now with Alan Jackson) and Kelly Rhyne’s (on guitar) first date with me since high school. The band, with Narvel on steel guitar, was supposed to set up and perform for about an hour before the rodeo. Unfortunately, during that hour a tractor was “discing” up the arena to prepare it for the rodeo, so they could hardly hear how they sounded.

Someone came up with the idea for me to enter the arena on horseback and then take the stage to do my show. So I rode in on a pickup horse, but that old horse nearly ran away with me before I got him settled down. Some grand entrance! Then, after the rodeo, we had to take our equipment down and set it all up again, facing the opposite direction, to play the four-hour-long dance.

At that point, Narvel hadn’t even been told the worst—that we only had ten dates booked!

S
USIE AND I TRAVELED FROM SHOW TO SHOW IN A LINCOLN
Continental. The five guys in the band rode in our leaky van, which pulled the horse trailer that carried the instruments. The guys took turns driving through the night. When we arrived at our destination, we would get two hotel rooms, one for me and Susie and the other for the band, who would split the mattress into two double beds and put the fifth guy on a rollaway. Their room would often
be so jammed with bedding that no floor space would show, and the guys would have to walk across the tops of the beds to get to the bathroom.

At any time, Narvel could have gone back to the economic security and suburban comfort of the insurance industry.

“I was getting a lot of pressure at home to quit because I wasn’t making enough money,” Narvel says. “But I really had no thought of going back. I had gotten to the point where I knew that music was where my heart and love was. And as bad as it was playing with Reba, it was the only avenue I had at that time beyond the local club band.

“The first year with Reba was very tough,” Narvel remembers. “We may have played fifty dates that first year. We kept thinking with each album, ‘This is going to be the album that pushes her over the top.’ I think the next one was
Heart to Heart
. Then we did a little better, but nothing big was happening. It was a slow, slow build.”

That’s how Narvel came into a band he never left. In 1982, Narvel told Mama that he believed in me tremendously.

“I’ll be around long after everybody else has quit,” he said. And he is.

I
’
D HATE TO TRY TO GUESS HOW MANY MILES I TRAVELED
during the 1980s. So when I got my first bus in 1982, a twenty-year-old Silver Eagle, it was a really big event. I got it in May, so I called it my Mother’s Day present. I already had a busload of kids!

We had been traveling since 1977 in trucks, vans with trailers, and cars, which didn’t give us much of an air of seriousness. You pull backstage in a bus and the guard motions you to a parking spot. You pull up in a van and the guard asks you for identification. And you can park buses in commercial spots when you sometimes can’t park a van at all.

I nearly lost a van in 1981 over a parking space.

I was at home in Stringtown cooking supper when my agent called me to say that Tammy Wynette was sick and had to cancel a show in Wisconsin. He wanted to know if I could fill in for her, and of course I said yes—her deposit was more than we’d make in two months. So I rushed
around and rounded up my band, and we drove down to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Six of us pulled up to the curbside check-in and I told Preecher, the tour manager, to go park the van and trailer.

I don’t know if it was because we had a plane to catch and there was little time to look for the right parking place, but Preecher parked the van and trailer in a one-hour parking slot.

We were gonna be gone for three days.

We returned to the airport, and everyone in the group except me knew what Preecher had done.

“Okay, Preecher,” I said, “go get the van.”

He walked outside the terminal and came back in about a few seconds.

“It’s not there,” he said.

We were tired from performing and flying, and still had a three-hour drive back home ahead of us.

“What do you mean it isn’t there?” I said.

“It’s been towed off,” he answered.

“How do you know?” I fired.

“ ’Cause I left it right there,” he said, pointing to a sign that said “One Hour Parking.”

“You mean you parked on the other side of the street from that sign?” I said.

“No,” he said as he cleared his throat. “I parked it on this side in
front
of that sign.”

I told him to find out where the van was, and to go get it. It cost him $75 to get it out of lockup. I didn’t speak to Preecher for a few days, and I never planned to pay him back. Years later, he told me that Charlie sneaked the money to him.

Having a bus meant that everyone could travel together to our shows. We would talk about the show, everyday life, politics, religion, and what we were doing on the way to the next job. We’d never had that luxury before.

F
OR A TOURING SINGER, FINDING A GOOD BUS DRIVER CAN BE AS
important as finding good musicians. I’m a light sleeper, and since we traveled at all hours, I had to look hard to find someone who would drive smoothly enough to keep from waking me up. Then, too, especially in those early years, my drivers had to be good mechanics. My first driver, Wormy Miller, once had to get under a bus with a broom handle to try to force the transmission into reverse while my piano player, Wayne Lewis, struggled with the gears from the driver’s seat.

After Wormy, we got a driver who the band nicknamed Sominex Rex, because he was so slow. I can’t remember his real name. But I remember how he used to make U-turns in the middle of four-lane traffic. He scared all of us to death.

Greg Cochran from Atoka was our next driver. Greg had been with my cousin Gary Thompson when Gary was electrocuted in Stringtown while they were trying to put that tarp over the hay. Greg had been shocked and burned in the incident.

He was a great driver, but we think he had an esophageal reflux: he couldn’t swallow his food. We’d pull into a truck stop, he’d order a giant plate of shrimp, and take two bites. He couldn’t swallow the rest. Whoever sat by him often didn’t order a meal, because he knew he’d get to finish Greg’s. He was a funny guy who all of us liked, but unfortunately, Greg didn’t last long on the road.