Born Country Page 7
It all just evolved. I didn’t take it off of a Rolling Stones record or anything. I thought it was a great way to support Jeff’s intricate lead-guitar playing. Now Jeff or Teddy might explain it differently, but to me, that kind of rhythm style simply gave us a unique sound for a four-piece band, the three of us and the drummer.
But the real uniqueness of Alabama, if we can claim such a distinction, is the unison of all the players. It was never conceived of or organized as a lead singer and a backup band, the classic country arrangement at the time. It was three equal musicians playing together. I sang lead but only because, at least initially, somebody had to. The principle idea was that we’d each merge our particular musical personality and style into the whole and come out with a much greater organism. To me the “sound” of Alabama is me singing lead and Jeff and Teddy singing along, bolstered by their incredible musicianship. And that sound was there from almost the very beginning. Everything that followed for the life of the band was merely an extension of that basic arrangement tentatively arrived at on that first Sunday at Jeff’s house.
It would take years, most of them performing as a group capable of playing any rock or country song out there, before all the various elements of Alabama’s sound, style, and presentation gelled into something unique and permanent. I loved to play with these guys and felt that we might just have something in our combined talents, but I was still intent on finishing high school and going to college.
And I had to continually sidestep trouble. One tragic incident illustrates this perfectly. Not long after I graduated from high school, I was going to a nearby junior college and hanging out with much the same crowd as always. Early one evening my girlfriend at the time and I decided to drive out to a swimming hole in the area called the Blue Hole. When we arrived, we bumped into a couple of guys I’d grown up with. That particular evening, they seemed a lot more interested in my girlfriend than in me.
Something told me to get the hell out of there. On any other occasion we would have gotten out, gone swimming, and just waited for things to unfold. That night we left without much of an explanation and went somewhere else. Only a few hours later, as the whole town found out the next day, those two boys grabbed another couple, tried to kill the guy by slicing his throat, and raped the girl. Both survived, but not without deep scars. The two guys were quickly caught and sent to prison.
Why did I leave that night? I have no idea. They weren’t drunk or on drugs or in any way threatening. They certainly weren’t strangers. The situation just felt wrong.
I think there are two main reasons why I got out of adolescence without a long rap sheet. First of all, as I’ve said, it was God’s mercy at work in my life. But equally important, I think, I didn’t want to embarrass my mama and daddy or in any way add to their burden. Someone would try to start something, and before I jumped in and started swinging, I would ask myself, “What would Daddy think of this?” There was always that governor going off in my head, a kind of foreshadowing of the consequences of what I was about to do and its effect on my parents.
Plus, I wanted to end up on top, and for that to happen, I had to stay focused, stay the course. Getting carried away in some impulsive way to settle some grudge or to test the limits of the law was not part of the game plan. In the end, it was just common sense.
In any case, I was headed toward a four-year college degree. Having gone through the humiliation of going back to high school and being sneered at, I was determined to earn something that couldn’t be taken away. Music was a passion, but certainly not a surefire career path for an eighteen-year-old from small town Alabama. I needed a Plan B. College would give me that.
I first enrolled in an area junior college, Northeast State in nearby Powell, now called Northeast Alabama Community College, as a way to gain some academic footing for my next step. It was one of the smartest things I ever did. First, it didn’t cost that much. The state government had bolstered the junior-college system in Alabama, so it was a great entry point. Tuition was $67.50 a quarter, all in, and they had a special bus service to and from campus so you didn’t need a car, which I didn’t have. I worked it out so I could go to classes during the day and work at a sock mill on the third shift from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. I was hired by this fine lady named Ida Goza, even though I didn’t know much about socks. I took on the most complicated task of all, running and occasionally fixing the knitting machines.
While I was going to Northeast State, Young Country had its first “professional” outing. We competed in a talent show at Section High School in Section, Alabama, over in Jackson County near Scottsboro. I played a 12-string electric guitar, Jeff played a Fender, Teddy sat in on drums, and cousin Jackie played bass. The song we played was the Merle Haggard classic “Sing Me Back Home.” We won first prize, a free trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. It was our first taste of public acclaim.
Soon after, I graduated from junior college and went on to Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. I ended up getting a B.A. in English with a minor in Spanish, but not without a few more twists and turns. Young Country by this time had become Wildcountry, and through a series of contacts, we found out about a gig playing for tips at a bar in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I had a major conflict—on one hand I wanted to finish college, get a B.A., and not drop out just a few months before I was through. On the other hand, I wanted to get to Myrtle Beach and play with my bandmates.
I finally went to the president of Jacksonville State and explained my predicament. He asked me what I was going to do with my college education, and I said I was headed to the coast of South Carolina to play music every night in a resort bar. Though I’m sure he didn’t think this was the best use of a degree from his fine institution, he allowed me to finish school and graduate in absentia. That was a very big deal to me. I now had my Plan B. I could always fall back on a career of teaching high school English or Spanish if the music business didn’t pan out.
But for now, I was headed to the Bowery. Or, to quote the lyrics of my song “Tar Top” again:
In the Bowery hangs the memories
Of dreams that still come true
Every time I see the spotlights
I’m one of the Chosen Few
CHAPTER 4
THE BOWERY
Well I’m hangin’ out down at Sloppy Joes
They may doze but they never close
And them ’Bama Boys at the Bowery
They can’t dance but they play for free
“DANCIN’, SHAGGIN’ ON THE BOULEVARD” BY TEDDY GENTRY, GREG FOWLER, AND RANDY OWEN
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is one of the prime locales along the eastern seaboard, where everyone from Michigan to Georgia comes to play. Just south of the North Carolina state line, it is situated in a wide cove, part of what is known as the Grand Strand, a stretch of wide, sandy beaches along South Carolina’s beautiful coastline. There are plenty of surrounding golf courses, if that’s your sport, but it’s mainly a beachfront resort for millions of regular, hardworking vacationers. People with kids and a modest income can hop into the camper, drive from West Virginia, Tennessee, or Indiana, park in an inexpensive camper lot, and have a relaxing three-or four-day seaside holiday. It has all the appeal of Hilton Head or Miami Beach without the pretense or expense. Primarily in the summer months, the place is packed with sunburned kids in cutoffs and flip-flops, looking for a good time.
The Bowery, a nightspot right on the ocean, was certainly a place they could find it. In the days when Wildcountry, a.k.a. Alabama, began playing there every night as the house band, it was a pretty colorful joint. The sign when you walked in read Be 18 or Be Gone. Two hefty bouncers would greet you at the door as you entered a dark, smoky room with a long bar on one side and an array of pint-sized ice-cream-parlor-style tables and chairs in the middle. There was a stage, complete with chains hanging down from the ceiling for on-stage dancers to use, but there was no room on the floor to dance.
It was
loud in there. People came to the Bowery to drink beer, holler and scream, and forgot their problems waiting for them back in Knoxville or Charlotte. And they came to hear the music and see the ever-changing freak show of performers that would pop up around the band. First there was a long-legged acrobatic go-go dancer who would pull herself up the chains onstage and hang upside down to the song “Long Train’s Runnin’.” Then Bouncing Betty, the world’s largest go-go dancer, weighing in at around 350 pounds, would dazzle the crowd with her shaking and shimmying. After Betty did her workout, you might see a guy named Don’t Cry Joe, an old-timer who worked at the club and loved to sing old drinking songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” He was also skilled at chugging beer.
Before Wildcountry began playing at the Bowery, the star attraction was a lead vocalist named Jeff who had polio and performed with crutches. It was that kind of place—a home for unusual characters to gather and perform.
Bouncing Betty and the others would fill in when we took short breaks between our nightly sets at the Bowery. We arrived there in March of 1973 to play the summer season. Initially I played for two weeks, went back to college while cousin Jackie filled in for me, and then came back for good. We thought this steady gig would be a good way to earn a little money and have the time to hone our writing and composition skills. It turned out to be the hardest work any of us had ever done, outside of maybe picking cotton. We played every night, Monday through Saturday. Showtime began at 7:00 p.m. and ran weeknights until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., with minimal breaks. Many times during holidays we’d play daytimes too. On Saturdays we’d start around 8:00 p.m. but end at midnight on the dot, because there were blue laws in South Carolina at the time that prohibited the sale of alcohol even one minute after midnight Saturday night. We’d crash on Sunday and had little appetite for getting together to write or rehearse our own material. Before we knew it, it was Monday again and time to start another long week of performing.
We played mainly for tips. We had a receptacle on the edge of the stage called the “pee pot”—it was an actual vintage chamber pot once used for middle-of-the-night emergencies. Patrons would come and toss in some money either to make a request or in appreciation of something we just played. A tip could be anywhere from a quarter to the rare hundred dollar bill, the latter usually coming from someone too inebriated to care. The Bowery people hung a huge cowbell over the bar, and every time a waiter or bartender would get a tip, they’d clang that bell and rev up the crowd. Not that it needing much revving up. It was just another loud noise in a very noisy, rowdy place.
We fielded every request for every song of every musical genre known to mankind outside of opera and Gregorian chants, I think. Conway Twitty, Marshall Tucker, Merle Haggard, ZZ Top, the Doobie Brothers, the Commodores, John Denver, Jim Croce, Bob Seger, the Eagles, Marty Robbins—the playlist was endless. And as far as I can remember—and Kelly backs me up on this—there was rarely a time when we couldn’t play, or at least play at playing, any tune thrown at us. The logic was clear: our assignment was to please that crowd. If they weren’t happy, we wouldn’t get any tips. If we passed on playing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” or “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” that might have been a couple of bucks down the drain and one disgruntled customer. So we became an all-hits-all-the-time bar band, and it turned out to be the best musical education we could have possibly received.
The Bowery was our testing ground. My test was becoming a lead singer, the front man, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I wasn’t the kid who sang the national anthem or recited the Gettysburg Address at the school assembly at age nine. I could sing, thank God, and the more I sang in the context of the group, the more I gained confidence that I wasn’t making a complete fool of myself. But singing in your cousin’s living room and singing before twenty thousand people who are expecting you not only to sing the song in key but storm out to the edge of the stage, jump around, and entertain them in every way are two different experiences. Going into it, I’m not ashamed to say, scared the hell out of me.
As we evolved, I began to realize that few groups with a bashful, head-looking-at-his-shoes lead singer make it to superstar status. I had to constantly remind myself of that fact as I slowly, painfully redefined myself from crack guitarist to principal singer. Necessity is sometimes the best way to help you get over your greatest fears. In this situation I had no other choice. It was sing or find another group where I could just play the guitar and hide in the shadows.
As a lead singer, I faced not only the fear-factor but also my concern that I not sound like a clone of some other country singer with a deep tenor voice like Merle Haggard or Hank Jr. My natural style of singing was much like Elvis. If you go back and listen to the earliest Alabama recordings, I sound a lot like Elvis did before he went into the Army. I worked hard to develop my own style of delivery so when you tuned in to an Alabama song, you recognized my voice right away. I didn’t want to sound like Elvis, that’s for sure. There was already one Elvis Presley, and he was pretty well known.
One thing about singing that I later learned from the recently deceased country great Eddy Arnold was an invaluable tip for any performer. He said the secret to connecting to a crowd is to pick out someone in the audience and sing directly to that person. You can move from that person to another but not before you make him or her feel like you’re singing, one on one, a song dedicated just to him or her. That tactic has always worked for me, especially after Alabama got big and audience members were singing the lyrics right back. Making direct personal contact is paramount. Thank you, Eddy Arnold.
The staging of the group, just like about everything else we came up with, was simply a natural outgrowth of the roles we each chose. The three original players were equals, so we lined up in a row on the stage. I have no idea why I ended up in the middle. When I look back, I think it was because on the left side, Teddy had a big bass amp next to him, and on the right side, Jeff had three or four amps he wanted close by. The drums took up a lot of space behind us, so the best place for me was in the middle. As many people have pointed out, this was the way a rock band tended to line up onstage, not a traditional country band. We probably realized that at the time, but it wasn’t something we did to market ourselves as something different. It was convenient and it was the best arrangement for playing the way we played, no matter how you categorized it.
Another thing that began to define us early on was our look. For most of the history of country music, stars dressed up. What started out, at least for men, as string ties and felt cowboy hats evolved in the ’50s and ’60s into the elaborate rhinestone finery best exemplified by flashy Nudie outfits worn by Porter Wagoner. The women wore a lot of lace and crinoline, like Loretta and Dolly. If you were a country star, you dressed up. You were country royalty onstage, wearing clothes that dazzled and delighted the audience. I loved those outfits and the stars who wore them, but that was not my way of dressing.
We felt more comfortable in jeans and T-shirts, more like the appearance of the Marshall Tucker Band. We were never dubbed country “outlaws” like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in their Saturday-night street clothes and long, stringy hair, but we were about as close to outlaws as you could be. We all kept our hair pretty long because that’s the way we’d always worn it. I had no choice. If I cut my hair, it would grow back in three weeks. And coming from the bar-band venue of coastal South Carolina, we dressed like the people who were throwing us tips every night, who themselves dressed like every grungy rock-band performer since Keith Richards. If we performed in worn-out Levi’s, that was fine with them. We just looked like another band, period. They were there for the music, not the style show.
Again, none of this was by design, but as we went along, it helped our audience realize that we had no intention of dressing above them and, by extension, performing on some star-elevated pedestal. Alabama has been called a lot of things in our time, but no one has ever called us pretentio
us. Nor particularly offensive. We may have dressed like we just got out of bed, but we never fell down onstage in a drunken stupor or lit our guitars on fire or shouted obscenities to the back row. You could bring your folks to the show without fear of embarrassing or upsetting them, unless they were dead set against shaggy hair or secular song lyrics about making love.
The Bowery also allowed us to play our own original songs and actually “test” them out on an audience, in the same way a stand-up comedian will go to a small club and test comedy material before he does a routine on The Tonight Show. I remember playing the song “Feels So Right” to a crowd of women from Washington, DC, who were secretaries and aides to congressmen. I wasn’t sure about one verse, so after the show, I polled them for their opinion. They said not to change a word, and I never did. I really miss that experience of crafting and recrafting a song as you sang it nightly to real people.
Dancing was not just discouraged at the Bowery, it was prohibited. If a couple got up to dance and took up much-needed room from other patrons, they were asked to sit down or get out. This no-dance policy dictated what and how we performed onstage. We weren’t background music—we were the main entertainment, and we had to entertain. We couldn’t get onstage and lean on a musical set of easy-to-dance-to tunes, like endless disco riffs. We had to put on a show, regale the crowd with their favorite songs, and keep ’em coming back for their whole stay in Myrtle.
We were essentially a country band dropped into an environment that favored R&B and rock-’n’-roll. When we could get our original tunes into the nightly mix, people responded to them even though they weren’t a hard-country crowd. That told us something—that country music, done in a looser, more energetic way, could appeal to anyone who liked music, period. You could look like someone from the first row at an AC/DC concert and still appreciate and jump around to “My Home’s in Alabama.”