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He has not spoken to Miley in the week since the bong video appeared. "You know, it seems at this point there's not a lot that I can say she doesn't already know. And of course I've sent her the texts of 'I'm here if you need me,' 'Always still love you,' those kind of things." She's coming to this Tennessee house for Christmas in a few days. "I'll see when she gets here. Hopefully there's something I can do. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe she knows exactly what she's doing."

It's difficult, I say, because to some degree every teenager should be able to do some stupid crap.

"You know what, there's no doubt I did stuff when I was a teenager that I'm sure could have turned out horribly," he agrees. "I've done some stupid crap—I do stupid crap. We all do. But it's different when you sit back and you see it happening to your little girl. I feel like I got to try. It's my daughter. And some of these handlers are perhaps more interested in handling Miley's money than her safety and her career."

I ask what kind of communication he and Miley are able to have at the moment. "Good enough to know that it could be a lot better," he says. "I'm scared for her. She's got a lot of people around her that's putting her in a great deal of danger. I know she's 18, but I still feel like as her daddy I'd like to try to help. Take care of her just a little bit, to at least get her out of danger. I want to get her sheltered from the storm. Stop the insanity just for a minute. When you go through what she's been through, it takes a beating on you. And there comes a point where you just got to step back. That's how I ended up out here." He is talking about when he first bought this house in the early '90s. "I stepped back. I was supposed to go and do another world tour. I said no. I canceled my tour. Kurt Cobain had just died, and that really had an impact on me. He was one of those guys that became a friend to me that I never expected. We met at a venue one night, some big coliseum somewhere—his rig was pulling out and mine was pulling in—and I was standing in the shadows, 1 a.m. in the morning, and he's 'Hey man, congratulations—you pissed the whole world off.' We shook hands, and I said, 'Thanks, man... I love what you all do.'" After that, Cobain congratulated him at an awards ceremony when most of his peers did not. "We crossed paths a couple more times," says Cyrus, "and then I was in St. Louis..."

He asks whether I'd like to see something, and leads me into a dark hallway. Framed on a wall, scribbled on the small pages of the St. Louis Regal Riverfront Hotel stationery, dated April 8, 1994, is the poem that he wrote upon hearing of Cobain's death. "It was about what we do as entertainers," he says, and recites it to me. "It came so fast," he says. The final page:

_But after all was said and done

And the big top now came down

No one could ever doubt the fact

The circus came to town_

When I say they seem like unlikely friends, he points out that they'd both just had baby girls—Frances Bean, Miley—within three months of each other. "That's what we talked about, that we each had a little girl...." Cyrus shows me pictures of Miley on the same wall, when she would run onstage as an infant, collect the roses. "One more thing about Kurt—Kurt was one of those guys. That's why I'm concerned about Miley. I think that his world was just spinning so fast and he had so many people around him that didn't help him. Like Anna Nicole Smith—you could see that train wreck coming. I was actually trying to reach out to Anna Nicole Smith, because I kept telling Tish and everybody around me, going, 'This is a disaster.' Michael Jackson—I was trying to reach out to Michael Jackson. I knew he had kids, and I was going to invite his kids down to a taping of Hannah—I just felt it would be good for Michael. I don't know why. I met Michael one time at the Grammys. He sat in front of me, in the front row, and a dime rolled out from under and hit my boot—this very boot I've got on—and I reached down and picked up this dime, and looked, he was going through his pockets, and I said, 'Are you looking for this?' 'Thank you.' And he took that dime and put it back in his pocket. I looked at my manager, I just said, 'Why did Michael Jackson have a dime?...' Nobody could tell me."