Born Country Page 8

  Our great friend and publicist Greg Fowler, Teddy, and I wrote a song later on that does a pretty good job of capturing the mood and spirit of Myrtle Beach in those days. It’s called “Dancin’, Shaggin’ on the Boulevard.” The shag, also known as the Carolina shag, is a swing dance invented in the Carolinas and is today the state dance of both North and South Carolina. It’s a dance that fit the vibes of Myrtle Beach events like Sun Fun Week, which we also stuck in the song. We make reference to great groups like the Drifters, the Embers, and the Tams, not to mention some upstarts nicknamed “the Bama Boys.”

  Got the top down and the traffic’s slow

  It’s Sun Fun Week and we all go

  Where the girls are sunnin’ and they’re lookin’ good

  Well I never met ’em but I wish I could

  And we’d go dancin’ shaggin’on the boulevard

  We’d go dancin’ shaggin’on the boulevard

  The great thing about the Bowery was that there was a completely different crowd every night. Because it was a tourist spot, people from all over the country came and went. It wasn’t like playing at a local club and seeing the same people nightly asking for the same music. It was a cross section of America that came in to see us—all ages, all musical tastes. In some ways, it was an ever-changing microcosm of the audience that later made Alabama famous.

  My wife-to-be, Kelly, was living in Columbia, South Carolina, when she first heard Wildcountry onstage at the Bowery. She was first attracted to our music—and later, I’m happy to say, to me—not because we played country music, but because we played R&B and soul music, her favorite music at the time. She loved to dance and taught dance and loved the rhythm of soul music. Hell, if we’d stuck to only country classics, she might have walked right back out the door.

  For the next seven or eight years, the game plan was pretty well set. We’d relocate to Myrtle Beach in March of every year and start playing nightly as soon as we got there. We would be rooted there until after Labor Day weekend. Before most of us were married, we’d rent a big house with three bedrooms and plenty of other space and all pile in. We had a succession of five drummers over that period—among them, Ben Vartanian (BV in the song “Tar Top”) and Rick Scott—who, for one reason or another, didn’t work out for long. The group didn’t find a permanent drummer until rock drummer Mark Herndon came out to hear us play one night at the Thunderbird Lounge in Florence, Alabama, in late 1978.

  I tried to book gigs whenever or wherever I could—Holiday Inns, Ramada Inns, any small-time venue who would have us—but most of them occurred after Labor Day, during the winter season between September and March. In the summer of 1976, we had a disagreement with the management of the Bowery and decided to spend the summer in central Illinois. A club owner in the Champaign-Thomasboro-Rantoul area had three different places where he would book us. It didn’t last too long. After only weeks, we’d been fired and were on our way back to South Carolina. We had to beg our way back into the Bowery. We were back at our home away from home.

  The Bowery was the reason we ended up with the name Alabama. Over the years we more or less followed the catch phrases of country radio. When they called their music “Young Country,” they were talking about us. We were Young Country. When they decided to turn up the volume on radio promos with “Wild Country!” we switched to Wildcountry. This is what we were called at the Bowery, though within a week or so after arriving, we took an Alabama sign already on the wall of the bar and put it behind us onstage. The Bowery wanted to appeal to the whole country, so they covered their walls with signs of all fifty states and the District of Columbia. No matter where you came from, you’d feel right at home.

  So the Alabama sign soon became the way most people who wandered in would identify us. It wasn’t like there was a splashy Vegas-style neon sign in front announcing “Wildcountry.”

  People from the state of Alabama tended to vacation in south Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, so few bands from Alabama played in the Myrtle Beach area at the time, which made us stand out. People would say, “When is that Alabama group going to come back on?” or “Let’s go hear those Alabama boys over at the Bowery.” At some point we decided that actually calling ourselves Alabama was simply a good way of keeping our name out there, so we designed a distinct logo for ourselves that clearly distinguished the band from the state, and that was that. With a few modifications along the way, that’s the logo we proudly carried with us for the next thirty-some years. The Bowery, in short, was the graduate school of American music for Alabama from 1973 until our last gig there on July 12, 1980. By that point we already had a hit record. And thanks to the Bowery, I already had me a wife.

  Kelly Roseanne Pyle, soon-to-be Kelly Owen, my loving wife of the last thirty-three years, was an army brat. Born in Augusta, Georgia, the second child of six, she lived in six or seven states before she was fifteen, including Hawaii, as well as overseas in Germany. Her dad was a colonel with the 82nd Airborne, and they traveled to wherever the army wanted him. That itinerant upbringing couldn’t have been further from the close-to-home, rural, Lookout Mountain upbringing I had. She had to adjust to new people and new situations almost every day of her life. She’d start the school year in Georgia and end it in Hawaii. She was much worldlier than I was, then and probably even now.

  Her dad was based at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, when Kelly, all of fifteen, and some friends—closely chaperoned by their mothers—came to Myrtle Beach for spring break. One mother heard that there was this really good band playing at this nightclub called the Bowery, so Kelly wanted to go. You had to be eighteen to get in, but this mother convinced the owner that Kelly just wanted to listen to the band and wouldn’t touch any alcohol. So they let her in, closely watched, and she saw Wildcountry in our full glory.

  Kelly remembers details of things like this that I’ve long forgotten. “So I went in,” she says, “and Randy was sitting on a stool in the middle of that little stage, and he was wearing this caramel-colored suede hat, playing his guitar. He had long, thick, solid black hair down to his shoulders and a black mustache. What immediately attracted me, besides the fact that he sounded so much like Merle Haggard, were his forearms and his hands. He has very large hands. And I thought, man, this guy is muscular. He knows how to work.” The next time she came in, she says, we made eye contact, but then again, in a place full of beautiful young women in bikinis, I probably made eye contact with more than one girl.

  Kelly went home to Columbia but was back two months later, right before the summer ended. She had gotten a job at the local Columbia Dairy Queen for $2 an hour until she had enough money to afford a return trip. She was still only fifteen, but even then, when she wanted something, she’d just go after it.

  So back at the Bowery, she found a little chair right in front of the stage and planted herself in my line of vision. She can even remember what she wore the night I first gave her more than passing attention: a Hawaiian print dress that her mom had made for her. It was a classy little dress that did a good job of offsetting her age and the fact that she still wore braces. She says now that she was “infatuated” with me and just wanted to meet and talk. It took a few visits before I got the message, I guess. Men are often not the most perceptive creatures on the planet.

  Even at the advanced age of twenty-three and being the front man and lead singer for a band that played six nights a week, I was still incredibly shy. If George Harrison was the quiet Beatle, I was the quiet Alabaman. Onstage, I was learning to do the job and enjoy it. Offstage, I was still naturally bashful and retiring. Kelly, of course, was anything but.

  I finally devised a way to make contact with her. I’ll let Kelly describe it: “I had just about given up on Randy. I figured I was barking up the wrong tree. Anyway, one night, one of the go-go dancers came up to me at the table and said, ‘You know what? I feel like kicking your ass.’ And I thought, Oh, no, what have I done now? She went on, ‘I’ve worked down here at this Bowery al
l summer long, and I’ve tried to get Randy Owen to go out with me, but he won’t, and now he sends me over here to ask you if you would like to go out with him. He’s too bashful to ask you himself, I guess.’”

  Kelly gave the dancer a big thumbs-up, and five minutes later we were talking. I had to ask permission of her chaperone to take her out soon after, and I had to lay out the details of where we would go and when we would get back. The following Sunday, my only day off, I took her to get some pizza, which she wouldn’t eat because it would get stuck in her braces, then to see the movie Walking Tall. I finally got around to asking her how old she was, figuring early twenties at least, and when she said “fifteen,” I got a little nervous and decided maybe it was time to take her home. She left to go back to Columbia the next morning.

  In my mind, this was more or less a summer fling. I wasn’t ready to get serious with this obviously vivacious, independent woman. She was so young, she couldn’t even get a driver’s license. She was still a junior in high school. Her parents were military people and weren’t sure she should be dating anyone at that point, let alone an “older” man who made his living singing in bars. In any case, she wrote to me, I wrote back, and by the time I got back to Alabama after Labor Day, I had decided to go see her before she moved out of the country.

  My cousin Jackie and I drove my yellow Camaro over to Columbia and met the family, excluding her dad, who was then stationed over in Germany. We met Kelly and her mom in a Kmart parking lot so we wouldn’t get lost trying to find their apartment. Back at their place, I wrestled with her little brothers and sisters, and Kelly and I got to really know each other. I told her my game plan for life: by the time I was thirty, if the music thing hadn’t turned into a record deal or something, I had the education to become a teacher and would probably do so. She in turn offered up her own view of the future. She said she loved to dance, wanted to be a wife and mother someday, and hoped to end up living in the country. Her grandparents lived on a farm in rural Georgia, and she’d always loved that life. All of this was pretty much what I wanted too. There was only one immediate problem: Kelly and her whole family were soon on their way to Germany for two years to be with her father.

  I stuck around on that first trip as long as I could, taking her back and forth to high school and getting to know her mom and family as best I could. Her mother was obviously a strong, resourceful woman, taking care of six kids while her husband served the country in the military. It wasn’t an easy life, but she handled it well. One morning right before I left, I got out my acoustic guitar because I wanted to play Kelly this song I had been working on for some time. It was a song about a girl back in Fort Payne I had liked a lot but with whom things didn’t work out. I wrote the tune about how I felt about that girl back then, but I was singing it to this girl right now for whom, I was slowly realizing, I had much deeper feelings.

  A few years later, the song became an early Alabama hit. It was called “Feels So Right.” It opens with these lines:

  Whisper to me softly, breathe words upon my skin

  No one’s near and listening, so please, don’t say goodbye

  Just hold me close and love me, press your lips to mine

  Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm, feels so right

  Feels so right

  Kelly remembers, “I started wiping the tears from my eyes, and I said to him, ‘Let me tell you something. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again but I hope this is a No. 1 song for you someday. That is one of the most wonderful things that ever could be said about a woman or said to a woman.’”

  It was time for me to head back to Fort Payne that morning, and as we walked to my car, I knew I had to say something now, before we parted for who knew how long. Although she was all of fifteen going on sixteen and knew she wasn’t ready to get married right then and there, I nevertheless had to broach the question. “Would you, you know, ever consider, you know, maybe marrying me?” It wasn’t a formal proposal, for sure. It was more like a heartfelt stab in the dark. And Kelly said, “You know what? I sure would. I’m awfully young still, but you have captured my soul, not just my heart.”

  That was enough for me. We walked back in the house to talk to her mama and let her know I was serious about her daughter and she was equally serious about me. Her motherly response was, in essence, “not so fast”: “First of all, she’s way too young to be serious.” According to her mom, Kelly got tired of boys fast and would probably get tired of me. She went on: “Also, she’s off to Germany, so you’ll just have to wait until we go abroad and Kelly finishes high school.” That would take a while, she went on, and in those intervening years, anything could happen.

  So Kelly took off for Germany for the next two years. That was a major test for both of us. Mrs. Pyle was right. Anything could change. Kelly finished the last two years of high school, went to German discos and danced with the local boys, and even enrolled in business school so she’d know how to do something in the real world besides change diapers and clean house. I didn’t give up, though, or get distracted by some other pretty girl who wandered into the Bowery. I made one or two ridiculously expensive long-distance calls from South Carolina or Alabama to Europe to talk to her, and it continued to feel right.

  The following June, Kelly pulled a big surprise on me by coming back to the States unannounced to see me. All her girlfriends back in South Carolina, including the ones who were around when we first met in Myrtle Beach, had staged a car wash to raise the money to buy her a round-trip ticket. It was a wonderful reunion. Her girlfriends were right there in Myrtle to watch it all happen, like a real-life romance novel. Their pal Kelly had met the man of her dreams, a musician who might just make it big someday, and they wanted to be a part of it. The relationship was a classic attraction of opposites. I grew up bending corn and plowing mules, and she grew up on army bases, riding bicycles and climbing monkey bars. I was shy; she was brazen and headstrong. I’d never been more than two states away from home; she had traveled the world. Unlike the small-town girls with small-town ambitions that I tried to avoid growing up, this was a woman who shared the same big Technicolor dreams that I had.

  It was awfully hard to say goodbye to her yet again when it was time for her to return to Germany. Kelly says it was the hardest goodbye she ever had to give, outside of the time she had to say goodbye to her dad when he took off to fight in Vietnam. In any case, the way I channel sorrow is through music, so after she left, I sat down and wrote another song. It’s called “Goodbye (Kelly’s Song).” I kept the song in my notebook of songs for years before Alabama could finally record it and do it justice. It’s a very important song to me. I wrote it for Kelly, but many years later I ended up singing it as a solo at the funeral of my very good friend, Dale Earnhardt. In part, the lyrics I wrote at Kelly’s and my parting go like this:

  Before I fly and wave goodbye

  I say to you “Days with you are the best years of my life”

  But if I don’t see you anymore

  Keep my words safely stored

  And I’ll be back I promise once more

  Goodbye, goodbye

  Till I see you again

  Goodbye, goodbye

  I’ll love and I’ll miss you till then

  After a few months I got on the ne one day with her father, a man I had never met in person, and asked him for Kelly’s hand after she finished high school. He said yes. I guess by that point both of her parents got the idea that Kelly wasn’t going to lose interest in me and I wasn’t going anywhere either.

  We got married just as Kelly turned seventeen and I was twenty-five. Here’s how we pulled it off: Kelly was back in the States now, and since neither of us knew the other’s extended family that well—I still hadn’t met her dad—we thought about having a wedding that would include everybody. Kelly had moved into my parent’s house in Fort Payne, and following the strict rules of the times, when we said goodnight every night, she would go one way, and I would go the other. Then one day Kelly said, “
You know, I’ve been waiting to marry you, and I’m getting a little tired of this arrangement.” So we changed plans and decided to get married before a justice of the peace. Because Kelly was under eighteen, I had to get written permission from her dad for the proceedings. When it arrived from Germany, we took off to find a marrying judge.

  Taking Mama with us as a witness, we got in the Camaro three days before Valentine’s Day—February 11, 1975. I had to work on Valentine’s Day itself. We headed for a justice of the peace in nearby Trenton, Georgia. It was bitter cold outside, I remember that. Before we could go into the courthouse, we had to go across the street and have our blood checked to make sure we weren’t carrying any diseases. As we finally entered the courthouse, I told Mama to stay put until we went in and found out what exactly was involved.

  The justice, Judge Gray, well into his seventies and having done this more than once, just started right in. He told me to stand here, Kelly to stay there, and began with his set speech, directing us in the vows of marriage. It was a very emotional moment. We had waited for this and didn’t want to wait another minute.

  We had already made a trip to Martin’s Jewelers in Fort Payne, a business that is still thriving, and got a deal on the rings—one man’s wedding band, one woman’s engagement band, and one woman’s wedding band for $199.99. We exchanged rings and kissed; I slipped the judge $20, and as we headed for the car, we realized we had left Mama sitting there! It had all happened so fast, and we were punch-drunk with love. She was a little taken aback. “But, why didn’t you call me to come in?” she asked. I said, “Mama, the judge just started up, and we were halfway through the ceremony before we knew it, and we were in a hurry, too, so we just did it.” That was a Monday. I had to be at a nightclub on Friday night. We had to get going.