NASHVILLE CALLING
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s hardly news anymore when a musician or an actor shows up in rehab to get off heroin or cocaine. But by all accounts the only substance Williams indulged in consistently was marijuana. According to Maureen Herman, the former Chicagoan and ex-Babes in Toyland bassist who now works for Williams as a publicist and booking agent, the intervention was less about substance abuse than about “a clash between two worlds: Nashville versus indie rock.”
She says Williams, who used to play drums in a rock band called Buzzkill and whose current stripped-down honky-tonk style is more No Depression than contemporary country, is interested in entering the mainstream through the alternative-country market. But Curb, a label in the belly of the beast known as Music Row, has other plans. According to Herman, Curb wants to market Williams through the Nashville machine, booking him into traditional country venues and angling for a hit on country radio.
But Brown and Herman say Williams doesn’t have a big problem with pot, that he was naively exaggerating for the Rolling Stone reporter. And Bob Campbell-Smith–Howard’s head engineer and, more significant, the person who actually called Williams to get him to come to Curb’s offices–says, somewhat ambiguously, “It’s not like he has a serious drug problem. He has decided, along with his family, that it’s now or never.”
Postscripts
