During Mike Reid`s pro football days, a teammate-a linebacker from Mississippi-asked for some records to try out on his new quadraphonic stereo. Reid gave him Gustav Mahler`s Eighth Symphony and Richard Strauss` ”Also sprach Zarathustra.”
”I asked if it made any difference what I brought, and he said no,” the ex-All Pro defensive end explains. ”He said he just wanted to see if he had bought a good system.
”He had never heard that kind of music, had no idea such a sound existed. But when I put it on, it really shook him. It reached in and touched him in places nothing else ever had, and he couldn`t get enough of it.
”I think football players tend to be less one-dimensional than the media might think.”
No illustration of that fact could be more pointed than Reid himself.
The former 255-pound master of mayhem for the Cincinnati Bengals now is a 210-or-so-pound pianist who writes some of the more sensitive songs coming out of Nashville.
With his current big hit, ”Walk on Faith,” he has started singing them, too.
”That dad-gone record is like a dog that got out of the pen,” he says of the rise of ”Walk on Faith.” ”I should symbolically reach up and scratch my head, right?”
Right. See, Reid wasn`t out to become a recording star. He was a settled, respected, Grammy-winning songwriter when, back in 1989, he submitted a demonstration tape of songs to Willie Nelson.
Nelson chose-and made a hit of-a great one titled ”There You Are.” But CBS/Sony Records executive Bob Montgomery, who had heard the songs submitted to Nelson, telephoned to ask Reid if he would like to make a record.
Reid says he ”heard myself” reply in the affirmative-while thinking
”(I) wasn`t sure I wanted to go through all that.
”If you`ve got to really want to be a star, then I`ll be left behind,”
he says. ”I don`t think I really have the drive to be a star. When I was a a kid, I would have, but I`ve had two children, and I`ve learned to value what they and my wife mean to me.
”Still, I am driven to take whatever music is in me and offer it to people, to say, `Make whatever use you can of this.` And if I had in me what it took to make this record with the help of (producer) Steve Buckingham, it seemed wrong not to try it.
”I talked long and hard about it with my wife and my boy, who`s a very wise little guy sent down here to teach his old man a thing or two.”
Whether or not Reid made the correct decision for himself and his family, he certainly did Nashville a favor. His album, ”Turning for Home,” is a middle-of-the-road musical masterpiece that adds considerable breadth to a Nashville musical spectrum dominated at the moment by country neo-
traditionalism.
”Turning for Home” offers uptempo songs in the hit ”Walk on Faith”
and such other prospective singles as ”I`ll Stop Loving You,” whose melody bespeaks the joyful power of Reid`s gridiron days, and the amusingly philosophical ”As Simple as That.”
His slower songs can be as powerful as his fast ones. ”I Got a Life”
expresses attachment to home and family. ”Your Love Stays With Me” has gospel-ish power. ”Till You Were Gone” is a moving lyric about the inability to forget a first love: ”Baby, I wonder if you look the same/Do you have children, and what are their names?”
” `Till You Were Gone,` while not totally autobiographical, came from a true deal,” Reid says.
”My most enduring heartbreak happened to me at the age of 17. This was back in Altoona (Pa.), and over the years, every time I`d go home, even though this girl was long gone, moved away, I`d always drive by her house. I was over her for years, but I`d still do it.
”When I`ve told this story onstage, it`s amazing. You can see people in the audience nodding. They`ve been there.”
Born in the Pennsylvania coal mining and railroading town, Reid grew up in a close-knit family. He was recruited by legendary coach Joe Paterno at Penn State, where he went on to win the Outland Trophy as the nation`s top interior lineman. Drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals in 1970, he made All-Pro in 1972 and 1973.
Then, after plying his trade with murderous intensity for five years, he suddenly walked away.
”I think what happened was, I just emotionally burned up,” he reflects. ”I was not able to summon that energy anymore, and I don`t know how I could have played without it. I just sort of ran out of gas.”
He did not quit football to go into music, he says, but the music was there. Actually, it had been there all along. It had been his major at Penn State, and he had even performed once with the Cincinnati Symphony while playing with the Bengals.
He started playing piano with a Cincinnati band called Apple Butter, then formed his own aggregation. After a year or so, he went solo.
Eventually, he sent some songs to a Nashville publisher and was signed to a writing contract. Working with Ronnie Milsap, he soon earned two Grammys
(for Milsap`s ”Stranger in My House” and ”Lost in the Fifties Tonight”).
Ultimately, he parted ways with Milsap and began to write for other stars. His hits include Don Williams` ”One Good Well,” Lorrie Morgan`s ”He Talks to Me” and the Judds` ”Born to Be Blue.”
”I`m late to country music,” he readily confesses. ”I didn`t grow up with Hank Williams Sr. But a few years ago I began to fall in love with the great country song when I started hearing the records Vern Gosdin was doing of songs that he and Max Barnes wrote. It sort of opened my eyes.”
Reid is capable of expressing his own no-nonsense emotionalism in his songs. But his artistry isn`t confined to country music. He has just co-written a musical about the Civil War, titled ”A House Divided,” for the Tennessee Repertory Theatre in Nashville.
But get back on the topic of football and Reid seems to weary, especially when asked about the brutality of his former profession.
”Brutality kind of implies that it`s consciously done to hurt other people, and it`s not really,” he says. ”On the football field, you have too much to do, too many responsibilities, to think about that.
”Dick Butkus, that was never his desire. He was the most frightening person I`ve ever been on the football field with-the best football player of my era, and that was at the end of his career when his knees were shot and he couldn`t even walk-but his desire was just to play the game as wide-open as he could.”
The violence of that life, Reid contends, fosters within its practitioners a great openness that may seem totally incongruous to outsiders. ”My experience with pro football players was that they did not repress their emotional side,” he says. ”The players I played with were all fascinated that I was into music; the fact that I was wasn`t the least bit strange to anybody.”
