Crazy for it

Sunday column

I have been watching, a little at a time, loving, the Ken Burns documentary Country Music. 

It’s not everyone’s idea of a good time, the music, but you'll know from the clips at the end of the newsletters that I'm fully into it. 

If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Brad Fischer’s. 

You may remember Brad from such previous yarns as the day he and I nearly held up the Reserve Bank and all the days he would say hey Slick old buddy, what do you say, few shooters at the Bond Street Inn? and we would leave our desks at the advertising agency and stroll down the road and settle in for whisky and beer, stories and lies.

His wife Alice was a fiddle player. They wrote country tunes and had an advertising jingle business. Also, Brad was a man of forceful opinions and his strongly held opinion that many people in the advertising business were morons gave him a building headwind.  When Muldoon got voted out, he decided it was time to head back to America. 

He got on a plane to LA, I got on with the booze business. 

Even though I admired Alice's fiddle playing I didn’t really get country music. One of our hotel managers, a fan of the genre, wanted to stage some touring country act, and would I approve it? I said yeah have a go I suppose but also I subjected her to weeks of yeehaw ribbing. 

But then I saw a TV programme in two perfect parts that shifted my whole point of view. 

Irish documentary maker John T Davis made Route 66, and filled it up with clear-eyed unromantic images of America and its music. It’s far from the only doco that has had the idea to take a camera from Chicago to LA, more than two thousand miles with stories all the way. But no one has ever done it better. 

So many character vignettes; and a music track that begins with Every Day I Have The Blues, and a Greyhound rolling out of Chicago and then Merle Haggard giving us Big City. And down we go, down through the panhandle and the line dancing and George Strait and on over the mountains, into the desert, down into the valley and on to a recording studio in LA and there is Maria McKee singing After The Flood in a darkened studio and I wanted to know: who was this  amazing singer, and who were these bands and where would I find more of this music, and it really was time to go look for America. I bought a ticket.

From one shining sea to the other, I didn't know a soul who lived there. But I did know Brad and Alice. They were now in Nashville. Come say hi, he said, come visit.  

I rolled from LA to Chicago by Amtrak. I rode south on the actual City of New Orleans, changed to a car in Memphis, Tennessee. I sat on a park bench by the water and sure enough the Mississippi delta was shining like a National guitar. There was some part of me wanted to see Graceland but I got there at dusk to closed gates. Next morning I just couldn't wait to get on the road again. I made for Nashville, stopped at a gas station, bought a baseball cap with a confederate flag that said if Heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie, me and Hank ain’t going. 

Brad and Alice and little Dallas were in a condo development amongst the trees, warm and quiet. He was excited to show me around Music City. He was especially keen for us to go down to his local bar and set up some shooters. His was whisky, mine was beer, he was introducing me to everyone: my old buddy from New Zealand, the brewery magnate. Full of good cheer but also a bit on edge; like maybe hustling for business on Music Row was a lot of panning and not much gold.

But it was a time, drinking, joking, living large. A day or two in, he said he wanted to introduce me to a session singer he had met in the studio last week, and he wanted us all to go to the Grand Ole Opry.

We met at a bar downtown and Claudia the singer was cool, she did radio news reporting and voice work and session recording and was very pleased to meet you and wanted to hear all about New Zealand.

And then the guys in the band hailed her, asked if she'd like to come sit in. She walked to the mic, looked at me, smiling, and launched into a torch song performance of Crazy. It was maybe not the first time I'd heard the song but it was for sure the first time I ever really, really listened.

And then we were on the way to the Grand Ole Opry and, sure, I knew its legendary reputation but really I didn't know anything about it. And now we were being greeted and feted by someone official and being escorted backstage, and we were in the green room and getting all kinds of attention and I was thinking well that's the American way - which it is, yes - but also it began to dawn on me that this important person was under the impression that I was important too. And I realised that Brad had been using my immense prestige as a big deal in one of the largest entertainment conglomerates in New Zealand to open some doors. 

I felt like a pretender but I also felt that these were very nice canapes and yes please another glass would be great and yes I’ll warmly shake the hands with these strangers who are apparently legends of country music and very nice to meet you, and we chatted amiably and agreeably and it was not until years later that I came to realise that this time I had got to spend chatting with Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe and Little Jimmy Dickens was pretty damn special. 

Pics or it didn't happen? Here you go. 

Here's Bill Monroe, Bluegrass legend, plus Alice, plus Claudia the torch singer, plus the Global Managing Director of Dominion Breweries.

And here's Roy Acuff, also a legend of the Opry, and whose Acuff Rose publishing house put out just about every country classic you know.

This is  little Jimmy Dickens, beloved  star of the Opry forever

And this is Dallas and Alice making their Nashville sound and yes, what you’ve been seeing really was a jacket that I actually paid for with real money and wore in 1987.

And then I was back to my prestigious big deal job in New Zealand and phone calls followed. Claudia liked the idea of coming to see New Zealand. Brad had this great act he wanted to tour through the DB circuit. We were making arrangements and everyone was excited about possibilities and then: bang. I was on the deck with the heart attacks and everything just kind of unwound after that. No one came to New Zealand, no one went on tour, and soon I was saying adios to the big job. 

But the country music had taken hold. And now I discovered new country, and alt-country, and Border Radio every Sunday on bFM hosted by Real Groovy's sardonic Grant McCallum sharing his vast and never-uncool love of all things country and Americana and folk and honky tonk and blues. And the deeper I went, the more I loved it.

It has never stopped. These days, it's not so much Border Radio as all kinds of streaming, and my favourite radio station in all the world, Knoxville's WDVX and I just keep loving all this music that is three chords and the truth.

Knoxville is where Claudia moved and married and raised a son. Then cancer found her, and she was gone.

Brad stayed in Nashville - I’m not sure Alice did - and he went on writing and hustling and ordering another drink until his time ran out a few years ago. 

And now a Ken Burns doco rolls around, and I cannot get enough of it. Every singer and writer and musician in that whole story of the country music is an old friend and here are their stories told in all their full wonder, hours of it already: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and we’re still hardly started.

But already it's been heartache and yearning and tragedy and long black limousines and funerals; insanely talented people digging themselves an early grave.

All that anguish and we aren't even at Patsy Cline.

And there, in black and white photos of a black and white day, gone at just 29 years of age, is the Shakespeare Hillbilly, the totem of country music: Hank Williams.

And standing alongside his casket, singing him to the next world, are my green room companions, Bill Monroe and little Jimmy Dickens and Roy Acuff.

Man. You were in the presence of greatness and you were mostly just slugging your drink and looking over at the woman who had crooned a torch song for you.

The country music, it's forever about all that sort of thing.