From This Moment On (45 page)

It’s amazing how much living space can be squeezed into a bus. My personal space was in the center area, closed off from the driver and from Helene’s sitting and sleeping area in back. Helene and I
shared a side door, but the layout afforded me a surprising amount of privacy.

The trip from city to city could range from six to ten hours, and I’d typically be awake for much of it before finally drifting off—only to be jolted awake a few hours later when we’d arrived at our parking spot either at the venue or nearby. As the bus was maneuvered into its space, it shimmied and jerked till it finally stilled in parked position. It was impossible to sleep through the parking of the bus. Larry, having driven all night, would then head off with Helene to a hotel, where they could get a more comfortable sleep, leaving me and Tim to ourselves.

My dog was impatient to go right outside. I didn’t share Tim’s excitement, as you might imagine, but I didn’t have to. Check this out: I’d had the bus customized with a special floor hatch that opened to a ramp leading down to a luggage bay below. Without having to leave my compartment, I could hook Tim to a lead attached to a run line outside and let him out through the hatch in the floor. He could then take care of business and run around to his heart’s content, and if he wanted shade, he could always lie down in the bay. A security camera kept him in my view at all times until he was ready to come back in. It really worked beautifully.

Sometimes we were able to park on neighboring farms, which gave me an opportunity to ride Dancer. That’s right: he came along, too, for much of the tour, riding in a mobile stall. Being able to ride him while enjoying nature definitely helped to clear my head, but I really made the most of my limited free time. By late afternoon—and remember, since I’d be up half the night, I generally didn’t get out of bed until around ten or eleven—I’d either ride Dancer when he was there or take long walks with Tim, and before I knew it, it was approaching three in the afternoon, time to head to the venue for the pre-performance sound check. All in all, I had a pretty good setup and lifestyle on the road. Having it so personalized helped make the eighteen months manageable.

The first U.S. leg of the tour took us to approximately eighty cities,
ending with two shows at the Miami Bayfront Park Amphitheater in mid-January 1999. By then the
Come On Over
album had been out for more than a year and had delivered two more number one country hits, the rock-heavy “Honey, I’m Home” and the dramatic love song “From This Moment On.”

“Honey, I’m Home,” which draws you in with an infectious, danceable groove before changing tempo on the choruses, is sort of my playful take on the Johnny Paycheck classic “Take This Job and Shove It,” but from the female perspective. While I can’t vouch for this 100 percent, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s the only chart topper in country music history to contain a reference to premenstrual syndrome. “From This Moment On,” practically a wedding vow set to music, was my first record to feature another recording artist, Bryan White, and for the international version, the lead singer from the group Boyzone, Ronan Keating. A few times during both tours, men were proposing to their girlfriends during the performance of this song. I was told by countless fans that it was a popular wedding song. This was an unexpected fact about the song that pleased me. The song was living a life of its own, independent of me. It now belonged to the public, and a large number of them decided it was going to be their wedding song. Some couples even came to my concerts in full wedding apparel. I just loved this.

Music moves people, and I was touched by how much my music did this for the fans. This was what I was doing it for; this was what made all the hard work so worth it. I took pleasure in the pleasure the music brought to them and their lives. “You’re Still the One” and “From This Moment On” went to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart and reached the top five on the Hot 100.

When we flew off to Australia for seven dates in February, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” was on its way into the Top 10 on both the country and pop charts. A tongue-in-cheek put-down song about men who think they’re hot stuff but, in reality, leave the woman singing the song ice cold, it could be a cousin of Carly Simon’s biting 1973 number one hit “You’re So Vain.” Except that in her song, the
guy in question is so besotted with himself that it’s inconceivable to him that she might be referring to someone else. My man, on the other hand, is so conceited and condescending, but, above all, clueless, that it would never dawn on him that he was the star of “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” In fact, he’d probably listen to the lyrics, grunt, and say, “Man, what a jerk
that
guy must be!” This character was fictitious, but it spanned a stereotype that most women, by their thirties, have met at least once in their travels, so in that sense, I was confident I was writing about a sort that really did exist.

The cowbell-propelled song had an unhurried rhythm and marked a bit of a return to more traditional country rock. It was the sixth release from
Come On Over,
and we still had five more singles to go, plus four solid months of shows in North America without a breather.

We’d bought a French château–style estate in an area referred to as the Swiss Riviera. “The world is our oyster” type thinking made us consider many different places to settle. Any corner of the world was a possibility. We were open to trying something new, but our goal was to choose somewhere we could enjoy some anonymity, an attractive landscape, and convenient access to North America. We figured that if the local language was not English, which language could we live with and actually enjoy learning? Croatian might not have been our number one choice of second languages to learn, for example, but we were attracted to the Latin-based languages such as Italian, Spanish, and French.

Since I’d had a base in French from my bilingual exposure growing up in Northern Ontario, I had an ear for the language. We scanned the French-speaking countries, and when we toured Switzerland
as one of those on the list, we were captivated by the dramatic views of the Alps and Lake Geneva’s stunning shade of emerald. The food was exquisite, with everything from rustic to gastronomic. The people came across stern and distant, at first, but we figured we were looking for somewhere to keep to ourselves anyway, as a portion of our year would always be spent traveling internationally for work.

The château we found had world-class views from every window and was a historic landmark, with impressive architecture and design. This was the place we wanted to be. Our plan was to finish renovating by the end of the year, just as the tour was wrapping up. Mutt flew back and forth to oversee the work on the house; although I couldn’t be there, I’d direct the renovation and decorating from a seat on the tour bus, a set of blueprints spread out before me. Living in Saint Regis Falls permanently was not our plan; after four years of near constant travel—and my largely nomadic life prior to that—I was
so
looking forward to putting down roots. But until then, I had another nine months ahead of me, playing sixty-four dates in sixty-one cities.

From March through June, following our return from Down Under, our convoy of buses and equipment trucks crisscrossed North America, from as far east as Moncton, New Brunswick, our first show; to Vancouver, British Columbia, on Canada’s West Coast; and all the way down to Jacksonville, Florida. The trip to Australia was particularly rewarding for me, knowing that my music had reached the other end of the planet, literally. I took advantage of the outback experience and made a horse trek through the bush with some local ranchers one afternoon on a down day from the tour. We were lucky to come across a herd of kangaroo, which was such a rush, and I felt as if I were seeing storybook creatures right before my eyes.
Come On Over
brought me to this exotic, faraway land, giving me one of the highest-selling albums ever, reaching fifteen times platinum and spending nineteen weeks at number one and 165 weeks in the Top 100. In Australia, it is the bestselling album of the 1990s.

A music tour very much resembles a traveling circus. The Come
On Over tour employed more than one hundred people: besides me and the nine-member band, there were drivers, roadies, soundmen, riggers, caterers, carpenters—you name it. I take off my hat to these skilled folks for the dedication they exhibited every day. Their job was harder than mine: the road crew essentially constructs the equivalent of a good-sized house, then tears it down and packs it up, four or five times a week for months at a clip. As Jackson Browne sang in his affectionate tribute to his roadies, “The Load Out,” “They’re the first to come and the last to leave,” and although they traveled the same number of miles that I did, they probably got half the sleep.

The monotony and pressure of road life get to everyone, not just the star, and under those conditions, you bond together like family, especially since you are far away from home and loved ones. We all had jobs to do, but we did have ourselves some fun. To break up the daily grind, I initiated a “crew lottery”: at every sound check, I would pull a name out of a hat or a bowl, and the winner would receive $500. On weekends, we had two draws. A small thing, perhaps, but it helped to keep up morale. Plus, I got a real kick out of watching the smiles and hearing the cheers each time a crew member’s name was announced.

One time I just wanted to give the bus and truck drivers a break. I forget where we were and where we were going (after a while, the cities seem to blend in to each other), but as a surprise/prank, I hired substitute drivers to drive the tour buses, and one separate party bus for our drivers to ride on as passengers instead of drivers, so for a change they could sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. But they didn’t know this yet. I stocked the party bus with food and refreshments and arranged for a meeting to be called on this bus for all the drivers. Once the last driver was on board, thinking they were about to have a meeting, the hired driver closed the door and drove away, abducting our driver/passengers for the overnight journey to the next city. The initial reaction of many of the drivers was panic. They were anxious and uncomfortable with the fact that someone else would be sitting in their driver’s seat, operating their bus, and don’t forget, as it
was a surprise, they hadn’t grabbed personal effects like cell phones or toothbrushes. They just weren’t prepared for this surprise kidnapping. In the end, they had a good time and were grateful for the break and thoughtfulness.

Practical jokes are a time-honored tradition of the road, and if I say so myself, mine were pretty creative, especially two that I played on my band. We had a rare break coming up, and I wanted to throw a surprise appreciation lunch for everyone, with the help of a handful of crew members who were sworn to secrecy. So that no one would suspect anything, we planned to hold it in the afternoon at the arena I was playing, since that’s when most of the crew would be there anyway, loading in the equipment.

The band members were informed that I wished to meet with them privately before sound check to discuss an upcoming concert that would be filmed for a TV special. In general, musicians, like most onstage performers, pay attention to their appearance. Sometimes to an obsessive degree. With that in mind, I had ordered them the skimpiest, tightest spandex outfits you had ever seen, like something a wrestler would squeeze into. Everything bared and nothing spared. To top it off, they came in garish blue, pink, yellow, and purple. At the meeting, I excitedly called up the band members one by one and handed them their outfits.

You should have seen the horrified expressions on their faces, and you could all but read their minds:
I’m expected to walk out onstage in this? And for a performance that’s going to be filmed, for posterity?!?
Even Andy Cichon, our hunky bassist, who has a buff bodybuilder’s bod, was visibly uncomfortable with the painted-on look of his stage wear. They were all holding them out at arm’s length, as if a skunk had sprayed them.

“Okay, well, go try ’em on!” I said brightly. They eyed one another as if they were thinking,
She can’t be serious.
“I can’t wait to see you in them!”
Oh. My. God. She’s serious.
A few minutes later, they emerged stiffly from the dressing room wearing the outfits, not to mention pained expressions, in front of the whole crew. On cue, a marching
band came trumpeting in, the caterers rolled in a banquet table full of fabulous fare, a mass of balloons soared over our heads after being released, and the ribbon scoreboard, a band-type screen that wrapped around the venue, flashed the names of everybody on the tour. The cat was out of the bag.

The band members were good sports about it, considering the laugh that everyone had enjoyed at their expense.

If they handed out a prize for Best Gag Played on a Bunch of Musicians, this next one would have brought home the trophy. And it was a high-tech prank to boot. Guitar techs are the people responsible for making sure the guitarists’ instruments are all polished and restrung, tuned, and ready to go. Before one show I conspired with them to detune all the stringed instruments that would be used for “No One Needs to Know,” an all-acoustic number. The techs twisted the tuning pegs this way and that, making for one wince-inducing sound.

Okay, here’s the genius part: of course, I didn’t want to inflict any of this on the audience, so in preparation for this practical joke, I got the crew to secretly record us performing the song the night before. When you’re playing a big stage, where the musicians stand far apart from one another, you don’t hear what the audience hears, only what the soundman sends you through your earpiece.