(Rascal Flatts)
I’m not a country music guy by any stretch, but I definitely didn’t want to alienate any genre based on personal taste. I’m not sure if LeVox was afraid to tell me any truly gnarly stories, but with sixteen number one songs, I honestly believe that they just didn’t have time to get truly out of control.
This one is really weird, and it’s a miracle I didn’t get seriously hurt. It was the beginning of our tour a few years back, so the set and everything was new. A few weeks in, I told my stage manager, “Dude, I can’t see where I’m walking out there.” Usually there’s glow-in-the-dark tape to mark the edges and outline of the stage. When the spotlights went dark, it was totally black for me, and I couldn’t see squat. I was getting worried I would torpedo right off the stage, and it was about a ten foot drop to the ground. Sure enough, one night I was singing, and brother—I just walked straight off the stage. The weird thing was everything went quiet, and it was like I went deaf for about five seconds. I landed square on my feet, right in the middle of the audience. I didn’t really know what had happened, and I just stood there.
All the camera phones came out, and it was like an out-of-body experience. It was almost like I had floated down there. The baseball player Johnny Damon was there, and we hung out with him after the show. He gave me a baseball that read, “To Gary, nice recovery bro.” Another bad one was when we were playing an outdoor festival with a huge, elevated stage. The camera guys were shooting up at us, and putting it up on the jumbotron. It was our second song, and the crotch completely ripped out of my pants. As it was only the second song, I’m thinking, “Dammit—what am I gonna do for the next hour?” I jumped up on the drum riser and yelled at our drummer Jim Riley, “Did my pants just rip?” He’s banging away and yells back, “Yep,” with a big smile on his face. I had to reach down and wrangle one of the camera guys. “Dude, please don’t shoot me from that angle!” I had to sing with my feet together for the whole show.
When you go from being an opening act and take that lead to headliner, it’s either gonna work or it’s not, and it’s scary. The people suddenly weren’t buying tickets to Kenny Chesney or Brooks & Dunn with us included. It was suddenly all on us, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready. It was a really scary time in my career because the last thing you want to do is fail at something you love. Thankfully, that self-doubt went away because I knew we were ready. We started with Jo Dee Messina, Toby Keith, Brooks & Dunn and finally Kenny Chesney. We were building up hits, but even with four singles, that’s only thirteen minutes of music. What were we gonna do with the other forty-five minutes? Our plan was to build it up as big as possible before going out on our own.
We’ve had people turn on us and been heckled a bunch of times. Early on, it was mostly girls coming out to the shows. There’d be a ton of high school girls who had dragged their boyfriends along. They’d come back for the meet-n-greet and would literally say, “I don’t even want to be here, but she made me come.” This one time in Colorado, there was a whole wrestling team at the show that was throwing rocks at us. They hit our fiddle player and drummer and banged up our instruments. Finally, the wrestling coach realized what was going out and threw them out. A few years ago, we were opening for the Rolling Stones at the Indy 500. Stones fans are so incredibly passionate and don’t want to sit through an opening act. They were flipping us off and heckling the entire show. I was thinking, “This is crazy! These senior citizens are flipping me the bird!” There was a woman who had to be at least seventy-eight, flipping me off and flashing me. You don’t forget that kinda thing.
Nowadays, somebody gets two hits and they’re out there headlining. You can only play “Sweet Home Alabama” so many times in a forty-five-minute set. You gotta be ready for that main stage. Our first single went number one, and it really hasn’t stopped. It’s been eighteen years and sixteen number one songs. Twenty-six million records sold. It really has been a whirlwind. We were in our early twenties and didn’t really know how to take it. I was the only one that was married. It was as crazy as you can imagine, with no sleep. We were working so hard, doing three radio stations a day. We were touring and cutting records while on tour, and it’s been that way for the past fifteen years. Last year, we only did thirty-five shows, and that was us essentially taking the year off.
Because of that crazy schedule, you’ll never see us on Behind the Music: The Drug Years. There just really wasn’t time. We were doing stuff that no one had done before. We were the first country act to play and sell out Wrigley Field and the first country band to do three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. We were high on our career. The best training ground for me was the early days, playing bars and honky-tonks in Nashville. I learned what worked on stage and how to talk to the crowd. I really honed my craft in those whiskey joints. With American Idol or The Voice, you’ve got winners who have never even sang in a club with no training on how to be a front man or woman.
Man, people love to fight in those honky-tonks. People get hammered and just lose their minds, and I’ve had to get physical a bunch of times. They’re trying to test you. The bars don’t close until 3:00 a.m. in Nashville, so we were up there from 9:00 p.m.–3:00 a.m. By the time we’d get outside, people were going to work. It was like, “What the hell are we doing? What kind of life are we living?” I had a bunch of moments when I thought about quitting, especially before we got our record deal. I’m originally from Ohio, and I had a state job for ten years. I left a good job with benefits to chase this dream and starve. I don’t know how many times I called my mom, freaking out that I couldn’t do it.
When we first started, we were working off of tips only. One night, Jay [DeMarcus] had his keyboard set up on the floor by a cigarette machine. I was sitting on a stool, and that was our set-up for the night. We made twenty-seven cents one night, and that’s a true story. I looked at Jay and said, “How the hell are we going to split this?” Touring has gotten better with age for me because I appreciate it so much more. Country fans are loyal to the end, and I believe they’re the most loyal in the music business. With pop, hip-hop, or rock, I don’t think their fans are any less passionate—I’m just not sure that they’ll stay with a band for as long as country fans. We have four generations of fans coming out to our shows, from grandmothers to granddaughters. We had a lady schedule her C-section around our tour date. That’s fan loyalty, man.