Doug Supernaw

But one time, drunk on beer, Supernaw did accidentally let the horses out. “All four horses went runnin' down the road,” Tisdale remembers. “All my neighbors are calling me asking me why all my horses are running down the road and he wouldn't even help.”

Tisdale believes that Supernaw's problems can only partially be explained by substance abuse. “It's not the alcohol, it's something that's already there, the chemical imbalance that's already inside of him,” she says. “It depends on whatever that thing might be, and then when you start adding all these other chemicals, it either helps or hurts him.”

“Lord I used to ride so high / They wrote songs about me / But now the old man's home alone / They rode on without me.”

— Doug Supernaw, “Fadin' Renegade”

The year 1993 was as much a banner one for White as it was for Supernaw. At a show in Fort Smith, Arkansas, about two months into his stint as sound man, White received his dream battlefield promotion to rhythm guitarist. “So here I was, a 20-year-old college dropout, and all of a sudden I'm playing guitar for one of the hottest regional touring acts,” he says. White says that Supernaw was still as sane as anybody in the music business. “He was just a great guy — 100 percent normal,” White says. “There was no telling what was to come back then. He was just a regular guy — he hardly drank at all, and we had a great, great time.”

But “hardly drank at all” has a different meaning in the music business than in ordinary life. The band had added another sponsor to its roster — Crown Royal whiskey. “We were all pretty wild, we all liked to drink and Crown was Doug's drink of choice,” White remembers.

“Doug had bad stage fright when he first started out,” Tisdale says. “He really is a very shy guy. He was a sober kid, and then all of a sudden he had these people coming up to him saying, ‘Smoke some of this' or ‘Have a couple of these to help with the butterflies before you go onstage.' That's what really started the drinking, was the shots before the show.”

White doesn't deny that there was a fair bit of pot-smoking going on back in the band's glory days. He won't confirm or deny that Supernaw smoked it back then — only that he himself did, and he adds that he hasn't touched any in over six years. White is not anti-pot today, but says that he is glad that he gave it up. Supernaw, on the other hand, is still singing its praises. Two years ago he touted it on the message boards on his Web site, writing: “For the record, when I smoke, I am more spiritual, read the Bible faster with more meaning and concentrate on the things that I should, as opposed to what everyone else thinks I should think about.”

Leery as he is of giving an old friend unsolicited advice, White thinks he needs to take a break from it. “That stuff has been getting him locked up every now and then,” he says. “If I was talking to him and he asked me my opinion, I would tell him he needs to stop, and he'd probably look at me and tell me I didn't know what I was talking about.”

For her part, Tisdale thinks pot helps Supernaw stay focused. “If anything, weed does seem to slow his mind from the racing thoughts that he has,” she says.

At any rate, pot and booze weren't yet issues in 1993. Supernaw's domestic life, however, was starting to unravel. Like many a star before him, his family life wilted in the first bloom of his fame. He and Trudy had added two more children to the two that he'd adopted, but the marriage fell apart shortly after “I Don't Call Him Daddy” hit the charts. Perhaps not coincidentally, before that divorce was final, Supernaw had a son with a radio promotions director from North Texas.

Things were starting to come undone a bit on the professional end as well. Supernaw came to hate the games that Nashville expected him to play, the rings he had to kiss, the cliques he had to join, the compromises he had to make, the egos he had to stroke. All of this was starting to get him a reputation in Nashville's boardrooms as something of an ingrate and a bad apple.

And yet the pinnacle of his career was yet to come. Back in 1993, before he had even played anything more than a side stage in the Astrodome parking lot at the Rodeo, he told the whole world that one day he would fly onto the main stage. In February of 1994, he made good on those words, descending hundreds of feet on guy wires from the roof of the Dome to the stage before more than 60,000 screaming hometown fans.

“Lord I used to think I'd ride / God's prairie all of my, my days / But now you can't ride anywhere / For the barb wire and the highways.”