The Terrors of Nashville

Photo by Mitchell Baughman

Back in the mid-1970s, Shoney’s coffee shop on Nashville’s
Music Row was an inevitable destination for stars, groupies, fans, and shady
promoters who would set up in a booth with a telephone and an electric adding
machine. It was the site of numberless escapades (Faron Young reportedly once
stripped a waitress’s uniform clean off with a single flourish), but few could
rival David Allan Coe making a loaded 10 a.m. entrance — rhinestone suit, shoulder-length
hair, tattoos, earrings, and a venomous greeting for any civilian gawker: “What’re
you lookin’ at? I’m David Allan Coe, motherfucker!“

Coe is the King Kong of country music, an 800-pound guerrilla
so outrageous and seemingly out of place in Nashville that his considerable
accomplishment there could have sprung only from skills even the most conservative
record exec couldn’t ignore. When he arrived there following his 1967 release
from prison — a series of incarcerations had consumed almost a third of his
28 years — Coe set up shop in an old hearse, picking guitar, pitching songs,
running with the likes of fellow troublemaker Billy Joe Shaver and generally
manifesting the most disorderly destiny Music City ever suffered through.

Ultimately, Coe had great success as a songwriter, enjoyed a very
respectable decade or so of his own chart records and traversed an equal stretch
of confrontational run-ins with just about anyone who dared to look at him askance.
His first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry pretty much sums up his Nashville
experience.

“That was quite interesting,” says Coe. “I called
Bill Anderson to tell him I was cutting his ‘Get a Little Dirt on Your Hands,’
and he said, ‘That’s great — can I sing on it?’ It went to No. 1, so he invited
me to guest on the Opry. When I got there, they wouldn’t let me in, just laughed
and said, ‘You don’t know Bill Anderson.’ I argued, they finally went and got
him, but the guy who was the head at the time took one look at me and said,
‘You know what, Bill? We’re just about out of time on this segment.’ So Bill
said, ‘Fine — I just won’t sing today.’ Well, we went on and got two standing
ovations. After the show, all the same guys who wouldn’t let me in wanted to
have their picture taken with me.”

But Coe is more complex than the foulmouthed, Stars and Bars–brandishing
wild man who rampages on the bandstand: Born September 6, 1939, in Akron, Ohio,
to a Mormon father and an Amish mother (a distinct break from the Southern Baptist
background so prominent in country), he was raised in poverty and emotional
distress; while his criminality showed early in charges ranging from assault
to possession of obscene materials, music was always a significant force. “I
grew up with a lot of music — my parents listened to Spike Jones, the Dorsey
Brothers, Bessie Smith. Then I got into R&B very heavily — Jimmy Reed, Howlin’
Wolf, Bobby Blue Bland. And that was what I started cutting.”

“Blues Unlimited voted my Penitentiary Blues
album best of the year — they didn’t even know I was white. I was on tour with
B.B. King, and he told me, ‘David, you are the best white blues singer in the
world, but nobody wants to hear a white boy sing the blues.’ Then I met Kris
[Kristofferson], and I just started writing more country-type songs. I liked
bluegrass and old-style country, but I didn’t write them kind of songs. I wanted
to have something more to say — ‘Jack Daniel’s if You Please’ was a far cry
from what was on the radio at the time.”

Coe’s work covers an extraordinary spectrum. “Would You Lay
With Me (in a Field of Stone)” is a superb example of his metaphorical
poetics; written for his brother’s wedding, it assumed a new dimension of psychosexual
gravity when 15-year-old Tanya Tucker took it to No. 1. “Longhaired Redneck”
is a stream-of-consciousness glimpse at survival in the honky-tonks. The plainspoken
commonality of “Take This Job and Shove It” resonated with millions.
“Heaven Only Knows” is a bleak update of the broken-family ballad
(daughter works in porn, son OD’s, wife dead). And Coe sits on a hundred equally
powerful explorations.

Yet his lurid reputation always precedes him; his between-song
patter does, after all, feature more motherfuckers than a Wu-Tang Clan
show. “I’ve been a member of the CMA for 30 years, and they never once
asked me to be a presenter,” says Coe. “When I won a Grammy for ‘Take
This Job and Shove It,’ they just sent it to me, wouldn’t even invite me to
the show.” Now 65, Coe still works about 49 weeks a year, drives his own
bus, sells out most every date, and always delivers a mesmerizing display of
the raucous and the profound. He has little choice but to play the road slave
— the rights to his prime songs were lost in a bankruptcy proceeding, and the
catalog was sold: “They sent me the first check by mistake. It was for
$38,000.” Asked to speculate on what lies ahead, Coe responds with one-percenter
pragmatism: “I tell everybody the same thing — I just hope there is a future.”