Reba: My Story (23 page)

I was in grade school when he wrote the classics “Heartaches by the Number” and “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,” as well as one of the most haunting country songs of all time, “I Fall to Pieces,” for Patsy Cline. It would take too much space to list all of his hits, but he is just as productive today as he was when he moved to Nashville thirty-three years ago. He had a hit in 1993 with Pam Tillis.

In 1983, I felt like I was in the presence of royalty when I settled into a big, wing-backed chair at Harlan’s house.

Charlie and I sat there quietly as Harlan loaded his tape machine. I listened carefully as he played me a batch of tunes, and I was a little disappointed. They weren’t what I expected of Harlan Howard.

Harlan was just sitting there grinning at me, and after several passes on his songs, I said, “Have you got anything else?” And he said, “Yes.” Then he played “Somebody Should Leave,” a song Harlan had co-written with Chick Raines. I started tearing up, with chills all over me. I said, “Harlan, can I have that song?” He smiled real big and said, “Do you like it?” I said, “I love it.”

He said, “Yep.”

I know now that Harlan was testing me. If I had liked all those other songs, he would never have played me
“Somebody Should Leave.” When I passed on all those others, he knew I knew a special song when I heard it.

Ultimately, Bowen didn’t agree to produce me, but compromised by mixing (electronically arranging) the album, which we decided to call
My Kind of Country
. It was produced by Harold Shedd. Harold found one of the songs for that album, “How Blue,” a song I almost didn’t do! When Harold played it for me I thought it sounded like a man’s song. Very wisely, Harold suggested we quit for the day. He knew I was really tired! When he played it again for me the following morning, I said, “Oh, Harold, I’m sorry. That’s a great song!”

“Somebody Should Leave” and “How Blue” both became number-one hits. “Somebody Should Leave” taught me that Jimmy Bowen’s words were true: “You’ve got to find your own songs, because nobody but you knows what you want to sing.”

Up until then, I was more or less just a singer, leaving a lot of the creative decisions to the “professionals”—my managers, my producers, the label heads. I was really totally ignorant about the business. Then I came to realize that the difference between being a singer and being an artist could rest on something as simple—though hard to achieve—as my belief in myself.

But that took years of great education from my producers, manager, and record label heads. I think they taught me well. I owe a lot to Glenn Keener, Jerry Kennedy, Norro Wilson, Harold Shedd, and to Jimmy Bowen!

Thanks to Bowen, I even got some control in the studio. During the session work, it was up to me to communicate with the pickers—to let them know what I wanted in a song—while he stayed in the control room. He told the players that if they had a question, they were to ask me, not him. The album applied the newest electronic recording techniques to traditional country arrangements, and I sat right behind Bowen when he mixed the cuts, taking notes on just how much of each voice and instrument
would be heard. That part was a little boring, but it helped me understand what really gives a record its sound.

Bowen gave me a very great gift—the right to control my own music—and a great deal of wise advice. He was a very patient teacher—or maybe I should say “preacher.” Bowen has a well-earned reputation for talking a lot. He’d get you in his office, and you might not get the chance to say ten words. He’d start telling you his philosophies and his ideas about what works and what doesn’t in music, and why. As a joke, I started numbering his speeches. That Speech #37 was a good one!

M
Y KIND OF COUNTRY
HELPED KICK OFF WHAT THE NATIONAL
magazines called “the New Traditionalist movement,” a revolution in country music that they credited to Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, me, and George Strait.

Randy had hit with “1982” and “On the Other Hand.” The first two lines of the second song were no more than Randy’s voice and a rhythm guitar. The simple arrangement was a far cry from the lush violins that Nashville had been using on records throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ricky was named “Entertainer of the Year,” the highest honor in country music, for reviving old mountain and bluegrass tunes. George, with his beautiful voice, revived Western Swing. His ballads and dance music brought “Texas music” back to the forefront.

Of course, none of us set out to spawn an entire musical movement. We never had that in mind. We had just been looking to record good, solid country music, the kind we had grown up with, the kind that ran steadily in our veins. Our kind of music also seemed to be the special kind that touched people’s hearts.

T
HANKS TO
MY KIND OF COUNTRY
, I
WAS STARTING TO CHANGE
my billing status. When I signed on with MCA in 1984, I
had played a date with Conway Twitty in Grand Falls, Wisconsin. I was paid $5,000—the most money I had ever made for a show at the time. I had been releasing records for eight years, had traveled more than a million miles back and forth across the nation, and that was my biggest draw. Some folks think $5,000 is a lot of money for approximately an hour’s worth of singing, but consider that I had to pay five band members and a bus driver. I had to rent motel rooms. I had to buy the diesel fuel to get to the show. I had to give my booking agent and my manager 10 percent each off the top for booking the show. Of course, I had to pay taxes on what was left, and I was making payments on the bus. So those dollars didn’t go far.

Conway Twitty, of course, was a major star, one who could pull in a large audience, and by opening for him I performed for about five thousand people a night. But at some point, I hoped to become a headline act myself, and Bill Carter thought that
My Kind of Country
made 1984 the right time. Charlie, on the other hand, thought I should work my way up, appearing as an opening act for a while longer,
with
a guaranteed fee. But I went with Carter’s advice. It was a huge gamble—for my first headline show, I attracted only eight hundred people and everybody lost money, especially me—and eventually, that gamble paid off. We had some mighty lean times until then, though!

Still, I don’t care how successful you are as a recording artist, it’s important to keep bringing your music directly to the people. I’ve always believed that the heart of entertainment is performance, not just producing a studio version of your work. And one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you’re never as good as you could be. There’s always room for improvement. I’ve never stopped trying to improve my act—whether it would be my hair and costumes or sets or how my shows are staged.

Early on, for instance, I was very insecure. I would try to find nice clothes, but for a long time I couldn’t afford them. I’d put everything I had into looking nice, but I just
didn’t know how. And when I’d go out to sing, I didn’t know how to talk to audiences.

But from the start I wanted desperately to mature as an artist and performer, and, fortunately, I’ve had people around me who could help. They have been so instrumental in getting me where I am today.

Most important, I made it a point to be receptive to any advice that would help the show to grow or to improve my sessions in the studio. I might choose to do something one way—a music fragment, a piece of stagecraft—or maybe not at all. But I always listened very, very closely to what people had to say. Not that I did all they told me. I’d listen and take what I liked—and I still do.

I
STARTED USING CHOREOGRAPHY IN MY SHOW AT A TIME WHEN
, except for Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, the idea was still foreign to country music. I met my first choreographer, Andre Tyier, through my then-manager Don Williams. Narvel and Preecher were with me when I walked into Andre’s office in Studio City, California. After watching me sing, the first question he asked was “Why aren’t you looking at me?”

“ ’Cause you make me nervous,” I said.

My stage presence still left a lot to be desired.

“Well,” Tyier said, “don’t you look at the audience when you sing?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You should look at the audience,” he told me. “Then take your eyes from person to person, and go down the rows like a typewriter. Then go up with your eyes to the next row and look them in the eye! That’s the way to really reach an audience.”

Those suggestions are obvious to me now, but at the time I said, “Good Lord, that’s awfully personal.”

“Well, where do you look?” he asked.

“At the Exit signs,” I said.

One of the reasons I looked at the Exit signs was to keep from choking up during my delivery of songs like “Somebody Should Leave.” Even now, I find it difficult to get through certain songs, like “The Greatest Man I Never Knew” and “For My Broken Heart,” without choking up.

But I followed Andre’s suggestions to the tee, and I know it’s made a huge difference in performing.

I also began experimenting with stage lighting. By the time I signed with MCA, Narvel, then our road manager, had gotten the fever to make our show more theatrical. We tried out one of his ideas at a theater we played in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Narvel’s plan was to turn off all the stage lights after our last song. Everyone would leave the stage in total darkness. Then we’d turn up the “moody-blue” lights and I’d come back on to sing my encore song, the Patsy Cline classic “Sweet Dreams.”

The first night we tried it we didn’t even have a stage curtain. Darkness was our only cover. I could barely see the Exit signs.

I started to shuffle offstage in the darkness, and I remembered something was to my right. I thought it was a microphone stand. I put my hands out to find it, but my feet shuffled right under a monitor speaker. I fell right over the top of it.

I hit my stomach and my shins, ripped my new satin pants, and then crawled over the monitor. The microphone was still hot, and it made a loud thud when it hit the floor. I said a little dirty word, but hopefully nobody heard it. My new pants were so tight that I couldn’t get up, so I had to shuffle off the stage on my hands and feet.

Tom Bresh, who had opened the show for me, was sitting on a stool at stage right. I literally went hand-overhand up his stool to stand up. He didn’t even try to help me. He just looked down at me with his arms crossed and said, “Good show, Reba.”

Somehow I managed to gracefully hobble out to do
“Sweet Dreams,” and later the band and I laughed for hours about our first try at a “big production” number.

Some of our later, more ambitious attempts had equally funny results. For one show in Lubbock, Texas, we planned to make onstage “fog,” using a dry-ice machine. The barrel used for the machine we bought was broken, and so the guys in the band fixed it in my bus barn in Stringtown the night we left for a Lubbock show. To make sure it didn’t leak anymore, they filled the fifty-gallon barrel with water from Charlie’s diesel-fuel can. That made Charlie furious! You don’t put water in a diesel can.

Charlie started grumbling about the time—it was raining, and we were running late for our show. So, without doing a run-through with the machine, we packed up and headed for Lubbock.