Doug Supernaw

— “Fadin' Renegade”

“No one knew how to play the game better,” White remembers of Supernaw's early chart-busting days. Radio was behind Doug because, for a while at least, Doug was everybody's buddy. He slapped backs, cracked jokes, had a firm handshake and a steady gaze. “We had radio in our back pockets because of the way Doug knew how to relate to people. But somewhere along the line, he lost it and he started alienating people.”

Music City, White explains, is a small community, and people talk. Something happened, that's for sure. None of the singles from 1994's Deep Thoughts from a Shallow Mind caught on with radio and the album tanked. A defiant Supernaw sounded off to the Chronicle's Mitchell at the end of 1994. BNA had ordered him to grow out his wavy blond locks, and he had responded by shaving them down to the skull. He said his label wanted him to record “novelty songs,” and instead he turned in slab after slab of steel guitar-drenched “stone-cold country.”

Nashville brass like their stars to be relentlessly cheery and aw-shucks upbeat, neither of which at all described the Supernaw of late 1994. And it got worse. Supernaw went on to tell Mitchell that he was a bad fit for country radio and that kids, including his own, were turning away from the music. He said he longed to be like Lyle Lovett, free to make whatever album he wanted no matter what the programmers at country radio wanted.

“You try to put out music that people will love to put in their pickup truck in Brenham, Texas, and if they won't play it on the radio in New York or L.A. or Miami, you can't have a hit,” he told Mitchell, who later asked him if he wasn't worried that BNA's brass might not take umbrage at some of his comments.

“I'm a publicist's dream child and worst nightmare,” Supernaw replied. “I'll talk to anybody, and I'll say anything. Oh, well.”

Not surprisingly, Supernaw was dropped by BNA after Deep Thoughts from a Shallow Mind. But he hadn't run out of chances yet. The next year he signed with Giant, another major-label subsidiary, albeit a sputtering one that would shutter in a couple of years. And Landis refused to give up on Supernaw. The Nashville veteran followed Supernaw over from BNA and produced You Still Got Me, the singer's Giant debut.

It looked like Landis and Supernaw had pulled off a stunning fourth-quarter comeback. Supernaw had gone into damage control mode with some of the people he had pissed off, and it seemed to be working. “Not Enough Hours in the Night,” the first single, shot to No. 3 on the charts.

But, as White remembers it, this was the time when Supernaw's mental health started to waver. The changes, White says, were incremental. “It wasn't like he went to sleep one night and he was Doug and he woke up somebody else,” he says. “Every now and then there would be something that would make us go, ‘Oh, that was weird,' but we would blow it off because the next day everything would be back to normal.”

At any rate, Supernaw had some delicate work to do, and was becoming less and less capable of doing it. “Doug's not the first guy this has happened to — Tracy Lawrence had his run-ins, Mark Chesnutt had his,” White says. “Once you've been at the business at the top level for that amount of time, you're bound to piss somebody off. When you do, it's how you rebound from it. Unfortunately, right when that started happening with us was the same time that Doug started experiencing some of the mental issues that have been haunting him ever since.”

White says that Supernaw's drinking continued, and he believes that it magnified Supernaw's mental state, so much so that there were times when the singer seemed like a different person. Meanwhile, the rumors were growing ever more extravagant. People began to whisper, then more or less openly declare, that Supernaw was a druggie. White is absolutely adamant that Supernaw was not, at least not then. “I hear all the time that Doug was a cokehead, Doug was on heroin, he was using this or that. Doug was nothin' like that,” he says. “He liked to drink his whiskey. He loved to drink his whiskey. But then people would call me and say, ‘I heard Doug is the biggest cokehead that there is.' And I would ask them where they heard that, and they would always say something like ‘My half-brother has a cousin who knows a guy who has a sister who dated so-and-so.'”

The next two singles from You Still Got Me totally bombed. Giant Records imploded and Supernaw was a free agent again. And that's when he started to get in some trouble with the law.

“And I'm a stranger in this time / My buckskin days are all behind / This fadin' renegade's made his last stand / This fadin' renegade's done all he can.”

— “Fadin' Renegade”

“The old saying that ‘Any publicity is good publicity' is not necessarily true, especially in the country music business,” White says. “Especially on the national level, the people you deal with are often Christian types.”