HERE FOR THE PARTY
Well I’m an eight-ball shootin’ double fisted drinking son of a gun
I wear my jeans a little tight
Just to watch the little boys come undone
I’m here for the beer and the ball busting band
Gonna get a little crazy just because I can
“Here for the Party”
Despite the hardships I’ve described, my life as a kid was not an endless nightmare. We moved a lot, of course, and there was often a lot of stress and anxiety wherever we were living, but like I said, I always had friends and relatives nearby to keep me semi-sane and make me feel loved and protected.
And I had music.
I can’t remember when music and singing wasn’t a part of my life. It’s funny, because no one else in my immediate family either sings or plays an instrument or has more than a passing interest in music. The only person who might have instilled a love of music was my biological father, but he wasn’t around long enough to have much of an influence. It was something that I feel came to me as much from the inside as from the outside.
My mom claims I started singing around the house when I was about three. Apparently I was pretty good at carrying a tune, because by the time I was four or five, Mom would set up little impromptu concerts in the middle of Kmart on a Saturday afternoon. We would go there to shop and find a Blue Light Special where a crowd was already gathered. Mom would then plant me on a box or something and announce she had a treat in store for all the weary shoppers. I would then belt out a Patsy Cline tune, a cappella. The crowd would go nuts. We didn’t pass the hat or beg for tips. Money had nothing to do with it. Mom just did it for the reaction it got. She was very proud of my talent and of course I liked doing it, too. I mean, who wouldn’t want a Kmart full of people clapping and cheering and patting you on the head at five years old?
By the age of five I was also entering local talent shows, most of them sponsored by whatever school I was attending at the time. Mom claims I won my first talent show at five. I don’t remember that one, but I do remember an early one where I came in fourth and the kid who won first prize did a great version of “New York, New York.” Don’t think I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into these competitions. By the time I was seven I was actively looking for any and every opportunity to sing. No matter what school I was in, whether in Greenville, Illinois, or North Miami, Florida, one of the first things I did after reporting to my new homeroom was to sign up for the school choir, or chorus, or any other creative program that would allow me to sing. If there was a talent show, I was there. If they needed someone to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an assembly, my hand went up high. I was the perpetual new kid at school who loved to sing.
And if I couldn’t muster up an audience at Kmart or at school, I’d make one out of the family. At any family gathering of more than five or six people, I’d likely find a hairbrush to use as a microphone and run through my repertoire of four or five Hank Williams tunes like “Jambalaya” or “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Or it would be the other way around. I’d want to go outside and play and someone would say, “Oh, come on, Gretchen, sing for us, sing for us,” and even if I were tired of belting out tunes that day, I’d do it anyway. At seven, I learned a very important show business lesson. Never disappoint your fans. The show must always go on.
Vern had an eight-track deck in his room—remember those things?—and I was forever sneaking into his room when he wasn’t home to root through his record collection. I knew it would piss him off more than anything else in the world; I guess I was getting back at him for all those Indian rubs and wild rides on the wagon behind his motorbike. Vern, in a way, introduced me to a much larger world of popular music at a very early age. He had quite a stack of records—Charlie Daniels, AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and even the latest album by Loverboy. Right next to the rock was Waylon, Willie, the Outlaws, Hank Jr., Ray Stevens, George Jones, Tom T. Hall, and Roger Miller. You have to be exposed to music to learn to love it and Vernon provided me with almost daily exposure to all kinds of wonderful music.
I can remember clearly when singing became something more than just a parlor game for my in-laws or some hurried shoppers. Again, I was about seven. My grandma had bought a console stereo on credit from a local department store without telling my grandpa; he didn’t like wasting money on such nonsense. It took her like five years to pay it off.
I was at her house one day and someone played a 33 1/3 LP recording by Patsy Cline of the song “Faded Love.” I listened to it and that was the first time that any song really got to my emotional core. It made the hairs on my arm stand up. It was like an electrical charge or something. I was absolutely stunned by it.
I had already been singing for a while, but the moment that I actually knew what I wanted to do with my life was listening to that song that day. My dream was born right then and there.
Later that evening, I was inspired to sit down and try to write my very first country song. With my grandma’s considerable help—she supplied words I had yet to learn—I cranked out a tune called “Winter Love.” I can still remember the lyrics today:
I hate these cold nights lyin’ in bed,
Thinkin’ about the winter love that you and I had.
I love you dearly,
I’m so lost and weary without you.
We had a love like the perfect romance,
Under the stars I was lost in your trance.
Grandma gave me the word “trance” to rhyme with “romance.” I didn’t really know what a trance was at the time.
Anyway, that was my first effort at a tear-jerker and actually my last effort at writing anything until I started writing songs with John Rich many years later. But I kept up the singing and the general showing-off. By the time I was eleven, I had expanded my around-the-house stage act to include anything I could pick up and memorize from television or movies. Gather the clan for Thanksgiving or Christmas and the after-meal entertainment might include Gretchen reciting entire routines from the onstage performance film Eddie Murphy Raw. These kinds of pop culture exercises would offend my grandpa greatly—they usually involved racy language, not to mention black people—but Grandma loved it and I got a kick out of shaking things up a little. Hey, I still do.
Music was not only a way that I entertained people and received a lot of praise as a kid. It was also the one thing I could hold on to when things got crazy, which was often. It was my getaway. I had to find a new getaway every time we moved. Sometimes in Florida, it was riding horses on a Cuban farm. Sometimes in Illinois, it was playing pool for hours on end. No matter what was going on in the family and no matter where we had moved to and for however long, music was always something I could escape to and let me feel good about myself. Unlike a lot of precious things in life, you can carry music around in your head and always feel soothed, inspired, and reassured by it.
I have some very poignant memories growing up in the country that involved music as an escape valve. If I was bored, bothered, or just lonely, I’d occasionally slip out the back of a trailer with a jam box, or portable cassette player, in tow, and head out to the open fields nearby. I’d find one of those giant concrete drainpipes that ran under an overpass or just along a drainage ditch. They were something like four or five feet from bottom to top. I’d crawl inside the pipe, assuming it wasn’t full of muddy water, and I’d plant myself with my tennis shoes braced against one side and my back against the other. Then, away from all distractions, I would turn on my jam box and sing along to my favorite music of the moment. In those days, it was most likely a song by one of the great woman country singers of the time (and all time) like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, or Tanya Tucker.
During this little concert for myself, the drainpipe would resonate like a big echo chamber and make my voice sound a lot louder, like it was being amplified across a giant auditorium. I was so happy in that little hideaway. I was in my own little world, just me and the coalminer’s daughter or that coat of many colors, miles away from all the uncertainty and unhappiness that was often waiting for me back in the trailer.
As much as anywhere else, I grew up in bars. My mother was by profession a bartender, among other jobs, and by addiction an alcoholic. Pretty much everyone in my family drank, from Grandma’s “half a beer” to all the kinfolk gathered around the beer cooler or the Jack Daniel’s bottle during family gatherings. And at one time or another, many of my other relatives had worked in bars, including Grandma, Aunt Vickie, and Uncle Vern. Since I was a kid, one or another bar, especially those around Pocahontas, has been my home away from home.
If you haven’t gathered this by now, bars are the center of the social world where I was raised. It’s where all the local news and gossip gets passed along, where people play out their private domestic dramas in public, often with someone getting punched in the face or kicked in the head as a consequence, and it’s where a steady supply of nightly and weekend entertainment can be found. When you got bored, which was often, you could head to the bar for a little lighthearted company, a boilermaker, and a game of darts. It was like a recreational center for adults.
These little Southern Illinois taverns, dozens if not hundreds of them, just sit along the side of the country roads out there with nothing else around them but wide expanses of farmland. They were every twenty miles or so. All you have to do is get in your car, start driving, and you’re bound to find one where you least expect, on the loneliest, most desolate stretch of two-lane blacktop imaginable.
“Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going?” some suspicious spouse would yell to another at about 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening. “You know where the hell I’m going,” was the usual reply. “I’m goin’ down to . . .” (Fill in bar name here: Hoosier Daddy’s, or Flicks, or Lenjo’s, or the O-Zone, or the Leisure Lounge, or Mooch’s Pit Stop, or the Rail Shake Inn) over in Highland.” This last place was called the Rail Shake Inn because it sat right next to the railroad track and every time a train came through, the whole place shook and rattled. It scared the hell out of first-timers.
The bar of my particular youth, as I’ve mentioned in about every interview I’ve ever done, was a nondescript little roadside oasis situated on County Line Road in the metropolis of Pierron, Illinois. It was called Big O’s.
One of only two bars in Pierron, Big O’s was a perfectly square concrete building, maybe forty by forty in size. On a good night, when a favorite local band was playing or just a lot of people decided they wanted to get good and drunk, the place held maybe forty-five to fifty people. Pierron is even smaller than Pocahontas and the main activity there is drinking. There’s no stop sign, no stoplight, no gas station, and no grocery store. There are these two bars and a little cigarettes-and-pork-rinds convenience store with no gas. It’s not like you’d go to Pierron, catch a movie, do a little window-shopping, then hit the bar. You’d just hit the bar.
County Line Road runs through the middle of Pierron and separates the two drinking establishments. One bar is in Bond County and the other is in Madison County. This is significant because it means both of them are on the fringes of both counties, which means the police station in each county, located in the county seat, is a long ways away. The local cops or even the Illinois State Police rarely patrolled out that way. Pierron was close to being no-man’s-land, law-enforcement-wise, and underage drinking was not an uncommon sight. If a teenager dropped in with his dad to have a beer, the kid usually got his own mug. If the people there knew you and/or your folks, your chances of getting carded at Big O’s or any other such place were pretty slim. I mean, come on, you’re with your dad!
Of course, if there was trouble—a brawl, a car wreck, or, God forbid, something involving guns—the police came running. But that was a rarity. Mostly the trouble was one-on-one fights, and mostly those got settled without having to call the cops.
Big O’s was owned and operated by Mark “Big O” Obermark, a man who weighed in anywhere between four hundred and five hundred pounds, and a dear friend to this day. Nowadays Big O, in failing health, gets around in an electric wheelchair and lives behind another bar in the area. When he wants to hang out at the bar, he just wheels his way up a cement ramp, finds his spot in the room, and plugs the chair in to recharge the battery.
I was about thirteen or fourteen when we first met up with Big O. We got to know him down at the stock car races in Highland when Aunt Vickie’s husband, Eric, was down there tearing up the track in his favorite Chevy. Big O was a big race fan and a delightful guy to hang out with. We’d see him at the track—he was kind of hard to miss—then join up later at a bar to drink beer and tell jokes. After he opened Big O’s, my mom started working for him and we all just naturally gravitated there because Mark was so friendly and free-spirited. Soon he was like another member of the family.
Then, at fourteen, I started to work in the kitchen at Big O’s, fixing burgers and fries. It wasn’t long after that when I started bartending up front. Given the circumstances, you didn’t have to be twenty-one to get a drink at a place like that, and you didn’t even have to be twenty-one to serve that drink. It was just another way that I grew up fast.
Mark’s dad, Rudy, was also a fixture around Big O’s, but you’d never know he was his dad in a million years. He was a thin little guy, about five foot four, had a white beard and white hair, and always wore overalls and often a railroad hat. He was the spitting image of Papa Smurf. He also worked hard around the bar, doing anything that needed to be done, from serving up chicken strips and fries out of the tiny kitchen behind the bar to closing the place down. The menu at Big O’s was pretty much anything you could drop into a deep fryer.
My mom worked for Big O at one time or another, as had my Aunt Vickie and my Uncle Vern. Even my grandma worked in his kitchen a time or two; she and Rudy became good friends. At one point we lived in a trailer park where you could walk to Big O’s, so it was our neighborhood hangout. Kids in those parts didn’t have many places to go and waste time. There were no shopping malls or down-the-street pizza joints where you could meet your friends and goof off. Bars like Big O’s were great for that. You could go in one of them and shoot pool, throw darts, play an electronic poker machine, watch TV, play the jukebox, or eat a cheeseburger. Especially if your mom was working in a bar, you’d just wander over to the place and amuse yourself while you stayed out of everybody’s way.
I also learned at a pretty young age that it is a great place to watch people tell stories, complain about their lives, get into arguments, and just let their hair down and be themselves. Especially if you are a songwriter, you just soak up everything like this and are pleasantly surprised when some detail you observed—like a Skoal ring on the back pocket of every man who walked in the bar—shows up in a song fifteen years later.
I learned to be a pretty good country pool player from all those trips to Big O’s and later used that skill to make a little side money when on the road with local bands I joined up with. There were times, in fact, when I made more money hustling pool than singing in a band. Men everywhere hate to get beaten by a woman in anything, especially something like pool that they have played day in and day out for years. That always made taking their money extra sweet.
Live music was a staple in almost every bar in the greater Pierron/Pocahontas/Greenville/Highland area. Unless you wanted to drive into St. Louis and confront an alien urban culture, you got your music not from seeing Bob Seger or Ted Nugent in concert but from seeing the local Bob Seger or Ted Nugent wannabe who did a pretty damn good job playing and singing songs like “Night Moves.” The local musicians invariably had day jobs during the week and hooked up with their band mates to earn a little extra cash on the weekends. Even before I formally joined my first band, I would worm my way into sitting in with bands playing these local joints. I was only eleven or twelve at the time, but I’d be there at five o’clock when they were setting up and I’d slide up to the lead guitarist and say, “Hey, can I get up and sing one with you later?” He’d most likely ask, “I guess so, what songs do you know?” I’d answer, “Well, I know ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ in the key of G,” and two hours later I’d be on stage, singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in the key of G.
Not that Big O’s had much room for bands. If you packed people in like sardines, it was still a relatively small crowd, all of whom smoked, so the air was usually a wall-to-wall cloud of smoke. O had an ingenious way to make room for a stage performance. The pool table that dominated the back of the place was on wheels. A piece of the back wall flipped up and you could push the table into an empty storage room right behind that wall. The band would then set up where the table once was and when they were through for the night, we’d move that table back in place and commence a game of eight-ball.
Big O’s was a rowdy place. There are bullet holes in the back wall, but they didn’t come from some cowboy trying to even the score with his cheating spouse. It was just our way of letting off steam at quitting time. Big O always carried an automatic .25 pistol in his pocket and after the evening crowd left, we’d take turns shooting empty bottles and cans at twenty paces. If there was some drunk still there who refused to leave, O would fire off a few rounds into the ceiling as a wake-up call. It always got them moving.
The seven or eight regulars who held down the bar during the daylight hours were seldom any trouble. They’d just sit there all day, nursing their “mug of Busch,” with little piles of nickels, dimes, and quarters in front of them to pay for the next mug. You could tell how many beers they would consume that day by the change they had piled in front of them.
But at night and especially on the weekends, there was always something going on—a loudmouth drunk looking for trouble, an angry husband looking for his wife, or maybe the age-old rivalry between hard-asses from Greenville versus hard-asses from Highland. Even in an area as unpopulated as that one, there were cliques in the bar. The old guys hung together, as did the roughnecks, the women who dropped by, the Harley crowd, and the farmers. Not that any of us were much different from the rest. We all came from the same place and we all liked to listen to everything from Merle Haggard to AC/DC.
The men who called the place home were often just strange. One regular, named Herschel, drove a piece-of-crap old Cadillac with a big set of longhorns on the front grille and he talked in an eerie, robotic smoker’s voice. He’d mostly just laugh . . . “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh” . . . between ordering up another mug of Busch. Then there was Mark, a good friend of my Uncle Vern, who lived across the street from us. He’d walk in the front door of Big O’s, already drunk, go straight up to a wooden post in the middle of the bar, and start beating his head on it. He’d do that, methodically, until his head would start bleeding. Sometimes this could take a good twenty or thirty minutes. Then, as suddenly as he started, he’d stop, wipe the blood off, grab a seat at the bar, and order a beer.
None of us knew why he did it but we knew not to interrupt his head-pounding ritual. If you went over and tapped him on the shoulder during this event, he might turn on you like a rabid dog. Sometimes Big O would have to kick him out for some reason and he’d start beating his head on the door. O claims Mark went home one night, got his pistol, dressed in camouflage, and sat in a tree waiting for O to leave so he could take him out. O probably talked him out of it.
O claims that Mark was a madman when drunk and a sweetheart when sober. With people like Mark, you generally just let them alone to work out their problems in their own weird way. That’s the way you dealt with most people who frequented Big O’s. Whatever their personal pain—no job, a broken heart, a warrant for their arrest, the DTs, or just a psychotic tic like beating their head to a bloody pulp—if they didn’t bother you or some other patron, you didn’t bother them.
Bars are not the healthiest environment to be around, especially for someone barely in their teens, but I never much questioned that life at the time. I do think that being in such a place where people often came to escape from unsatisfying lives and bitch about their miseries, I picked up on their restlessness. I have always been restless. I’ve always felt like things could be better, that there was more to do, to see, to experience and learn from.
Even today, if I write a song, it takes a lot of convincing before I think it’s done and as good as it will get. My mom’s compulsion to keep looking for a new life around every corner probably has something to do with this. She let someone who mistreated her drag her all over the country so that she might find a better life for herself and her kids. In this respect, I’m a lot like my mom. I also knew that there was something better up ahead for me, and I was itching to find it.
Some of my restlessness came out as just pure teenage rebellion. By the time I was fourteen, I’d had more than a beer or two, smoked more than a couple of packs of cigarettes, and was already a dedicated dipper. I used to dip in class in school. During one study hall in Greenville, full of two hundred kids scared to death of the teacher, the football coach, I had a dip in my mouth and was spitting into a Coke can when he spotted me. He located my can of Skoal and announced to the whole class that I was chewing tobacco and since I seemed to like it so much, maybe I should have the whole can. He then proceeded to make me eat the whole can. And I ate it. Luckily I only had a half a can left.
Here’s where I showed the stubbornness that I had learned from years of dealing with my grandpa. I swallowed the whole thing and then sat there for another forty minutes as if gulping down a fistful of dipping tobacco was no big deal. I wasn’t going to let that bully see me get sick. I wasn’t going to let him think he really nailed me. Of course, as soon as class was over, I ran into the bathroom and puked my guts out, but I had made my point.
By the time I was about fifteen, the urge to get away from my mom and stepfather and try something totally new had become overwhelming. The restlessness finally took over. I had to get away from the craziness of their unstable life, for sure, but I also had to prove something to myself and anyone else who cared. I had to show the world that I could make it on my own.