So we got together to write us some country songs. Mike (I’ll call him that because that was his name) could write songs, it turned out, a little better than I could, but he couldn’t play guitar for shit. He was actually worse than I was. He couldn’t sing as good as me, either, but that was my opinion, which he didn’t agree with. Taken all together we were pretty much a disaster waiting to happen, and we were in no mood to wait long.

To record our crap, I bought a boom box. This was no ordinary boom box. It was a state of the art Panasonic, which set me back about 400 bucks, so it could make some pretty good-sounding tapes. With a mic, and everything in the house that would make a noise turned off, including the air and the refrigerator, it was damn near studio quality.

But the problem was, we sucked, and there was nobody around to tell us that except each other, and we tended to lie. So we smoked cigarettes and drank beer and taped our asses off, and one day we found that we had several tapes with five or six songs apiece, and we decided to head down to Music City and set the town on fire.

Later, we were to learn from a veteran songwriter who had been published and recorded and knew Chet Atkins personally, that the thing to do was take one tape down there, with one song on it. One very good song.

Of course, we didn’t have one very good song, so we took a whole passel of bad ones. Not a good move, hoss.

Now this is how stupid we were. We got down there and started looking for Music Row, in the general area it was reputed to be, and we couldn’t find it. No Sixteenth Avenue, no music publishing houses, nothing. Nada. The only streets we could find were Music Square East or West or whatever, smack in the center of which sat the Country Music Hall of Fame.

So, like the two rubes we were, we went in and asked someone.

When they were finished snorting with laughter, they told us that Music Row was all around us. Turned out a lot of streets in Nashville have more than one name.

After we got oriented, we found the RCA Building, the CMA Building, and several other landmarks, including Sixteenth Avenue itself. Our first stop was at Combine Music, which I knew from country music magazines was were Kris got his songs published, so we went in there. A bored-looking dude behind the counter inquired as to the nature of our business, and Mike, who had chosen to speak first, allowed as to how we had some songs we’d like someone to listen to, and we got our first shock of the day. The first of many.

The man told us that Combine had 25 writers on staff, and was therefore not in the market for new material at that time.

Good grief! That many writers on staff?

So we moseyed next door to Cedarwood Publishing. Legendary Cedarwood, home to many a country hit. It was my turn to speak. My heart was doing flip-flops.

Cedarwood, in outward appearance, was lower mid-range in the pantheon of Nashville music publishers, somewhere between Tree Publishing’s glittering office building and the old houses that held the publishing digs of Porter Wagoner and Marty Robbins, one of which had a side entrance featuring a ramshackle-looking aluminum storm door. The other , if memory serves, had a swing in the front yard.

Cedarwood was a low-slung brick building that looked quite a bit like a dry cleaning establishment. When we went in, we were met immediately by a counter, and I almost expected to see plastic wrapped clothing on hangers waiting to be picked up. My mouth was so dry I could barely croak out our business to the man behind the counter. It didn’t help at all that, to the right of the counter, dressed in faded jeans and an old sweatshirt, leaning back against the wall in a wooden chair as he worked his teeth with a toothpick, sat Conway Twitty. He was giving us a hard, “Who the hell let your asses in here” glare that stunned me with its malevolence. He looked like he wouldn’t have minded killing us.

I muttered my spiel, listened numbly as we were told Cedarwood had all the material it needed, thank you very much, and we made a rapid and not very graceful exit. We said nothing for the space of several blocks. Then I ventured, “Was that who I thought it was?”

Mike said, “Yep.”

The Southern sun was hot, and we spent all afternoon trying to get someone to listen to our tapes or at least let us drop one off so they could listen to it later, but we had no luck. We went into Tree, the world’s largest music publisher. It had a fountain in front, a pristine reception area, and a girl behind the polished counter who was as nice as she was drop-dead gorgeous, but the answer was the same: Thanks, but no thanks.

This would not be our last trip to Music City. We would make several more before finally throwing in the towel, and have several adventures along the way. The tour bus full of gawkers who went by waving, pointing at us, and yelling, “Look! Songwriters!” The fight Mike almost got into with the professional manager at Coal Miner’s Daughter because when asked his business, Mike said he wanted to sell some songs, to which the PM snottily replied that buying songs was illegal, to which Mike growled, “You know what I mean,” to which the PM said no he didn’t and asked Mike to leave. The song Mike and his guitar friend wrote together and put my name on because we were writing together, which we recorded in a studio in Owensboro with some first-rate musicians Mike knew, and which was taken to Nashville by the guitar dude, who returned with a contract from Jim Reeves Enterprises and a promise from the PM that he was going to pitch it to Willie or Waylon or whoever big was in town.

Alas, the PM left Jim Reeves Enterprises shortly thereafter, and then we read in Music City News that Reeves had sold out to Tree, including all of its song inventory. Long story short, Tree had someone listen to the tape upstairs while we waited nervously with a new gorgeous receptionist, and someone finally came down and said “Sorry, not for us, thank you.”

And then there was the song I wrote that was so godawful that it caused Peer- Southern, a top publisher which had been polite to us in the past, to tell us politely that they’d heard enough of our stuff to make a judgement, and that there was therefore no reason for us to come back again. In other words, Get Lost.

This song was bad to begin with. It was called “Fat Boy With the Blues,” and was based on the premise that despite all the old songs, kickers didn’t really drink “warm red wine” to forget, they drank beer. By the case. By the MF-ing carload. It is well-known that beer, in sufficient quantity over a period of time, makes you fat. Hence the title. The opening line went, “Here I sit all broken-hearted/Me and my best girl have parted.” Bad. Bad. Then, we were all drunk when we recorded it, me, Mike, and his brother, who’d brought along a jug. Since it was a novelty song, I decided to sing it as Leon Redbone, and then Mike’s brother began scatting in the background... We all agreed Nashville would either love the song or hate it.

Guess which.

But that day, tired, hot, discouraged after striking out at our first attempts at bat, and a bit disgusted, we walked sweatily toward my car, ready to begin the long drive home. And a weird thing happened. An old Chevy began to shadow us. Driving slowly, as if following. It was creepy. Then the car picked up a bit of speed and we saw fishing tackle in the back, and we got a look at the driver, who was giving us a look of contempt and anger that seemed so disproportionate that we didn’t know what to think. We were hoping the guy didn’t have a gun. It was a very strange moment.

Because the driver was Conway Twitty.

The term, WTF had not yet come into vogue. This was before the Internet got cranked up. But the term fit perfectly.

WTF?

I mean seriously, WTF?

We never did find out.