THE MUZIK MAFIA
You know I’m here for the party
And I aint leavin’ til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun, gonna get me some
You know I’m here, I’m here for the party
“Here for the Party”
The minute I stopped looking for a way into the business, it seems, things started happening.
The bar I tended at the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar was upstairs; the bandstand where I occasionally sat in was downstairs. On a typical Saturday night in March of 1999, Stacy Michart, the lead singer in the house band downstairs, Blues U Can Use, called on me to come down and sing a couple of songs. It was about 1:30 in the morning and the bar was set to close at two. This was an end-of-the-evening routine that I was very familiar with at this point.
I’ll let John Rich pick the story up from there:
“Big Kenny and I dropped into Bourbon Street for a drink because the band there was so good. We heard this woman being called to the stage and we thought, ‘Oh, okay, the bartender’s going to get up and sing.’ Neither of us, truthfully, was paying a whole lot of attention.
“So this little brunette comes trotting down the stairs and hops on stage. Her hair is in a ponytail and she’s wearing a little cutoff half-shirt and shorts. The first song she sang was ‘Lady Marmalade,’ and she just laid into it.”
(“Lady Marmalade” was a big disco hit for the group Labelle in 1975, around the time I was born, and another smash hit for Christina Aguilera and others in 2000. The chorus translates: “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” I prefer the French version.)
John goes on: “It was like somebody had sucked the oxygen right out of the room. All of a sudden all you could focus on was her. You didn’t care about your drink, your drinking buddy, the crowd, nothing—you were completely mesmerized, or at least Kenny and I were.
“When the song ended, I looked at Kenny and said, ‘Was that as good as I think it was?’ His considered reply: ‘I don’t know, but maybe we should pay more attention when she sings the next one.’
“She then sang her second song, an Aretha Franklin ballad entitled ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).’ Again, she just obliterated it. Kenny and I both realized, then and there, that she had this incredibly powerful voice that she had almost total control over. It was as clear as day—this woman had the goods.
“So when the set was over, she went back to the bar upstairs, and I kind of followed her. I was probably half-lit at this point. I was wearing a cowboy hat and a duster, or long coat, and probably looked to her like the typical wannabe cowboy lounge lizard/con artist with not a whole lot going for him. So I ambled up to the bar, got her attention, and said, ‘So when are you gonna get yourself a record deal, darlin’?’
“She looked back at me with those kind of sharp, darty eyes of hers—a look that says, unmistakably, ‘I could whip your ass’—and she said, ‘Why? Do you think you can f**kin’ get me one?’
“I said, ‘Well, I can’t get you one, but I might be able to help you get one.’
“Without skipping a beat, she reached into her purse, grabbed a homemade CD, and slid it across the bar to me. ‘Listen to that,’ she said. ‘But I’m busy and can’t talk right now. So either order a drink or get out of my face.’ She then looked right past me at the guy standing behind me, and said, ‘Hey, you want another beer?’ In other words, she completely blew me off.”
John is right. I did blow him off exactly for the reasons he said. He did look like a cowboy Romeo trying to hit on me, and in my job, I got that maybe fifty times a night. Plus, I had no idea who he was. At that point, John Rich was already a well-known and highly respected singer-songwriter in Nashville. He was a member of the group Lonestar and had just recently hooked up with Big Kenny—who he saw performing with the group LuvjOi—to form the soon-to-be breakthrough duo Big & Rich. John thought Kenny was a wacko when he first saw him and probably thought I was a surly bitch with a permanent chip on my shoulder. Of course John was someone I should have jumped at the chance of meeting and even working with, but what did I know? I was just a bartender with a good voice who hadn’t gotten a nibble after two years in Nashville.
John listened to my demo and liked it enough to call me to figure out something to do together. I didn’t call him back. I thought he was full of crap. He claims he kept calling every three days for close to a month. Finally, he talked to another waitress at the bar who knew who he was and she came to me and said, “Call John Rich back. He’s legit. He wants to work with you. He’s not trying to pick you up and he’s not a stalker.”
I finally called back, we got together, and there was the start of a long and fruitful friendship with both Big & Rich and a whole lot of other talented singers and songwriters.
John and Kenny were like a lot of promising but unsigned talent in Nashville at the time—they were disillusioned by the way the business was run and frustrated by the fact that safe, mainstream choices seemed to dominate every record deal. John had just been dropped by a label as a solo artist and Kenny was $140,000 in debt on his credit card. But unlike most singer-songwriters in the cold, hard world of Music City, they decided to do something about it.
Together with two other local troublemakers—Jon Nicholson and Cory Gierman—they formed a loose association called the Muzik Mafia. “Mafia” stood for “Musically Artistic Friends in Alliance.” The idea was that a group of like-minded souls would get together on a regular basis, bounce ideas off each other, play original songs for each other, and get honest, sometimes brutal, feedback. If the record companies wouldn’t pay attention to them, at least at the moment, they would pay attention to themselves. And the idea took off. What started out as just a circle of talented and ambitious friends—a kind of musical support group—soon became a legitimate Nashville scene. Early on there were maybe ten strange people who showed up at a Muzik Mafia gig. A year later the place we played was a fire hazard. The “Godfathers” of music staked out a unique territory in the country music biz.
Soon after I met John Rich and Big Kenny and started to hang out with them, they asked me to join the group. Other women occasionally sat in or wrote songs with the others, but I became the only official Mafia “Godmother.” Just like when I joined Baywolfe five or six years before, now the Muzik Mafia had a chick singer.
I can distinctly remember when John Rich first started introducing me to his friends. He’d say things like, “You’ve got to listen to this girl. You just got to listen to her. She’s twenty-seven, she’s skinny, she’s this, she’s that . . .” and then he’d always end with “. . . and she ain’t ugly.” Not “beautiful” or “good-looking” or even “attractive”—just, “she ain’t ugly.” He would tell people that I was just about the only chick tough enough to be in the Mafia. The truth is, we were pretty hard-core with each other. In a business where people lie constantly, we thought the best service we could provide each other was to tell the truth, especially about our music. If someone didn’t like a song that someone else had written, he or she just said so without mincing words. “That song sucks.”
Cory Gierman, the only nonmusician in the group, did a lot of the planning and strategizing for the Mafia. He was actually a song plugger for Universal Publishing. A song plugger is a guy who pitches new songs to established artists in the hope that they will record them, and thus make the publisher, and maybe the songwriter, rich. It’s a huge business in Nashville. Anyway, Cory had the brilliant idea of taking the Mafia into a public arena so that like-minded music lovers had a chance to hear some new and often outrageous music. On top of that, if the Mafia could create a good buzz about what they were up to, maybe even a few progressive decision-makers in the industry might take notice.
Soon the Muzik Mafia had a standing showtime and showplace—every Tuesday night at a little bar called the Pub of Love. I had to get someone to take over my Tuesday night shift at Bourbon Street, but I tried never to miss a single get-together. The Pub had two stories—a bar downstairs and a wide-open hardwood-floor room upstairs, more like an empty rehearsal hall than a barroom. Every Tuesday we’d transform the place into a funky living-room-type setting. We’d bring in couches, lava lamps, carpets, rugs, and other such bric-a-brac, and do a little home-decorating. We’d vibe it out, so to speak, so it would fit our style and mood.
If you came backstage at one on my concerts today and came into the group dressing and lounging room we hang out in before a show, you’d see much of the same decor—old furniture, candles, and as a constant reminder of my grandma’s presence in my life, old ceramic owls. Throw in a little Jack Daniel’s and hard salami and it’s just like home.
We’d make the Pub of Love equally homey, then we’d sit down and start playing. We’d just trade off each other’s original songs, and everyone would chime in on some level as the song unfolded. Someone would add a second guitar, someone else would sing background. Not only was I the only chick at a lot of these sessions, early on I didn’t have any original songs to contribute. Because of that, I felt kind of inferior, like I was more of a tag-a-long than a fully contributing member of the group.
The one thing I could add to the proceedings was my voice. I sang a lot of cover songs, but more importantly, by the second chorus of a brand-new tune, I could come in and sing harmony. Doing that, I could support almost anyone’s new song even if I was only hearing it for the first time. Until I started writing or co-writing my own material and singing it in front of the group, background harmony was what I did a lot of the time.
Onlookers and other participants wandered into the Pub by word of mouth and soon that Tuesday night jam session felt more like a house party. I was second-generation Muzik Mafia—along with a guy named James Otto—but because of the free-spirited, open-ended nature of the enterprise, soon there was what seemed like another player or songwriter on stage every Tuesday. At some point, Cowboy Troy—a shoe salesman by day—joined up and became closely identified with the group.
The informal motto of the Muzik Mafia was: Everybody is welcome, but nobody takes the stage unless he or she is good enough to be up there. Everyone was welcomed and a lot of talented people doing all kinds of creative work showed up. You could come on stage and play whether you were a singer, a saxophone player, a harmonica player, a drummer, or a rapper, as long as you were accomplished and had something to say. It wasn’t Amateur Night as much as it was Talented Misfits Night. As John Rich once put it, “It’s about people who are unique and are not afraid to express their uniqueness.” In retrospect, I fit right into this band of misfits.
And it wasn’t just musicians. You might come to the show and see someone in one corner of the pub painting. Or a fire-breather or a juggler or some other kind of circus performer. It was crazy, for sure, but it all seemed to fit. On most Tuesdays, it was a strange and ever-changing mix of artists and mavericks and freaks for any city, from L.A. to New York. For Nashville, it was a whole different reality.
Imagine something like this: In a room stuffed with secondhand furniture and lit by lava lamps and candles, there are twenty or thirty people standing or sitting around singing one of Big Kenny’s crazy, out-there songs. We’re singing together, arm in arm, in three-part harmony, loving each other at that moment. It was almost like a flashback to the 1960s, though none of us happened to be around in the 1960s. It had that communal vibe, though, the sense that you were surrounded by people who loved you, thought like you, and made you feel part of a real creative community.
Compare this to the way most people in Nashville have to conduct their lives as they struggle to find a foothold in the music industry. They might work with a co-writer or another musician friend or perhaps a manager, but they often feel isolated, frustrated, and forgotten. It can get awfully lonely in Nashville when you’re trying to make it on your own. Lonely and discouraging. During some very unstable and confusing times in our lives, the Muzik Mafia kept us all going. Because we were all in the same boat at the time, we were naturally inclined to support each other and help each other through the rough spots. I think it’s fair to say that if each of us had had to make it on our own, only a few would have survived.
There are a thousand reasons why people succeed or fail in Nashville, some of them legitimate and some of them as silly as the wrong hairstyle or waistline. Mutual support from your peers can often make the difference between giving up and carrying on. John Rich remembers more than one conversation where I became discouraged and he felt it was his duty to pump me back up and reiterate that he and a lot of others were behind me.
“Just look at me, Gretchen, look at me,” he recalls saying. “You know what I am? I am a rabid pit bull dog. I am not letting this thing go until you at least get your shot.”
I remember, between pep talks like that, lying in bed and thinking to myself, “You know what? I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going out there and take a beating anymore.” Everyone who comes to Nashville has those thoughts early on. Not everyone, unfortunately, has a team of like-minded supporters like I had with the Mafia.
We knew we were all good and we kept hoping that someone was going to walk through the front door of the Pub of Love one fine day and take some serious notice. We didn’t really care who got signed out of those sessions. We just hoped one of us got offered a deal and then, maybe magically, the rest of us would get our turn, too.
To make a long story short, the Muzik Mafia turned out to be a big success and things started to happen for a lot of us. First Big & Rich got a record deal, then I got mine, and others soon followed in our footsteps. Jon Nicholson’s debut album, A Little Sump’m Sump’m, was released in 2005. The Mafia established their own record label with Warner Bros. Records called Raybaw Records. “Raybaw” stands for “red and yellow, black and white.” The Raybaw release of Cowboy Troy’s first record, Loco Motive, is nearing gold, quite a feat for a black rapping country artist. In fact, Troy is the first black country performer since Charley Pride to sell this many records. Cowboy Troy’s second album, along with James Otto’s first, will soon be released by Raybaw.
The Muzik Mafia still tries to get together on occasional Tuesdays to play, but we now have to pick various bars and give our fans little or no notice of the occasion. Otherwise, it would be a mob scene. When we officially perform together as the Muzik Mafia, often to raise funds for a worthy cause, we can fill an arena or stadium. The organization’s mantra of “Love Everybody” extends to all kinds of charitable efforts, from Katrina relief to arranging Internet access for inner-city schools. What once was a slapdash gathering of diehard maverick artists has now become an enduring Nashville institution.
Early in my Mafia days, John and Kenny helped me discover a talent I wasn’t sure I had—songwriting. At the time, I didn’t really think of myself as a writer—only a singer—and told them as much. I was just being honest, I thought. I had never written anything that I thought was any good. John proceeded to turn my head around about this. “Just because you’ve yet to write a great song,” he said, “doesn’t mean you’re not a songwriter.” Anyone with a story, he went on, and with the talent I had—there’s no way that I didn’t have a great song or two inside me. I just had to figure out how to dig them out.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”
I was starting to get my hunger back. I was starting to feel like I did the night after I first heard Patsy Cline singing “Faded Love” on my grandma’s console record player. Writing songs as an adult was uncharted territory for me but with John’s encouragement, it now seemed worth the effort. It didn’t take long, working with John Rich, Sharon Vaughn, Vicky McGehee, and a lot of other talented songwriters, before I realized I did have something to write about and maybe even the ability to get that experience down on paper. It was a while before I got around to writing or co-writing the songs that helped launch my career—“Redneck Woman,” “Pocahontas Proud,” and “Not Bad for a Bartender,” for instance—but those songs began to germinate in those early days of the Muzik Mafia.
Though it was written a little later in the story, here’s how one of those songs, “Redneck Woman,” came about. We were sitting around John’s apartment in Nashville one afternoon. We had gotten together for the explicit purpose of writing a new song, though we had no idea what that song might be. John was tuning his guitar and I was watching CMT (Country Music Television) on his TV. I watched three videos, back to back, and they all featured drop-dead beautiful women singing beautiful songs. They were combination singer-supermodels and they were, and still are, some of the reigning stars of country music—Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and Martina McBride, just to name three.
John remembers exactly what I was wearing at the time—a wife-beater tank top, a pair of sweatpants, and flip-flops. I had no makeup on and I had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in another. After watching these videos, I turned to John and said, “You know what, man? There’s just no way that I can do that. No way in hell.”
“Do what?” he asked.
I pointed to the TV screen and said, “That. I can’t do that. That’s just not what I am.”
He asked, “Then what are you?”
I replied, “I guess I’m just a redneck woman!”
Bingo!
“You’re right,” John said. “You are not the Barbie Doll type.”
Right there was the idea for the song, and an hour and a half later, the song “Redneck Woman” was done. It was a song exactly true to who I am and the people I come from. And it has nothing to do with the racist, stupid, hateful, backward “redneck” stereotype that will hopefully, in time, disappear from the language. “Redneck” in “Redneck Woman” is a lifestyle, an attitude toward the world. It’s about people who work hard, often in blue-collar jobs, and play hard. And they don’t take no crap from anyone about who they are and where they come from.
“Redneck Woman” and other songs I began to write were part of a discovery process, I think. I wasn’t discovering how to write a hit song in the conventional sense or how to come up with something that the record executives might see as a commercial winner. I was discovering something much more important—what really makes a singer-songwriter connect to his or her fans and build a career on a solid foundation and not just on hype, musical fads, or the right image for the moment. That’s at the heart of country music—connecting with your audience on some level of real-life experience. The more of yourself you put in the music—warts and all—the greater the chance that the audience will take that music into their own hearts.
It’s a simple-sounding lesson—be true to yourself—but it’s a lesson that a lot of very talented people never quite learn; trying to please others to get ahead usually gets you nowhere. There are a lot of BS’ers in Nashville and if you walk in the door with your own line of BS, they can see it before you plop down on the couch.
John Rich has said that I probably spent too much time after coming to Nashville trying to hide or skip over my rough spots. I guess that’s what the blond hair and gold jewelry were all about. Sobering up helped me shed some of that protective stuff, and when I began to realize that the rough spots were part of my life, and probably a part of millions of people’s lives, that’s when I began to write songs that were more honest and open. When you stop to think about it, a lot of my life was nothing but rough spots—learning to deal with all of that adversity and still keep going was the main story I had to tell. Now, all I needed was someone to give me the chance to tell it.
In the same way I had to learn to let a little more of myself out in my music, I had to learn a few things about letting my guard down and being more trusting of others. In some ways, I guess, my “don’t-mess-with-me” personality was getting in the way, or could get in the way, of people embracing my music. Big Kenny’s first impression of me was that I was a bit of a smartass, which I was, and not all that personable. As I said earlier, I had developed a pretty hard edge to protect myself from all the nasty, untrustworthy, and conniving people I had to deal with as a child. Big Kenny remembers having more than one long conversation with me during those tell-it-like-it-is Mafia get-togethers on my need to mellow out a little and not see everyone around me as a potential rival or threat. If that group of merry music-makers taught me anything, it was that there were people out there who cared about me and supported me and were happy to help me stand on my own feet and survive in Nashville.
As I say in the song “Redneck Woman,” I’m not the sweet, perky Barbie Doll type, and never will be. I grew up with a pretty tough crowd and will probably always be a little bit wary of strangers. But, with the help of friends like Big Kenny, I’m a hell of a lot more open and trusting than I was when I pulled into town eight or nine years ago.
Looking back, Kenny now thinks it was a blessing that I wasn’t the Barbie Doll type and couldn’t pull off the glossy beauty-queen act with the soft, sweet voice if my life depended on it. I would have fallen on my face. I would have failed miserably at being something that I wasn’t cut out to be and probably be back at Hoosier Daddy’s right now, pouring beer. I could only be one thing—who I was—a redneck woman who still kept “my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long.”
We were damn lucky that the Muzik Mafia gave a lot of us a platform to succeed, but again, it didn’t happen overnight. I played Tuesday nights with that group of gypsies for another two years before I finally met the right executive who saw what I had to offer and was ready to roll the dice. It’s a truism but it’s the absolute truth—nothing happens fast in Nashville. You have to wait a lifetime for one twenty-minute shot at stardom.
So I was bartending, learning my craft with the Muzik Mafia, and trying to stay positive and hopeful about the future. Then something else happened to make things even more complicated.
I up and got pregnant.