Reba: My Story (35 page)

Paula Kaye Evans was just the opposite of Kirk. She was like a tourist at almost every stop, running around sight-seeing and taking pictures. On one trip she waded into snow that was as deep as she was tall. There were many times they’d get into a town real tired from the road and the routine. Everybody wanted to lie around until it was time for the show—but not Paula Kaye.

I met her in 1990 when she auditioned to become my second background singer, alongside Suzy Wills. Her husband, Larry Wallace, was running the sound for Pink Floyd and occasionally taught techniques to my sound man, Ricky Moeller. When Ricky mentioned to Larry that I was trying out background singers, Wallace suggested that I listen to his wife.

Paula Kaye was one of six girls remaining who auditioned that day, and she wasn’t one bit nervous. I liked her confidence, her ability to move onstage, and obviously, her captivating personality. And so I hired her.

On one tour, the backup singers and I used to do a choreographed routine that involved moving our arms a lot. Paula Kaye hated that bit, and nicknaming it the “air traffic control” part of the show, would do spoofs of it when we were offstage. She not only loved to make fun of our theatrics, but she could also do a super imitation of fashion models strutting down runways. She would suck in her cheeks and tummy and prance. No matter how many miles or hours had gone into a bus trip, Paula Kaye could break into her air traffic control or her model routine and crack everybody up.

Another source of amusement, to everyone but them, was Paula’s running conflict with Jim Hammon about her luggage. He always thought she brought too much, and just couldn’t understand why a girl who might be away from home for three straight weeks needed to pack more than a toothbrush and change of clothes. At one point Jim grew tired of arguing and resorted to the silent treatment, just staring at Paula’s bags as the two of them rode a hotel elevator and hoping that would get to her. But he usually couldn’t keep up the war of nerves, and by the time they reached her floor, he’d have launched into the thousandth verse of the same song about how she could have left some bags at home.

Paula also loved to paint. I have two tiny watercolors that she gave me of vases and flowers, which I cherish.

Guitarist Michael Thomas came to me after working for T. Graham Brown. He was simply one of the best guitar players around, an artist with as much stage presence as talent. From the first time we played together, he’d always look directly into my eyes as he took a guitar “ride,” as if he was trying to stare me down. Since he was new to the show, I was surprised he had that much gall, but then I figured maybe he wasn’t wearing his contact lenses and so he wasn’t really staring. Then I asked him. No, he told me, he always wore them onstage. He could see me fine. He just had the guts to play the fire out of his guitar while looking me squarely in the eye. I really liked that.

Michael’s wit was extremely dry, and naturally, his special target was often Jim Hammon. Now, Jim was a heavy eater himself, but he just hated having to wait for slowpokes when they would all stop to eat. Then came the night in Texas when Jim was the last to finish dinner and get back on the bus.

“Where is Hammon? Where is Hammon?” the band was chanting.

“He’s still inside,” Michael said without emotion, “waiting on his deep-fried Shetland pony.”

When Michael was with T. Graham, he pulled a famous stunt on his roommate, a guy who always enjoyed a party. Most nights Michael would go to sleep after the show, only to be awakened by the clatter of his party-animal friend. So one night, in his ever-present prankster fashion, Michael took the television remote control with him to bed and hid it under his covers. He pretended to be asleep when his roommate stumbled in and turned the TV on low before sliding into bed. The minute he laid down, Michael pushed the volume button, and the television slowly began to get louder and louder. Michael’s buddy jumped from under the covers and ran to turn it down, then tiptoed back to the bed. Michael let him tuck himself in before he pushed the volume control again. Once again, the guy rolled and wrestled himself out of bed to slam down the volume before it
woke up Michael. No telling how many times that happened before Michael got caught.

Michael caught Jim Hammon in a similar trap of his own making. Jim had laid down a rule that everyone had to sleep in his or her own bunk on the bus. But being such a big man, Jim hated his own bunk because it felt too cramped. So he would wait for everyone to fall asleep, then he’d sneak to the front of the bus and
he’d
sleep on the couch. No one might have noticed except that Jim snored so loud—I mean, like a freight train. Larry Jones would be driving maybe ten feet away, on the other side of a closed curtain, yet he claimed he could hear Jim plainly over the crackle of the citizens band radio and above the whine of the diesel engine at sixty-five miles per hour!

So one night, when Jim’s snoring was waking everyone up, Michael tiptoed up to Jim and laid a tape recorder by his side. The next morning he slipped the tape into the bus’s tape player and turned up the volume. Jim’s snoring sounded like a cross between a chain saw and an outboard motor. Jim didn’t like that at all!

My drummer, Tony Saputo, was one of the other jokemasters in the band. Jennifer Bohler remembers a time when the bus broke down about an hour outside of Nashville. Nothing is more frustrating to a road musician than having a breakdown when he is almost home after a tour. So, as everyone else sat fuming, waiting for its repair, Tony suddenly came bounding from the back of the bus dressed as a mummy. He had wrapped himself in toilet paper from head to foot.

Tony had a loving, almost childlike nature, and so no one found it unusual that he enjoyed children’s toys. After all, there are lots of worse kinds of eccentricities in the music business! He would stash his collection of toys in the cupboards above the table and sometimes play with his toy dinosaurs or whatever to pass the time.

His stash included some packages of stick-on facial features—eyes, noses, teeth, and more. He would plaster
them on in the right and wrong places, and get everyone rolling in the aisles. Once he talked Suzy Wills into putting fake eyeballs on her eyelids. It looked pretty funny—with her eyes closed, she had eyes, and with her eyes open, she had eyes. But when it was time for all of this to be over, Suzy couldn’t get her stickers off! She went nuts! She thought she was stuck with them for life. When she finally succeeded in removing her fake eyes, they yanked out her real eyelashes too. By that time she was hysterical with worry, and Tony and the band were hysterical with laughter.

Bass guitar player Terry Jackson, who had moved to Nashville with Tony, claimed that he liked touring because of his apartment. He’d signed a six-month lease on a place in a “hip” apartment complex overlooking the Cumberland River, wondering a little why no one else had grabbed it. Well, he soon learned that it was directly across the river from the city’s sewage plant. He said the odor was so foul he could taste it. No wonder his rent was so cheap. Terry was as easygoing as his friend Tony was outgoing—the target rather than the initiator of jokes. But he never seemed to get angry. Maybe that was his way of fighting back.

Terry was one of the most sought-after bass players in Los Angeles. He had even played on some Michael Jackson sessions, and I could see why. His sense of showmanship was wonderful, for one thing. I used to sing “Little Rock” while walking up some portable stairs. Terry would come bouncing down from the top to meet me halfway for a jamming standoff. I loved it and so did the crowds.

He was one of the few black musicians in the country music business, and he was making a name for himself.

Chris Austin was a new addition to the band, and he showed up for work on his first day carrying a Bible and his guitar. A veteran of the Ricky Skaggs Show, he was a born-again Christian who was also a talented secular and Christian songwriter. I hired him to sing harmony after Suzy
Wills quit my organization in December 1990. His high voice blended beautifully with Paula Kaye’s.

Chris took a genuine interest in others: Sandi Spika remembers sitting next to him on a commercial flight to Alaska in January 1991, and how he deflected questions about himself to learn more about her and the rest of the band. Eventually we found out that he was married and that he and his wife, Trish, were in the process of buying a house. Chris was sure they’d get the financing, so he decided to paint the place before they were approved to move in. As Larry Jones recalls, Chris disappeared into the bedroom with a bucket of paint but when his wife walked in, she saw that he wasn’t covering the walls. Instead, he had only painted “I love you” in giant letters. He was a gentle, romantic man.

Keyboard player Joey Cigainero was kind of the baby of the group. Kirk had thought that a second keyboard player would enhance our sound, and so Narvel approved the hire.

Joey was an innocent boy in that he hadn’t been on the road all that long, and he was truly a gentleman as well as a real professional: No matter how far we had to travel between restaurants or motels or show venues, no matter if we were playing in 100-degree heat or in Canada in January, he never complained. He was always on time and prepared to play.

If all the players had been like Joey, I might not have needed a tour manager.

The reason I’m going into so much detail about these eight people, I’m sure you already know. We lost the “Crazy Eight,” as Garth Brooks called them, in late 1991.

Rounding out our band were Joe McGlohon and Pete Finney. Joe, my saxophone player, also came from T. Graham Brown and started working for me in 1989. He was one of the passengers on the second airplane, which landed safely in Nashville. After the crash, Joe took over guidance of the band and today he is my band leader.

Pete Finney played steel guitar in the band. He had been with Foster & Lloyd before he joined our group in October 1990. He also flew on the second plane.

A
S WE BEGAN THE EARLY-1991 LEG OF THE TOUR, OUR PERFORMANCE
schedule was heavy, so heavy that sometimes we had to move our entire organization by plane. In January, we did two shows in Alaska, and so of course we had to fly.

Then came a week, beginning March 11, 1991, when we were booked into four different cities spread across the country over six days. We had a show in Saginaw, Michigan, on Thursday, March 14; then a private show for IBM in San Diego on Friday, March 15; and then we had to make it to Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the sixteenth and then to Evansville, Indiana, on the seventeenth. We’d fly back to San Diego for another private show on Tuesday, March 19.

There was no way we could move all of my people that far and that fast without flying.

We’d been leasing our planes from Roger Woolsey, and for that week he’d promised us a Gulfstream I. It would seat seventeen people and cruise at about 280 miles per hour—that was a lot faster than our bus, of course, but it would still mean a lot of time in the air. But a day before the Saginaw show, Roger called and said the Gulfstream would not be available. He said he had worked out another plan for our transportation. He would lease us two small jet planes, a Sabreliner and a Hawker, for the same price as the Gulfstream. We’d have to split the band between the two planes, but they’d be faster. Narvel and I had flown in a Sabreliner and felt very comfortable and familiar with it, and so we agreed to the plan.

For the Saginaw show, Narvel, Sandi, and I flew up and back home in the Sabreliner. The band and crew had traveled to Saginaw by bus. After Roger dropped us off in Nashville, he flew back to Saginaw where the planes were scheduled to leave for San Diego early the next morning.
We wanted to fly the Hawker because we’d never flown in one before and it was a good time to try it out. So the band took our Sabreliner that we usually flew in with the other leased plane. Narvel, Sandi, and I flew out that afternoon in the Hawker, and by the time we touched down at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field the band was already in town and getting ready for the show.

Jim Hammon stood on the runway to meet us in the drizzling rain, walking us one at a time under an umbrella to our waiting limousine. Later Narvel and I would recount all the little details of that trip.

As soon as Jim got into the limousine beside us, the talk turned to airplanes. “The Hawker is a little bit bigger than the Sabreliner,” Jim said. “Do you all mind if we take the Hawker to Fort Wayne and you all take the Sabreliner when you fly back?”

That was fine with us—we didn’t need the extra space. Our only other passenger on the way home would be Sandi. Then, as Jim, Narvel, Sandi, and I rode to the Harbor Island Sheraton Inn, where we would do our show and Narvel, Sandi, and I would spend the night, Jim brought up another problem.

“We got a dilemma here,” Jim said. “The show is at nine o’clock. That means Reba is going to come off at about ten-fifteen. But there is an eleven-o’clock curfew at the airport. Still, I think we [the band] can make it to the airport before eleven.”

“Man,” Narvel said, “that’s only forty-five minutes after she walks offstage. You’ll have to load up the equipment and get over to Lindbergh Field. I don’t think you can make it, Jim. That’s too close.”