‘Bring Out The Boogie In Me’ was an old blues song by the great duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. It was a feel good song that he was putting on his next CD, and we gave it the full big band treatment.
When he sang the last verse he sang it just to her.
“When you woo like that, when you coo like that, you shake my peaches down from the tree/ you’re my sweet cupcake maker and you bring out the boogie in me.”
He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek while we played, and had her stand with him and wave as he said goodnight. The crowd ate it up.
He released the live video to promote his next CD, it made Julie and her mom minor celebrities, and their cupcakes became so popular they opened a shop. Every time he or Faerie came to town they had standing backstage passes.
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We went home, tired but satisfied. Took a little time off while waiting for the baby. I was still working on the songs for our first effort. I wouldn’t let Moira work, which pissed her off no end. I did relent and gave her the songs to arrange as I got them, but no more than three hour a day.
She was working on an arrangement while I was writing a lyric down, when she missed a note. She never misses a note. I looked up.
She was smiling and crying at the same time.
“Honey, let’s go, my water just broke.”
The nurses said it was one of the easiest labors they had seen in a while, but it was still five hours before he came.
I held her hands and when she got close the doctor told her to vent, yell or scream, it would help with the pain.
She was looking into my eyes.
“You son of a bitch. I hate you! When I get outta here I’m gonna shove a guitar up your ass and see how you like it. Oh God, here he comes! I love you honey! I love youuuuu.”
It ended as a scream, them mumbling over and over “I love you, I love you, I love you”.
Tears flowed as I put our new son on his mothers’ breast, and suddenly I had to sit down. I went pale and the nurses were laughing.
“Put your head between your legs and breath, you’ll be okay in a minute.”
Thankfully I was.
Moira delivered a week early, so Dad and Dottie didn’t get to be there at the birth. Mom was pissed but got over it instantly when she got her hands on her grandson. Dad just stood there with a stunned look on his face. Tears ran down his cheeks when he touched Aarons’ hand and it curled around his little finger.
Dad retired and they moved to Nashville. Dottie said no way she was going to be away from him while he grew up. They bought a house nearby, which I thought was a waste because they were always at our house.
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We finished the first CD. Erins’ Song went to number one on the pop and country charts. We redid ‘Perfect’ as a duet between Moira and Jenny and it charted at five before dropping off. ‘Hanging On The End Of a Kiss’, one I wrote and Jenny sang, went to three on the country charts and one on the pop charts.
Life was good. No, my life was great. We were successful, pretty well off, and loved each other and our son madly.
After we finished our album, we concentrated on Freddies’. We had a few tracks down, and they were good solid songs, but none of them were hits.
I was going over old songs I had one day when Fred came by. He looked like hell. Bleary eyed, moving slow. He piled into a chair and laid his head back.
“What happened to you?”
He grunted.
“I think my truck got drunk last night.”
I looked out in the driveway. He had a 1984 four wheel drive Silverado that he had restored and loved more than was reasonable. Usually a shining silver, it was covered with mud.
“Don’t tell me you drove last night?”
“Nah, Sarah drove us home. She’s a little pissed. We went down to the bar last night and some guy was bragging about his Dodge. I had enough beer in me to challenge him, and we went to the pits.
‘The Pits’ was a four wheel drive park, where several acres were constantly kept muddy. People paid a fee and ‘slung mud’ to their hearts content.
“What happened?”
“Hell, we both ended up stuck. To add insult to injury some girl in a hopped up Jeep pulled us loose enough to get out. Damn my head hurts.”
I just grinned and left him to nap on my chair.
The next day I gave him the first draft of his next hit.
“Think my truck got drunk last night
retty sure he started a fight/with a Jeep and a big Dodge Ram/ things got out of hand.”
“Started talking trash/wrote checks my gas had to cash, ended up slinging mud/we were out for blood.”
Three more verses followed. He laughed his ass off. Moira gave it a good beat with a lot of steel guitar.
We probably had more fun doing that video than any we’ve done before or since. We used his truck, a big Dodge dually, and a monster jeep painted bright pink.
JT, our video genius, filmed it a bar and The Pits. I don’t know how he did it, but he got the Mattel people to let us use the Barbie logo on the jeep.
Singers are almost as superstitious as baseball players. Freddie insisted Moira and I be in his videos for luck, so I drove the Dodge, and Moira had the Jeep. We had stunt drivers for the serious stuff.
Remember the old Alan Jackson video where he walked through the mud sling without getting any on his white shirt? We borrowed that idea, and he even did a cameo where he was standing beside the pit in a white shirt while mud hit everyone but him. While the two trucks got covered with mud, through the magic of cameras and computers, the Jeep never got a speck on it. She even pulled the trucks out. At the very end, Moira stepped out of the Jeep wearing the black and white one piece swimsuit that was on the original 1958 Barbie. She had lost the baby weight, and at 37 she stilled looked amazing.
Mattel even put out the jeep and a reissue of the original Barbie as a tie in. Sales were through the roof, and 100 were signed by Moira and Freddie and distributed randomly.
Moira had so much fun she wanted the Jeep, so the monster ended up sitting in our driveway. As Aaron got older, whenever she went somewhere he would cry “Jeep, Mommy, Jeep.” he loved it.
On the subject of cars, remember when I said I had another car stored at my storage buildings?
It was a 1970 Grandee Mustang, generally acknowledged as the ‘girl’ model of Mustang. It belonged to my grandmother, the only new car she ever owned. She loved them when they first came out, but couldn’t afford one. A few pay increases later and after an enormous amount of overtime. my grandfather bought it for her to commemorate their twentieth anniversary. She told me she cried for a week, it meant more to her than anything he had ever given her. She was going to give it to my mother, but when she was killed in the accident, she promised it to me. To be given to my wife when we married. Oddly enough, I never thought once about giving it to Sammi.