Hillbilly Heart (11 page)

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Play music in bars,” I said.

“Bo, let’s be serious for a minute,” she said. “You don’t play an instrument. You’re not a musician. You’re a catcher. In college.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I think this is what God wants me to do. I think it’s my purpose. I’m being called.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

I dropped out of Georgetown just five weeks into the semester, and Susie and I didn’t speak for a few days afterward. Going into damage-control mode, I waited till she went home for the weekend and then arranged to take her to Kings Island, an amusement park just outside Cincinnati. Going there was always a special event for us.

I picked Susie up at her house early in the morning and we drove to Kings Island in my red Chevy S-10. It was a little less than a three-hour trip. We got there early, hoping to be among the first through the gates, so we could go on all the rides before the lines got too long. We pulled into a parking space and leaped out of the car like superheroes. However, as I slammed the door shut, I realized that I had screwed up.

“Oh, shit!” I said.

“What?” Susie said, stopping in her tracks and turning around to see why I wasn’t with her.

“I locked my keys in my truck.”

Susie watched as I spent the next two hours trying to get the door open while people walked past us on their way to a good time. Eventually, someone helped me get the door open, and Susie and I managed to get on a couple of rides. But we never recovered from the strain and tension of my mistake.

We drove home in silence. I knew Susie and I were at the end of the line. She knew it, too. When I pulled up in front of her house, I told myself to take a long, intense look at her beautiful face and remember it forever in case I never saw her again. As it turned out, I didn’t. We looked at each other. I said, “So this is it,” and she nodded. She got out of the truck and that was it.

One morning I was at the cigarette warehouse, listening to the radio as I drove my forklift. It was September 1982, and the radio was tuned to WKEE, the pop station out of Huntington, West Virginia. Around eleven o’clock, I took a break, parked my lift, kicked back, and let the tunes wash over me. We liked to crank up the radio and let the music fill the vast space, especially when a song came on from a rocker like George Thorogood, whose song “Bad to the Bone” had come out earlier that year and was like a three-minute vacation from the boredom.

Between songs, I heard a promotion for a Neil Diamond concert. The station was giving away two tickets to the eighth person who called the station. They were going to continue giving away two tickets every hour till 9 p.m. that night. I had never once before thought about dialing in and trying to win—until now.

The reason? I heard that voice.

“OK, you’ve been wanting to know whether you’re crazy or whether what I’m telling you to do is real,” it said. “Call the station. You’re going to win the tickets to see Neil Diamond.”

“I’ve never won anything,” I said to myself in response. “I don’t
know much about Neil Diamond, either. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.”

At times like this, I really did think I was crazy.

“When you’re at the concert,” the voice continued, “you’re going to see and hear why you’re supposed to buy a guitar and start a band.”

“OK,” I said.

That was it: game on!

I ducked into the warehouse office, picked up the phone and dialed the radio station. I didn’t get through. The line was busy.

“See,” I said.

“Just play the game,” the voice said. “If you don’t win those tickets, game over. It’s done. You’re crazy, like you think, and you’re going to need to get help. But if…”

I wasn’t going to win. I was definitely going to need professional help. Nevertheless, I started to play the game. By 5 p.m., I was deep into it—more because I wanted clarification than the tickets. Later that night, at 8:55 p.m. to be more specific, I was in the weight room at the YMCA in Russell. I still had the radio on, and I knew WKEE had one last pair of tickets to give away.

I dialed the number, which I knew by heart, and this time, instead of a busy signal, someone at the station picked up.

“Hello, it’s WKEE. You’re caller number eight, and you are going to see Neil Diamond in concert!”

“Really?” I said. “OK.”

“Caller eight, you don’t sound very happy,” he said.

“No, I’m just in shock,” I said. “I’ve never won anything before.”

“Not anymore. Hey, hang on and we’ll get your information so you can get the tickets.”

The concert was September 10. Unable to find someone to take, I drove to Charleston, West Virginia, by myself. It was a haul from Flatwoods, about seventy miles. My seat was way up in the rafters—beyond the nosebleed section. Neil’s songs were classic, and he was a phenomenal showman. He could rock, slow it down, tell stories,
and then pull out yet another humongous hit from his quiver, like “I Am… I Said” or “Sweet Caroline,” and the entire place sang along with him.

At one point, he brought an orchestra and choir of gospel singers onstage and began singing “Holly Holy.” His band and the orchestra played with one another, with a lush dynamic that I’d never heard on a stage before, and the singers carried on as if they were in church. Then suddenly, as if on cue, all of their voices dropped down to where the mood turned soft and spiritual and amazingly intimate considering there were probably twenty thousand people in the audience.

The multicolored lights dimmed, the stage darkened, and then Neil stepped forward into a solitary spotlight. In his low, slow, soulful voice, he spoke to the crowd, almost as if he were preaching. And who knows, maybe he was.

“I don’t care if you’re white or black,” he said. “Rich or poor, man or woman…” He let those words simmer for a moment. “If you just believe in the power of love, you can reach your dreams and be all that you can be. If you just believe… and have faith.”

As he said all that, I was swept away into some new place I had never felt before, not even in church. This was a church like no other: a church of music. It was either as if a hundred hands were upon me or I was being cradled in one giant hand. I had goose bumps. And then instead of hearing Neil Diamond, I heard another familiar voice: “That’s it. That’s why you’re supposed to buy a guitar and start a band.”

“But—”

“You can do it. You’re going to do it. You’re going to be a positive influence in people’s lives. God is going to use you to share his light and love.”

I wasn’t the first person in my family to hear a voice. My papaw Cyrus had been told to become a preacher, and he did. And while my dad, who was currently in the seventh of what would eventually be twenty-one years in the Kentucky House of Representatives,
never heard a voice telling him to help other people, he clearly answered a calling when he ran for office. Something motivated him.

Now the same was true of me. I drove home from that concert in a trance. Back at my mom’s—where I was living at the ripe old age of twenty-one—I pulled my Chevy into the driveway, turned off the ignition, and sat there, trying to make sense of what was happening in my life.

Confused and a little scared, I looked up at the sky, a canvas of black, dotted with stars that seemed to stretch to infinity. Its vastness would have made me feel like an insignificant speck if not for what happened next. I pounded on the steering wheel and yelled, “I don’t play guitar!”

“Buy a left-handed guitar.” The voice was calm and direct.

I
was
left-handed, except for when I played baseball or threw a football. My dad’s guitar, and every other one I’d ever tried to play, had been right-handed. Could it be that simple?

It was not so simple to find a left-handed guitar. Even in a big city, music stores don’t keep them in stock. Finally, after numerous calls, I found a store in Portsmouth, Ohio, with a left-handed Fender F-3.

“Really?” I said to the guy on the phone.

“I just told you, man. We got one.”

I said, “I’m coming to get it. My name is Cyrus…”

CHAPTER 9

Sly Dog

A
LL THE WAY TO
the music store, I kept telling myself that this was really happening to me. I was excited. I was barreling down the highway, literally and figuratively, which, I guess, is the very definition of faith. For the first time, I knew I was heading in the right direction.

The Fender F-3 cost me $225. I sped back home, sat down in the living room, took the guitar out of its case, and began to play. No, I didn’t suddenly play like Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan, but damn if holding that thing didn’t just feel right. I had spent years mangling the songs in my dad’s Glen Campbell songbook. Yet now I was making something that actually sounded like music.

I had never been able to play like this before but I didn’t question it, either. It was clear my brain was just wired that way. The music all made sense, from my head to my heart to my fingers to my soul. It felt good and right, and I just went with it. I was going to start this band, right then and there, that night.

My brother Kebo had been laid off from the C&O Railroad and needed something to do, so he was thrilled when I called that night and invited him to join a band—my band. I also rounded up two guys from the warehouse—bass player Paul Rice and drummer Bob “Bubba” Wileman—and a guy named Pat Williams who
played guitar. We met that night at 2317 Long Street, in our old converted carport.

I plugged into my dad’s old PA from his gospel quartet days and taped one of his Elvis-era microphones to an old broom handle. For some reason, everyone just assumed I would be the lead singer. We jammed on Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”; Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Call Me the Breeze”; Hank Williams’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”; George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today”; and Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

All of a sudden, using my left hand—the same one I use to brush my teeth—the guitar made sense in a way it never had before. I watched my brother, copied the basic chords, and let the music I felt inside me come out. I credit Dr. Bailey and his book. Thanks to the powerful lessons of positive thinking, I put up no resistance to what I was trying to do. I pictured myself playing music, and I did.

The rest is history… only it took another decade to get there.

“Man, we’re playing!” Bubba chortled after a Skynyrd song. “We’ve got a band. All we need is a name.”

“Yeah, so what are we going to call ourselves?” someone else said. Good question. As we cooled off with some beers, Bubba knelt down and scratched Spike on his stomach. Spike was equal parts bulldog and scrappy mutt. He’d gotten in a scrape with another dog the previous Christmas and lost an eye, which the vet had sewed shut, giving him the look of an old pirate. I thought Bubba was brave to pet him on account of how ugly and unsavory he was, but my pal was amused by the way Spike immediately rolled over and opened himself up to the attention.

“Look at this guy,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, you ol’ sly dog.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“What?” my brother asked.

“Our name. We’ll call ourselves Sly Dog.”

Having music back in my life was a blessing. My dad was nothing but supportive. “If this is what you’ve decided to do, put your whole self into it,” he said. My mom occasionally joined us during rehearsals in the converted carport, sitting at the piano in there and jamming on Bruce Springsteen’s “Open All Night” and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.” If nothing else happened with my music other than seeing my mom going at the keys with a huge smile on her face, I would’ve thought the whole thing was worthwhile.

Playing brought out a feeling in me that had been locked away since I was a little kid. It released the joy I remembered as a five-year-old when the whole family made music together. I’d stashed that part of me in some distant corner for most of my growing up.

By day, I was a laid-back, introverted Kentucky boy (except when provoked), but once I picked up a guitar and stepped in front of a microphone, I turned into an uninhibited, balls-out rocker who couldn’t wait to get onstage in front of people and share the good times.