Last spring, on one of his three-day weekends with Hank Williams Jr. and Patty Loveless, singer Doug Stone found his left arm hurting every time he walked off his touring bus.
Knowing what that sounded symptomatic of, he became alarmed enough to tell his road manager.
The road manager called paramedics, and the paramedics rushed Stone to a hospital.
Informed he wasn`t having a heart attack, he told hospital personnel he had a show to do and left.
”So I did three shows that week with my arm feeling like it was going to fall off my body,” remembers Stone, who will sing at Poplar Creek Music Theatre Aug. 30 with Williams and Loveless on the Chicagoland stop of their Rock `N` Country Tour.
”I`d just drop my arm by my side and do my show,” he goes on. ”I couldn`t even hold the microphone in that hand.”
Coming home to Nashville, he was the subject of more medical tests-but none, for some reason, on his heart. When the next week`s three-day road trip rolled around, he left again, and he recalls that in Prineville, Ore., he nearly passed out before his performance but did it anyway, in pain the whole show.
When he returned to Nashville this time, he demanded that his heart be tested, and his physicians finally complied.
They found that a major artery in his heart was 99 percent blocked, and they quickly scheduled him for a quadruple coronary bypass. Had they waited a week longer, it might have been too late.
”I don`t believe you and I would be talking,” he says.
Stone has recovered now. The former Georgia auto and truck mechanic-turned-ultraromantic-vocalist has quit the three-pack-a-day cigarette habit he indulged for a couple of decades, is eating a lot more rice and vegetables and is exercising on a treadmill, a rowing machine and a stairstepper.
More important to music fans, he is back on the road opening for Williams and Loveless, as well as doing some shows on his own.
To say his performances betray no traces of his recent ill health seems unnecessary; a man who would do two weeks of shows under near-heart attack conditions is obviously a confirmed trouper.
The shows he is doing now, though, are far beyond the call of contractual obligation. Unless you knew, you`d never guess the man onstage had recently recuperated from open-heart surgery.
”You know the saying `Don`t let `em see you sweat?` ” he asks, with a laugh. ”That`s what I`m doing. I want `em to get their money`s worth.
”I love what I`m doing now, and I never want to go back to what I was doing before. So I`m giving `em all I got.”
A performer who can sing love ballads to a Hank Jr. crowd and not get pelted with beer bottles and tire chains-who can, in fact, elicit cheers instead of loud choruses of ”We want Hank!”-has to be something special, and Stone assuredly is.
Easily the most under-noticed incipient superstar on the Nashville scene, he is a man who combines an unforgettably romantic voice with a redneck drawl and an eyepopping stageshow that is possibly the most daring in Nashville.
No, Stone doesn`t festoon his performances with Garth Brooks` trademark rope-swinging, ladder-climbing, guitar-smashing theatrics.
Rather, he energizes them with another kind of theatrics: flamboyant pirouettes, etc., reminiscent of vintage Rhythm & Blues performers. The result is un-heard-of for a mainstream country star. The man dances.
”I`ve always had rhythm in my body and could dance without lessons,” he says.
”Then I got hooked up with this band called Jasmine Sound. I was running sound for their band right before I got my recording contract, and they had a black guy doing the lead singing, a great vocalist named Larry Young, who showed me a few things.
”He danced a lot onstage, and sometimes I`d get up there with him, and we`d do some dance steps together.”
That isn`t all. Stone has had more recent help from Christine Dunbar, who has served as a consultant for the staging of shows by such varied but professionally flamboyant stars as David Bowie and Reba McEntire.
She, he says, has taught him about the stronger and weaker ”impactful”
points on the stage (”Downstage center, for instance, is the strongest, because everybody`s eyes are on you, and when you fade back toward the band it lessens that”).
Most of Stone`s moves, though, are ones he has come up with after contempating her advice.
For instance, he falls to his knees downstage center at the point in
”Burning Down The Town” when he reaches the line: ”I`m down on my knees, begging you please.”
He says he doesn`t use a Brooks-style headset because he has gotten used to moving the traditional hand-held microphone closer or farther from his mouth as the individual note requires, and he doesn`t use earphone monitors because they would keep him from hearing comments shouted from the crowd.
”If you just pay attention to the crowd,” he says, ”they`ll tell you what they want. You`re there for them, not vice versa.”
He also displays a lot of flamboyant hand movement.
”In a big concert, people 50 rows back can`t see your facial expression, unless you`ve got a video camera and a big screen,” he explains. ”So you`ve got to use a lot of hand motions.”
Stone`s romantic way with a song-such hits as ”(I`d Be Better Off) In A Pine Box,” ”In A Different Light” and ”I Thought It Was You”-has some women following his show for hundreds of miles
One woman went to each of the six shows he put on at a fair in Pueblo, Colo., over a three-day span. Yet his stage prowess remains one of Nashville`s better-kept secrets.
At the time of the release last week of his new album, ”From The Heart,” Stone`s previous packages had never seen the country Top 10.
Yet both were still sticking persistently between the teens and the 30s, each reportedly selling at a clip of 8,000 to 10,000 a week.
If there`s any justice, ”From The Heart” should up the take. It`s Stone`s best collection yet.
The album spans the whole country spectrum from the ultracountry
”Warning Labels” and ”Ain`t Your Memory Got No Pride At All” to such more pop-styled cuts as ”You`ve Got A Future In The Movies” and the superior ”Made For Lovin` You” to the white-hot rhythms of ”Leave Me The Radio”
and ”Leavin`, Left, Goin` Or Gone.”
”It does disturb me, in a way, that I haven`t made as big a splash as some of these people who have hit like meteors,” he says, in response to a question. ”The thing I`m finding right now is that just about anybody can tell you my songs, but they can`t tell you who did `em, and they can`t tell you what I look like.
”That`s the gap I`m trying to close now-face recognition. I think when the songs and the face hook up together, I`ll become a household word like Randy Travis and Garth Brooks, Billy Ray (Cyrus) and Ricky Van (Shelton). Then it`s going to boom.”
Audiences will get a good show from Stone. If you`re expecting him to creep around the microphone in fear of coronary complications, you can forget that.
”I`ve heard of people who`ve had this operation who become living vegetables, afraid to go do anything,” he says.
”The way I am, hey, I`m going to go do it, and if I fall dead, maybe it`ll be quick. I`m probably going to leave here within 40 years, anyway.”
