Chapter 62 – Timing is Everything

By February of 2010, twelve songs were chosen out of the fifteen to make the cut on my newest record, Timing is Everything. This was the first album I had made where I used outside musicians and an outside recording studio. Fortunately, I still had my Protools setup at home, so after the basic tracks were finished, I would take the files home and overdub my guitar, pedal steel and any other strange instruments I fancied. The vocals I would record at the studio. Seven of the tracks were recorded at Switchyard, and the other eight at a new place in Hermitage, Shadow Lane Studios owned and operated by Phillip Wolfe, a pretty decent utility player in his own right (or as John Lennon had coined –In His Own Write). Phil would actually paly some Hammond organ on a few of the tracks and he always had a plethora of guitars I could use to overdub. One I especially liked was a Gibson 12-string from the sixties. Nice!

The record was in the mixing stages now and, although they sounded good, they weren’t great. Something was wrong and I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I had my friend Chas Sandford attempt to mix the songs, but even though he is a great producer, it was sounding too brittle and booming, especially the drums. I wanted a warmer, live sound and it was not translating correctly, for my ears anyway. Chas had invited me to a party by Old Hickory Lake one night where a lot of singer’ songwriters would gather around the campfire and pass the guitar around and sing some of their compositions. I sang a few and this Australian guy approached me. He said he really liked my tunes and asked if I had a record out. I told him yes, I had a few and was in the process of mixing my fourth. When I asked him what he did, he said he was a musician, producer and recording engineer. Luke Garfield (a nice presidential name) and I were getting along famously and, instinctively I thought, he might be the right guy to give my record a try.

Luke had a great little setup in his living room of a small house next to a church in the Berry Hill section of Nashville. I would stop by in the mornings, bring over some coffee, and we’d get to work. It was sounding great, especially when he ran the mixes through some of his vintage plug-ins. By the end of February we had twelve songs mixed and mastered. The last song on the record was one I had recorded live in my home studio, and I think it is the best one on the album. It’s called Song for my Sons, in which I postulate my life’s lessons to my boys. Here’s a snippet:

The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree;

It dropped straight down and hit you on the knee,

So if you want to grow up and be like me,

You’ve got to learn to play your song.

I’m your dad so take my advice

Go lead yourself an honest life.

And don’t burn the candle at both ends

 Be good to yourself and all of your friends.

You don’t need fortune, you don’t need fame—

All you got to do is play the game.

Find a good partner to be your mate—

Give a little more back, son, than you take.

Oh I love you so, and I take you with me, wherever I go.

In March, I had booked a photo session with Holly, the same photographer that took the photos at Daniel’s Bar Mitzvah. It was a cold day and the snow was partially covering the railroad tracks by the Thompson Station town hall. There is an old fashioned railroad car positioned on a small bit of track adjacent to the rail line. Across the street was Thompson Station Grille which, at one time, had been the original country market where the railroad workers would get off and buy their breakfast—a real whistle stop. We decided this would make a great location to shoot the album cover. I had brought my youngest son, Morgan, with me and had planned to use him as one of the band members. He had an old WWII bombers jacket and a tweed flat brimmed cap, like Ben Hogan used to wear. He looked great. We were waiting for the rest of my band to show up but they were beyond late and I was getting worried. When I finally reached Tom, the bass player, he informed me that his mother-in-law was experiencing chest pains and he and his wife had to rush her to the emergency room. I think that Rudy, the drummer was with him at the time was the one driving them. I knew then that the two of them were not going to make the photo shoot, which I understood perfectly.

Meanwhile, with Holly already there and my pockets full of cash to pay her with, I saw Ronnie, the local homeless man hanging out by the train car. When I first met him, he was sitting on a director’s chair in front of the old bank building on the corner across the street from the railroad car. It was an tiny, old brick building built over a hundred or more years ago, and I was told it used to be the local bank. Now it was a hair salon owned and operated by a woman, Suzanne. She let Ronnie sweep the hair off the floors for a few dollars. When I went in to get my haircut, Suzanne introduced me to him. When he went outside, she told me that Ronnie was illiterate and a young girl by the name of April was teaching him how to read and write. She didn’t want anything in return; just the satisfaction of knowing that she was helping a “good Christian” was payment enough for her.

  Now in preparation for the photo shoot, I had brought a change of vintage clothing, a few guitars and a snare drum, some harmonicas and some clocks (one was a Hofner bass with a clock face in the center) and plenty of hats. I asked Ronnie if he would like to pose for the photo as one of the guitar players. I said I would give him twenty bucks and he was over the moon with excitement. He hadn’t seen that much money in one place since he had a job at the convenience store a few years back. Ronnie was a paper thin man in his late fifties with long, stringy gray hair and a ruddy face. We were still one man short to complete the band ensemble. I went over to the Thompson Station Grille and convinced the cook to pose as the drummer. I gave him a three cornered hat and positioned him behind the snare drum. Morgan threw on the accordion and I had a ukulele while Ronnie slung on my old, black Harmony Stratotone guitar. We were an eclectic, but interesting looking band that ranged in age from eleven to almost sixty.

About a year later, I was saddened to hear that Ronnie had gotten an incurable case of liver cancer and was dying. He was living in a shed behind the car repair place down the street from the train. There was no heat in his eight by ten wooden shack but there was an extension cord which powered and old TV and a VCR. I went over to visit him from time to time and remembered that I had a bunch of old video cassettes I was going to sell on Ebay. I gathered them up and drove down to his shed with over thirty good movies and a C harmonica. He was very thin and could hardly talk but his eyes were still okay. I knew he was glad to have those tapes and I was told, after he died that January in the home of a local resident who had taken him in and took care of his needs, he would watch them all the time. I don’t think, however, he ever played the harmonica. I also gave him an autographed copy of my CD and when he saw his picture on the back cover he smiled. He knew now that his image would go on, even if his body wouldn’t. At least he spent the last few weeks of his life in the warmth of a guestroom and was eating, to the best of his ability, good, healthy food and drinking hot tea and coffee.

The funeral was at the Baptist church in Spring Hill, the neighboring town. I was amazed how many people were there, probably over a hundred. Ronnie had touched the lives of more people than I had thought possible. I heard so many inspirational stories of Ronnie’s life from the people who knew and loved him. Thompson Station had lost its one and only homeless person but it would be a long time before he was forgotten. Someone had erected an old lawn chair with a sign reading Ronnie’s Place outside the BP gas station where, from time to time, he would sweep the blacktop parking lot for cigarette money and food. As I drove past his shrine, I had thought about the day we took those photos. I miss that guy and I think of the lyrics to an old Bob Dylan song: Only a hobo but one more is gone/ leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song/ leavin' nobody to carry him home/ Only a hobo, but one more is gone. The only difference, there is somebody to sing his sad song. Me. His name was Ronnie Johnson and for one brief moment in time he was a part of the James Wesley Haymer band that cold March afternoon in Thompson Station, a small town where he lived his fifty-nine years and the same town where he slipped away silently in the night.