Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction…
—Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 14, stanza 101
It’s time for another cliché—and as far as my pitching the Sinatra Song to Willie Nelson is concerned, this next one is pretty damn apropos. Every cliché is the result of someone somewhere in the course of history coming up with a truism so perfectly encapsulated in a single phrase that it catches on with the general public and is ultimately so overused that as a rule, writers avoid them. As you’ve noticed by now, I’m ignoring that rule. Plus, I figure if it’s good enough for Lord Byron, it’s certainly good enough for me. Byron’s lines from Don Juan would eventually be truncated down to simply this: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” And so it is.
Despite my full-time day job running Jerry and Mike’s music publishing companies, I’ve always had plenty of free time due to an inability to sleep more than four or five hours a night—a malady I developed when I moved from a sleepy Alabama hamlet to the open-all-night city of New York. So after years of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling from midnight to about four a.m., I decided it would be more productive if I sat at my computer in my home office and wrote during those hours. By 2006, I had pumped out two books, dozens of articles for various music-oriented magazines, and the liner notes to over 100 albums (many of those albums being ones I had compiled for Rhino, K-tel, Warner Bros., and other labels).
In May of 2006, I was putting the finishing touches on the book I was writing about Duane Allman. A couple of years earlier, the very first person I had interviewed for the book was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s John McEuen. Bill McEuen—John’s brother—was already the Dirt Band’s manager when he discovered Duane Allman and his brother, Gregg, playing at a club in St. Louis, Missouri, in the mid-1960s. Bill encouraged the two lads and their fellow bandmates to move to Los Angeles, which they promptly did—soon sharing space in a house that was also home to John McEuen and the rest of the members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
In short order, Bill McEuen had gotten Duane’s band, the Hour Glass, signed to Liberty Records—the same label Bill had earlier gotten the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band signed to (and coincidentally, the same label Willie Nelson had recorded for at the beginning of his career). A close friendship formed between the members of the two bands. John even played banjo on a couple of songs for the Hour Glass’s first album.
I had met John over the Internet in 1989, so when I started writing the Duane Allman book in 2004, I gave him a call. John agreed to let me interview him, and a number of the stories he told me about Allman ended up in the book.
During a break in the interview, John just happened to tell me a story about an experience he’d had in Vegas involving Willie Nelson. Now as I sat at my desk two years after I’d interviewed him, I couldn’t remember anything about John’s story except that the setting was Vegas and the subject was Willie Nelson. I didn’t know how well John knew Willie. All I knew was that he’d told me about a conversation they’d once had in Sin City. But after having no luck with Willie’s manager or Willie’s PR person, I was reaching the desperation point. I’d gone through all of my Rolodexes and hadn’t come up with anyone else I thought might be able to connect me with Willie. John McEuen was my last hope—and my potential “Strike 3.”
When I called John’s house, I got his answering machine. I hung up the phone without leaving a message. I tried to stay calm, but I knew John could be almost anywhere. He was always playing a gig, sometimes as a solo act and sometimes with the still-together-after-nearly-forty-years Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Just as I had done when I was trying to figure out where Willie was, I went back to pollstar.com and typed “John McEuen” in the little box. There was one date listed for a May 21st solo gig at McCabe’s in Santa Monica. It was now May 5th. I couldn’t wait until May 21st. I had to get in touch with John now. So, I typed in “Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,” and a list of dates and cities appeared on my screen. It read, “May 5—Fredericton, New Brunswick; May 6—Moncton, New Brunswick; May 7—Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; May 9—St. John, Nova Scotia; May 10—Halifax, Nova Scotia; May 11—Sydney, Nova Scotia; May 13—Corner Brook, Newfoundland.”
John McEuen
I could feel my heart rate actually starting to increase. Could this really be happening? I typed in Willie’s name again and there it was: “May 5—Fredericton, New Brunswick; May 6—Moncton, New Brunswick; May 7—Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; May 9—St. John, Nova Scotia; May 10—Halifax, Nova Scotia; May 11—Sydney, Nova Scotia; May 13—Corner Brook, Newfoundland.”
It seemed absolutely impossible—the ultimate coincidence. The odds were completely off the charts. Truth is, indeed, so much stranger than fiction. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was playing on the same bill with Willie Nelson—all the way across Canada.
I grinned from ear to ear, reached into my desk drawer, pulled out the bottle of Gentleman Jack I’ve always kept on hand for only the most special of occasions—and raised a toast to good ol’ Lord Byron.