Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (15 page)

“Right,” she said.
 
“Great idea.”
 
This is good
, Megan thought.
 
Jimmy’s
really getting into the book.
 
Maybe
he’ll get so caught up in his writing and research that she could use it as an
excuse to end things with him.
 
“All you
ever think about is that book!” she could say.
 
“What about me?
 
What about my needs?”
 
That wasn’t a bad approach
, she
thought.
 
“I know I’ve said this before,
but I think the book’s a great idea.”

Jimmy was pleased by her endorsement.
 
“It’s coming along good too,” he said.
 
“I’ve got my notes organized and I put
together a chronology for the ‘early years’ chapters.”
 
He paused.
 
“That reminds me.”
 
He pulled out
his pad and made a note.
 
“I need to call
Eddie and get his early impressions of Nashville.”
 
He put the pad down and glanced again at
Megan’s handwritten notes.
 
“So what’re
you working on?”

The lie came to her suddenly.
 
“Oh, yeah,” she said brightly.
 
“I was going to tell you, but I wanted to
hear about the book.
 
I got the wildest
call this morning.
 
The program director
from a station in Nashville called,
completely out of the blue, said he heard me do a shift when he was driving
down to New Orleans for the
Me-Oh-My-Ohs.”

“The whats?”

“The ‘On
The
Bayou Country Music
Awards.’
 
They’re new.
 
The little trophies they give out are called
Me-Oh-My-Ohs.
 
They’re little statues of
Hank Williams standing in a pirogue.
 
Anyway, this PD was going on and on about how he loved my voice and my
banter.
 
It was really flattering and he
wanted to have a tape and blahblahblah, so I decided to send him one, just so
he could have it on file, you know, just in case.”

Jimmy felt like he’d been hit with a nine pound hammer.
 
“You’re moving to Nashville?”

Megan saw his eyes drifting toward the open
Radio & Records
so she dropped her
grease pencil on the floor by his feet.
 
When Jimmy bent to pick it up, Megan swept the
R & R
into the trash can.
 
“Nooo,” she almost chortled.
 
“I’m
not moving to Nashville.
 
Well, it’s not up to me, anyway, is it?
 
He just asked me to send him an air check
tape.
 
He didn’t even say they had a job
or anything.
 
And who knows?
 
The guy’ll probably be working in Buffalo
by the time this tape gets to Nashville.
 
You know how radio is.
 
But still, working in a larger market would
be a great career move for me, don’t you think?”

“Well, sure, but I
just.
. . it
never occurred to me you might want to leave… Jackson.”
 
Megan rewound the reel-to-reel then popped a
cassette into the deck.
 
“It’s not that I
want to leave Jackson.”
 
She cued up the newly edited tape and started
dubbing.
 
“In fact it’d be great if Jackson
suddenly became a medium size market, but I don’t think that’s going to
happen.
 
So — look, it’s no big deal,”
she said.

Jimmy sagged a bit.
 
“It’d be a big deal to me if you moved.”
 
He seemed wounded.
 
“Who would I
give flowers to?”
 
He looked at Megan and
smiled as hard as he could, but he started to get an empty feeling, like he was
one date from the old I-think-we-should-see-other-people speech.

Megan struggled to look sympathetic.
 
It’s not like she wanted to hurt him.
 
All she wanted was, well, she wasn’t really
sure what she wanted.
 
But she knew
whatever it was, it wasn’t in Jackson
and it wasn’t with an unknown freelance writer with limited financial
prospects. “You’re right,” she said, “it would be big deal, I’m sorry.
 
I don’t mean to— I don’t know what I
mean.”
 
She waved a hand hoping to make
it all go away.
 
“I wouldn’t worry about
it.”

“Yeah, well, easier said than done.”
 
Jimmy leaned against the wall, arms folded,
an
inch away from a pout.
 
He didn’t say anything, he just looked at Megan.

Megan couldn’t look at him.
 
He was in love and she wasn’t.
 
And even if she was, she figured she could do better.
 
And didn’t she owe it to herself to try?
 
Why couldn’t Jimmy just get the clues and let
her go easily?
 
Why did someone,
specifically her, always have be the bad guy in these scenarios?
 
She didn’t like breaking his heart or anyone
else’s
, but it’s not like you marry everybody you date,
right?
 
She felt the pressure from
Jimmy’s stare and suddenly, it just shot out of her mouth.
 
“It’s just — I feel like I’m stagnating
here.”
 
Megan thumped the Ampex machine
with a finger.
 
“I don’t want to get
stuck here where everything’s still analog.
 
I want to go someplace
digital
, you know?”
 
She finally looked up at Jimmy.
 
All he could do was shrug.
 
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
making ten dollars an hour doing live remotes for every donut shop that opens
out on

“So you’re just thinking of others then.”
 
As soon as he said it, Jimmy regretted the
sarcastic tone.

Megan snapped back.
 
“It’s just an air check tape, Jimmy.”

“Okay,” he said.
 
“I’m
not trying to stand in the way of your career.
 
I guess I just thought there was more to us than this.”

“This has nothing to do with us,” Megan said as the cassette
rewound.

Jimmy absorbed the comment.
 
“That pretty much says it all, I guess.”
 
The bad news about loving someone,
Jimmy thought,
was that they didn’t have
to love you back
.

Megan had ten minutes to get to the post office.
 
“Look, don’t try to make me feel bad about
this.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” Jimmy said.
 
“Besides, I’m not sure that’s possible.”

Megan stuffed the cassette in an envelope and sealed
it.
 
She stood and looked at Jimmy.
 
“Listen, I gotta go.”

25.

It’s a generally accepted fact that it takes years to become
an overnight success in Nashville.
 
About the only folks who don’t accept this
are the ones who just got to town.
 
They
were the big fish in their own small pond who decided it was time to share
their gift with the world.
 
They were
pretty sure all they had to do was knock on a couple of doors, let somebody
hear a few of their songs and, quick as you could say ‘Grand Old Opry’, they’d
be opening for Shania Twain.

When that failed to happen, they either went home blaming
their failure on Nashville or they
got serious.
 
For those who got serious
there were plenty of opportunities to be heard.
 
Bellevue Station, The Broken Spoke, Douglas Corner, and 12th and Porter
were just a few of the Nashville clubs
that featured an ‘open mic’ night offering performers a chance to play in front
of an industry crowd.
 

But of all the clubs in Nashville,
one in particular had become the Mecca
for aspiring singers and songwriters.
 
It
was a small, unassuming place several miles south of Music Row.
 
The Bluebird Cafe served food and drink like
any other modestly priced cafe in the south, that is, with more cholesterol
than regard.
 
But it also served up
music, and this it served with reverence.
 
In fact, the club had a motto printed on t-shirts to reflect this
reverence.
 
It said:
Shhh!
 
The food, it had to be
noted, didn’t get a slogan.

Tucked into a shabby strip mall on Hillsboro Pike, the
Bluebird Cafe was famous for being the place where a lot of stars got their big
break.
 
Artists like Vince Gill and
Sweethearts of the Rodeo were said to have been discovered here and the artist
formerly known as Chris Gaines was alleged to have secured a recording contract
with one of his Bluebird Cafe performances.

The Bluebird had two ‘open mic’ nights, one on Sunday, one
on Monday.
 
Sunday night’s required an
audition and so usually had a higher level of talent.
 
Monday night, however, was luck-of-the-draw
and the performances ranged from pleasant surprises to don’t-quit-your-day-job.
 
Every Monday afternoon around five, the
hopefuls arrived in the parking lot.
 
The
doors opened at five-thirty and those wanting to perform rushed in to sign up.
 
The names were all dropped into a hat and
twenty-four of them were chosen.
 
Starting at
six o’clock
, each
person got to sing two songs and hope for the best.

It was Monday night and the Country Music Confederation
Awards were getting underway across town at the Ryman Auditorium.
 
This was good news for Bill Herron and
Franklin Peavy inasmuch as it meant there would be plenty of parking at the
Bluebird and there would be few competitors scouting the ‘open mic’ talent.

Franklin arrived
first and snagged a good table.
 
While he
waited for his partner, Franklin
nursed a scotch and played with his new toy, the latest wireless application
protocol internet connection device.
 
He
was as fond of digital gadgetry as Big Bill was averse to it.
 
Franklin
constantly goaded Bill about this, suggesting a connection between technophobia
and Bill’s diminished status among Nashville
producers.
 
While everyone else in the
recording industry had embraced the use of computers in the studio, Big Bill
was still holding firm against the new technology.
 
That
idiot would bring a club to a gun fight
, Franklin
thought as he used his toy to get some stock quotes, make a few bad trades, and
check his E-mail.

Franklin was
logging off when his partner arrived.
 
Despite plummeting to 99 on the Power 100, the staff at the club still
treated Big Bill with a certain respect.
 
He could hardly get across the room without one of the club’s regulars
stopping him to pay respects, “Excuse me, Mr. Herron, I’m a big fan,” they’d
say.
 
“I bet I’ve got every record you
ever produced.”

Franklin watched
all this from his table, his eyes narrow and bitter.
 
The thing that galled him most after all his
years in the industry was that no one ever stopped him to pay respects.
 
They’d all scurry over to that fat, bug-eyed
partner of his, scraping and bowing and hoping for a word or two, but they
never acknowledged Franklin.
 
It wasn’t fair.
 
Franklin
had been involved with as many hit records as Big Bill, if only in the contract
negotiations.
 
And he knew all the big
stars, or at least their attorneys.
 
How
come he didn’t get any damn adoration?
 
Because he was a lawyer, that’s why.
 
The guy who wouldn’t be eaten by a shark out of
professional courtesy.
 
Yeah,
yeah, he’d heard ‘em all and they weren’t any funnier coming from Travis Tritt
than from some twice-divorced car salesman dissatisfied with his custody
arrangement.
 

This hadn’t always bothered Franklin,
but as he approached the end of his career, he’d begun to crave
recognition.
 
To this end, Franklin
had lately been thinking about producing records himself.
 
He’d been to hundreds of recording sessions
and watched Big Bill practice his craft.
 
It didn’t seem to amount to much more than telling the engineer to make
the drums louder or to put some echo on the vocals.
 
Anyone could do that, he thought.
 
And by God if that’s what
garnered respect in this town, then Franklin was ready to do it.
 
The only problem was all their clients had
signed contracts making Big Bill their producer.
 
Now all Franklin
had to do was figure out how to get around that niggling detail.
 
But how hard could that be?
 
After all, he was the one drawing up the
contracts.