Reba: My Story (29 page)

Linda did what Susie had done. She told me nothing about her bookkeeping system, and I wasn’t about to ask her anything. She didn’t explain records of my fan club that would indicate who wanted to renew membership, who hadn’t paid dues, and so on. My family, friends, and I got all of the office papers and dumped them into boxes. There wasn’t any order to anything.

We finished loading by 11:30
A.M.
, thirty minutes ahead of Pee-Wee’s deadline.

Larry drove the truck that contained my entire office from Centrahoma to Nashville. We met him there and unloaded all of the contents into my garage.

Fourteen months earlier I had been named “Entertainer of the Year.” A month earlier I had made my Carnegie Hall debut. But in late November 1987, I was inside my garage trying to sift through records that looked like they had been arranged by a tornado.

It was there, sitting on the concrete floor, that I learned how to do my own payroll. I had no idea how to handle Social Security or income tax withholding or anything else. But I had employees who needed to be paid and so I figured it out, with the help of Mike Vaden, my accountant. All the checks went out right on time.

Linda was left with the building and a note for half of its cost, the way we’d agreed.

I didn’t hear from Linda again until 1993, six years after I left Oklahoma. She wrote me a letter saying that though she’d paid off her half of the building’s cost, she had decided that the deal we’d struck was unfair because she’d had to pay off the note. She now thought I should reimburse her for her share, plus pay her interest on the money.

I was understandably surprised at her request, considering
that I’d already paid for half of a building that I couldn’t use and which she owned outright, not to mention the unpleasantness of our final meeting and the length of time that had passed. Still, I wrote her a check for the total amount, interest and all.

“Here you go,” I wrote, in a letter with the check. “I hope everything is fine in your life and I think this squares everything up between us.”

It’s been said that success changes people. But I’ve learned the hard way that it also changes the people around them.

B
ESIDES LOSING LINDA, I HAD ANOTHER PARTING-OF-THE-WAYS
to deal with during that troubled time. I asked Bill Carter, my manager of four years, to let me go.

Carter recalls that he wasn’t surprised. Once I had gotten rid of Charlie, he says, he expected to be next. He had never made a secret of his belief in Charlie’s common sense and of his conviction that Charlie was good for me in many ways.

But that wasn’t the reason I let Carter go. It wasn’t that kind of personal thing at all. Perhaps Narvel’s explanation says it best: “When Reba divorced Charlie, Bill Carter immediately said, ‘Okay, Charlie is gone, I’ll take control of everything.’ What Bill didn’t realize is that’s exactly what Reba was running from. The move that Bill made at that particular time was the worst he could have. She was looking for space. That’s where her head was. Instead of letting her grow and do some things she wanted, he came in and was domineering. And I can’t say he would have done a bad job. But he smothered Reba.”

Carter had been a tremendous help to me, getting me signed on MCA, where I have been recording for ten years now, guiding me through my first gold record, helping me broaden my audience, and, bringing off, among other milestones,
my debut at Carnegie Hall. He taught me so much about how the music business works.

Most folks don’t know that when I turned over my career management entirely to Carter he had never before managed anybody’s career. He had been an immigration lawyer for the Rolling Stones and had represented guitarist Keith Richards and other entertainers in the United States. But I was his first management client. His skills helped me succeed, and my success helped his career. After our parting, many artists sought out Bill Carter for management, and I’m very glad.

But after the divorce, I felt like I was trying out my wings—living in a major city for the first time—and I wanted to feel that same spirit of exploration in my career, to fly higher, to try new things. I had gotten a new jolt of inspiration when I’d gone to Carter’s management from Don Williams’s and from Harold Shedd’s record producing to Jimmy Bowen’s. Now I wanted a new launch from another manager, and the person who I turned to was Narvel.

Once again I was turning to a person who didn’t have any formal management experience, although he has told me often how much he learned at Prudential about managing and motivating people. In the eight years he’d been with my organization, he’d always impressed me with his drive. Like me, Narvel’s a studier, soaking up everything Bill, Don, and all the rest of them could teach us. A real go-getter, Narvel was always coming up with ways to make the show bigger, better—our stage-lighting experiments, the risers for the band, and much more. He had big ambitions and excellent instincts, the kind of savvy that can’t be learned in a classroom. He is one of the smartest men I have ever met.

In May of 1988 he accepted the job, and I’ve never regretted it. Almost immediately, he proved that he was the right choice. We were at rehearsals for the Academy of Country Music Awards Show, and the backdrop for my song was a country quilt—the show that year was working a
traditional country theme into the set and staging. Trouble was, I didn’t know about that and had brought along a beautiful pink evening dress with sequins and pearls to wear. I didn’t notice the problem myself at first, but Narvel did! He met with Gene Weed, the producer, and asked him to get me another backdrop.

Gene wasn’t used to being questioned by someone he didn’t know that well or a person who didn’t have a track record of being familiar with the world of television. But Narvel stuck to his guns. He kept explaining to Gene that the dress and backdrop would clash, and would he please put me on a different set. So finally, they swapped my backdrop with Tanya Tucker’s. It all worked out fine, and today Narvel and Gene Weed are great friends.

W
ITH NARVEL TO HELP ME, I COULD REALLY BEGIN TO TAKE
charge of my career. From the time I signed with MCA, I realized how important it was to control as many aspects of my work as I possibly could, and today my organization’s almost totally self-run and self-contained.

One of the first important decisions Narvel and I made together was to form our own booking and concert promotions agency. For twelve years I had worked for independent concert promoters who bought my shows from booking agents. On a lot of those bookings, I had to wonder whether my agents had any idea how far I had to travel between dates. Sometimes my band and I would arrive in a town barely in time for the show, without enough time to take a shower at a hotel. There is nothing worse than going on stage wearing fresh clothes and yesterday’s dirt. There were times in the early days that we had to unpack and set up our sound equipment all dressed up in our stage clothes.

Bill Carter was my manager then, and I talked to him about the prospect of handling my own bookings. Some other artists were already doing it. Bill said that if I hired enough people to do the bookings my overhead would be
too high. But I just kept thinking to myself, “This system can be improved. This could be better.”

Narvel and I always had a practice of studying and watching what other artists and companies were doing, learning not only from their accomplishments but also from their mistakes. Narvel began interviewing successful agents and promoters to run this new end of the business and finally narrowed the selection down to two candidates: Trey Turner, who had been an in-house promoter for Alabama and was then with Keith Fowler Promotions, and Mike Allen, who was working with C. K. Spurlock, who booked and promoted all of Kenny Rogers’s dates.

“They both were coming from very powerful organizations,” Narvel recalls. “I was really struggling, trying to decide which would be the best for Reba. And I was talking to Joe Gehl, another promoter friend of ours. He knew both of the guys real well. I told him I was really in a dilemma, and I asked him which one he would hire.”

“Why don’t you hire both of them?” Joe said. “What you’re looking for is going to take more than one person anyhow.”

So that’s what we did. And I’m proud to say that our operation is one of the best in the business.

The secret in hiring people is to find folks who are ambitious, hardworking, creative, and loyal. Then you have to set a good example by working hard and giving 110 percent at everything you do. Larry Jones has worked for me since 1984. He said in August 1993 that the secret to working for Reba McEntire is to not get too comfortable.

“She and Narvel are always looking for ways to do their jobs better,” he said, “and if you’re going to last around here, you’d better do the same thing. One of the reasons I like working here is because it’s like a book you can’t put down. You never know what they’ll come up with next. And whatever it is it’s usually something better than they were doing before.”

I’m someone in the music business who thinks the business is just as important as the music. I may sing for ninety minutes a night, but the singing is just a part of my sixteen-hour day.

A lot of people who have interviewed me insinuate that I oversee Starstruck Entertainment. That’s not true. Basically, I’m the executive producer. In other words, because of the money I make, I can finance such an organization, but in no way could I have thought of all the things we’re involved in. Nor could I run it.

Narvel is the director, producer, and overseer! But the most beautiful part is everyone runs their own department, whether it’s publicity, publishing, fan club, the farm, jet service, construction, advertising, management, the house, or promotion. Narvel and the others at Starstruck keep me up-to-date on what’s going on. I’m proud to have such a team.

T
HAT
’
S NOT TO SUGGEST THAT WE NEVER RUN INTO ANY PROBLEMS
. Sometimes we play what we in the business call “unusual dates,” performing under low ceilings on small stages without enough room to set up our regular stage and all our production equipment. But these are usually private parties that pay very well.

Then there are dates that we call challenging! I just had one of those at the end of 1993. We were scheduled to perform at a Tropicana Twister, a sponsored show in Des Moines, which is a one-hour flight from where I live in Tennessee. Narvel, Sandi, and I left in plenty of time, bringing our friends Ken and Pam Keller and Leigh Reynolds to see our show.

But as we approached Des Moines, the airport tower told us we couldn’t land because of the fog. We’d have to land at Ames, Iowa, some forty-five minutes from where we had to play.

It was already 8:15
P.M.
and I was scheduled to go on
no later than 9:50. So our pilot, Kevin McCutcheon, radioed Des Moines in advance so our limousine could hurry over to Ames to pick us up and take us to Des Moines. When we stepped off the plane, though, there was no limousine in sight.

Rather than waste time, while we waited for the car, Sandi and Pam helped me get ready in the tiny airport’s ladies room. Sandi had my first outfit on the plane—usually she packs them in the wardrobe case, and the crew puts it on the truck. While Sandi heated the curlers, I changed into the outfit that I was going to wear for my first song. She had just rolled my hair up when the limousine arrived, and we had to run outside.