Have you guys run all the way up here in Nashville on the bus “one fan Stepping Stone Ranch in Escoheag asked, Rhode Island, where the bus pulled up on stage or how to unload it “. Gee, Stonewall, you are one of my biggest fans. The next time you see Johnny Cash, would you give her this song I wrote?
Fans of country music. They provide the money that keeps the entertainment channel, which begins when a composer writes a successful recording star and ends when a collector spends his last five dollars on a package of six and a hot dog express a way to Mapco a house concert for proper operation. They dress funny and stupid questions and still want the Greatest Hits of the 8-track, but you should love ‘em, like Ernest Tubb said.
They come from all over the motel or the Truck Stop, or a theater or a club, and want to meet the star. “Hey, ‘Boot Camp Lighthouse was with him at Ft. Bragg.” “Lighthouse was in Ft. Bragg.” “Yes, it was. We used to get drunk together.” Fat sweaty guys that just seem to pass from the ’72 Monte Carlo coverage to come tottering up to the bus to absorb the Lone Star: “Tell Alan that Billy Bob is here I am his cousin, I gave him the git-tar …” The girls want to know what y’all are staying in a motel room numbers. If you can not connect to the star, they will be satisfied with another singer, the frontman of the band members, roadies, or the bus driver, usually in that order. Types mother brings baskets of fried chicken around you and if you look like you’re under thirty, we want to know what your parents think of you to travel around the country a number of country musicians hairy legs.
The types of paternal eyes you suspect you are too close to their wives.
Local musicians come to see you. Sometimes they bring a bottle of cheap whiskey to share with you and you want to spend their guitars and their submission to the star. Older children have stories about the time they record an album in Nashville and played with Red Foley and another singer died he can not support your claim, and most young people want to know if they should go to Nashville. They think we all have Cadillacs conducting a study down here and party with Tanya Tucker and Travis Tritt in the Alley of the world famous printer. Hee! Haw! Tell them to come to earth! Fans want to know what is on the road. (Did you live on the bus, or stay in a motel at times?) They want to know what the star really is. (He got that drunk all the time?)
Gatherers to ask if you are tired of playing the show ever. “How long have you been with the Lighthouse eighteen years? How many times have you played” Hello Walls “?” “Three thousand and a half times 546.” “How ya get half the time? ‘” It’s been a lot of time in half . “
Fans get to be old friends when they come again and again to see their favorite singers, and it is good to have friends down the road. It could lend his race car for a pizza, or to help load equipment or sell T-shirts and tapes, and even help drag his star to his cabin in the back of the bus when it was on the floor blocking the cooler beer. Fans gathered at the road show in Nashville and get out of bed at the crack of noon, and must show Dolly’s house, or when Ernest Tubb is buried, or when Randy Travis used to wash the dishes, and then you have to get behind the scenes of the Grand Ol Opry “and then show them the nightlife of Nashville. I never thought I actually call, shoot, tell everyone to call.
A scary thought, all the fans you’ve ever met who come to visit. Imagine a horde of camera-toting, autograph hunting, K-Mart rolled straw hat to wear, cheap plastic souvenir shopping, Reba and Garth-ogling country music fans in Nashville are heading to turn left to from right lanes and complaints of heat and humidity. Gee, sounds like it should be an annual event ……
But fans have been instrumental (pun intended) in the development of country music into a marketable product high time, and raised from its humble beginnings in the hills and crying in the South, and the dusty plains of Texas and Oklahoma, boards of companies large record companies in New York and Los Angeles, when it could be spurious, disinfected, marketed and packaged and sold as Tide to housewives, who would not know a fork of a fork, but aspires to be the Chattahoochee by Alan Jackson and who truly believe they can imitate Lorrie Morgan with aerobic exercise enough and the right hairstyle.
If it is not country music fans, there would be piles of unsold, “Heart Your Cheatin ‘” is a deformation of 78 turns in somebody’s attic down to what would have been a Music Row, and Reba McIntyre to return to Oklahoma to take the first place in races called pork. If you are a music business, remember that you are working for the fans. They have helped create a major industry in which they toil. They are paid a salary, as can be, and you owe them a good show when they buy a ticket and come and see. smile and act like you have the best time of your life as you’ve never played these songs in 3546 and a half times, and have not heard these jokes before, and maybe you buy a beer and ask for an autograph.
