Doug Supernaw

“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.”

“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.”

Still, country music fans will tolerate some bad behavior, as long as it can be written off as good ol' boy shenanigans, such as one fairly recent mini-scandal that ensnared two of the genre's biggest current superstars. At a fair in upstate New York, Kenny Chesney drunkenly absconded with a police horse named Chico and a scuffle ensued, with Tim McGraw jumping in.

“When Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw got arrested for hopping on that horse, that was one thing,” White says. “That was a playful incident; they apologized for it, they paid a fine, everybody got over it. But you don't want it to keep on building up until you are David Allen Coe or Johnny Paycheck and in the penitentiary for five years.”

Right off the bat, Supernaw's arrests were beyond the country music pale. In Lubbock in September of 1997, he was arrested for owing $135,000 in back child support to his first wife, Trudy. While Supernaw is hardly the only good ol' boy to fall behind on his child support payments, for a star to do so is one of Nashville's mortal sins.

In February of the following year, the Chronicle reported that Supernaw was arrested after a drunken fracas near the KILT booth in the parking lot of the Astrodome during the Rodeo. He was charged with public intoxication, served a day in jail and the charges were eventually dropped, but the stain remained. A scant six weeks later, Supernaw was arrested again, also for public intoxication. According to a short Chronicle piece, a deputy discovered Supernaw slumbering in his sports car at 3 a.m. on the side of Highway 290 near the Mueschke Road exit. The deputy stated that the car smelled strongly of alcohol and that Supernaw flunked a field sobriety test.

“Country music fans have strong beliefs and most of them are pro-law enforcement,” White says. “When the headlines started popping up for things like child support and public intoxication, it all adds up and you see where it's going, especially when the individual is showing no remorse or even an inkling of trying to rectify it.”

But despite his woes, Supernaw still had a career then, and the Possum Eatin' Cowboys were still standing by their leader. The breaking point finally came in the summer of 1998 at some festival gigs in Colorado. “He was showing up late and there were a couple of TV interviews scheduled one night and he didn't bother to show up at all,” White says. “So here I am trying to sound-check and I've got two reporters, one from Denver and one from Boulder, screaming me down about him not being there. And the next night he showed up late again.”

Supernaw was en route back to Houston on a friend's private plane. Thousands of feet below, his band was in a motor home making a hard decision. “We all decided that we had a good, strong eight-year run, and it looked like it had come to an end, and it was time for us to do something different and take care of our families,” White says. “We all decided that once it became a job and wasn't fun that we would end it, and we all agreed that that time had come.”

“And the mirrors in the middle reflect / Years of going nowhere / Of trying to catch the horse out in front / When you know there's not a prayer”

Supernaw has gotten into trouble so often in the Bellville-Brenham-Bryan area, you could call that part of Texas the “Supernaw Triangle.” Rumor has it that at least one police captain in the Houston suburbs has taken to briefing his underlings to make sure they “turned on their Supernaw Detectors” when the singer is said to be around.

After the rash of arrests that closed the '90s, all was quiet on the Supernaw front until 2001. (Tisdale says that a Supernaw family member told her that they were slipping prescribed meds in his food at that time.) That came to an end when he lashed out at the Harris County judge who presided over his child support trial. According to White, Supernaw coldly informed her that he felt the proceedings were dragging on a little too long, and he would like for her to speed things up a bit so he could make it to the Astros game for the first pitch. He was convicted of contempt of court and sentenced to ten days in jail, which were tacked onto the six months he was given for the original charge. (According to The Eagle, he would later inform a different judge that the court in Bryan “would just have to work around” his gig schedule.)

Supernaw's troubles were considerable then, yet still manageable. That would change on his 42nd birthday. According to an account in The Eagle, that fateful night found him tying one on in the Texas Tavern in Brenham. That evening would end with a parking lot fracas that culminated in Supernaw facing misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest and public intoxication as well as a felony charge of assault on a peace officer. The last charge had the potential of sending him to prison for 99 years to life, but eventually the case was dismissed after three juries failed to convict.

While out on bail, Supernaw headed south to Mexico, ostensibly to perform a few shows. Originally, the plan was to stay a week, but Supernaw extended his sojourn for quite some time. Soon enough he started getting in some trouble down there, and he was eventually deported by the Mexican government, White says. They shipped him back to Texas, and he was greeted at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport by squads of police from several agencies. According to The Eagle, Supernaw would later grouse in courts that he “would expect no less for Osama Bin Laden.”

At some point around this time, Supernaw went to France on a vacation with friends. “He went with a bunch of people and he got separated from them, and the plane was leaving and he wasn't there and so they left,” Tisdale says. “And supposedly they found him in his underwear. And of course over there in Amsterdam or France or wherever he was, you can buy whatever kind of weed you want, or mushrooms.”

White remembers it differently. “He was butt-naked, and he was mumbling something about how he was running from the people who had chopped his wife's head off. Debbie wasn't even on that trip.”

White and Tisdale both say that Supernaw didn't know his own name when he was picked up, so he was taken to a psychiatric ward — the so-called “mentally retarded home for terrorists” — until he collected himself. Doctors there patched together his identity and sent him home, where there was another surprise in store for him — an intervention. White was there.

“He accused his dad of arranging the whole thing,” White says. “And his dad just said, ‘Yeah, Doug, I got you stoned, stripped off all your clothes and pushed you out into the street.'”

According to Tisdale, Supernaw agreed to go to treatment at the intervention and then backed out. Meanwhile, his legal woes continued to mount. 2003 was a fairly quiet year by his standards, but the springtime of 2004 brought a new tide of arrests, dutifully reported by The Eagle. According to Eagle reporter Craig Kapitan, Supernaw was arrested twice in April for possession of marijuana, once each in Austin and Fayette counties. In May, he went to court on a bail-jumping charge.

The next month, Supernaw would add a few more pages to his rap sheet with one of his most bizarre capers yet. According to reports in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and the Amarillo Globe-News, former Houston Astros outfielder Glenn Wilson, who was then the manager of a Robstown-based, unaffiliated minor league baseball team called the Coastal Bend Aviators, invited his old buddy Supernaw to ride the Aviators bus with the team from Corpus Christi to Amarillo. Later, the Caller-Times reported allegations from several players that Supernaw smoked marijuana in the bus's bathroom. The players would also say in the Globe-News that Supernaw was “just a groupie,” while the singer himself claimed to have been slated to pitch every fourth day in the team's starting rotation. Before the road trip was over, the singer would get arrested in Amarillo three times in one week, on charges of marijuana possession, trespassing and for missing yet another Washington County court date. Despite singing Los Lonely Boys' “Heaven” on the stand in his own defense, he would end up spending two months in Amarillo's Potter County Jail.

Save for a bail-jumping charge and a driving while intoxicated rap in Austin County, all was quiet until March of 2005, when he was arrested in Bryan for the “Gin and Juice” escapade.

According to Kapitan's arrest log in The Eagle, the month after that, free once more, Supernaw traveled north of Texas, where he was arrested in Lawton, Oklahoma, for disturbing the peace. Later that same month, Fayette County authorities issued a warrant for his pot possession case there, while July found Brazos County authorities issuing yet another warrant, this time after a bondsman told a judge that Supernaw had been AWOL for three weeks in the aftermath of the “Gin and Juice” caper.

Last November, the Chronicle reported that Supernaw was arrested and charged with marijuana possession after an incident in an Humble nightclub, and The Eagle reported that he was arrested a month later in Conroe and charged with his second DWI. Then there was another Montgomery County public intoxication charge on April 13.

And then on April 25 he was picked up again for missing a hearing after the Humble pot bust, which is how I finally got to talk to him face to face in Harris County jail.

"...And the brightly painted ponies / They have feelings inside / Like me do they ever want / To get off of this ride”

Tisdale was with Supernaw on the night of his Humble pot bust. There had been a disagreement with some of the other patrons that night, and Supernaw believes they called in a favor with some powerful friends. And just like Supernaw says, she thinks it did look like he was set up. “We did not have one thing on us and when I saw that guy get that out and light it — I thought it was a cigarette but then I smelled it and I said, ‘Doug, we need to go. Let's move away from this person. This is not gonna be good.'”

But Tisdale doesn't deny that the charge is legitimate. “I told Doug that ‘Even if it was a setup, well, you fell for it.'”

She believes that Supernaw has fallen in every trap in his path for years. Two women have gotten pregnant by him out of wedlock, she says, both when he was living high on the hog. He's a famous guy, prone to screwing up. The police all know when he's in the vicinity, and he seldom fails to give them legitimate reasons to haul him in. If his paranoid fantasies were just that in the beginning, his actions have made them real.

And there's just enough truth in his ramblings to make Tisdale wonder about some things. Her own sanity, for one: “He's been living here a long time and there are some times when I think, ‘My God, I am starting to believe this crazy shit,'” Tisdale says. “You start to think you're goin' flippin' nuts yourself.”

And then there's that implanted microphone. Supernaw said the French put it in there in 2002. He has even shown Tisdale where it went in. She doesn't buy his idea of what it is — “He says it makes it so everybody always knows where he's at and what he's doing. And I'm like, ‘No Doug, you tell everybody where you are.'” But there it is, anyway, a little bump that gets bigger and smaller.

“I pulled up bipolar disorder on the Internet a while back and I read that sometimes they will put something in your head under your skin that releases chemicals to help the situation,” Tisdale says. Nobody really knows what happened in that French hospital — Supernaw was all alone, and all anybody has of his stay there is his account. “I'm starting to think there really is something up there,” she continues. “Maybe it's that chemical thing, or maybe there's something else. Maybe there's something up there that is twisting against part of his brain. Who knows?”

“Somehow through the pain / I'll grab hold of the reins / And all will end up well / When I stop this carousel.”

As of this writing, Supernaw is in jail for failing to appear on the Humble pot charge. After his bond was initially set at $10,000, it was doubled. Tisdale doesn't know how to break the news to Supernaw. “I'm afraid to tell him because he's gonna think they're railroading him,” she says.

Supernaw could walk on this simple marijuana possession charge, if only he would plead guilty, Tisdale says. He would be fined, maybe be sentenced to a few days in jail, perhaps be released for time served. But Tisdale says he would prefer to have another day in court, where he could prove that the arrest was a setup. “To me, he sees it as a fight against the judicial system,” she says. “I think he is just addicted to being a rebel. Is that something? Some people are addicted to sex, so an addiction doesn't have to be a drug. He thinks that he knows what he's doing and that it's what made him big. And I'm like, ‘Negatively big!' For some people that works, but for him it isn't.”

And Tisdale isn't sure she wants him released, at least not on his terms. Tisdale says a mutual friend had offered to pay the $10,000 bond if Supernaw would consent to a psychiatric exam. “I told him that our friend wanted to do it his way,” Tisdale says. “But he said he wanted a friend to come get him out, not a friend that was gonna come get him out and put rules on him.”

And yet, she's not ready to sever ties with him. She can't quite bring herself to put the tough in her love. “He wants to go cut his hair and get cleaned up and go to Nashville,” she says. “We were gonna drive there. All of a sudden it was ‘we.' At least now he is almost acknowledging that I am somebody that's in his life that could actually be his girlfriend.”

“There's any number of things that could happen to Doug right now,” White says. “He could say the wrong thing to somebody in a bar and get the livin' shit beat out of him. Or he might lunge at a cop the wrong way and get plugged, or he might get drunk and drive and run over somebody.”

On good days, Tisdale says, Supernaw is still a good father. “Doug sent his daughter's present to her school on her birthday just the other day,” she says. “He's got the biggest heart, a heart of gold when he's in the right frame of mind. But when he's in that anger mode, he could care less about anything. He doesn't care about being arrested and he tells me that and I go, ‘You need to care! Stop that!'”

And she says his talent is still more or less intact. “He's got this fabulous new song about his no-good buddies called ‘The Company I Keep,'” she says. “It's a slow ballad that will put chills on your arm. It's classic Doug Supernaw. And that's what sucks. That's the talent that he's got. I mean, people will record him all day long, but who is gonna put him on a label and take the chance on him? He's saying all these wacko things.”

“He just wants to be such a rebel,” she says. “He thinks that being a rebel has got him where he is today. And I say, ‘No it didn't, because you weren't a rebel then.' His talent got him where he is, and his rebel-ness became his downfall.”