Country Music Broke My Brain (34 page)

We also got treated like dirt in Japan. Because we bombed them, I realize they can be a little ticklish. But
they
started it. We finished it. Neither my father nor Allyson's dad had one little good thing to say about the Japanese. You get years ripped out of your life to float around on a ship (which they both did) because the “Japs attacked us,” and you don't like certain folks. The Japanese didn't like us, either.

Sometimes, when I hear the word “discrimination” bandied about, I think back to a ritzy, steel-and-glass, upscale dining place in Ginza, the posh neighborhood of Tokyo. This was probably my only time of truly being treated differently because of what color my skin was and what nationality I looked like.

My family—Allyson, Autumn, and I—entered and took a seat at one of the lovely tables. We waited for service, which was a little slow. Waiters sauntered by and looked elsewhere. Probably the language barrier. After a long wait, I finally waved at one of the servers and mimed we wanted to order. He just stared and walked on. Suddenly, it began to occur to me we were being
ignored!
We weren't getting slow service, we were getting
no
service. Our reaction was a slow burn. This just doesn't happen to
us
. You have to wait on people, it's a
restaurant,
for cryin' out loud. It's quite an awakening to realize you are about as welcome as a banjo at the symphony.

We walked as slowly as we could out of there. We weren't offended (that's a lie; we were P.O.'d as hell), and nonchalantly moseyed our little old American butts out the door. Stupid restaurant. We didn't want to eat there anyway. It's the only time in my life this has ever happened to me. I can't imagine if that was the regular routine, if you had to wonder if somebody would let you eat at their counter. It would make you rage at the world. You'd be Toby Keith.

The massive area was lit by burning oil lanterns. As the sun was setting, the flames cast an eerie, spooky glow over the square. As your eyes adjusted, you noticed monkeys on leashes, bears asleep on rugs, tables filled with snails, and piles of goat brains. People were drinking and laughing and fighting. You noticed a man having a tooth pulled by someone with his leg on the patient's stomach. Strange music floated through the evening heat. Men looked at you with blank stares as if they wanted to either shake hands or pull a giant knife out of their sack. Bladders of wine were hoisted toward the sky and shared by the crowd. A woman gave a greasy character with no teeth a haircut. Steel griddles were covered in shrimp that danced as the oil heated beneath them. A shout in the distance, and somebody held up a steaming animal leg.

Yes, it looked exactly like the tailgate before an Eric Church concert. Exactly.

Or, it could be you've walked into the Djemaa El Fna. The open-air market/restaurant/mall/pub/farmer's market/dentist's office/barbershop/yard sale of Marrakech, Morocco. I've been backstage at a lot of Eric Church concerts, so this place wasn't a total shock to me. It was still a bizarre bazaar anyway. During the day in Marrakech, you see women totally wrapped in rich, black cloth. Allyson says she still remembers locking eyes for a moment with a woman with only a slit in the traditional chador for her to see. It wasn't confrontational or angry, just one person sizing up another. Travel does that to you. You realize, underneath it all, humans are basically the same everywhere. People with families and jobs trying to make it to five o'clock and get home to feed the kids.

I always asked a driver or guide, when I heard some music, what the song was about. The melodies were intricate and nothing Dierks Bentley would record, but the subject was the same: a love gone wrong, a story about a hardworking man who didn't get what he deserved, or riding your camel into the desert for some privacy or a party. It might as well have been something by Jason Aldean—the Moroccan version of “Big Green Tractor.”

I still get a chill thinking of nights in Morocco. The air is warm and filled with incense. Women and men, covered head to toe, move like ghosts as the wind whips at them and they disappear into invisible doors and twisting alleyways. And there ain't a Cracker Barrel for 10,000 miles.

The French and country stars of the '60s and '70s have a lot in common. They drink like fish. They smoke like chimneys. They do what they want and couldn't care less what people think of them. Ray Price could have been French.

It's not as bad in Paris today as it was the first time I went to the City of Lights. Back then, everybody smoked—the men, the women, the babies, and the dogs. You would see nannies puffing away, pushing a stroller with a pint-sized Parisian, lighting up a Gauloises. The French also don't care what they eat. If at one time it was part of an animal, then fire up the grill, Pierre, dinner's comin'!

I think it's hilarious that there is a “Country Music Association” in France. The thought of François in a cowboy hat singing “All My Exes Live in Toulouse” is just funny to me. I've discovered over the years in the music business that a lot of American artists claim to be “big” in Europe. They can't get arrested in the States, but somehow people in Provence love their music. It might be true, but I'm just sayin' I don't think Alan Jackson is planning a tour de France anytime soon.

The one thing I love about Paris is the showbiz look of that city. I once was seated beside a lovely man on a flight from Paris to London. I couldn't help but notice he was reading a lot of letters with the heading “Directeur de la Lumiere.” In the worst French possible, I asked him what that was. It looked to me like “Director of Light.” It
was
Director of Light. He explained to me in flawless, accented English that his job was to make sure everybody in Paris looked good at night. It ain't called the City of Light for nothing. His mission was to put a golden glow on couples walking along the Seine or sitting in a small café with a glass of Sauvignon blanc. Why, it's just like the
Grand Ole Opry
with berets. The
Opry
gives you a special spotlight, and so does France.

A few times I've been scared traveling. Once when the girls and I were lost behind the city wall in Luxor, the stares from guys sitting on their haunches were creepy. We were also stopped by a hotel manager from wandering too far down a road near our hotel in the Valley of the Kings. He just shook a finger at us and said, “No, no. You no go. Very dangerous that way.” It looked almost exactly like a backcountry road in Tennessee or Kentucky . . . lush and green and almost romantic but probably precarious. We took his advice.

St. Petersburg, Russia, was the worst. It's a beautiful city with churches that take your breath away. The Hermitage is a stunning collection of artifacts and paintings in a building founded by Catherine the Great in the 1700s. If you wanted to look at all 3 million exhibits, it would take untold years. Allyson would still be there today, on the second floor, reading about some lamp. When we were in Russia, it was more like the Wild West. It's been years, but I still get the willies thinking about that city. We walked past stores with such opulence and then passed a poor Russian squatting on the sidewalk, with a single head of lettuce for sale.

We had a young guide named Olga. I think there's a national law that young, blonde guides in Russia be named Olga. She was a terrific guide, but there was a sadness about her I never could get my head around. I always imagined she left us and returned to a gray apartment in the shakier part of town.

I asked Olga to take us to Nevsky Prospect. It's the Fifth Avenue of St. Petersburg. She acted like it wasn't all that great an idea but agreed to lead us into the crowds. What happened next is so typical and so scary at the same time. Young gangs of Russian boys gathered around Allyson and Autumn shoving sweatshirts for sale into their faces. They held items up high and babbled on about how we should buy them.

Al finally had enough and shouted, “No!” Just as suddenly as the throngs of young street vendors had appeared, they were gone. They just disappeared, like Dave and Sugar. Olga stood in front of us and was a little wobbly. Then we noticed what she knew had happened. They were pickpockets. Allyson had kept our passports in a little leather bag she wore on the front of her belt. It was unzipped and empty.

I tried to calm things and said, “It's not that bad. We can get new ones.” Olga disagreed, much to my shock, and said, “No, this is bad, very bad. This is
very
bad.”

Great,
I thought.
I'm gonna wind up sitting on the sidewalk selling a head of lettuce.

We did what everybody does when confronted with being stuck in a foreign country with no passports and no visas—we called our radio producer in America. I called Devon O'Day. In a heartbeat, Devon was on it. While we sat like potatoes in our room, she went to work. She called Vice President Al Gore's father's office in Carthage, Tennessee. She actually got the former senator on the phone. He said, “Let me see what I can do.”

A short while later, Dev told me she answered the phone and heard, “This is the vice president's office.” It always helps to have the vice president of the United States' dad start the ball rolling for you when you're stuck in Russia. We were told to go to the U.S. Embassy with new pictures of ourselves and await further instructions.

That Saturday, we walked up to the guard station of the American embassy. An officious young Marine said the embassy was closed. I said, “Did you get a call from the vice president's office?” He sort of snapped to, looked at a list, and said, “Oh, you must be the Houses. Yes, sir. Just a moment, sir.”

He made a phone call, and we were in. The whole security affair is quite similar to going backstage before a Tim McGraw concert. If you can mention the right name, you are welcomed inside with open arms.

I fretted and worried the whole time. The day before, we'd spent hours slogging to one Russian government office after another, trying to get a visa to get out of Russia. It's no wonder Russia was in such trouble. Nobody cared, nobody worked, and nobody helped. It was a lot like Music Row the month before Christmas, except there were actually bottles of vodka sitting on desks. Empty vodka bottles. I guess it helps to have a little Stoli to get you through a busy workday in the Soviet Union. Come to think of it, that's also a lot like the Music Row offices.

Olga stayed with us as we went through security with our new visas and the passports that had been handmade by a slightly disheveled embassy employee. He'd come to the office on a Saturday to help out some fellow citizens get the hell out of St. Petersburg. Allyson had said it best (as usual), “Everybody in that city was just deflated. They had no reason to want to do anything. They lived every day with no reason to smile.”

We boarded the plane and landed a few hours later in Venice, Italy. As gray as St. Petersburg had been, Venice was as sunny and blue. I will never forget the exhilaration of riding in the back of a water taxi across the Laguna Veneta. It was a brilliant day and seventy-five degrees, and me and my girls were out of Russia and going to have Italian every night in a row. We laughed like schoolkids at how free we were. I don't think I ever felt more American, either.

American and free.

We stood—Al, Autumn, and I—on Wangfujing Street. That's the “main drag,” as my mother used to say, in Beijing, China. The clouds were managing to squeeze out a little misty rain on the shoppers and the few tourists on this busy thoroughfare. We'd just been gawking at a Chinese pharmacy across Wangfujing. Shelves filled with tiger paws and dragon lips and God-knows-what-else in hundreds of rows of tiny jars. The Chinese still practice “natural” medicine, and from the looks of the people, it works. We were in a strange land—the only non-Chinese in either direction.

The rain began to pick up a bit. I noticed a small, elderly Chinese woman in traditional garb crossing the street. She was walking directly toward us. Uh-oh. Customs in other countries are strange, and I figured we'd probably done something to insult half the population. She approached, she bowed, and then she opened an umbrella and held it over our heads. Such a simple gesture, but it told me what people in China were like. They were like everybody else. Usually, folks are kind and helpful and ready to laugh. A smile is universal in its message. I've never smiled or received a friendly grin such that I didn't know things were going to be all right.

Sometimes I think Music Row has the Great Wall of China surrounding it. It's tough to penetrate and to go around. Strangers from another land, like Arkansas, have to learn where the gates are and how to go under or over or through the barriers to get inside the Forbidden City.

We were told by our Chinese guide to turn left when we got to the Great Wall. I had no idea how huge the Wall really is. It's like a double-lane road on top. It has gates and entrances every few miles to walk along the upper Wall. “Turn left” was good advice from our guy. As we walked with a few other Americans along an empty section of the Wall, I looked back at the other side, and it was packed with Chinese. I don't know if the custom is to go one way, but the populace obviously stayed the course. Our side was almost deserted.

Just like Nashville, they buried a lot of people in the Wall when they constructed it. People just got covered up in the course of living their lives. It happens in Twang Town the same way. Nashville has a lot of rules, too. You go a certain way. You do things in a particular manner. Outsiders can sometimes get lost in the shuffle or get buried in the wall.

Autumn loves to remind me that our guide for the whole Chinese trip was not named Dong. I, apparently by not listening, never learned his real name. I addressed the poor guy as Dong the entire trip. I yelled “Dong!” in crowds to get his attention. He spoke perfect English, and I spoke two words of Chinese. One of them was “Dong.” Our last day, as a big treat for Dong, we invited him to breakfast. The Great Wall Sheraton had a buffet to make Waffle House pea-green with envy. Sausage and bacon and eggs and pancakes in metal warming trays. I half-expected the Chinese guy manhandling the little fry griddle to ask me if I wanted things “smothered and scattered.” That's Waffle House-ese for, “How do you like your hash browns?” We slid in a booth and I said, “Dong, have a good old-fashioned American breakfast on us.” I was certain he was about to have the meal of a lifetime.