7. Knox #2
“Yeah.” I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn on the arm of the chair.
How much should I say about Gramps? My first instinct was to keep him to myself, but then I thought about what he had meant to me, how he’d shaped my life, and suddenly I wanted to talk about it.
“I was ten. I was already obsessed with music by then. He used to spend hours with me, playing his records for me. All the stuff he’d loved when he was young—and current stuff too.
He didn’t have much but he had a record collection fit for a museum.
When I was in fifth grade, I had the chance to join the school band.
My folks didn’t have money for an instrument but the school had a piccolo available.
” I chuckled. “Me at ten, sitting with the girls in the wind section. I was in heaven.”
She laughed.
“And listen, I wasn’t the greatest student ever.
School kind of bored me. But the minute they started teaching us how to read music, it all clicked.
It was like a language I didn’t even know I knew.
I practiced that piccolo like it was going to save my life, you know.
Gramps saw that, and that Christmas there was a used guitar under the tree.
Used but perfect. From then on, it was just me and my guitar. ”
“Did she have a name?” Blake asked.
“Carmen. Don’t ask me why. Later on, I learned Gramps had sold part of his record collection to buy it for me.”
“When did you know what he’d done?”
“A few months after Christmas. I knew that collection like the back of my own hand. I could see that some were missing. He admitted it to me then. He said, ‘Kid, you remember that every time you pick it up—that’s how sure I was that you had the gift. You make sure you respect yourself enough to use what God gave you.”
“And he was right,” Blake said.
“Yeah, he was right. He died when I was fourteen, so he never saw how far I took it, but I know he’d be proud.
” My voice came out rougher than I wanted.
“Where I come from, you don’t dream big.
You take the job at the plant, or the line, or the mine, and you’re grateful for it.
You don’t go getting ideas you can ever rise above your raising.
But Gramps said, don’t you let them talk you small, kid.
You’ve got something. You go on and dream past this place.
Nobody else ever said that to me. Nobody.
” I turned the cup again. “Not my dad. Not my mama either. But her dad, my Gramps, he made sure I knew that before he left this earth. I’m grateful. ”
“It must have been hard to lose him at such a young age,” Blake said.
“Yeah. Not a good age to lose the one person who thinks you hung the moon and vice versa. At fourteen you’re not a kid anymore and you’re not a man yet, and the one person I always turned to—gone, just like that.
” I snapped my fingers, quiet. “So. Yeah. But I had my guitar and this secret mission to show him he’d been right.
” I paused for a second. “Music saved my life. I’m not being dramatic.
My family didn’t get it, but they left me alone.
Didn’t tell me no, just acted like it was something I’d outgrow the minute I got some girl pregnant.
But I knew different. I knew it was my ticket to a new kind of life.
I’d take that guitar out to the woodshed where nobody’d bother me and I’d just—play.
For hours. Till my fingers bled, some nights. But I got good. Then great.”
“Tell me about the boys in the band,” she said. “What are these three men to you?”
“Brothers. Simple as that. Rhett too.”
Blake was smiling, and her eyes were a little bright. “You’re not the only one who has said that.”
“Yeah, we all know what this is, even when we bicker.”
“Your first arena tour—the one opening for Wyatt Black. That was the turning point, correct? How’d that come together?”
“We got lucky. Right place, right time. Everything just kind of clicked. We had a hit single, then another. Then we won the best country album of the year and skyrocketed. I remember thinking I just had to hold on for dear life.”
“You must have been grateful for Madeleine’s audacity.”
“Audacity?” I asked.
“When I spoke with Rhett, he told me Madeleine Price was solely responsible for Wyatt Black’s endorsement.”
A cold chill went down the back of my neck—that feeling when you’re about to learn something that changes your entire mindset and belief system. “Okay?”
“It was a bold move, asking Wyatt to give you the opening act on his comeback tour—much coveted from what I understand.”
“That’s right. He was huge. Still is.”
“Rhett told me she risked big capital with Wyatt. A lot could have gone wrong, and it would have been on her. But Wyatt Black trusted her—the biggest name in country music at the time. She was orchestrating his comeback, so to speak. His first album and tour after the festival shooting. He was still fragile, which maybe made him even more open to it. From what Rhett said, Madeleine told him your stories and backgrounds, knowing instinctually that Jack and Wyatt were kindred spirits. Scrappers. Meanwhile, the label was trying to make Jack’s sound more commercial, less outlaw.
Wyatt told them to back off and let Jack’s style become the new trend, not bending Jack to the current one. ”
I had no idea what to say. All these years I’d thought Madeleine was the one pushing for us to bridge the gap between pop and country, instead of who we really were. That was a wrong assumption.
“It’s important to remember where she was in her life at that point,” Blake said.
“Twenty-six, still building her reputation. She wasn’t the Madeleine Price everybody’s scared of now.
Rhett told me Wyatt Black was the account—the one that was going to make her or break her.
She’d met with him and impressed him so much he hired her to manage his comeback.
A publicist who steers a comeback like that, and lands it, she can write her own ticket for the rest of her life.
And if it goes wrong—” Blake let it hang.
“That was the ledger she was working with. Her whole future, riding on keeping Wyatt happy through the most fragile stretch of his career.”
“And she risked it all for us.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“She brought him what was a B-player at that point and a band who’d never played an arena in their lives, and she vouched for you.
Personally. To the one man she couldn’t afford to be wrong in front of.
” Blake nodded slowly. “If you’d bombed—if you’d caused one problem, embarrassed him, blown a night in front of forty thousand people—that would’ve landed on her.
During Wyatt’s comeback. It could have taken the whole thing down.
Her whole future.” She paused. “She knew that. She did it anyway. Rhett said she wanted the whole world to see not just Jack’s talent but yours too.
She’d said to him—Knox Hartley will be known as the best lead guitarist in the business by the time we’re through with this tour.
And then she made Rhett swear to keep it from Jack and the rest of you, because she didn’t want any of you carrying it around like a debt. ”
“Well, she got what she wanted. I wasn’t aware of how it all went down.
” I thought for a moment about the preparation we’d done before the tour.
Madeleine had pulled out every tool in her arsenal.
She’d ordered new wardrobes and haircuts.
Photo spreads in magazines that had nothing to do with music, all building around a narrative that—again—had nothing to with art.
I remembered she’d said something about how women should want us in their bed.
Men should think we were just like them and their buddies—great guys to have a beer with and that kind of thing.
“We’re not just selling music, gentleman,” she’d said during one of our early meetings. “We’re selling you.”
How I’d bristled at that. Still did, truth told.
“We done?” I was already standing, because I couldn’t sit in that chair another second.
“We’re done for now.” Blake’s eyes were soft on me. “I may want to circle back on a few things later, if that’s okay?”
“Yeah, sure, fine.”
I got out of that little room, burst into the lobby and stood for a moment, staring at the Christmas tree in the corner by the fireplace.
Twenty-six years old. Her whole future on the table.
She’d looked at five broke nobodies and bet her whole career, everything she’d built out of nothing, on us.
On us being as good as she thought we were.
On me being worth it. Ten years later I was still calling her a machine, a shark, a woman with a strategy where her heart should be—and every ugly thing I’d ever said—all directed at the person who’d risked more for me than anybody in my life.
Knox Hartley will be known as the best lead guitarist in the business by the time we’re through with this tour.
Madeleine Price was responsible for making my dreams come true. And all this time I’d treated her like the enemy. How had I not seen this before now?
How could anyone be that brave at twenty-six years old? Or have the foresight to see what even Jack or Rhett or me could not—we deserved to open for Wyatt Black and all that it would bring because of it. One fateful, courageous, nearly reckless decision, for us.
And I had no idea what to do with that information. No idea at all.
I stumbled outside, no jacket on, and started walking.