The tour Dolly Parton hated: “Hell”
Touring is a strange thing. From the outside, it’s romanticised as the pinnacle of the artist’s life. In the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, touring epitomises the hedonistic ideal of being an artist and living life on the road, meeting fans, partying all night, sleeping all day then waking to do it all again in a different city in the evening, but obviously, Dolly Parton wasn’t into all that.
The reality of touring is very different. While the idea of abandoning normality for a period of beatnik living might sound appealing for a while, the actualities of stepping outside of normal functioning life are much tougher. There’s no kitchen to simply cook yourself an easy, nutritious meal, so enjoy eating nothing but junk for weeks. The sleeping arrangements are likely cramped and uncomfortable. You’re stuck around the same small selection of people, and while they might be lovely and might be your best friends in the world, it’s bound to bring up issues. Sleep deprived and being worked to the bone each night, feeling your body weaken with a lack of fruits and veggies and feeling cramped in a van all day; it’s not a context that really screams ‘healthy’.
But for an artist looking to grow, it’s an essential, or certainly, it was back in the days pre-social media, where the only way to genuinely develop your fan base was to be in front of them, putting a face and a personality to the sounds on the radio. So, for Dolly Parton, at the start of her career, she was touring extensively.
In particular, she was touring extensively with Porter Wagoner, the man behind The Porter Wagoner Show, which essentially gave Parton her big break. While many record labels were turning her talent down, Wagoner spotted something special and invited her to join his TV show. As they began singing together, releasing duets and enjoying some success with them, he also invited her to join his tours.
It was an incredible opportunity, but was it a nice one? No. “It was hell,” she said about those tours when the duo would play over 100 shows a year, racing up, down, and all across the states. That would be exhausting enough, but with the cramped conditions on the tour bus, too, it was overwhelming.
Parton talks of only one silver lining: “In the early days when I was travelling in the bus, Porter saw to it that I had my own little bathroom,” adding, “I didn’t have to pee in the same room with the guys.”
But it was less about the physical conditions and more about the mental ones. “We just got to where we argued and quarrelled about personal things,” Parton admitted about hers and Wagoner’s relationship on the road, “Things we had no business quarrelling and arguing about. It was beginning to tarnish a really good relationship. We didn’t get along very well, but no more his fault than mine.”
Willing to take just as much responsibility, the singer is fine to admit that the person any musician becomes on a cramped and hectic tour isn’t a true representation of them. Instead, it becomes an intensive boiling pot of personalities with hers and Wagoner’s clashing because they were all too similar; “We were just a lot alike. Both ambitious. I wanted to do things my way, and he wanted to do things his way”.
