That great speckled bird sang her song in his ear
Whisperin’ words of magic that only Vince could hear . . .
It was a rainy Nashville night, the dregs of winter, as Vince Matthews and his Budweiser stumbled down a back-alley stairway and ducked into the automobile of a friend. Vince was entering that happy stage of inebriation in which his tongue is unleashed on a variety of philosophical rampages, ranging from the evils of Richard Nixon to the trials and tribulations of writing country songs.
The latter subject is actually most interesting to him, for, like most people, Vince finds himself one of the world’s more fascinating topics of conversation. Unlike most people, he is probably right. He has been knocking around Nashville for a dozen years, writing songs that run the gamut from terrible to poignant, and building (sometimes consciously) a richly deserved reputation as the quintessential crazy, mixed-up, manic depressive, unlucky, when-you’re-hot-you’re-hot, when-you’re-not-you’re-not kind of songwriter who is still hanging in there and no doubt will be as long as he’s breathing.
“You gotta live it, man,” he said with slurry-tongued sincerity as the car bounced gingerly along the alleyway potholes. And with that he launched into the story of how he once hitchhiked to Chicago with five dollars in his pocket, arrived with only one, and passed three days in a drainage culvert wondering how to spend a lonesome dollar bill.
Eventually he said to hell with it, and threw it away. After miraculously failing to starve, he somehow wound up in Nashville again, where he wrote a song about the whole experience. Johnny Cash heard it, recorded it, and before long “Wrinkled, Crinkled, Wadded Dollar Bill” had made it to the country music charts, and Vince became temporarily rich. “I think,” he said, as his mind wandered reluctantly back to the present, “that it’s called casting your bread on the water. At least that’s what Jesus called it.”
The parallels between Jesus and Vince are not overwhelming, however. He has a lot of traits that Jesus no doubt would have admired, but throwing away the dollar was more an offering to art than to religion, and in an odd sort of way it typified Matthews’s whole career. There is nothing he loves more than a wallet full of money, but he has steadfastly refused to become a slave to its pursuit. And the refusal has kept him pure—a personification of the uncommercialized side of country music.
Matthews was born in the west Tennessee town of Waverly on May 3, 1942, and spent his teenage years listening to the rockabilly outpourings of Sun Records in Memphis and trying his hand at some amateur songwriting. Some time around his twentieth birthday he headed east to Nashville, and he cut a pretty impressive figure when he hit town—a bright and energetic young man, with the high Cherokee cheekbones and the jet-black hair of a forgotten Tennessee ancestor.
He had little trouble landing a job in an advertising firm, then later in the office of a commercial artist. But a friend named Bill Brook (who had written a song for Chubby Checker) showed him how to approximate the A, E, and D chords on a guitar, and on the same afternoon Vince sat down and wrote twenty-eight songs. They were terrible. He was hooked, however, and kept on dabbling until finally, in the late winter of 1963, he helped compose a maudlin ballad called “Hobo and a Rose.”
“Don Vincent and I wrote it on a Sunday,” Vince recalled. “We pitched it to Webb Pierce on Monday, and he cut it on Wednesday. I thought, ‘Jeez, this is the easiest thing I ever did. I think I’ll do it every day.’ I’ve been hitting off and on ever since—mostly off, I might add.”
The gyrations between high-riding success and abject, starvation-level failure have defined Vince’s career, and the capricious pummeling has taken its toll on his ego and all-around psychological functioning. His songs kept getting better and better, but his ratio of success remained frustratingly constant. There were some definite high points: He wrote “Bob” for the Willis Brothers, which was one of the most serious records that they ever did, and along with Jim Casey he wrote a song called “Toast of ’45” for Sammi Smith. It told the story of an over-the-hill movie actress, and established Matthews as a writer with a deep-seated understanding of the human condition.
It established him, that is, among the other artist-types around Nashville, but not among the record-buying public. For the dry spells continued to plague him, and the eye-opening fact of the matter was that they had little relationship to anything—to how hard he was working, or how well he was writing, or even how deeply he wanted to succeed.
That kind of psychological environment will leave you with a finely honed sense of the absurd, and it may have been for that very reason that Vince fell in so compatibly with Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson arrived in town several years after Vince had already established a toehold, and like Matthews he found himself bouncing around between his own basic confidence in what he could do and the hard and cold fact that no one was listening. So the two of them took what comfort they could in a loose confederation of other Young Turks, a sort of artistic cabal consisting of Mickey Newbury, Townes Van Zandt, Billy Swann, and a few dozen more—sharing songs, joints, and good times, and boosting one another’s creative instincts.
Vince was genuinely stunned by Kristofferson’s ability with words, and during the lean years when the Music Row decision-makers weren’t paying much attention, Kris would bring over his latest compositions and lay his ego on the line for a Matthews critique. Sometimes he listened to what Vince had to say, and other times, fortunately, he didn’t. Once, for example, Kristofferson brought over a brand-new ballad called “Me and Bobby McGee,” and Vince told him it was great except for the line about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose.
“Doesn’t fit,” Vince insisted. “Disrupts the story line.”
Matthews will tell the story on himself with considerable delight these days, laughing in his semi-maniacal way about how Kristofferson’s words have become a sure bet for any updated versions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Then, with another slurp at his Budweiser, he will turn suddenly serious and affirm with a sheepish nod of his head that “there was actually a time when I thought I was as smart as ole Kris.”
It’s a revealing confession, an unintended testimonial to the fact that his friendship with Kristofferson has been a double-edged reality. On the one hand it has certainly helped him, for Kristofferson has pushed his songs, plugged him on national TV, and even, on occasion, shoved him onstage for concert appearances. But on the other hand Kris became famous and Vince never did, and that’s a tough one to take no matter how well you and your ego get along. In Matthews’s case, the relationship with his self-esteem has always been a little bit turbulent, and he has spent more hours than he cares to remember wondering why he wasn’t born a genius.
Actually, however, that may be the wrong question, for at his best Vince can write songs with anybody. Johnny Cash once maintained that a Matthews composition called “Melva’s Wine” was the “best contemporary folk song in American music.” And “On Susan’s Floor”—recorded in equally moving versions by Gordon Lightfoot and Hank Williams, Jr.—has its own mini-cult following among country musicians.
So the barrier between Vince and stardom is not really his brain. But it is something equally basic: it’s his voice. He can’t sing a lick. Some people would argue, of course, that Kristofferson can’t either, but Vince is to Kristofferson as Kristofferson is to Mario Lanza; and to understand the full weight of that reality, you had only to accompany Vince one night a few years back to an Exit Inn appearance by Mickey Newbury.
Newbury had established himself by then as one of the more magnificent vocalists on the country scene, with a voice that was mellow and strong and throbbing with emotion. When he turned it loose on his own compositions—songs like “Heaven Help the Child” and “An American Trilogy”—jaws would drop in the crowd, eyes became riveted to the front of the room, and all other sounds dried up with the kind of awe and deference that the occasion always seemed to demand.
At least that’s what usually happened. But if Vince was along you never quite knew what to expect, and on this particular night he was so far on his way toward chemical alteration that he simply couldn’t contain himself. He began to sing along from his back-row seat, softly at first, but soon with all the power and sincerity of a wounded dog or a cow in labor.
Through it all, he retained a sort of boozy and beatific tolerance toward the stares of hatred and disbelief that were being cast in his direction. However, when a waiter began taking whispered orders for drinks during one particularly moving number, Vince lurched up to him and demanded that he please show respect for an artist of Mickey Newbury’s caliber.
But that, as people around Nashville are fond of saying, is just Vince. He has a fierce and unshakable loyalty toward people he respects, and the feeling is very often mutual. When he decided a few years back, for example, that he wanted to cut an album, Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein agreed to produce it, and Johnny Cash wrote some liner notes and even whistled background on one of the cuts. And surprisingly enough, given Vince’s limitations in front of a microphone, most people who heard it thought it was a pretty good record, especially in its content. It was a concept album titled Kingston Springs Suite and telling the story of Kingston Springs, Tennessee, a tiny, hill-country town that you could plunk down with equal validity almost anywhere in middle America.
Matthews lived in Kingston Springs for seven years, developing a strong affection for its people, and he brought that feeling alive with songs about an old man dying, a young girl leaving town (because she believed, erroneously, that no one cared about her), and a village blacksmith who was also a dispenser of down-home wisdom.
Counting the time he spent writing the songs, Vince worked on the album off and on for more than five years. He couldn’t find a record label to back the project, but it developed into an obsession with him and he went into the studio anyway. He says he spent fifty thousand dollars of his own money (actually money that he didn’t really have yet) buying studio time, paying musicians, and even having half a dozen records pressed in order to try to sell the finished product to a major label.
But even with the intercession of his well-connected friends, nobody was interested, and Vince found himself financially and spiritually in considerable debt—especially since he wasn’t getting any songs cut by other artists. The year 1974 came and went before he had earned a penny, and the prospects didn’t appear too much better in the early months of 1975. So Vince said good-bye to Kingston Springs and Nashville and headed for New York, hoping desperately that greener pastures might be waiting somehow amid the concrete canyons. They weren’t.
But then, in one of those unexplainable quirks that have characterized Vince’s flirtations with country music, a pair of newcomers named Gene Watson and Crystal Gayle decided to record some songs that he had written several years earlier. Watson’s version of “Love in the Hot Afternoon” went to the top of the charts, and Miss Gayle (who is Loretta Lynn’s little sister) did almost as well with “This Is My Year for Mexico”—the story of a housewife trapped by habit and dreaming of the places she would go if her spirit were only a little bit freer.
Charley Pride soon cut a masculine version of Crystal Gayle’s hit; Hank Williams, Jr., went into the studio with “On Susan’s Floor,” and suddenly—thirteen years after he’d first breezed into Nashville—Vince Matthews was hot commercial property. He signed a writing contract with Peer-Southern, a prestigious company headed by Ralph Peer, Jr., whose father, Ralph Sr., of Okeh Records, had wandered down from New York in the twenties to record such ambitious hillbillies as Pop Stoneman, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Carter Family.
One of the first songs Vince wrote after his deal with Peer was titled “Who Was Bradley Kincaid?”—an ode of sorts to the college-educated Kentucky guitarist who had headed north in the early twenties to become a star on the WLS Barn Dance. All of that was symbolic to Vince, for he is, among other things, a student of the country tradition, and captivated by the concept that his own niche is being carved, somehow, by an inscrutable destiny with the inevitable doses of artistic suffering.
All of that may be simple presumption or conceit, but then again it may not. For Vince has lived and embodied all the things that give country music its power: He has known the sting of failure and the whiffs of occasional prosperity. He has been drunk, lonesome, lovesick, and hungry, and through it all he has clung to the basic sensitivity and human compassion that have always been the cornerstone of good country music.
“I like Vince a lot,” says Johnny Cash with a nod of somber finality. “He’s probably one of the greatest writers this business has ever had. I sure would like to see him make it.”
Personally, I don’t think it will make a whole lot of difference to Vince, for he is equally at home cruising around Nashville in a Cadillac he can’t afford, or selling the damn thing and hitching a ride with a friend. Which is what he did a little while back, and as we rumbled down the alleyway toward a sleazy little tavern where the pickers gather for pinball and beer, he began to talk about the deal he had struck with Peer—a songwriter’s dream, he affirmed with a sweeping gesture that sent the rearview mirror spinning into nonalignment.
“Oops, sorry,” he said, making a feeble attempt at repairing the damage. “Anyway, man, I ain’t saying it’s been easy, but hell, I’m only thirty-three. That’s not too bad, is it? I got two songs on the charts, I got a good deal with a publisher, hell I just might make it this time. But then,” he said, opening the door and pausing half in and half out for an eloquent summation, “I s’pose I’ve said that before...”
As he grinned and went trudging off into the Nashville rain, humming off-key and wobbling toward the fog-shrouded honky-tonk, you had the feeling, somehow, that country music just might survive its current bout with success.