Doug Supernaw

“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.

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“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.”

— “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.