Backstage Nashville: The Undisclosed Story Of A Major Label Recording Artist

By Wayne Warner

Backstage Nashville: The Undisclosed Story of a Major Label Recording Artist is Wayne Warner’s memoir of his life as a musician in the country music world. Warner talks about touring the country and headlining shows where he followed Lonestar and “Amazed,” Josh Turner and “Long Black Train,” and Billy Ray Cyrus of “Achy Breaky Heart.” Those three performers with number one hits would be expected to close the shows on which they appeared.

The first two words in Chapter One are “I hate…” Even though Warner is talking about video shoots, it sets an unfortunate tone. Throughout the book, his main focus appears to be a struggle to find satisfaction in life, evidenced by the ongoing monologue about his feelings. He talks about burnout: “It wasn’t music to me anymore; it was a chart position; an opinion from a critic; a session to be booked, and a song that needed writing.”

As a lifelong country music fan and–for the past twenty years–a country music biographer, I wondered why I had never heard of Wayne Warner or his signature song, “Turbo Twang.” I decided to do some internet research. Warner has 68 titles listed with Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) as a songwriter. Some of the songs he recorded are available on YouTube, but I didn’t recognize them and hadn’t heard them played on the radio. In Backstage Nashville, Warner repeatedly mentions writing a song with Taylor Swift and helping get her career started. BMI lists “Wayne Warner and T.S.” as writers of that particular song. Swift does not claim it as one of hers.

Warner recorded for B-Venturous Records, an independent label started by his family to record his music. He describes growing up in a family band that played every Saturday night at the family-owned Warner’s Dance Hall in his Vermont hometown. He was sixteen when a local radio deejay arranged a recording session for him in Nashville in 1978. The experience made him “acutely aware of the fact that I never wanted to turn over control of this part of my life to anyone. Not fully. Not ever.”

He often refers to “WW the persona, and Wayne Warner the man,” talking in third person. About signing his CDs after a concert, he writes, “On the covers of my albums, I looked happy, content, and sure. But the guy signing the CDs was glad to sign ‘Best Wishes’ in black, permanent marker right over the face of the guy in the picture.”

Warner had started drinking as a teenager in the family band. He finally kicked the habit after becoming a father, as described in Chapter 10, “Dadhood.” In the early 1990s, he and his longtime girlfriend, this white couple from Vermont, adopted two little black boys from Florida. The boys brought Warner his greatest happiness.

For most of the book, he talks about traveling on his Prevost bus, which he describes as “metallic silver” and “designed for maximum comfort.” His sister, Juanita, was his manager. He doesn’t say when he bought the bus, how he could afford it without having hit records, or how he was well enough known that people came to his concerts. “Success, however, was helping to draw our map now, and we had a lot of map that needed to be covered,” he writes.

He had apparently been touring for twenty years–dates and concert venues are not detailed in the book–when he signed with Atlantic Records; I surmised this was the “major label” in the subtitle. He refers to Craig Morgan as a label-mate. While Morgan’s first album was released in 2000, the record label chose not to release Warner’s album. “I was initially shocked and confused,” Warner writes. “It was only after a few weeks that I had discovered my feelings of absolute relief.”

At some point, Warner was invited to audition for an unnamed major label in Nashville. During his performance, he showed the audience a photo of his sons and joked, “Don’t they look just like me?” Instead of the exuberant laughter he expected, he recalls, “I stood there on the stage with my guitar, in a crowd of people in absolute silence.” The label did not offer a contract, which Warner blamed on racism. He later talked to Charley Pride, whom he expected readers would recognize without being named. He described Pride as “a man who, when his first album was released, was done so without his picture on the cover. He scored hit after country hit before anyone ever discovered that he was black.” I wondered why he didn’t credit Pride for advising him to “sing, Mr. Warner, just sing.” When Charley’s name is mentioned elsewhere in the book, it is misspelled.

Numerous editorial problems throughout Backstage Nashville include the murky timelines, errors such as “stay within excepted standards of the format,” and overuse of the phrases “stare into the light, Wayne” and “ETA 15 minutes.”

Warner eventually quit touring, although he doesn’t say when or where he performed his last show. “We rocked through the show and ‘Turbo Twanged’ the crowd,” he writes. He concludes his story on a note of optimism. “I have been spending the last several years being a single dad and have learned things that WW would never have known,” he tells the reader. “Every day of dadhood is a gift.”