Living the Nashville Dream

(from the book Twisted by the Wind by Tom Hays)

Cody walked onstage and surveyed the huge, cheering crowd, soaking in the excitement and energy radiated by thousands of adoring fans, the flashing effects lighting, the fog, and fireworks spewing from the pillars behind him. The warm-up band had been good … but the huge audience had evidently come to see him, Cody, the star attraction.

“Cody! Cody! Cody!” Their chant filled the huge auditorium to the rafters.

He threw his right arm up in the air with his guitar pick in-hand in a gesturing salute to the crowd, and the cheers grew even louder, more demanding!

Turning his head slightly to the right, he gave a shallow nod to the keyboard player, and his band began the set. The crowd was still screaming over the first, familiar bars of the first song.

He stepped to the mike, sang the first line, and the crowd noise swelled again. It was one of his signature songs, one he had written himself, one of many that had placed him on the top of the charts over and over again. At the chorus, everyone in the audience sang the hook with him. They knew it as well as he did.

Women in the front rows charged the foot of the stage, trying to get closer, reaching for a touch of his pant leg, tossing flowers along with notes, phone numbers, and undergarments onto the stage.

Cody smiled broadly, his pearl-white teeth gleaming in the spotlights. The crowd grew more frenzied and their sing-along turned to cheering at the top of their lungs, louder and louder, a constant high-pitched roar!

The loud buzzer on the timer over his head brought him to now. He suddenly realized the French fries were done. He lifted them from the cooker and dumped them into the draining tray. He salted them liberally and scooped them into small, red cardboard sleeves and placed the packages one by one onto the serving rack.

His dream had brought him to Nashville for his big break nearly five years earlier.

Looking through the small opening over the rack holding the cooked fries, out to the serving counter and beyond to those waiting in line, he saw a collection of other wannabe dreamers on both sides of the counter, all playing the lottery in some form or other.

Some, like him, playing the “Nashville Lottery” and hoping for a chance at fame.

Others, perhaps with an equal chance, simply purchased their lottery tickets at the quick mart, hoping for the big hand of chance to point to them and say, “You!”

Cody’s dream had followed him from Oklahoma all the way to Nashville. It was as real as any dream had ever been. He had lived it over and over … but after five years it was still just a dream. And it was still no closer to reality than it ever was.

He dumped more frozen fries into the cooker and hit the button to start the timer again. As the white fries sizzled in the oil, Cody slipped slowly back into his dream.

The crowd was still roaring as he began the second song. Cody tipped his cowboy hat and gave them a thumbs up.

There are people all over the world who wished they could be in Nashville, living the dream. Cody had made it.

Others, like Ben, knew about dreaming, but they knew about waking up too. Ben wanted to live in the best reality he could imagine.

Life Discovered on Distant Planet!

By Tom Hays

It was a few years back, a time when life had a different feel to it. The air in the recording studio seemed electric, sparking, crackling with activity and creativity, spiced by the smells of stale pizza, herb and cigarette smoke, filled with the amplified sounds of voices, music and sound effects.

As my friend John and I worked into the fuzzy hours of the night, building commercials for our advertising clients and educational audio programs for school publishers, we had little knowledge of just what was coming our way, courtesy of an errant sound mixing console.

My agency studio was filled with second hand equipment, mostly acquired from radio stations. That old broadcast console and the Ampex recorders had some miles on them, but I had a good consulting engineer go through the place on a regular basis who kept it right up to specs. Maybe too good.

As I said, it was late, and we were trying to finish up, but as we were listening to a playback, we started to hear some sounds that were not coming from what we had just recorded, faint sounds as if from far, far away. We were in a soundproof studio. Nothing was on except for the tape player, the console and the speakers. What was that noise? We turned off the tape playback, but the far away sound persisted. We turned the speakers all the way down, and still the strange sounds came. With our ears we followed the sound to the source, the small broadcast monitor speaker in the console. We were not a radio station. We were not “broadcasting” anything. It got weird after that.

“If we’re not broadcasting,” I said, “then we must be receiving.” John turned up the volume on the console monitor and the sound became more audible. It was like nothing we had ever heard before, like a microphone was on in a strange place and no one knew it was on, and it was being transmitted and somehow, our old radio console was picking up that transmission. Strange indeed, for the sounds were like an old radio serial from days gone by. “John,” I said, “we’d better get this while we can.” So, John turned on one of the recorders and we started recording.

The recordings continued, night after night, and in time we came to discover that what we were hearing was some sort of transmission from a small planet named Amphibia, in a far away galaxy known as Croakatoria. All in all, we managed to piece together 40 of these recordings. Astounded as we were, but fearing how the government dealt with those telling stories about "hearing people from outer space", we dared not release them to the public. The project was code named “Star Base Toad”.

Kept secretly and securely in my vault for all these years, I have now decided to risk ridicule and share these recordings with others who may find them of interest. People who may wish to hear about life on other planets, about alien civilizations and the distant reaches of space and time. It is important to me that the world has the opportunity, through these recordings, to study the society that exists on Amphibia so that we may try to better understand our own, and there has never been a time when we needed that more than right now.

In order to share this amazing audio discovery with as many others as possible, I have transferred these 40 recordings, each 6 to 7 minutes long, to 4 audio CDs. I am making the complete set available for only $34.95 plus $4 for shipping and handling. But wait, there’s more. The first 5000 people ordering the set will also receive the valuable Prologue recording, giving rare insight as to the origins of civilized life on Amphibia, a total of 41 recordings in all.

Supplies are limited! Not available in stores. Great gift idea! Order yours today! Operators are standing by. An opportunity of a lifetime! Don’t miss out on this fabulous offer. Do it NOW! http://www.barkingfrogmusic.com/sbt/ for more information, to hear samples of the tapes and to order.

Barking Frog Music Group - How It All Began.

The Story of The Barking Frog Music Group


"The mind will play funny tricks on you. One minute you’re in a business meeting or hard at work on the job, and then, something will hit you that brings back a familiar taste, or smell, or feeling, and the next thing you know, you’re remembering those times years ago, sitting around a campfire after a big camp meal, with friends or family. I remember we’d pull up logs and sit around . . just poking the fire, swatting bugs, swapping stories and singing songs, a lot of them made up right there on the spot. We’d pass around the guitar and those that could play would. Those that couldn’t would tell a joke, or a story, or recite a poem. But we’d all join in with something, and it’d go on ‘til the moon was way overhead, and the fire had burned down to red hot coals.

There’d be plenty of laughing and kidding around … and sometimes we’d get to laughing so hard that a “different” noise would come from somewhere around the campfire ... and everyone would look around at all the other faces in the smoke to try to guess who the guilty party was. Sooner or later, it would be agreed that it must have been just a big frog . . barking at the moon.

Those “barking frogs” earned quite a reputation in our part of the country, and it was hard to have a camp-out where you wouldn’t hear at least one or two. So, it came to be generally known that anyone who would come, and maybe join in and play, or sing, say a poem or tell a joke, was automatically a member of the Barking Frog Music Group. And back then, we had meetings just as often as we could.

Now, it’s a gathering around a virtual campfire. We call it the bfmg Café, and nearly every night it’s a new group of members sitting around playing their songs, and singing, and telling stories. Maybe you’ll join in, or maybe you’ll want to just sit back and listen. Either way, we hope you’ll have so much fun you’ll come back often. Click to the bfmg Café, put a beverage in your hand, put that work day behind you, and drag up a log! You're a member of the Barking Frog Music Group!

P.S. You might want to have a souvenir of your visit to the bfmg Café, or proof that you are a proud member of the Barking Frog Music Group. You’re invited to drop by the store to look over the bfmg collection. Cool!"