Willie Nelson talks to David Letterman about his song "Crazy" and meeting
Patsy Cline
Patsy Cline's
"Crazy"
By Barbara Schultz
Reprinted from
Mix magazine
No one could touch her. Her voice was one of the most ravishing instruments
ever recorded. Her life and her career? Well, they were a bit checkered, but
Patsy Cline sang like a goddess, and "Crazy" was her masterpiece. Hers
and Owen Bradley's.
The connection between Cline and the now-legendary producer came to pass toward
the end of a series of bumps and breaks in Cline's short life. Cline, who was
born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932 (her stage name came from her middle
name and the last name of her first husband, Gerald Cline), was driven to become
a country singing star from pre-teen age. Her biographer quotes
her mother, Hilda Hensley: "Virginia was dedicated. She had to be. I told
her she was picking the most competitive business in the world. In those days,
it was difficult for a woman no matter what she wanted to do, but country music
was dominated by men. It would be especially tough for a woman, but there was no
talking her down."
Cline talked her way onto a regular radio spot on station WINC in her
hometown of Winchester, Va. at the age of 14. At 16, she convinced radio
performer Wally Fowler to arrange an audition for the Grand Ole Opry (though
she didn't actually land a spot until years later). And throughout her
teenage years, she performed with Bill Peer and his band in clubs, lodges
and bars, becoming well known for her striking, womanly stage appearance, as
well as for her voice.
In her early 20s, Cline won first prize at the National Country Music
Championships in Warrenton, Va., which were sponsored by Connie B. Gay, a
promoter from Washington, D.C. That triumph resulted in a regular spot on
Gay's radio program, Town and Country Time. It was a huge break for Cline
and led to her first recording contract with Bill McCall and Four Star
Records.
The contract with Four Star was a terrible deal, which Cline signed gladly
without reading it carefully. The fine print stipulated that Cline record
only material owned by McCall's publishing company, and she incurred all of
the recording expenses. But Four Star also had a recording/distribution deal
with Decca, where Decca VP Paul Cohen would control the sessions and choose
Cline's producer: Owen Bradley.
Cline's career might have taken off at that point if it weren't for the
inferior material she was obliged to record. Her radio performances on Town
and Country Time and, by then, as a guest on the Opry-broadcast Ernest Tubb
show had gained her an enthusiastic fan base, but her records were not
selling and her expenses were mounting. When she went to Connie B. Gay for a
raise, he turned her down flat. "She referred to her contract with Mr. Gay
as a 'Hitler contract,'" Hilda Hensley told Nassour. "Patsy went to
him and
asked for a raise. He informed her she was being paid more than enough for a
woman in the business." When Cline approached McCall for an advance on her
royalties, Nassour writes, he replied, "You don't have any. Your records
haven't earned one red cent!" He then convinced her to sign a contract
renewal in exchange for a $200 loan.
Cline was recording in Nashville with Owen Bradley's "A" list of
musicians, but the songs she was permitted to sing did not match her immense
talent, and what little profit she might have gained went to pay for the
expenses
she incurred under her contract.
"Bill McCall made her do his songs, the ones he had in his publishing
company," confirms Harold Bradley, the most-recorded guitarist of all time
and brother to Owen. He played guitar on all of Cline's sessions. "In all
that time, I think the only hit we had was 'Walkin' After Midnight' in 1956.
That's the one that got her on the Arthur Godfrey Show."
"Walkin' After Midnight" became a Number 2 country hit and went to
Number 12
on the pop music charts, but Cline's sales continued to flounder after that,
until her contract with Four Star finally ended and she signed with Decca
Records in 1960. Then, she and Owen Bradley really started to make magic in
the Quonset Hut.
Owen and Harold Bradley's much-celebrated studio opened in the mid-1950s,
largely because the brothers planned to get into recording for film. The
music studio built into an existing house and a Quonset Hut was added onto
the back to be used for film work. However, when the music area proved too
small to record live - the way projects were done then - the operation began
to take over the back building. By the time Cline signed with Decca in 1960,
the Quonset Hut was established as Owen Bradley's main recording room, and
he had developed the formula that amounted to what is now simply referred to
as the "Nashville Sound." The first single Cline recorded on her new
contract was the Number One charting "I Fall to Pieces."
"My brother always stayed with the same players, those same guys,"
says
Harold Bradley. "I saw an interview one time when the interviewer asked,
'Why didn't you change musicians, change studios? You all weren't getting
any business, and you didn't know Patsy would sign with you because you only
had one hit.' And he said, 'It's like the girl in the sweater: It just
depends on what you put into it. We just changed songs. We started doing
better songs.'"
The Bradleys' studio was then equipped with a 3-track console purchased from
Decca and selected by Owen Bradley and renowned engineer Glenn Snoddy, the
technician who had built the studio's first stereo board. "We went to see a
3-track console that they had installed up there [in New York]," Snoddy
told
Mix in a 1988 article on the history of Nashville recording. "They had
built
two or three of those units and Owen wanted to get one of them in Nashville.
On the plane coming back from New York, Owen and I drew out the control room
design on a piece of paper. By the time we got back from New York, we had
that pretty well fixed and started to tear into the Quonset Hut, building a
place to put this console. Shortly thereafter, it was shipped down.
"Three-track changed things dramatically, because now we could really do
some production work in stereo, although we did not do a lot with the
stereo. We were still making mono records, essentially, because that's what
was selling. You were recording, mixing and listening to mono records
because that's what radio was playing and that's what everybody depended on
to get the hit."
The 3-track actually became extremely important to the sessions for Cline's
next single, the Willie Nelson-penned "Crazy." Work began on the song
in
mid-August 1961, with Owen Bradley producing and engineer Selby Coffeen
behind the board. There are varying reports as to how the producer convinced
Cline to record the song, which, by all accounts, she initially considered
irritating. However, she had agreed to put the song on her second album. But
Cline was still recovering from a near-fatal auto accident for which she had
been hospitalized for a month. She arrived at the Bradleys' studio on
crutches. Cline sang well on a few of the other songs that she and the
musicians were scheduled to record, but when it came time to sing
"Crazy,"
she just couldn't get through it.
"Her ribs had been broken, and she couldn't hold the notes out,"
recalls
Harold Bradley. "When we were doing this, there were no overdubs. She had
to
do it all live, and we all had to do it all live. By that time, we had
progressed to 3-track, but they wouldn't put anything in the middle. They
put the band and the voice and spread everything left and right. But on this
particular session, Patsy couldn't sing with the band. The 3-track allowed
them to record her [later] and not lose any quality on the tape. [Coffeen]
was able to put her voice in the middle. We would have lost a generation if
he had played it back and transferred to another tape [to add her vocal]."
So, the first sessions for "Crazy" turned out to be music-only - how
strange
for 1961 - with Owen Bradley, the seasoned producer and keyboard player,
directing the sessions from behind a small Hammond organ. Harold Bradley
recalls the configuration of the musicians, who were set up much the same
way on all of Cline's sessions: "If you think of it as a rectangle, and
you're looking at the back of the rectangle," he says, "that was the
entrance to the studio from the alley. Right beside that door was the
control room, and then it was a big, open studio back there. Patsy would
have been one-third of the way away from that door, and I would have been at
the very back; the amp that I was playing through would have been set up at
the very back. [Piano player] Floyd Cramer was about two feet in front of
me, playing piano with his back to me, and [bass player] Bob Moore would
have been four or five feet over to my left, and [drummer] Buddy Harman
would have been four or five feet over from his left. And right across from
Patsy, as she was standing facing us, to her left would have been [backing
vocalists] The Jordanaires.
"My brother came up with what we called the 'shed houses,'" Harold
Bradley
continues. "The drummer was in a little house, and then he had a big baffle
between Bob Moore and myself and the piano. It was roughly four feet high
and a long board of some kind with rollers on it. The amps, which were on
the other side of the room, had a baffle behind them to keep from going into
her mic."
"That was the beginning of isolating sections," Snoddy said in 1988.
"These
items were in the studio, and it was kind of a setup where we could pretty
much leave it for the next session."
The acoustics of the ultralive Quonset Hut had been improved by some
impromptu decorating that was done for a film project. "We'd had a problem,
because we had a ping off the tile floor, and also to trap the bass, they
put big curtains in the corners, and then the most fortuitous thing happened
to us," Harold Bradley recalls. "A guy came to us and wanted us to
film some
Grand Ole Opry 35mm color films in the Quonset Hut, and so they wanted to
build part of the interior of a barn. Along each side where it was concrete
block, they built wood all the way down the sides so it would look like the
sides of a barn. And at the very end, he built a barn door, and that wood
evened out the sound. We never took it out. It absorbed all of the right
sounds, but it was still live enough that you could hear everybody. I could
hear Patsy very well from where I was. Acoustically, it was a wonderful room
to play in."
The musical arrangement for "Crazy" was one of Owen Bradley's first
attempts
at straddling the fence between country and pop music, the sound that
eventually came to be known as "countrypolitan." "We were
following up 'I
Fall to Pieces,'" he told Mix in '88, "and the record company felt it
was a
little too country, so they asked if we could make the next one a little
more acceptable to cosmopolitan stations. We left off the fiddle and the
steel. I think most everything you hear is Floyd Cramer on the piano. If you
listen real, real close, because I didn't let them turn me up, you can hear
me. I'm just playing chords on the organ."
After recuperating for two more weeks, Cline returned to the studio to
record her vocal and nailed it in one take.
"That was the magic session," says Harold Bradley. "It was the
toughness of
it - and the magic of it, too - that made it an incredible session. Neither
one of them wanted to do anything else with it. They said, 'That's it.'"
Patsy Cline scored more hits with Decca in the brief time between the
success of "Crazy" and her death in a plane crash in 1963. She also
had a
number of posthumous hits, as Decca continued to release whatever Cline
material they had after her passing. Her 12 Greatest Hits, which came out in
1967, is still the top-selling hits collection by a female country artist
and has spent the most weeks on the Billboard charts of any album. Patsy
Cline was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973; she was the
first female solo artist to be chosen.
Cline's work is part of the amazing legacy that Owen Bradley left to country
music. His recordings of Webb Pierce, Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, Marty
Robbins, Ernest Tubb and so many others, as well as his own piano work, and
the innovations he brought to studio work, in general, earned him a place in
the Hall of Fame the year after Cline's induction.
"I'm a block away from the park named after my brother," says Harold
Bradley, who still plays and serves as president of the Nashville chapter of
the A.F. of M. "He's sitting there at a piano that weighs 1,200 pounds, and
he weighs 800 pounds. He did think that dying revived Patsy's career, but
the quality was there; and now, every girl country singer that comes to
town, that's the standard right there. Patsy Cline singing 'Crazy.'"
