After some of the best and worst that life with a major entertainment corporation has to offer, Gretchen Wilson wanted the chance to run her own business.
Just over a year ago, Gretchen Wilson looked into the abyss. Her third album, One of the Boys, had tanked, its singles stalling at 32, 35, and 53 in Billboard. The label team that had guided her 2004 debut CD Here for the Party to quintuple platinum sales had largely been swept away in the wake of a corporate merger. She had asked in mid-2008 to be released from her Columbia Records contract, but Joe Galante, chairman of parent company Sony Music Nashville, had declined, saying he wanted to launch one more album. Singles from that project had also gone nowhere and its release was in limbo.
Even when things went right they went wrong. After the label placed her "Work Hard, Play Harder," in a promotional spot for Saving Grace, the Black Crowes sued, alleging she and co-writers John Rich and Vicky McGehee had ripped off the verse melody from their "Jealous Again." And Wilson's sprawling 300-acre Lebanon, Tenn., estate and the 30 people who made up her band, crew and staff, once symbols of just how far she'd come, were rapidly draining her resources.
"The lowest moment I've had," she says, "came in January of last year when I had to take 12 of my employees off of salary. I hadn't had a hit song in three years. The economy the way it is, the money going down, down, down, I just couldn't afford them anymore, and I realized, 'Wow. It's all fading away here. What are the chances I'm going to be sitting here next January letting the rest of them go and closing up?' I had to face that that was a possibility. And I had never been so broken up as I was when I had to have that meeting with them, because I just didn't want to fail them."
The pain and uncertainty would last for six more months.
"I saw her at a gig in Cincinnati on the Fourth of July," says Wilson's publicist, Craig Campbell, who was part of her original Columbia Records team, "and it was the most down I had ever heard her. She was frustrated. She thought she had turned in a good album and she was bummed about everything."
"I don't remember a regional rep from the label present at a concert for the last two years," she says. "I had regionals there with other new artists but they weren't there for me. That's a stab. That hurts."
About that time, though, Galante reconsidered, and Sony and her management team worked out a mutually agreeable split. A little more than five years after "Redneck Woman" catapulted her from obscurity to magazine covers and concert fees that sometimes reached $250,000 a night, Gretchen Wilson was back where she started — without a record company.
But when Campbell talked to her not long afterward, she was, he says, "on top of the world." The reason lies deep within the psyche of a woman who escaped small-town poverty with sheer determination, a great singing voice and the ability to capture a lifestyle in words and music — and who is now willing to risk everything in exchange for the chance to control her own destiny.
If Gretchen Wilson succeeds in the comeback she is mounting as president, owner, chief investor and sole artist of Redneck Records, she'll be able to trace her psychic turning point in part to an outhouse.
"I bought one of those books like Feng Shui For Dummies," she says, "and I went totally into it, changing stuff around in my house. The book convinced me that my view from the front porch needed to be clear and pretty, so I tore down a shithouse that was sitting in the front of my yard. It made my view better. And then I got that call that I was released from my record deal. You think I'm joking? Ha! I'm going to blame it on feng shui!"
She later addressed the moment from another angle.
"I was down," she says. "I mean, I was depressed, but I don't know how to quit. I'm out there, I've got mouths to feed and I'm just going to work as much as I can. Then my release from the label really just came out of nowhere. I kind of felt like I was about to hit the bottom and God reached down and put his hand on me and said, 'All right. I can see how much you can take now. Let's give a little back.' It was a joyous day. I know a lot of people would be like, 'You just got dropped!' But I already knew what I wanted and what I needed to do."
After some of the best and worst that life with a major entertainment corporation has to offer, Wilson wanted the chance to run her own business. She weighed the freedom and the risk — it is her money that is on the line — and decided to roll the dice.
Born to a troubled 16-year-old mother, Wilson began to fend for herself in rough bars at the age of 14. She dipped snuff, drank whiskey, and was raising her own daughter with her then-boyfriend after a failed early marriage when fame hit. She was 30 by then and had long since given up on trying to follow trails — musical or otherwise — blazed by the Shanias, Faiths and Martinas of the world. As the song says, "I ain't never been the Barbie doll type."
Wilson's hunger for renewed success is not just a desire to cling to the spotlight. Her career is much more than simply her own ticket out of the world of rough edges and limited opportunities that is Pocahontas, Ill.
"This thing has affected my whole family," she says. "We were all lost. There were some on drugs and some alcoholics and some living from friend's house to friend's house, and to be able to offer a second chance at life, at real living, to my family members, that's part of what keeps me fighting every day."
Cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws and others moved to Nashville to live near her and work in her organization, overseeing everything from the house and grounds to her fan club. The music is key to their continued prosperity, and the single Wilson chose to launch her career on Redneck Records is "Work Hard, Play Harder." To do so, she settled the lawsuit with the Black Crowes' Chris and Rich Robinson.
"I could have won and kept their names off this song," she says, "but it would have been too late to include it on the album had I fought it."
Released last October, "Work Hard, Play Harder" began a slow but steady ascent, reaching the Top 40 on both the Mediabase and Billboard charts just three weeks ago. Wilson knows that moving the song into the upper reaches of the charts — and giving her debut Redneck album, I Got Your Country Right Here, slated for release March 30, a real shot at success — involves wooing key reporting stations, those whose playlists affect the charts. She has thrown herself whole-heartedly into the task, but she remains painfully aware that given her sometimes thorny relations with radio, it will take everything she's got.
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Not since LeAnn Rimes and "Blue" has anyone in country music ridden a debut single as far and as fast as Gretchen Wilson rode "Redneck Woman." Within weeks of its release she experienced the kind of fame few will ever know. Those at radio saw it coming first.
"I was blown away by the response to Gretchen's first single," says Tony Thomas, music director at KMPS in Seattle. "After our first spin of 'Redneck Woman,' listeners called for an hour solid. We played it again the next hour, and haven't stopped playing it since."
"Gretchen hit a chord with fans," adds Tim Roberts, operations manager and program director of WYCD in Detroit. "She had an anthem with 'Redneck Woman' that made people want to see her, be like her, and party with her. It just caught on like wildfire."
When it did, Wilson, a talented but struggling singer-songwriter from the downtrodden section of an 800-resident town, had her pumpkin turned into a coach.
"I went straight from totally being nothing and nobody to being a household name," she says. "Before my song was even in the 20s, I think, I was out there opening for Brooks & Dunn. I was doing Letterman and Ellen and Leno and Regis and Kelly and all these things new artists normally don't get to do. It was such a crazy whirlwind of things happening."
She partied with the likes of Hank Jr. and Kid Rock, won a Grammy, watched three more singles from Here For The Party enter the Top 5, and began touring the world. She even had the honor of being the first artist dissed by a young Kanye West. (He stormed out of the American Music Awards in 2004 after losing to Wilson, saying, "I was the best new artist this year.")
Success, of course, is a fickle godmother, and it is much easier to derail a career than to launch one. Still, Wilson's four-for-four run of hits from Here For The Party seemed to speak to a reasonably unshakable foundation.
"What created the initial success," says her manager, Marc Oswald of Morris Artist Management, "was a perfect storm of everything happening right. It was the right song and the right voice, the right artist who had a story to tell at the right time, with the total focus of her record label. And then, we kind of had the perfect storm of things not happening right."
John Grady, the Columbia/Epic label chief who signed Wilson after she and her friend, songwriting partner and co-producer John Rich played acoustically for him in his office, agrees with the "perfect storm" analogy.
"It was what the audience wanted and what the industry needed to give them in a desperate way," he says. "We were in the middle of a period musically that was a little soft and a lot vanilla, and this was sort of a cold slap in the face. There was a reality to the music and a magnificence of talent that collided, and that's what makes the world go around. It made immediate sense to me."
Grady threw everything the label had behind her and she remained "one of the top priorities in the entire corporation" during the launch of a second album that seemed destined to carry the magic forward. All Jacked Up had first-week sales of 264,000, even more than Here For The Party, and its first single, the title cut, went Top Ten.
But "All Jacked Up" was, for reasons that vary depending on who is doing the telling, the last of her singles even to crack the Top 20. All the trappings of major stardom — sold-out tour dates, TV specials, an autobiography that hit The New York Times best-seller list — would stay in place for years, but Wilson's relationship with country radio, the engine that drives all of it, was about to start sputtering.
The follow-up to "All Jacked Up," "I Don't Feel Like Loving You Today," earned a Grammy nomination but stalled in the low 20s, something Grady says "had a lot more to do with the tempo of the song — it was a ballad — than it did with passion or quality."
When it came to the all-important decision on how to follow it up, though, Wilson and Grady butted heads. Wilson wanted "Politically Uncorrect," a God/country/working-man duet with Merle Haggard. Grady argued for "Raining On Me," a bluesy country weeper reminiscent of "Rainy Night In Georgia" that let her soar vocally.
"I wanted a different look at her at that point," he says. "The artists that people are looking at to change culture or take them on a ride need to continually take left turns creatively, and I think we possibly stayed in the middle of the redneck thing a bit long."
It was, he said, "my decision to make ultimately," but he gave in and released "Uncorrect" — a testament to the strength of Wilson's personality.
"I said this to her then and I'd say it to her now — and I say it in all positiveness — she's as stubborn as the day is long," he says. "She knows exactly who she is and she's pretty hard-headed about it."
"Uncorrect" stalled in the 20s as well. It was the last single Grady and his team worked, thanks to the factor Wilson cites as the single biggest in her long, bumpy slide from the top.
Just as Here For The Party was hitting, Sony, the Japanese firm that owned Columbia, and BMG, the German conglomerate that owned RCA, had begun a merger. Of all the developments possible within the world of Nashville music, few are as feared or as potentially disruptive as a corporate merger. By the time "Politically Uncorrect" had run its course, Grady and many of those who had been Wilson's only industry family were gone.
"The very first uh-oh moment," says Wilson, "was when the merger happened and I lost John Grady. I didn't know how to do business with anyone else. I had to wake up the next day and go, 'Now I'm involved with a whole bunch of people I don't know who are going to have control over everything that I record and pretty much my image and everything else that's out there.'"
Her management team assured her that they had worked successfully with Galante and his staff, since they also manage BNA Records artist Kenny Chesney. Even so, Wilson says, she "knew at that moment it wasn't all fine. That was probably the reason why things just started going nowhere, because if you think about it, I didn't choose them and they didn't choose me. We kind of got forced together."
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Galante is as smart and successful an executive as has ever worked on Music Row. But he had dozens of artists on his roster, among them a raft of superstars including Chesney, Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Martina McBride and Brad Paisley. Wilson would not be getting the kind of focus she got at Columbia — although, Galante says, "I felt that after spending time with her and her management, we were all on the same page. A number of the folks from the Columbia Nashville team were with the company when we put out One of the Boys."
For a time, management held out hope that the new relationship could work.
"It wasn't until the third and fourth singles from that album, 'Politically Uncorrect' and 'California Girls,' were stalling out in the 20s that we realized we were really starting to get into some quicksand," Oswald says, "and it seemed like the harder we tried to dig out, the more it sucked us in."
As the singles stalled farther and farther down the chart, sales of All Jacked Up slacked. In part, Grady cites simple economics — a sudden decline in disposable cash for core Wilson fans lower on the wage scale than the average country buyer.
"All Jacked Up," he says, "was the first Tuesday release after gas had gone to three dollars a gallon for the first time in the United States. [Both happened in September 2005.] That had a lot to do with the numbers on that record. The market was in the tank and her demographic was deeply affected."
Another contributing factor, however, lay in the decreasing effectiveness of the music. Longtime music journalist Robert K. Oermann says that maintaining momentum was inevitably going to be difficult.
"She had the misfortune of launching her career with a novelty song," Oermann says, "and that is almost always hard to sustain. Then, when she wanted to be taken seriously as a vocalist — and she is a great vocalist — she had an uphill fight on her hands."
MTSU recording industry professor and longtime music journalist Beverly Keel agrees.
"Both she and Billy Ray Cyrus had those monster hits that ended up hurting them in a way," she says. "No other artists were so linked to their first hits as Billy Ray with 'Achy Breaky Heart' and Gretchen with 'Redneck Woman' a decade later. To this day they're still associated with them, and they were pigeonholed by them. Clearly, they wouldn't be here today if not for those hits — but maybe they would have had longer radio careers without them because radio might have stuck with them longer."
There are also the difficulties of choosing and writing top-drawer songs amid the incessant demands of a young career.
"You have your whole life to write your first album," says John Rich. "The next one is due in seven months. That's a really rough thing to do, especially when you're such a character and a defined entity like Gretchen. Songs that a lot of artists could have hits with won't work for her. It's got to custom-fit her message. She's at a disadvantage if she doesn't have time to slow down and write, to turn on the creative side of her brain again."
Wilson stands by the second album, saying, "I loved every song on it." But she admits that by the third, there were problems.
"I take full responsibility for that," she says. "I actually asked for a lot of control on that album and I got it. I think I learned my lesson that every single thing I sit down and put to paper and pen does not necessarily belong on my record. I think that whole record was destined not to be so great. I mean, from the music to the promotion to the backing to the heart, the whole record was just a learning experience."
Grady concurs that artistic freedom has its disadvantages, and that his presence had provided a check on the first two albums.
"A lot of times when people have a lot of success, they feel that they've got the answers," he says. "Gretchen has always needed and will always need somebody in her life that will actually say no or debate her or come up with another reason or angle other than what she wants to do or what their team wants to do. A rudder, a stick in the mud — that would have been my role there."
As it turned out, though, there was a bigger conflict looming with the country music industry's most crucial and temperamental arm — the one that had the power to lift Gretchen Wilson out of hardscrabble Illinois, and the one with the power to send her packing.
While new media are changing the way even country music is consumed, radio is still the gatekeeper, the primary filter between artist and fan. And radio demands tribute. Wilson may have continued to sell tickets, but as her career progressed it became increasingly clear that her relationship with radio had foundational problems.
New artists are expected to go on radio tours where they visit station after station, week after week, playing their songs for a handful of staffers and perhaps getting a bit of precious airtime. They are also expected to participate in "listener appreciation" and other concerts. All of this is at their own — or at first, at their record companies' — expense.
It's a loss leader the industry can demand, because without country radio, the odds of commercial success become negligible. But in those heady early days, Wilson didn't have time to play the game.
"It happened so fast," she says, "that I truly missed the radio tours and all of the stuff that most artists have to do. Management said, 'You've got Ellen. You've got Leno. You've got Letterman. And you've got money, money, money, money.' And so, not knowing the business, and being so new and everything, I went for the money, knowing that if I could just get on television shows and stuff, that's gonna help me later on in my career. It's gonna do wonders.
"Well, the one thing that it hurt was the dues that I was supposed to pay, and I've been trying to make up for that."
Oswald acknowledges that he and the rest of Wilson's team fumbled aspects of that relationship at a time they were doing well enough on the road not to notice.
"We all got a little complacent," he says, "thinking radio was coming so easy during the first five singles that maybe that stuff wasn't important." They were, in fact, often inviting radio people onto the bus to hang and drink during after-show jam sessions.
"We were constantly with radio on the road, every single show, so in our minds we were doing it," he says.
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Radio expected full obeisance, though. The lack of interviews, station visits and shows took its toll. By the time the third album came out, Oswald realized, "We had a bit of a problem. We were seeing radio on the road, but they were coming to her. We weren't going to them.
"I'll raise my hand and take some of the blame. We didn't realize how much of a difference those two things are. It got so big so fast we may have started believing our own press releases. You can count me in that. I was really surprised when we started having trouble with radio, hearing it was really personal for them."
Some in radio felt they caught attitude from all of those in and around the Muzik Mafia.
"I really believe it was management," says a radio executive who did not want to be identified. "People in that John Rich world didn't always have a very good relationship with people because they're all, 'Do you know how great we are?' Her management treated it like she was the biggest thing in the format when what she actually had was one big song."
Wilson cites times where the sheer size of the entourage and lack of coordination led to the scheduling of interviews she never knew about. Still other episodes left a bad taste in the mouths of station personnel. It became easier for those stations to decide not to play a new single.
"She did a show for our acoustic series, Live at the Wolf Den," says Randy Bliss, program director of WPAW, the Wolf, in Winston-Salem, N.C. "She asked if she could bring her whole band, and so she had the band, sound, and lights in a room in the back of a radio station with 100 listeners, and it was outstanding, just amazing. But she was not the easiest person to deal with. She was quite standoffish during sound check and then afterwards, about autographs and photos — she would do group shots but not individual photos.
"Country fans really pay attention to an artist's demeanor. They expect country artists to be accessible. And it was a great event, but we got a lot of feedback saying, 'She wasn't very nice during the photo session,' that kind of thing. I'll be honest with you, it was great, but it could have been a whole lot better, and it colored my view in looking at every single after that."
Wilson is convinced that in "Work Hard, Play Harder" she's got the hit she needs — "It reminds me of the first record," she says — and she has vowed to do everything she can to reconnect with radio, to reignite the excitement that for a time at mid-decade made her the freshest new voice in country music.
"It's been a long slow process," she says, "but I'm getting there with radio. Since I'm doing my own promotion for this album, it's been a lot easier for me to connect. I just pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, I'm here. I'm in business. This is the real deal and I'm ready to work with you and for you. What can we do?' It's a whole different thing when you're holding the cards, and so I feel like it's all going to get better now."
"It's unbelievable the amount of stuff she's doing to promote at radio," says Oswald. "I'll say, 'I'd like to see a three-and-a-half-week promo tour to 20 radio stations in March. As the head of the label, do you mind talking to your artist?' She'll laugh and say, 'Yes.' She gets it. We're doing all the stuff we need to do and she's having fun on it."
The album, I Got Your Country Right Here, produced by Wilson with John Rich and Blake Chancey, comes out two months after a greatest hits package released by Sony. The tour supporting it involves bars rather than arenas, but she can draw on the fact that, hits or not, she has remained in the public eye.
She earned widespread national media attention and spoke before a congressional hearing when she earned her GED. A political conservative, she performed and dined at the Bush White House and played Heart's "Barracuda" at a McCain/Palin rally during the 2008 presidential campaign. On Valentine's Day she sang the national anthem before 108,700 people in Cowboys Stadium at the NBA All-Star Game.
Her early concentration on the mass media may have cost her at radio, but the exposure it gave her still allows for a healthy touring income. Even now, she can still command north of $100,000 a show, according to Oswald.
"The average country fan," says KMPS' Thomas, "never got the memo that she's not a big country star."
Wilson has also got the sheer force of her personality and an indefatigable spirit.
"I'm a fighter," she says. "I've always struggled, and that's when I seem to do my best is when I'm under the gun, and so I'm not worried, although it's a little frightening. The record company is the most expensive thing I've done recently, so financially that's the biggest scare I've got going right now, not whether I can handle getting out there and doing 14 things a day."
Oswald is convinced the dynamics of the business have changed enough to improve the odds for a boutique situation like hers. Still, he tried to talk her out of putting her own money at risk. Like others before him who have tried to sway her, he was unsuccessful.
"I actually encouraged her to do it as a partnership with one of the majors," he says, "because they were pretty much all interested. She wouldn't have any of it. She could have been basically independent and not had the financial risk she does, but she believes in herself and was done with committee meetings for A&R decisions. She wouldn't give that the time of day."
Despite her frustration toward the end of her run with Sony, she expresses no bitterness.
"Had I started at RCA and had Joe Galante signed me and been the one behind me from the very beginning, it probably would have had a very different outcome," she says. "I can't really be mad about the way things ended up because I could have been sitting there for a long time and never made another record."
"We all tried various ideas and songs to make it work," says Galante. "It didn't, and she asked to be released and do her music on her own label. It was very amicable and I hope that she succeeds. Gretchen's gift is both unique and powerful. She is a great singer and needs to be heard."
Plenty of people in the industry report nothing but good experiences with her.
"She's one of the greatest vocalists in country radio, with a range like few others," says MTSU's Keel, "and she's among the nicest. When I've interviewed her, she's one of the most real and most gentle people I've dealt with. You feel like you're talking to a real soul who's not just going through the motions. She thanks me for caring enough about her to interview her. How often does that happen?"
And regardless of the merits of individual songs, few in radio or the rest of the industry dispute the fact that she possesses world-class talent.
"Nobody has stepped in and taken Gretchen's place," says Rich. "They just haven't. That's a mark of a truly classic entertainer when you claim your real estate in country music and nobody else can take it."
Aware that whatever legacy she has was born of an album driven by one of the biggest single records in the genre's modern history, Wilson looks back with a mixture of bemusement, wistfulness, and gratitude.
"It was a phenomenon," she says. "There is not a bone in my body that thinks I'll ever beat it. Would I love to have a song that's as successful? Yeah. But if I don't, I'm OK with that. I've never been upset about being the Redneck Woman. I'm truly happy to be that person. I still love to sing the song. I still love that the fans are waiting for that one. I'm OK with having that brand. I can't think of a better brand for me to have, really."
Trying to recapture the magic is one thing. Doing it with her own money is quite another.
"She's a card player," says John Rich, "and that's a big hand of cards she's got. You've got a 16 and the dealer's showing a face card and you say, 'Hit me.' 'Work Hard, Play Harder' is a great song and it's catching on. If she hits a 5 and gets a 21, people will say, 'Look at that!' and I'll be the first one in line for that autograph, I promise you."
For Wilson, a woman whose career is tied inexorably to her family and a lifestyle now centered on that Lebanon, Tenn., estate, success has highly practical consequences.
"Everything I have is in land," she says. "I don't have tons of money. I've never really blown any. I've just taken care of my family. I had to take a home mortgage to do all this.
"If I win, I'll be able to dig my ass out of the hole. If I lose, I lose it all."
Email editor@nashvillescene.com.
