Number One With a Bullet

Legend has it that Phil Gernhard only needed to hear a song once to know if it had that elusive combination of melody and rhythm that would yield a gold record and heavy rotation.

"He knew how to pick a hit," says country star Rodney Atkins, whose last album yielded four No. 1 singles, all picked by Gernhard. "But not just hits—career songs, the kinds of songs that define an artist and are remembered long after he's gone."

Gernhard, known most recently for bringing his talents to bear on musicians like Atkins, Tim McGraw and Jo Dee Messina, had been picking and profiting from hit records his entire adult life. From the Zodiacs' "Stay" in 1960, to soft-rock triumphs in the '70s and '80s, to the crossover country singers of today, Gernhard was a Music Row talent seemingly without peer.

But at 65, he was looking back on a personal life that had failed in equal proportion to his professional success. He'd been through four failed marriages—the last to a Swedish hooker—and years of addiction and drug use. He told some friends that cancer was killing him and he didn't have long to live, while he told others that he'd turned a corner and the prognosis was good. And he seemed to be fixated on a teenage romance he'd held as a young man in suburban Tampa with a woman he hadn't seen in 50 years.

Still, at the dawning of 2008, he was reveling in further music success. Atkins' latest album, If You're Going Through Hell, was shooting up the charts, spinning off four No. 1 hits in a row. One song, "Cleaning This Gun," hit No. 1 in the second week of February.

A few days later, alone in his Brentwood mansion, Gernhard put a silver revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He had just completed producing what a close friend calls one of his best songs. It's a Steve Holy tune, powerful and a little sad, appropriately called "What Might Have Been."

When Phillip A. Gernhard was a sophomore at Sarasota High, Betty Vernon was in the eighth grade. "He was my first boyfriend," Vernon recalls. "We were sweethearts."

The pair rode bicycles and the city bus together, since neither had a driver's license. What they did have was music.

At the time, Elvis Presley was sending America's teens rock 'n' roll crazy. "Elvis was our idol," she says. "Phil used to go buy his records as soon as they came out and he'd bring them to my house and we'd dance."

They swayed to the 45s in the halcyon confines of Betty's bedroom, dancing to a brand new sound pouring through the speakers. Though Vernon didn't know it, Gernhard would come to cherish these times for the next 50 years, perhaps because the moments of joy so contradicted the rest of his life.

"He didn't have a very happy home life," says Vernon, who declines to offer specifics.

Roland Lavoie is less circumspect. Under Gerhard's tutelage, he landed a string of soft-rock hits in the '70s under the stage name Lobo, and knew the Gernhard family. "His father, you would think he was a retired colonel," says Lavoie. "He was a real hard-ass."

Lavoie recalls once visiting the family home to pick up some documents. When Gernhard's father stepped out of the room, his mother, "a meek little woman, probably 70 at the time...comes over and gets real close to me," Lavoie recalls. "She says real quietly, 'Have you talked to Phil?' "

Lavoie answered yes.

"Just tell him that I love him," she whispered.

"Think about that," Lavoie says. "The father was such a dickhead that he wouldn't even allow Phil's mother to make contact with him."

By the time she entered high school, Vernon says she and Gernhard had "drifted apart." He would chase the music industry; she would settle down, marry and have kids and grandchildren. Over the next 50 years, Gernhard would return to visit family only a few times, once for just a few hours to attend his mother's funeral. He did not return when his father died.

Gernhard's first hit came in 1960, when he produced the Zodiacs' "Stay" in a South Carolina studio. He took the song to New York City to shop it around to record labels. Gernhard got an audience with Al Silver of Herald Records, who liked the song but hated the recording quality. "None of us knew what the hell we were doing," Gernhard later told Billboard magazine. Silver took out a piece of paper and "drew a VU meter for us and said, 'Go back and record it and keep the needle up in this area.' We took the piece of paper with us."

Gernhard returned to South Carolina and rerecorded the song, with a close eye on his equipment. "Stay," just one minute and thirty-seven seconds, would shoot to the top of the charts and stay there for a week in the fall of 1960.

Gernhard took his earnings and returned to the Tampa area, scouting talent at sock-hops and nightclubs.

At the time, Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic was a huge cultural touchstone; Gernhard smelled opportunity. He and Dick Holler—who's written songs for everyone from Ray Charles to Bob Dylan to Tori Amos—wrote a song called "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron," in reference to the cartoon beagle's flying exploits, and looked for a band to record it. Gernhard found The Royal Guardsmen in a Tampa club. According to pop-music lore, he handed the band a legal pad with lyrics and a note that read, "Give me a military feel or cadence."