Paulette Carlson, lead singer of the award-winning country group Highway 101, had been in Nashville with her partners for a couple of days last fall when she first heard the rumor they were disbanding.
She heard it, she says, from two of the partners, Cactus Moser and Curtis Stone.
”They said, `Everybody`s saying they`re sorry to hear the band is splitting up,”` recalls the Scandinavia-rooted Minnesota blond. ”I said,
`Where`d they get that?”`
She hardly had a chance to find out before the same report made the TV news in Nashville-reported as fact. Then Carlson`s mother called from Minnesota to say she had read it in a Minneapolis newspaper.
The impending dissolution of Highway 101 went on to become the most-printed unconfirmed rumor this side of the grocery checkout aisle. Everyone seemed ready to believe that country music`s top vocal group, an act that had every reason to stay together, was calling it quits.
The question is, why?
”They got it in Nashville, from the tipsheets that are sent around to song publishers,” says Carlson.
”We had it in the tipsheets that I was looking for songs for a solo album, and I guess people assumed that if I was going to do a solo album, I couldn`t do that and Highway 101 both. Which is not correct.”
Anyway, somebody in the press asked her about the solo project in a backstage press conference at the Country Music Association awards in Nashville last October, and she cooperatively talked about it a little.
Her fellow 101ers-Moser, Stone and Jack Daniels-chimed in that they, too, were contemplating a separate project of their own. Carlson obviously hadn`t heard about their plans, which added further fuel to the rumors.
Now, thanks to all the subsequent talk, Carlson says she isn`t thinking about doing her solo album anytime soon. Heck, she isn`t even thinking about talking about it.
”It`s so much in the beginning stages that I don`t want to fire up that issue too much, because of all the rumors,” she says. ”I`m trying to keep that low key right now because of all the controversy it has caused; it has caused a few problems, to say the least. I feel the less we talk about it the better.
”But it`s going to be a country album. I don`t even know who would produce it yet, but there`d be some of my songs on it, and it`d be basically just a country album, although I don`t want to do the same thing I`m doing with Highway 101. It would have to be a little different from that.
”But I don`t want to talk any more about it until it`s set down that I`m going into the studio on a particular date with a particular producer to cut a particular type of song. And I have no idea when that might be.”
Perhaps an underlying reason the rumors were so quickly accepted as fact by the media was that Carlson, Daniels, Moser and Stone didn`t find fame as a unit that had worked together for years; rather, they were put together by a couple of record producers for Warner Bros. after Carlson had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a solo artist with RCA.
Although the members of Highway 101 appear to be friends-”we get along well,” Carlson says-they seem to live separate lives even within the forced closeness of road life. It`s a life they have lived almost nonstop since hitting the scene three years ago.
”The bus pulls out at 1:01 at night,” Carlson says, ”and I usually hop right in the sack because I`m usually beat. The guys will stay up `til maybe 3 or 4 in the morning.
”Then we`ll get up and get to our destination at 9 or 10 or 11, get a bite to eat, go do a soundcheck, come back, get ready for the show, do the show and then go do it all over again.
”It gets to be a routine, and we all do our own type of things. Me, I sleep a lot.”
Executives of the Denver company that manages them say the dissolution rumors were nipped in time to keep the band`s plethora of bookings from suffering. But they nevertheless spawned tons of publicity-the most the group has ever had, Carlson says.
”A lot of people have certainly been curious about what we`re doing,”
she sighs.
During a recent two-month hiatus, the first extended break in the group`s career, Carlson stayed busy-planning her wedding.
Pressure is nothing new to Carlson and her new husband, Randy Smith, however. For three years, they conducted a long-distance courtship between Alaska, where Smith worked, and the rest of America, where Carlson did.
”Just before Highway 101 got together,” Carlson explains, ”a friend of mine who was working with a band in Juneau called me up and said their singer, who played rhythm guitar, had to go home to Wyoming on an emergency. He asked me if I could come to Alaska the next day.
”I went up there and worked with his band at Bronco`s in Juneau. On my day off, a Monday, three other people and myself decided to take the ferryboat up to Skagway, because that`s how you get around up there, by water or plane. ”It was about a five-hour boat ride, and while the others were in the cafeteria, I got chilly and went out to my locker to get a sweater. I couldn`t get the locker open, and this fellow came up and asked if he could be of assistance. It was Randy.”
Smith, as it turned out, had seen her at Bronco`s, so they talked a little. He told her he was a construction engineer working on a project in Juneau. After that, he kept showing up at Bronco`s.
It was ”pretty much love at first sight” for her, Carlson says, and that appears to have been the truth: After she returned to the Lower 48 and initiated her career with Highway 101, she and Smith maintained a logistically difficult courtship.
”He`d come visit me once every two months or something,” she recalls.
”We had very big phone bills. It got to the point where we even broke up a little. But I had been single a long time and was ready for a serious relationship, and I think that`s what kept it together, along with the fact that we were crazy about each other.
”He had been after me to marry him for some time before we got engaged, but I was skeptical about how it was going to work, being on the road all the time. But we were just determined it was gonna work, and it got to a point where we needed to either come together or let it go.”
The two came together, as Carlson puts it, in a TV-captured marriage on the fifth floor of the old St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minn., pop. 3,500.
Carlson recalls that she was ”nervous” but the bridegroom was ”doing pretty good.
”Then we got up there and the minister-we had a young minister-he was so nervous. The first thing he said when we got up there, he threw his hands up in the air and said, `The first thing we`ve got to do is, we`ve all got to calm down!` And when he turned the pages of his prayerbook, his hands were shaking so bad those old pages rattled.
”All of which made me even more nervous, of course. But I tell you, it was fun. I`ve never enjoyed myself so much, ever. Crook and Chase (syndicated TV entertainment reporters) were there, and while we were on our honeymoon up in Banff it was on. It was fun to watch it.”
Present at the wedding were two of her three Highway 101 partners. The absentee was Daniels, who was reported to be on the road from California in the process of moving his residence to Nashville.
Nashville, by the way, is where Carlson and Smith plan to live.
”We don`t feel I can live in Alaska, because of the work that I`m doing, and he feels he can work basically anywhere,” she says.
Carlson seems to be hoping Highway 101 will be making an adjustment, too- to a working schedule that will allow more individual activity on the part of each member.
She says she would like to return to Nashville more often, not only because she and her husband have settled there but because she would like to have enough time there to collaborate with some of Nashville`s stellar full-time songwriters.
”So we`re going to try to take a little more time off, maybe work two months and then take three weeks off or something,” she says. ”Everybody needs a little rest once in a while.”
