Reba: My Story (30 page)

So there I was in curlers, wearing my pajama top to keep the hair spray off my costume, walking out of the bathroom to a small bunch of people who worked there at the airport. Our only delay was me signing autographs—in rollers.

Sandi did my hair by the interior lights, with me sitting in the floor board, as the limousine crept blindly through the fog. Once we arrived, I went straight to the Tropicana Twister meet-and-greet and stepped out on that stage exactly at the tick of 9:50.

D
OING OUR OWN BOOKINGS HAS RELIEVED SOME OF THE NEEDLESS
pressures my band and I used to endure on tour, but there’s no getting around the fact that life on the road is grueling. So anything that brings a laugh is welcomed. I remember once being in Canada on a show with Steve Wariner, when he decided he wanted to show off his skills as a magician backstage after soundcheck.

“I’ll need a volunteer,” he said. “Do I have a volunteer?

“Thank you,” he continued, and pulled me from my seat.

I hadn’t raised my hand.

I got up there and he said, “Abracadabra.” He pulled a brassiere out from behind me to make people think he had magically removed mine. Everybody broke up laughing. It was a simple joke, but typical of the kind of innocent humor that helps pass the time on tour.

But other jokes are much more elaborate and carefully planned. One of the most complicated and funniest tricks was the one Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn of Brooks and Dunn’s band and mine played on each other.

As part of his act, lead singer Ronnie Dunn would throw his electric guitar offstage to his waiting road manager Eric Shinault. But one night Eric backed off the five-foot stage in the darkness and sprained his wrist. Galen Henson, my guitar tech, offered to stand in for Eric, and over the next month others from both organizations took turns. It got to be a game—each night’s catcher would be judged by a panel of his peers, who would hold up score-cards rating him. Members of both organizations would cheer and boo the judges’ decisions. I can’t imagine what fans sitting close to the stage could have thought was going on.

Each night’s score was entered into our road computer. My organization was beating the competition—until the night the guitar was stolen.

The catcher was robbed at gunpoint (fake, we later learned) by a man disguised in a long coat, sunglasses, and a black hood. For a few nights, there was no news of the missing instrument, and Dunn even had to do two or three shows with another guitar.

Of course, the robbery was all we could talk about. Someone said that Dunn had played that guitar for years and that it had sentimental value. Someone else thought it was the guitar that Dunn had brought with him when he moved from Tulsa to Nashville. Naturally, Brooks and Dunn’s people blamed the theft on mine.

Soon Eric came to Graeme Lagden, my tour manager,
and said it was time to cut off the silliness. “Where is that guitar?” he asked.

Graeme didn’t know for sure, but he had heard rumors that the “thief” was John Markham, who ran the laser equipment for me. So Graeme approached Markham and suggested that he send Eric a ransom note along with one string from the guitar. Markham loved the idea and constructed several notes by cutting letters from magazine pages, in true kidnapper style, starting, “If you ever want to see your guitar again …” The notes were bolstered by midnight calls to Eric’s hotel room, when an anonymous person would say, “We’ve got your guitar,” and then hang up.

The first ransom demand was three of Brooks’s expensive cowboy hats. Eric agreed to pay with hats but secretly went to Kmart and bought some cheap hats to pass off as the real thing. Then the guitarnapper upped the ante to include a batch of autographed pictures.

By the day of our next show, Eric was starting to think that his job was on the line. So he called Graeme, saying, “Hey, I’ve done my part. I’ve got the hats and the autographed pictures. I
want
that guitar.”

“It will be there [at showtime],” Graeme insisted. “It will be there, don’t worry.”

But Eric did worry, and so, probably, did Dunn.

Graeme had made a secret arrangement with my rigger, Matt Jumper, the guy who oversees the hanging of the stage lights and other equipment. And so while Dunn was walking onto the stage barehanded, his lost guitar was dropping slowly from the front lighting truss, and it arrived at Dunn’s microphone at the exact same time Dunn did. Ronnie reached up through the guitar strap, slipped the guitar on and hit his first note.

My guys made a videotape of Dunn’s startled face as his guitar dropped from the sky. They still watch it a lot for laughs. The crowd that night probably thought the stunt was Brooks and Dunn’s great opening, never suspecting that
Dunn’s dramatic opening was totally unplanned—unplanned by him, that is.

“T
HIS WAS THE ACTIVITY OF MEN WITHOUT REAL JOBS
,”
ERIC
says.

S
OMETHING WAS SHIFTING INSIDE OF ME. MAYBE THE
reason was my new freedom as an unmarried woman—for the first time in my life, not having to answer to anyone but myself; or maybe it was the sense of confidence that came from restructuring my organization and putting some of my long-held pet ideas into practice. Whatever the reason, in 1988, I found myself drawn to the old Aretha Franklin hit “Respect.” It just seemed to connect with my mental outlook at the time.

Jimmy Bowen, my producer, was surprised when I told him I was wanting to use the song as the opening number of my new 1988 show.

“Really,” Bowen said, “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like ‘Respect.’ ”

“Oh shoot,” I said, “I’ve been listening to Aretha Franklin, Frankie Valli, Fabian, Annette Funicello on ‘American Bandstand’ all of my life. It’s nothing unusual for me to think that ‘Respect’ is a great song.”

“Well, you know that we need some up-tempo songs for the album,” he said. “Why don’t you record it for the album?”

And so we did. It’s on my 1988 LP
Reba
.

I was so pleased with the results that I decided to sing “Respect” on the 1988 CMA Awards show, one of country music’s biggest events of the year. I knew it would be totally different from anything I’d ever done on the program. And since I was almost positive I wasn’t going to win an award that night, I wanted to be sure I was mentioned in the next day’s newspapers. I thought I could get publicity from performing “Respect.”

To perform the song, I wore a tight, black leather outfit that was a dramatic change from the formal gowns that I’d always worn for the awards. But I wanted a different look because the song itself was so unusual for me. My backup singers, Yvonne Hodges and Suzy Wills, and I spent a lot of time on the choreography, under the direction of Chris Dunbar. We were extremely serious about pulling off the song well.

I knew that our performance would get a reaction, but I never expected that it would be so strong. I quickly learned that a lot of people in the music business disliked not only the production but even the idea of my doing “Respect.” My collaborator, Tom Carter, was there that night, and remembers one of the old-timers saying, “Is this the CMA Awards or is this ‘Soul Train’?”

But the day after the awards, there we were! A color picture in the Nashville newspaper. I didn’t win an award, but I made the papers.

Many country fans tell me to my face what they like and dislike about my music and show. They send their opinions by mail if they can’t see me personally. They can be so painfully honest. I remember that after I played in Vince Gill’s golf tournament, two twelve-year-old girls told me that the shorts I wore made my legs look too scrawny.

There was nothing I could do about that, of course,
but my fans always know that I’ll listen to their criticism. If I get a suggestion that’s constructive, I use it. So I wasn’t surprised to hear a lot of fan reaction to “Respect.”

Shortly after my 1988 album containing “Respect” and the 1940s torch song “Sunday Kind of Love” was released, I played a show in Connecticut. Carol Scott, who had been a huge fan and good friend for a long time, was upset before she heard a note of my new material. When she came up to me before the show, she unhappily said, “Oh, you’ve left country [music]. You’re leaving us.”

I stayed very calm.

“Now, Carol, you watch the show,” I told her. “ ‘Respect’ is in it, and so is ‘Sunday Kind of Love.’ After the show, you tell me what you think.”

We performed that night in a theater-in-the-round. Afterward, Carol came backstage and was kind enough to say, “I’ll never doubt you again.”

I hugged her neck and thanked her. But, honest to God, I never thought that my recording “Respect” and “Sunday Kind of Love” would upset some of my fans so much. I had never thought that anybody would accuse me, of all people, of leaving country music. Stretching out a little is good for any artist, and I appreciate my fans’ open-mindedness and support when, now and then, I want to try new things.

T
HERE WAS AN EVEN STRONGER AND MORE CONFUSING SHIFT IN
my emotions during this time. Without ever expecting it or even wanting to feel that way, I had been finding myself drawing closer to Narvel. I had always trusted him and was excited to find our ideas so much in sync, especially now, during the renewal of my organization. But in the seven years we’d been working and traveling together, I had never before thought of him romantically.

Narvel is a very good-looking man. From the first night he played with us at that VFW hall in Nowata, Oklahoma,
it was obvious that many women were staring at him. He used to sit over his steel guitar, concentrating, with his chin down. Then he’d raise his head, smile, make eye contact, and roll his shoulders to the music. The women loved it, which was just fine with me. My philosophy has always been, I don’t care who the audience is looking at, just as long as they’re looking at the stage.

Now, I had eyes, of course, and I could see what all those women were appreciating. But Narvel was married, and so was I. And even if I hadn’t been, I was still Narvel’s boss. He was the cornerstone of my organization, and it would have been crazy for me to jeopardize our business relationship.

Nor—to be fair—had Narvel ever taken the slightest interest in me. He saw me as his employer, not as a female, and worse, he always thought I was a country bumpkin and a hick.

Over the years of traveling together I’d listened to Narvel’s stories of his road adventures as a teenage steel player, of his colorful ancestors, and of his fundamentalist upbringing. Although today his parents, Narvel Leroy and Gloria Alexander Blackstock, are more liberal, when he was growing up, their church’s teachings were much more strict. They didn’t believe in commercializing Christmas, so Narvel never had a Christmas tree. He was forbidden to participate in sports events, go to roller rinks and bowling alleys, and of course he was barred from anywhere alcohol was served. Since their church didn’t believe in it, his parents never owned a television, so Narvel didn’t have one until after he got married. At school, when the kids would say something like, “Did you see Andy Griffith last night on TV?” Narvel would say no, but he wouldn’t say why. He didn’t want his classmates to make fun of the beliefs of the parents he loved. So he kept quiet.