How to go
Who: Wyatt McCubbin
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday
Where: The Big Tent at the 2011 Clark County Fair
Admission: Free with $5 gate admission (plus $3 for parking)
SELMA — Wyatt McCubbin sat behind the wheel of his restored, 1963 Ford pickup and pressed play on a CD player that’s far and away the only frill on a truck made when you only needed air bags if you planned on wrecking.
The music that filled the cab had been cut live with a band of Nashville session pros this past December inside the kind of classic studio where you only need Auto-Tune if you plan on sucking.
Most 16-year-olds can’t be trusted in the driver’s seat of either.
But it’s only when Wyatt interrupts his own cover of the Waylon Jennings song “A Long Time Ago” to announce Reggie Young’s Telecaster break that you suddenly remember you’re in the presence of a kid who got his license just six months ago.
You’ll be able to judge for yourself when Wyatt plays the Clark County Fair Friday night with a band that will feature 85-year-old WBZI music host Chubby Howard playing pedal steel the same way he once did for Buck Owens.
The soon-to-be Southeastern High School junior believes wholeheartedly that the future of country music lies in its past.
And, incredibly, he’s already made the same kind of stand against the Nashville establishment that took his hero, Waylon, years to get up the gall to do.
Of course, the big difference is that when Waylon finally decided to defy the Nashville studio system in the mid-’70s in order to make his music his way, he did so as an established star.
Wyatt did it as a 15-year-old without a record deal who still lives with his mom, dad and sister in Selma, a place that makes Pitchin look like a metropolis.
“I’d rather fail at something I do believe,” he insisted, “than succeed at something I don’t believe.”
It’s the name. It’s got to be.
Like Waylon, like Willie, Wyatt just wants to be himself — his words, his voice.
His first experience down in Music City, barely a year ago, makes it sound as if the outlaw movement never happened at all.
“They started sending me songs, and you know what kind of songs they’re sending me,” Wyatt complained recently. “They wouldn’t even look at my songs.”
A long time ago
Through an almost storybook series of events last summer, in which Sawyer Brown’s manager heard Wyatt’s homemade CD playing in the lounge of a Nashville Best Western, he had found himself on the same management roster as the once-huge country band.
Wyatt’s parents were, as you might imagine, in a state of shock at the thought of their teenage son becoming a country star.
“We went from Selma to Sawyer Brown,” marveled Wyatt’s mom, Jerri Kay McCubbin.
Sawyer Brown’s lead singer, Mark Miller, was all set to produce Wyatt’s material, beginning with a cover of “Honky Tonk Heroes” for inclusion on “The Music Inside,” a three-volume series of Waylon Jennings tribute albums.
Each volume is to contain one newcomer like Wyatt alongside covers of classic Waylon tunes by such giants as Alabama, Kris Kristofferson, Jamey Johnson, Hank Williams Jr., Vince Gill and more.
The first volume came out this past February, with Wyatt set to appear on the second volume being released Nov. 1. (Word has it that Kid Rock now wants in on the album, too.)
However, you won’t hear him singing “Honky Tonk Heroes” on it.
His cover, backed by the members of Sawyer Brown themselves, along with legendary session guitarist Reggie Young, was essentially rejected by Witt Stewart, founder of Scatter Records and producer of the tribute series, as being overproduced.
Even at the ripe old age of 15, Wyatt just knew it wouldn’t turn out right last August.
For starters, he wasn’t able to sing with the band in the studio, and Miller had him sing the song dozens of times.
“After every line, he’d stop and say, ‘Sing it this way,’ ” Wyatt explained, still bewildered a year after the fact.
Lonesome, on’ry and mean
It’s probably best to use a truck analogy.
Wyatt wants to be the ’63 Ford short-bed that he spent the past 2½ years restoring with his granddad, learning along the way to appreciate an old man’s wisdom and the classic sounds of Hank Williams Sr. in the garage where they worked.
His management, however, wanted him instead to be the sort of Toyota Tundra that you’re more likely to see these days on the expressways around Nashville.
You climb inside the one, with its steel dash, and you instantly think, “Man, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
The other has a plastic dash.
The finished version of “Honky Tonk Heroes” came back and, sure enough, “It didn’t really sound like me,” Wyatt said. “It didn’t sound right.
“There’s so much makeup on it, it’s not even funny.”
Wyatt even suspects that his vocals were subjected to Auto-Tune — that infamous bit of software that digitally corrects a singer’s pitch.
But sensing potential, Stewart wanted Wyatt to be Wyatt, and booked two days for him in December to record a Waylon song of his own choosing in the old RCA Studio A.
Young, the 74-year-old session ace who famously played guitar on “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto” for Elvis and the electric sitar on “Cry Like a Baby” for The Box Tops, would return for the new session — only this time, he’d be allowed to cut loose.
Joining in on keyboards would be Jim “Moose” Brown, another master session player who also co-wrote the 2003 smash “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” for Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffet.
“Once you get everybody in there and it’s live,” Wyatt said, “it’s magic.”
Wyatt settled on “A Long Time Ago,” a lesser-known 1978 Waylon tune that includes the lyrics, “Me and ol’ Willie, lordy we’ve been sold and bought/I guess you all heard about some kind of system that we fought/We ain’t the only outlaws, just the only ones they caught.”
And with that, the McCubbins took a risk and broke their contract with Wyatt’s ever-so-brief, original management company.
Wyatt even got to play acoustic guitar on the new track.
“Why wouldn’t they want to change it up?” Wyatt wondered. “That’s the side of the business I don’t get.”
He’s not the first person to ask.
Just the newest.
Only like everything else these days, the outlaws are getting younger and younger, too.
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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