‘Follow Your Dreams’

She wore red pants and a white shirt. Perched atop beer cases so her voice could reach the microphone, 4-year-old Kelli Lidell warbled a song called “Shutters and Boards,” lisping the words through gaps in her teeth.

Her father, Johnny Lidell, stood beside her laughing and leading the applause from the stage of the Checkerboard, a club he co-owned in Wentworth, Wis.

Johnny had movie star features, brown wavy hair and rim-shot blue eyes set off by his dark complexion. He was a big man, 58-inch chest, strong from his day job as an ironworker, where he was as graceful and fluid on the high beams as he was onstage, where he lived and breathed with his band, Johnny Lidell and the Tempests.

His blood flowed through his music--hell-raising stomps that filled the house and rattled the roof, or country ballads that sent love swirling like windblown silk, searching for wounded hearts. It’s the same blood that flows through his daughter.

“Follow your dreams.” Those were the last words he spoke to Kelli, and that’s what she was doing in 1986 when she looked into the rearview mirror at a stoplight and in a terrible split-second realized the approaching car was moving too fast to stop.

She was living in Salt Lake City, earning up to $500 an hour for voice work and was up for a role in the film “Eight Men Out.” She had a bit part in “The Executioner’s Song,” had written a few screenplays and sang in local clubs. A recording contract was promised.

One jarring blow crushed it all. For 10 years, she has been recovering from a closed head injury that left her unable to walk, talk, remember the person she once was. Entertainment people who once saw a budding rose spoke in whispers that she was “retarded.” Her sentences were twisted, sometimes backward, and she couldn’t read. “I had people tell me that maybe I could do something like bag groceries,” she recalls.

Refusing to give up, she inched forward. Last year, she finally recorded her first CD, a collection of country songs titled “His Heart, Hers and Mine,” planned for national release this year.

Now living in Dana Point, she also has founded the Second Chance Foundation, a grass-roots program that helps people in the entertainment business battle back from career-threatening setbacks.

The recording is a tribute to never giving up. And it’s a tribute to her father, who, in the end, did.

In 1964, he recorded in Nashville a version of “Primrose Lane,” made popular in the late 1950s by Jerry Wallace. Backing him were the Jordanaires, who did the same for Elvis.

The flip side was “Take Some Love,” written by a friend, fellow musician and ironworker Len Gehl. Released in the upper Midwest, they became jukebox staples in small towns on the southern shore of Lake Superior.

“He could take a country song and bring tears to your eyes,” says Gehl, still performing in Florida. “When he recorded ‘Take Some Love,’ I didn’t care if anybody else ever sang that song again.”

Kelli remembers seeing her father sing on television once. The song was aptly titled “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

But his world turned to sand, and in search of wounded hearts, the silk from his voice settled heavy on his own chest. On Christmas Day 1973, at age 39, Johnny walked into the bedroom with his hunting rifle, stuck the barrel under his chin and pulled the trigger.

*

It was family tradition to open gifts on Christmas Eve. Kelli says her father was distracted that night. He had become a heavy drinker, and as he opened gifts, he just glanced at them and shoved them aside.

“Dad, did you see what I got you?” Kelli, then 14, asked. It was Mennen after-shave. He ignored her.

She remembers sitting on her father’s lap on Christmas morning: “He talked about how I had to keep going . . . and I didn’t understand why he was telling me that.”

Contrary to Christmases past, Kelli and her younger brother, Van, were sent to their Grandma Mary’s, who lived on their property in a mobile home. Kelli took her doll, Mrs. Beasley, her father’s Christmas gift to her.

Tim Michaels, a radio personality in nearby Duluth, Minn., said Johnny told him he had been offered a chance to go on the road and work for country singer Bobby Bare. “He wanted to do it, but his wife said she would leave him if he did,” Michaels says. “He was torn.”

Bare says Johnny played with him a couple times: “I could very well have offered him a job. He was a great performer, but it’s hard to remember. That was a long time ago.”

Darlene Lidell, known to friends as Dolly, says her husband never spoke of the offer, but there were discussions, sometimes arguments, about risking everything to pursue music. Earlier in his career, she encouraged him; but later in life she was less willing to risk the security and stability they had built, particularly for the kids. Still, she says, “I would have never left him.”

Years before his death, shortly after recording in Nashville, the band moved to Arizona for a year. Johnny’s drinking accelerated, says Lorry Clemens, a member of the band, and eventually, they split up. Johnny returned to Wisconsin and sold his instruments.

The music was gone; the liquor had taken control.

From time to time, he still talked about selling everything and pursuing stardom. After his death, Dolly discovered he had sent two songs to a recording label. His renewed interest sparked a Christmas morning argument.

“He talked about how he wanted to sell the house and move, and I flat-out refused,” Dolly recalls.

In the end, it was neither the dream nor the woman he loved that prompted him to pull the trigger. Friends say it was the booze. “The bullet stopped his breathing,” Gehl says, “but John died long before that.”

After the argument, Dolly saw her husband with his rifle. “What are you doing with that?” she asked. He said nothing and started walking down the hallway, then stopped and turned, she says. “You’re the only person I ever loved and ever will love,” he told her. Then he went into the bedroom and closed the door.

Confused and scared, Dolly heard a click and screamed his name as she rushed toward the bedroom. “The gun went off,” she says. “The door shook.”

Later that morning, a neighbor came to Grandma Mary’s. The man looked pale and he took her into a back room. Kelli heard her moan, “Oh, my God.”

When she returned home, Kelli went to the Christmas tree and retrieved the after-shave she had bought her father. For years, from time to time, she would open it to remember his smell.

*

After high school graduation, Kelli moved to Salt Lake City and found work in shampoo and car commercials, and stunt driving. She sang at clubs and was offered a recording contract by a small independent label. Like her father before her, the whole world seemed in her hands.

And, like her father, it slipped away in one explosive moment.

Initially, she didn’t think her injuries were serious, but the steering wheel was cracked, and bruises developed around her eyes. Her back and neck stiffened.

“There was a white fog around my eyes,” she says. “I thought it would just go away.”

But in the ensuing days, her speech lost its rhythm, turning slow and slurred. Her thoughts became jumbled, abandoning her in mid-sentence. Her left arm turned numb. Her back arched, lifting her chin into the air.

“It was like a snowball rolling downhill,” Dolly says. “Things kept getting worse, and I didn’t know where it was going to stop. She would crawl. To see your daughter crawl is a terrible thing.”

Kelli says it was like living inside the body of a stranger. “I would sit and stare at myself in a mirror and think, ‘Who are you?’ . . . I could no longer talk, drive; I lost the love of acting and singing. I felt I had lost everything, and I thought that death was probably better than living like that. I felt that way for one day, then I looked up and saw my mom, and she had this brilliant smile . . . and that saved my life.”

A year after the crash, Kelli still struggled. Dolly heard about Dr. Milton Thomas at the Stewart Rehabilitation Center in Ogden, Utah. They made an appointment and while walking toward the building, stopped to sit on a bench. Kelli observed patients slumped in wheelchairs, shuffling in walkers.

“Get me out of here,” she said. “I don’t belong here. I’m not one of these people.” Dolly placed a hand on Kelli’s face, held her gaze and replied: “Yes you are.”

The center ran her through a series of tests. She had regained most of her motor skills and long-term memory, but her ability to recover from short-term memory loss was in doubt.

Four years of physical, occupational and speech therapy followed, beginning with placing nine pegs in nine holes, trying to follow recipes; four years of unfinished sentences and pounding on tables.

Kelli found peace in her bedroom’s walk-in closet, where she had built a doll city. She would close the door and sit for hours. “I would sit and think,” she says, “sit and think.”

With the help of her brother and mother, she started singing again. She and Dolly would chant the words to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” over and over. Kelli’s pitch was gone and she couldn’t keep the beat, but slowly the music returned, stirring her spirit.

In 1991, she discontinued treatment at Stewart.

Physically, there are no signs of her injury, but she still struggles at times with her memory, prompting a fear that her mind might go blank onstage.

Much time now is spent on the Second Chance Foundation. The idea came to her during rehabilitation, and to help fund it, she sold her house in Utah. Proceeds from “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” to be released as a single, will go to the foundation.

In December, Second Chance hosted a rock and wrap party. The fund-raiser provided children with gifts distributed through the Red Cross and Salvation Army. Assisting her in the foundation is her husband/manager Rob Lambert, whom she met in 1994.

After recording the CD last year, she is hoping a major label will take her in. If not, it will be released under ShadowMan Entertainment Inc., their independent label.

The first time Dolly heard “His Heart, Hers and Mine,” she was running errands. She pushed the tape into her car cassette player and heard Kelli’s voice--deep, sassy and strong. Then came the last song--Johnny’s recording of “Primrose Lane.”

“I heard his voice, and it was like somebody hit me in the heart,” she says. “I played it over and over again. . . . I just ache when I think of all the things he’s missing. He’d be so proud of Kelli.”