John Bohlinger: God made him a gypsy
(Note: In the spring of 2007 I was asked by Montana Quarterly magazine, edited by my friend Nick Ehli, to write a profile of John Bohlinger, a boyhood friend. As both John and his father, John Sr., had become interesting public figures, the timing seemed ideal. By the time the story appeared in print, however, I knew that its timing could not have been worse. I think that is why I have been reluctant to post it online, even though Nick gave me permission to do so nearly a year ago. So why now? Because of the pride I feel as a Montanan seeing its goofy governor, Brian Schweitzer, perform on the stage of the Democrat convention. Because John is going on tour with "Nashville Star" and will be in your town soon. But mostly, I guess I just thought it was time to introduce my readers to a very special dude.--AB)
It's forty minutes before showtime at the Acuff Theatre, a modern, 1,800-seat auditorium on the Grand Ole Opry campus in Nashville, and backstage Meg Allison is a bundle of nerves. Six months earlier she was a struggling 24-year-old singer-songwriter in Chicago, a folksy, acoustic solo artist who got booked at places with names like Rumours Wine Bar and the Moon Monkey Cafe. Now she's one of the final six contestants on "Nashville Star," the country-music talent competition being telecast live from the Acuff and seen by three million people a week on cable's USA Network. Any young performer would find this kind of instant notoriety stressful, but Allison -- a Yankee transplant still adapting to the Southern music scene -- seems especially vulnerable. The first week she was on the show, a producer told her that she and the other nine finalists had made it "by the skin of your teeth." He had meant you-plural, but she'd heard you-singular: You, Miss Sarah McLachlan wannabe, are lucky we didn't run you back to Illinois. She nearly had a meltdown on the spot.
Success hasn't spoiled Meg Allison. Three weeks later, she's still on the show, and she's still a wreck. She smiles weakly as John Bohlinger, the gregarious, six-foot-two leader of the "Nashville Star" house band, approaches. Bohlinger, the 42-year-old namesake and son of Montana's lieutenant governor, is showing an old friend around, introducing him to everybody like he's running for something.
John was at the tryout in Chicago when Meg walked in and asked to do Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight." A dozen girls had already sung it that day, but he remembered that she had asked him to play the song in a bluesy, slow way, which he did, and it knocked the judges' socks off. So what if it wasn't country? She earned her ticket to Nashville.
Me and Johno in Nashville, February 2007.
"Be careful when a man says, I can warm you up a little bit," John says, and laughs. He leans in to Meg, his voice turning mock-conspiratorial: "I'm with the press, can I warm you up a little bit? Come over to my interview couch." John laughs some more. I've heard that sound all my life. It's hoarse and rolls out like exhaust, in big plumes, an irresistible one-man laugh track.
I laugh. Even Meg laughs, and relaxes a little. We chat some more. I ask if she's enjoying her ride on "Nashville Star."
"It's fun," she says, not very convincingly. "But I want it to be over."
Oh, Meg. If only you knew what I knew, which is that there is a folded-up sheet in the bandleader's pocket with the run-through for tonight's broadcast. John showed it to his bandmates (and me) during the secret pre-show ritual he calls the come-to-Jesus meeting. The run-through has the names of the five contestants who will be performing on the show that night. Hers is not one of them; she's been eliminated from the contest. She'll hear her name called out on live television in little more than an hour, be asked if she has any last words for her fans out there, and then she'll be gone.
For the past six days John and Meg have been rehearsing the Trisha Yearwood hit "The Wrong Side of Memphis." John has known for an hour and a half that Meg had been voted out by the viewers, that all their arranging and rehearsing would be for naught. But he smiles and humors her like it's all good. He's not paid to be the bearer of bad news. He's just here to help every contestant look, feel, and sound great on "Nashville Star," before the biggest audience most of them will ever know. "Bandleader" only begins to describe his role on the show, which also includes arranging songs, composing background music, and keeping the fragile egos of some contestants from shattering on live television.
John will tell you it's all he knows how to do. That he's just a dumb guy with dyslexia, never mind that Phi Beta Kappa key from Columbia, who worked hard at one thing like his old man did and along the way learned the secrets of success in the music business: Show up on time, play in tune, and lay it in the pocket.
That's what he'll tell you, at least. Others I spoke with say that of all the people in Nashville, a place teeming with musical talent, John is one of very few who could do his job.
"We went through several iterations of the band," says the co-creator of "Nashville Star," Howard Owens. "We were being very TV-producer about it. But at the end of the day, John held the band together. He's a real soothsayer for us. A great attitude, a total professional with no ego."
Superior musical ability is a gift, to be sure, but John Bohlinger's other gifts are even more rare. He is an insanely quick read, allowing him to handle the frenzy of auditions and performances, even when they involve scores of highly-strung musical amateurs. He is gracious, giving every entrant the same superstar treatment. Not least of all, he has a way of putting all those jaded musicians around him at ease during the dry patches in the day, when jealousies and resentments spring up like noxious weeds and take over everything.
"John has a unique personality different from everybody else," says Jon Small, "Nashville Star's" producer. "He never says 'I can't do it.' He always says 'I'll make it work.' The guy's always smilin', always happy to be there, always happy to work with you. To hang five years with a guy and not see him drift a different way is very unusual, let me tell you."
You can know the man 35 years and it won't change your opinion about John Bohlinger. I can attest to that. But still, it is curious how he made it here. How the smartest guy I know, who took off a year from college to do charitable work, a hard worker and team player, willingly put himself through nearly 10 years of hell, toiling as a country-music guitarist, when so many other pathways seemed open to him.
"I think John would've made a wonderful, kick-ass attorney," says his father. "He loves to debate, loves to argue, loves to defend the underdog. Most musicians who try to do this as their life's work, they're poor, they struggle financially. We were afraid we had doomed him to a life of poverty. "
When I ask John about that, he gives me the stock answer he's been giving people for years. "If God makes you a gypsy," he says, "then be a gypsy."
John's great-grandfather was a bandleader on one of the many chautauqua circuits that brought culture to Midwestern farmers in the days before radio. His grandmother Aileen -- the one the Bohlingers' clothing store is named for -- played trumpet in the band. John's parents, Bette and John Bohlinger, gave all six of their children music lessons.
Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer
and his GOP running mate,
John Bohlinger Sr.
The Bohlingers, all eight of them, moved into a large house on Mountain View Boulevard, halfway up the Rimrocks overlooking Billings. From where I lived, down by the campus of Eastern Montana College (now MSU-Billings), their house looked like it was carved into the Rims. "Johno," as he was called, had a ground-floor bedroom down a flight of stairs from the entry to the house. Upstairs, Bette tastefully appointed the place with art, and light poured in from the south.
John and I both went to Eastern Elementary. I loved being invited over to his house. What I really envied, though, was John's family life, which stood in such contrast to my own. His parents were kind and generous, but above all, they seemed incredibly supportive of their kids and their endeavors. Given how alone I felt at the time -- my parents divorced when I was six and my older brother and sister moved out soon after -- it's no surprise that I was in awe of the Bohlingers.
When John entered the fourth grade, he was allowed to join the school band, and that was when he dropped the first hint that he might have gypsy blood. His father was hoping Johno would pick up the trumpet, flute, or piano, since he'd already bought those instruments over the years for the other kids. But one night at dinner, John announced he was going to study the violin. "I asked why the violin," John Sr. recalled, "and he said, 'Dad, it's the only instrument with any class.'"
In eighth grade, the most powerful forces in his life -- parents, music, hormones, and faith -- harmoniously converged at the Billings Newman Center, a Catholic parish that met in a house on North 30th Street. Newman Centers sprang up in college towns around the country, named for John Henry Cardinal Newman, the most influential Catholic of the 19th century. A convert from the Church of England, Newman's intellectual acumen and his ability to engage other Christian faiths helped pry open the musty windows of the Catholic church to debate and inquiry. The powerful breezes of change that blew in led eventually to the Second Vatican Council, which is why many consider Newman the "father of Vatican II."
For years Bette and John had chafed at the strictures of the downtown church, St. Patrick's Co-Cathedral. The first 10 years they were married they weren't allowed to take communion, until finally he complained and the monsignor worked out an annulment of Bette's first marriage. "We are more progressive, more ecumenical, more inclusive than many of our faith tradition are," John Sr. said recently. He doles out his words in a warm, measured baritone, which incidentally he did long before he was a politician. "We feel the Holy Spirit led us to Newman Center, where a more progressive message was being preached."
Johno attended regularly, too, probably because he was dating Michelle Melius, the deacon's curly-haired daughter. But there was no doubt, from the way he quoted Scripture to his refusal to join a clique in junior high -- despite being good-looking and athletic -- that being raised in a liberal Catholic home had left a deep impression on the youngest Bohlinger. I remember one of the only times I saw him lose his cool: We were walking home from school and I had said something disparaging about a less-than-model classmate of ours, who'd had a run-in with the law. John turned to me and said, kind of angrily, "You're not to supposed to judge others -- it's in the book of Matthew!"
He's amused at his self-righteousness when I tell him this story, but he admits, "I read the Bible a lot. My parents were real spiritual people, praying together every night. During Lent we would do the stations of the cross. Man, what a sweet, different world that was."
The 1970s were a time of renewal in American Catholicism, a big burst of post-Vatican II energy marked by marriage encounters and social justice marches, but nothing reflected the period better than the guitar mass. The Billings Newman Center had a living-room area that extended in an "L" from the kitchen in the back all the way to the front and was covered in shag carpeting. The 40 or 50 people who attended each Sunday would greet each other with hugs, then sit on the floor for mass. Three or four musicians with acoustic guitars sat in the vortex of the "L," so everyone could see them, and played hymns with folk-song melodies like "Yahweh, You Are Near" and "Be Not Afraid."
The leader of the band was a fun-loving 26-year-old with a scraggly beard named Dave Kreiter. John remembers that his mom adored Kreiter. "I think she had a crush on him. He had a great big Guild acoustic, biggest guitar I've ever seen. My mom wanted me to play like he did. So I started taking lessons."
His folks bought him an electric guitar. Not long afterward, his dad heard "Sultans of Swing" on the radio, went to the store and picked up the LP. John played that Dire Straits album over and over, trying to imitate Mark Knopfler's effortless-sounding yet dazzlingly intricate stylings. Senior took Junior to the Billings Metra to hear Eric Clapton's band. John was blown away by Albert Lee, Clapton's virtuosic frontman, who could play R&B and rock with the best of them, but specialized in country. "He just kicked Clapton's ass all over the Metra," John said. "That was the best country guitar I ever heard." He borrowed his parents' jazz records -- Charlie Christian, Les Paul, Mary Ford -- and started working out their arrangements on his new guitar.
He progressed rapidly. Dave Blurton was 15, also learning to play, when "Nick's little brother" began sitting in with him.
"He was a natural," says Blurton, who now lives in Wisconsin. "He had the ability physically to play the instrument -- large, dextrous hands -- but also an ability to listen to and interpret a piece of music." At 14, John "could put in 30 minutes to articulate a line (of notes) that would take other musicians hours. He was a prodigy."
One of John's guitar teachers, Mike Hoover, invited him to join his band, which played a half-country-half-rock set at honky-tonks around town. For John, jamming with "Hoover the Groover" was a revelation. "I thought, 'I'm in a bar, playing music, they're sneaking me a drink now and then -- this is great!'"
Up to a point, his parents didn't stand in his way. The two of them had met in a bar, after all, and John Sr. didn't want to step on his son's musical education. Then, periodically during John's sophomore year in high school, the dean's office at Billings Senior would call the Bohlingers to ask if he was at home.
At night, John Sr. would ask his son where he'd been instead of school. "John never lied. He said, 'Well, I went down to Hansen Music and worked on my guitar licks.' He'd do this a lot. One day he came home and said, 'Dad, I've got an invitation to join a rock and roll band. We're going to travel the country.' I said, 'The hell you are.'"
The gypsy life was already calling out to John, but the grown-ups had a plan to thwart his crazy adolescent dreams. John had been diagnosed as dyslexic a couple of years earlier, and now with the truancy, his parents worried that his needs weren't being met at school. They met with a guidance counselor there, who suggested they look into prep schools. An East Coast apparel buyer they knew recommended the Hun School of Princeton, N.J., and that's where they shipped off John until he graduated.
In the spring of 2002, as the reality-TV craze was kicking into high gear, two former William Morris talent agents named Ben Silverman and Howard Owens were getting into the game. They had already sold one show, "The Restaurant," to NBC, and were on the prowl for more ideas. They had been monitoring the success of "Pop Idol," the hit musical-talent-search show in Great Britain. They wouldn't be able to create "American Idol," of course, since the company that owned "Pop Idol" would be doing that. But imitation, it's been said, is the sincerest form of television, and nothing was stopping them from starting up a show like "Idol."
Their idea, Owens explained to me recently, was a bit more ambitious than televised karaoke. "We wanted singers and songwriters, people who were multi-skilled talents. People in bar bands down the street -- that was the kind of contestant we were looking for." As part of the competition, each entrant would have to submit one original song. And Owens and Silverman wanted to base the show in Nashville, the songwriters' capital.
They would need help. So they flew to Music City and took a meeting with Jon Small, whom they would eventually hire to produce their show. Small was a kid from Long Island when he began his music career as Billy Joel's drummer in the 1970s. He made Joel's first videos for MTV, like "Uptown Girl," before becoming a fixture on the country scene, producing TV specials for some of Nashville's biggest first names: Garth, Reba, Toby, Faith.
Silverman and Owens had planned to use prerecorded music on the show, even for the songs that the contestants wrote themselves. To Small, that was still a form of karaoke, and he argued strongly against it. "I explained to them that this is Music City, and there are great musicians here," he said. "I said it'd be so much hipper to have a live band. I did the numbers to show that a live band would work." ("American Idol" used music tracks for a couple of season, then its producers hired an orchestra.)
Small's first choice to lead the ensemble was a respected and accomplished Nashville studio musician -- "the best bass player in town," Small said. "If Billy Joel's coming to down and putting together a band, he was the guy you go to. He knew the guys in Nashville who can make records." But as it turned out, those guys didn't make road trips. What Small hadn't factored in was the auditioning process. The road to "Nashville Star" would have to pass through a dozen cities every year -- Kansas City, Birmingham, Morgantown, Dallas, L.A., Portland, Chicago -- so USA Network could build excitement for the show in the local media. Problem was, the names Small wanted in his band were all highly in demand as studio musicians. Every cattle call meant time away from Nashville -- which meant missing out on more lucrative recording gigs. Small had touted his industry connections to Silverman and Owens in order to sell them on the live-band concept. Those connections weren't panning out.
"So now I'm stuck," Small said.
And that is how a show that was looking for unknowns to turn into music stars first had to find an unknown as its music director.
Bohlinger and Megan Mullins rehearse before a 2007 broadcast of "Nashville Star."
"There's a lot of Don Quixote in John," his father says admiringly. "He would like to right a lot of wrongs in the world."
For most of his high school years, though, John seemed to be righting the wrong done unto him when his folks made him the offer he couldn't refuse. Only later would he realize they meant well, and he certainly did nothing to disappoint them. He rose to the top of his class at the Hun School. But whenever he had the chance, he would fly home, play in bars, and hang out with his guitar pals. Dave Blurton remembers late-night talks about philosophy and religion -- "your standard existential angst that people in their late teens have." He also noticed that John had figured out how not to "overplay," that is, lay down too many notes when fewer would be more effective. "That's a tremendous aesthetic sense," he said. "Some musicians never learn how to leave notes out."
After John's graduation, where he was awarded one of the Hun school's top academic honors, the tug-of-war resumed. He told his dad he wanted to go to an Ivy League school, just like his buddies back East. Dad replied, "Honey, I can't afford to send you to Harvard. You're going to have to go to the Harvard of the West -- the University of Montana."
So the son went to Missoula his first year. Then he took advantage of an exchange program the school had with the University of Massachusetts, which in turn let him take classes at Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, Smith and Hampshire colleges. After his second year, he quit school altogether and worked for 10 months at El Hogar de Amor y Esperanza (The Home of Love and Hope), an Episcopalian school and orphanage operating out of the slums of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He bookended that with two summers canning salmon on Kodiak Island, Alaska. He socked away $3,000, enough that when he returned for the fall semester of school, he would have complete independence.
John showed up at the admissions office of Columbia University in New York, informed them that "my father's too cheap to send me to Columbia" (Junior's version of this story has a little less edge to it than Senior's), and got enough aid to make it through his third year. For his final year Columbia gave him a full academic scholarship.
At the age of 21, John was well on his way to an honors degree in English literature. And then he did something unexpected: While back in Billings on a break, he got his girlfriend, Sherrie Love, pregnant. They decided to get married. Sherrie came to New York to stay, but it was midway through the school year and Columbia didn't have any family housing for them. When I visited John, Sherrie and their baby August in the winter of 1988, they were living in a walk-up apartment building on 127th Street in Harlem, the only housing near campus he could afford. "Here, I want to show you something," he said, drawing me over to the window. "When Augie gets a little older, we're going to let him play down there--" and pointed to the enclosed courtyard, which was completely filled two feet deep with garbage. We laughed hysterically.
He graduated magna cum laude. He had a fellowship at Columbia's prestigious Teachers' College if he wanted it. But Sherrie had had enough of New York and longed for home. So they went back to Billings. He got a job teaching English composition at Eastern and played in the clubs at night. When I ask him about this time in his life, John is philosophical. "I think the quality of education I received at Columbia University wasn't any better than at Montana," he says. "I mean that. The students were more serious and they were better-armed, but I'm not sure the quality of the academics was any better.
"I think I was so driven because I was a dyslexic kid. I still am. When I'm tired, I cannot read worth a damn. And I had such an insecurity about it. I thought I was going to prove I could really do this so that people wouldn't think I was an idiot."
The rebellion was over, the prodigal son was home, and you could say he was rationalizing his decision to leave New York, except for this: A few years later in Tennessee, when his music career seemed to be in a rut, he entered a PhD program in psychology. He got an assistantship and began going to school full-time while continuing to play gigs at night. A year into the program, he just quit. "I thought, 'This is ridiculous. I'm working from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. five days a week, and after I'm done, what am I going to do -- listen to housewives talk about their middle-class malaise?' "
He quickly became an in-demand guitarist. He worked the "17" Club and Casey's Golden Pheasant in Billings, he worked the resorts at Chico Hot Springs and Big Sky. Wherever he played, Bette and John went to listen and dance. Nick, a licensed pilot, flew their parents to out-of-town gigs. Along with another local musician, Phil Fuqua, John and Sherrie formed a band called Naked Lunch, the name taken from a William S. Burroughs novel. The opening track off a cassette the group recorded, "Angel of Mercy," was a paean to Dire Straits, with John showing off a tuneful, Knopfleresque precision.
The couple started to talk seriously about moving to Nashville. He recalls, "As much as I loved Montana, my options were pretty limited. I had taken that as far as I could take it. I wanted to write songs and do all that stuff. In Billings I was just paying the bills. I could've worked at insurance, I guess."
In 1991, he and Sherrie piled their worldly possessions, and 4-year-old Augie, into a 1977 VW microbus and drove to Nashville. He would wait tables there for a year before landing his first music deal, writing songs under contract to a publishing company. That didn't quite pay the bills, so he started to tour. The money was OK, so long as he found work all the time. Which meant he was on the road all the time.
He played with old-timey country bands, garage bands, rap acts, you name it. He played bass for two weeks in Las Vegas with a metal band called Circus. "They had face paint and everything," he said, "so I painted mine as a Mexican death mask. We were booked at this place called the Loser Lounge from 12 to 5:45 a.m. every night. On the third night our methed-out frontman got fired. Now we were a man down, but we had to fulfill the contract. So we started playing what we knew -- country songs and rock songs. I took off the Mexican face paint."
We had a good laugh at this, and then came the reality check. He said, "That crowd from about 3 to 5:45 every morning was the most frightening bunch of drugged-out losers I hope you will never see."
Touring put tremendous strain on his family. At one point he was gone 260 days out of the year. He didn't make it back to Montana for five years. Sherrie and Augie would make visits without him. Even gypsies usually travel together, but John wanted his family to have a normal life. As if.
"I regret it," he said. "I was trying to build a career. I had to make some money and that's how you do it. It was kind of a bait-and-switch deal. When I was living elsewhere I'd see this guitarist on TV and I'd think, 'Wow, they've got it made, rich and famous.' But when I was on the road and wanting to be with my kid, sitting in some shitty hotel room, I'd tune in CMT and see this clip." It was him, playing in the background on a video for a Major Recording Artist. "And I'd look at that, and I'd think, 'Well, I'm on TV, and I'm on the road and I'm completely anonymous and poor, just trying to survive.' "
Eventually he was able to get off the road and find steady work in Nashville. Jon Small found him through Tracy Gershon, the record executive who served as a judge on "Nashville Star" its first two seasons. He asked Gershon if she knew of a rock-solid musician who could travel, show up on time, and lay it in the pocket. John was hired. He's the only member of the original "Nashville Star" band who is still with the show.
And he still works like a fiend. During the off-season, he goes on the road with the Nashville Star Tour, featuring the top four finalists from the last edition of the show. He'll be the opening act this summer for Alabama's Randy Owen, the "Nashville Star" judge who's embarking on a solo tour. And it seemed like every time I called him while working on this story, regardless of what night it was, he was heading out to some local club for a gig. When I ask why he doesn't let up a little now that he has TV work, he replies, "I'm like one of those people who grew up in the Depression."
Nashville operates on a youth economy, and for now John Bohlinger Jr., with his big shock of black hair and boundless energy, fits right in. "Nashville Star" had record ratings this year and has been all but renewed for 2008.
"You know how some people have a record deal?" John says. "I have a record ordeal."
He was joking about his new CD, JohnGoSolo, which was finally supposed to be released this spring after several promised release dates came and went. The title is a pun on Django Reinhardt, one of his favorite all-time pickers. "A two-fingered gypsy who could just tear it up," he said. He recorded it at Big Sky High, a B&B/studio outside Bozeman run by his producer, Dave Goodwin.
"JohnGoSolo" coincided with the release of another CD, "The Winner Is Angela Hacker," that he and the band recorded with the winner of "Nashville Star 2007" the day after she took the crown. They laid down five tracks to go with the six that they recorded during the contest. The album went on sale four weeks later. Get in tune, lay it in the pocket, and move on. It's what gypsies do.
Much like "The Winner Is Angela Hacker," John's CD is filled with instruments sounding happy and disciplined. He seems to play every kind of guitar ever invented, plus mandolin. The fiddle he leaves to Megan Mullins, who plays in the "Nashville Star" band. Vocals aren't his forte -- "I can't sing," John cheerfully admits -- yet his writing often rises above the singing. Like many musicians, he was moved to write about the images he saw after Hurricane Katrina. But I doubt any country artist reacted as harshly as John in his song "New Orleans":
What was the president thinking
When they gave him the news?
"It's just poor blacks that are sinking
What am I supposed to do?"
When the saints go marching in
And the oceans wash away all our sins
And the levee breaks and the waters meet
We'll have one last drink on Bourbon Street
It's by far the darkest song on the record, and listening to the sinister accompaniment, reminiscent of the TV show "Deadwood," you can't imagine it set any better to music. By and large, though, "JohnGoSolo" is like John himself, an upbeat affair, best reflected in his duet with Mullins on a bright little relationship song called "Crazy Enough to Work."
Goodwin sent a copy of the demo to "the Moose," the FM station in Bozeman that plays an adult album alternative, or "Triple-A," format. By April, two songs were in heavy rotation: "Sweet Addiction" and, interestingly, "New Orleans." Michelle Wolfe, the Moose's no-nonsense program director and morning show host, was impressed at how successfully John melded alt-country and blues on the same disc. As for those listeners who didn't care for his lyrics on "New Orleans," she read their emails on the air and kept on playing it.
"This ain't Top 40 bullshit radio," she said. "Triple-A radio is for thinking people. The lyrics are challenging. That's not the same as offensive or divisive. Being thought-provoking is something terribly lacking in music these days."
John is also getting his ideas out in other ways. He recently co-edited a book with the bestselling author Robert Hicks entitled A Guitar & A Pen: Short Stories and Story-Songs By Nashville Songwriters. His contribution was a story called "A Dish Best Served Cold," which he describes as a darkly comic tale "about a guy that gets divorced and has kind of a lengthy battle over this house with his wife. He ends up getting the house and then, just to spite his wife, he gets Martha Stewart to do a piece about it."
He pauses, then adds, "Funny thing -- I wrote it five years ago. And I gave Sherrie the house."
(Above: The house John lives in now.)
John and I never talked about his divorce while he was going through it. "Things were falling apart," he says now. "I was angry at my wife, and God seemed so distant. For a couple years there I just shut down." There's a pause. "But I'm fine now. Hell, for the vast, vast amount of time I'm so grateful for everything I have."
"I think he's a very complicated person," says Dave Blurton. "But he has this ability to emote musically. And through it all he's had a really good sense of humor. He could laugh at not only a joke but at all of life."
Indeed, John appeared to have weathered two powerful storms in his life -- the loss of Bette and the end of his marriage in the span of less than a year -- remarkably well. With the success of "Nashville Star," John was able to visit friends and family in Montana more frequently. He was there for his mom's homecoming and his dad's 2004 run for the statehouse. So when he and Goodwin started making plans to promote his CD, they decided Montana would be a better launchpad than Nashville. After all, no country artist did harm to his career by going back to his roots.
On May 3, 2007, John was in Bozeman with Goodwin and Mullins in the Moose's broadcast studio, chatting and playing some licks on Wolfe's morning show, when John's cell phone began buzzing insistently. After the show was over, he picked up the message. It was Sherrie. She had just discovered their 19-year-old son's body in her house. The coroner would determine that August Bohlinger had died of an overdose.
Four days later, in a shady picnic shelter at a state park southwest of Nashville, 200 mourners gathered to say goodbye. Sherrie stood next to John as he addressed the crowd, which included his father, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, in-laws and "Nashville Star" colleagues, as well as his son's friends from high school, a dozen of whom had gotten tattoos over the weekend in honor of Augie.
Minutes before the memorial began, John was pacing around the shelter, looking as grief-stricken as any son's father. But now, with everyone watching, he righted himself and spoke for 15 minutes from notes, without tears but in an unsteady voice. He spoke lovingly of August, a blithe spirit who had indulged his interests in painting, building hip-hop beats, freeform writing and other artistic pursuits.
"I feel like everything I've done in life is derivative," he said. "Augie was original. He was a wonderful, sweet creative force. I learned so much from him." Sherrie -- an accomplished painter and visual artist -- nodded in agreement. No mention was made of cause of death, no mention was necessary, but John did share one detail from the coroner's report: Augie had grass stains on his feet. John and Sherrie and others in attendance seemed to draw comfort from that, the idea of Augie spending some of his last hours barefoot in the park.
I stood next to John Sr., whose face was shiny with tears and perspiration, while his son humored the crowd with stories about Augie, a boy who, like his father, had marched to his own beat. There was the time John urged Augie to try his regimen of vitamin supplements and a healthy diet, noting how fit-looking it had made him. "But dad," the son said cheerfully, "I already look like you now."
And he was always urging Augie to get a job. Invariably, the son replied that there would be time for that someday. "I gotta hand it to him. He beat the system. He didn't have to work a day in his life," John said. There was a bit of wonder in his voice. He called Augie his gypsy son.
He asked for a few moments of silence and said everyone should offer up positive thoughts and prayers for August. After a pause long enough for three Hail Marys, he cued a man standing over an iBook. The man pressed a key and the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" began to play over the PA system. People began to sob loudly. Sherrie was overcome and stepped away from the microphone, leaving John there by himself. He closed his eyes, tilted his head peacefully to the sky, and rocked gently on his heels to the music.
Postscript (August, 2008): In addition to serving as bandleader on "Nashville Star," which recently completed its first season on the NBC network, he is leading the band on Next GAC Star on Great American Country. The "JohnGoSolo" CD was never released.--AB
Thanks Aaron for posting my baby brother's story, albeit our story. It only gets sweeter, and yet more bittersweet, with each passing day. We are all blessed to have family and friends in this life!
Posted by: JoLynn | October 02, 2008 at 11:39 PM
Dear Aaron,
Thank you for sharing our son John's story, as well as my families story.
We have lived a blessed life and one whose story must to told, for it brings hope to others.
Peace,
John Bohlinger
Posted by: John Bohlinger | October 03, 2008 at 04:10 PM