Photograph from Wikimedia Commons
Merle Haggard is on a roll these days. Last December, he stood alongside Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, composer Jerry Herman and choreographer Bill T. Jones as they were feted at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. Earlier in 2010, he released his most recent album, I Am What I Am, which is a gentle yet assured late-in-life statement of purpose. Most importantly, the lung cancer that has slowed the legendary troubadour down in recent years is in remission.
Things haven’t always been so good, however, and back in the early ‘90s, Haggard was in one of his career’s occasional downward spirals. As a stopgap measure, he and Willie Nelson took over Mel Tillis’ theater in Branson. Back then, 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer famously hailed Branson as “the live music capital of the universe,” but it was better known among music industry cognoscenti as a rattletrap old folk’s home for country singers whose careers had hit the skids. Haggard was not happy to be there.
I’ve interviewed the Hag on a couple of occasions, and I’ve never gotten him as animated about any subject as I did when I brought up Branson. Indeed, he seems to carry deep psychic wounds about his time there.
“I’ve never in my life, including San Quentin, experienced anything like Branson,” Haggard told me. (He was a prisoner at San Quentin, mind you, not an entertainer passing through, a la Johnny Cash.) “Willie said we should have received a purple heart from the government.”
The problems ranged from the daily grind of two-hour shows to audiences that were less than attentive. “I actually had to tell people to put their hearing aids back up and beat theirself on the chest and say, ‘Hey, it’s time to listen to the show!’” Haggard said with a growl.
And then there were the venue’s less than idyllic, um, facilities. “We were there in the early days, before they got the toilets fixed," he said. “[The theater] sat down in the bottom of those mountains, and sewage runs downhill, we all know that. The place that Willie and I worked had two sewage tanks, and you could always tell if there were more women in the crowd or more men.”
Let me just let that line sink in for a minute.
“We had to walk by that place every time on the way to the stage,” Haggard continued. “And it finally got to us.”
Finally, he could take it no longer. “I left there in a Lear jet with $40,000 worth of people sitting in the seats,” he said. “I never took my guitar out of the case for three months or turned on the radio. It almost ended me. I can’t say enough bad about it.”
Merle Haggard performs with Kris Kristofferson at 8 p.m. on Wednesday at the Fox Theater, 527 N. Grand, fabulousfox.com. Tickets are $48-$68. Call 314-534-1111.
