Bare Bones (19 page)

Still, when I got on air, everyone continued to compare me to Gerry—and as much as I respect him, I'm not him. Nothing about me is like him. Not better or worse, just different. But that old chip on my shoulder revealed itself again in the midst of an entire industry saying I was single-handedly going to ruin country music.

In the beginning I might have been a little
too
different. I can admit that now. Deciding I was going to make sure they knew I wasn't coming into their world but that I was just going to bring mine, I blasted hip-hop and pop. I blatantly ignored the “old guard” that is Nashville. And it wasn't just though my musical choices. I also vocally challenged them. I was outspoken with my social views. For example, I went on the air and supported gay rights completely in a format where that's never been accepted. Why should it bother me one bit if two people love each other? Answer: it doesn't. A lot of station managers, however, were not happy about my stance. (That's one thing I haven't changed; I'm a permanent and absolute supporter of gay rights.)

My attitude was “This is how it's going to work. I'm playing whatever I want to play. I'm doing the bits I want to do. I don't wear cowboy boots or hats or belt buckles. I am not you; I am me.” Looking back, I wish I hadn't been such a bull in a china shop, so to speak. But live and learn. (By the way, the “old guard” are still not big fans of mine.) It was no wonder that everybody hated my guts.

Well, almost everyone. Not long after I moved to Nashville, Brad Paisley invited me over to his house. With an album to promote, he had been our first Country Top 30 countdown guest, and after that he asked me over as a sort of welcome to Nashville. When I got to his house, he introduced me to his wife, Kimberly Williams. When I talked to her, I couldn't stop thinking, You're talking to the
Father of the Bride
girl. (I know, pretty stupid, but that movie, which she starred in, is a classic.) Then we got on his four-wheeler and drove from the house to the recording studio he has on the property, which is deep in the woods. He showed me the studio and then we walked out onto his property. That's when he said, “People aren't going to like you around here for a long time,” he said. “They don't like change. They didn't like me when I started. But I can assure you that if you keep doing what you are doing, they will come around.” That meant a lot to me then and still does, years later. He didn't have to do that.

Brad was right—about people not liking me for a long time. From listeners to station managers to the recording industry to the artists, everyone looked at me like the weird radio guy. Nobody wanted me there. It was not pretty. I had the same exact feeling going into work as I had walking into school every day after the T-Bone incident.

Almost a year after we moved to Nashville, I woke up to the fact that my attitude wasn't winning me any friends—or listeners. I needed to get people to like me, or at least feel sorry for me. Working on the theory that it's hard to hate someone if he is getting picked on, I thought, I'm going to turn myself into the one who's getting picked on.

This is the first time I've ever admitted to this story publicly, or privately, for that matter. But here we go. Ready?

What I did was I launched a massive negative PR campaign against myself to garner sympathy. Only one person other than me knew what was going on. My buddy Cruz, a former member of the military who was head of security for the show for a while, was my secret agent as I created a shell company through which to maneuver. I spent about thirteen thousand dollars of my own money to buy billboards all over town.

Then, one beautiful morning in the first week of February 2014, they went up. There were multiple billboards, in the highest-trafficked areas, that said in all-uppercase black letters on a white background,
GO
AWAY
BOBBY
BONES
. That was it. But that's all it took for people driving around to say either

a.
 
“Why do people want Bobby Bones to go away?”

b.
 
“I agree. Go away, Bobby Bones.”

or

c.
 
“Who is Bobby Bones?”

People started talking about it all the time. On the street they would come up to me and say, “Dude, I can't believe people are doing that to you.” Then began the speculation on who was crazy enough (and hated me enough) to pay for these expensive billboards. Even news organizations began investigating into the entity behind the signs. Was it a record company? Was it a rival radio station? Was it certain artists who I'd feuded with? (Yes, this has happened.) When media outlets tried to track the original buyer by going to the Nashville outdoor advertising company that had put up the billboards, they were told all that was known about the paying entity: the client who had purchased all four boards for a three-week run was known as “Anti-BOBBY BONES.”

Nobody (not even my bosses) thought it was me.

The plan worked. Listeners who were on the fence started to feel sorry for me, because someone had spent all this money to pick on me. And those who had never heard of me before tuned in to hear what a guy who gets billboards telling him to go away had to say. (A year later, when we did market research, people still remembered and remarked on those signs.)

In the middle of all this, the Academy of Country Music announced on February 18 that I had tied with Lon Helton, the longtime host of Westwood One's
Country Countdown USA,
to win the award for National Radio Personality of the Year. The award came out of left field. We hadn't even been on for a full year, and they were giving us the award for being the best? I took to Twitter that day to joke: “I won an ACM for National Radio Personality of the Year today. I'm still waiting for them to ‘recall' and recount and take it away.”

They didn't recall our award. I had to miss the awards ceremony, because one of my best friends was married the same day. So as Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton hosted and gave out awards, I gave a speech at the wedding of my buddy Ricky, who I call Softball. And I would do it again ten times over. An award is cool, but in the end it's just a dust collector. And I can always hold over Ricky's head that I skipped winning an ACM to be at his wedding, so he can help me move.

The listeners who tuned in out of curiosity after those billboards didn't change the dial, either.
The Bobby Bones Show
grew to nearly seventy affiliates, with about three million weekly listeners, and on the weekends I hosted the
Country Top 30 with Bobby Bones
over more than one hundred affiliate stations.

Now, you may be reading this and thinking that those were pretty desperate measures to take to get more ratings. Underhanded, even. And I understand that. But you have to understand how hard it was to be rejected for the thing that I had been doing for years and that had made my radio show so successful—and that was being myself. When the old-guard country folks rejected me because I wasn't “country enough,” it hurt for lots of reasons—my background, my respect for the music, but most of all because I was coming from the same place of authenticity that I always came from. When I put up the billboards, it was because I wanted people to take the time to actually listen to the show and make a judgment on the quality, not a snap judgment based on the fact that I had previously been on Top 40 radio or on how I dressed.

When I first came to Nashville, I was unfavorably compared to Gerry House constantly. It killed me to walk every day into what used to be his studio and see
his
sign,
HOME
OF
THE
HOUSE
FOUNDATION
. It was during that period that I said to myself, “When I hit number one, I'm going to take that sign down.” Until then, I didn't deserve to take it down.

So when we hit number one around a year later, I took a screwdriver into the studio and removed that sign. I didn't say anything about it afterward, because I wasn't trying to be disrespectful. I respect anyone who can stay in a job in the entertainment business for any amount of time—particularly one who did it as well and as long as Gerry. It's not easy, and I know that.

But this was now my workplace, and so I took the two-by-one-foot sign down. Someone in the building—I don't know who—called one of the broadcasting trade magazines, which printed an article about how I was being disrespectful once again. Another backlash followed, but luckily this time it was just within the industry. No one outside radio knew or cared about the sign, which was no surprise to me. Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, Gerry and I, we don't matter much. People move on.

When I took Gerry's sign down, I moved it to the trophy case upstairs, where hopefully my name will go one day. I thought I was doing a natural thing, making my studio my own. But it created discomfort that I didn't want, and I wondered if I hadn't subconsciously made things harder for myself than they needed to be.

While I worked through the tough times at the job, I continued to wreak havoc in my personal life. When it came to women, I sabotaged everything. It was the same old problem over and over. I jeopardized my happiness, because I didn't feel like I deserved it. I worried anyone I committed to would leave me, like everybody else in life had. So in a counterphobic move, I was the one to cut off the relationship every single time.

Betty and I had been dating for more than four years when I arrived in Nashville. When she and I first started to get serious, I'd warned her to stay away from me. Because I cared for her!

“You don't want to be in this relationship,” I said, and I meant it.

In the beginning, I tried all my tricks to try to ice her out (not returning texts, bad attitude, going away without telling her). I didn't want to play games or be a jerk. An unconscious fear sabotaged any kind of intimacy in my life. I slowly withdrew without realizing I was doing it. But Betty just stuck with me, and stuck with me. I'm not sure why, because I can't figure out the appeal of dating me.

Four years later, she was still there by my side. When I decided to move to Nashville, she wanted to come with me. But I wasn't having that, of course. I didn't think it was fair to her. Betty was such a great person, it wasn't worth her giving up her whole life to move to a new town for me. She deserved better. She deserved somebody who could love her fully. And it wasn't me. In all those years we were together, I never told her that I loved her.

So Betty stayed in Austin. We tried to make it work for a second. We talked on the phone and she visited, but we both knew that it wasn't going to last. Not long after I moved, we broke up.

I never told her I loved her
. And you know what? I probably did. See? I can't even say the words here. In text. In past tense.

Despite the fact that I ran from her like a coward, Betty continued to be a source of support at the times in my life when I needed someone the most. One of those was about a year after we broke up. Out of the blue, I couldn't balance and I couldn't read. I had no clue what had happened, only that it was impossible for me to function on air, and something was really wrong with me. But I didn't tell anybody at work that I was sick, other than Amy, who I needed to cover for me. Again, it was the old paranoia that I'd get fired in a hot second if I showed weakness. I would hand Amy news stories, because I couldn't read them. But sometimes I couldn't even speak in complete sentences. Terrified, I went to the doctor immediately, who didn't put my mind at ease when he said, “This could be a lot of things.” There was a lot of “blah blah blah.” Then I heard, “You may have MS.”

The only neurologist I could get an appointment with quickly was one I found through connections in Austin. So the next day I flew to Austin for an appointment. Worried, I called Betty to explain that I was coming to town and why. She took off from work and met me at the doctor's office, where she stayed in the waiting room for the entire day while I went through a battery of tests including MRIs, CAT scans, and one where I had to do breathing exercises until I passed out with all these weird things attached to my head. No matter how scary the stuff got, it was a relief knowing she was right outside.

It turned out I'd had a seizure in my sleep, and once I knew I wasn't dying, I slowly recovered. It took weeks, but I bounced back fully. The doctor told me that I may suffer from seizures again, but that it isn't anything that I can't handle. My brain is okay, but my mind still has a lot of problems. Case in point—I ran away from Betty because I started to feel things most people really want to feel. As soon as it became apparent this was a girl that I could have a really happy life with, I was out. It didn't take a brain surgeon to know that I had made a huge mistake.

GNAWING AT THE BONES

After my breakup with Betty Boop, I was pretty down in the dumps for a while. I went on dates with a few girls, but nothing serious. That is, until the day of “The List.”