The first time I ever played on the Grand Ole Opry was with the Earl Scruggs Revue.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, played a five-string banjo like Earl. Guys came along who played faster and flashier, but nobody had the touch and the soul of Earl Scruggs. He was one of a kind.
Earl called me in late 1969 and told me he had made a decision to attend a peace rally to be held on the Mall in Washington with Peter, Paul, and Mary, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and a bevy of politicians and public figures who were coming together to try to persuade the government to bring the troops home from Vietnam.
I know that decision had to be a tough one for Earl, as it could possibly have alienated a lot of his older, conservative fans who would misunderstand his motives. But Earl Scruggs was a man of principles and made up his mind based on those principles instead of his career.
I told Earl that of course I’d go with him, and on a cold November day we joined hundreds of thousands of other Americans on the big Mall in Washington to try to sway the Nixon White House to bring our troops home from Vietnam.
The problem with this and most of the other vast rallies of those days was that there were always fringe groups and troublemakers who showed up to grind their axes for everything from prison reform to evading the draft. But the massive crowds on the Mall in Washington that day had come for one reason: to bring our troops home from a war the politicians refused to let them win, and they got their point across.
My parents and grandparents came to spend a few days with us at our house in Nashville. Not being able to get tickets to the Saturday night Grand Ole Opry, Hazel took them to a Saturday afternoon performance, which the Opry was doing at that time to accommodate the overflow of folks who couldn’t attend the Saturday night show. It featured some of the lesser lights, the up and comers, and other good artists, but not the top stars the Opry was known for.
My grandmother had listened to Roy Acuff ever since he had joined the Opry in 1938, and just before they left to go to the show, I remember her saying, “I don’t reckon Roy Acuff will be there, will he?”
I said, “No, ma’am, he won’t.” But at the same time I was thinking, Little lady, one of these days I’m going to take you to the Grand Ole Opry when Roy Acuff will be there.
Some years later, I was able to take both of my grandparents backstage at the Opry, where my grandmother was able to meet Mr. Acuff, spend time, and take pictures with him.
That is one of the proudest nights of my life.
CHAPTER 20
THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CONTROL ROOM WINDOW
Bob Johnston was in demand and extremely busy and started giving me a weekly salary to be a kind of assistant and errand runner. I took things to Johnny Cash while he was doing his television show. I even picked up Bob’s kids from school a couple of times.
We could never figure out how Bob Dylan’s albums got bootlegged.
Spectators were not allowed in the studio when he recorded. At the end of each session, the tapes were locked away in a vault and mixes and copies were strictly controlled and carefully guarded.
I used to take a flight to New York for no other reason than to hand carry a copy of a mix of a Dylan album and personally put it into the hands of one of his people, for him to listen to and approve.
Yet with every precaution that was taken, somehow bootleg copies of Dylan’s work would show up on the street.
One time I was in sole possession of an entire unmixed Bob Dylan album in several bulky eight-track tape boxes.
I was in New York and Bob Johnston didn’t want to leave the tapes there, so he asked me to take them along with me and get them back to Nashville.
I was going to North Carolina to meet Hazel and Charlie Junior and spend a couple of days with my parents.
When I got to LaGuardia Airport—this was in the days before 9/11—they told me the boxes had to be run through the x-ray machine, which could erase part of the recording.
I told them it was the only copy of a new Bob Dylan album and that the only way I’d let it go through an X-ray machine was for the airline to assume the liability for any loss.
They backtracked pretty fast, and I was on my way, carrying my bulky load with me.
Even while doing these things, I was still playing on all the sessions I could, writing songs, and keeping my antenna out for anything that would take me another step up the slippery music business ladder.
Marty Robbins had been one of my favorite singers since he had come on the scene back in the 1950s, and working on a couple of his records was a real highlight for me. I remembering being in the studio playing guitar and hearing that magnificent voice singing, “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.”
For my money, Marty was one of the finest country music singers of all time and working on his records was an honor.
CHAPTER 21
BIRD ON A WIRE
When Bob Johnston brought Leonard Cohen to Nashville to record an album, I have to admit that I knew very little about him and was completely unfamiliar with his music.
Leonard was a totally different kind of artist than any I had ever worked with. His music was sensitive and haunting, and the imagery of his lyrics was abstract and poetic, like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Leonard was from Montreal and had already built an underground audience with his first album, Suzanne. He was best known in Europe and in his native Canada, where he was an unofficial poet laureate, but he was building a following among the college crowd in the United States.
When I first heard “Bird on a Wire,” I didn’t know what to think. Here was a truly unique artist, and his songs were so delicate that one out-of-place guitar lick could bend it out of shape. When you worked with Leonard, you had to listen closely and get in sync with what he was trying to convey. You had to interpret it in the same musical frame he was operating in. Sometimes it only called for a well-placed note or two, sparse but meaningful. I know that sounds philosophical and stilted, but so was Leonard’s music. You needed to be in a certain frame of mind, and it was a challenging but satisfying experience.
After the popularity of “Bird on a Wire” and some of the other cuts on Songs from a Room, Leonard wanted to go on tour, and I was asked to be part of the backup band that would be called The Army. It was a different kind of band, mostly acoustical instruments with no drums. We needed to surround Leonard with delicate, genteel sounds. For a bang, slam, redline graduate of thirteen years of honkytonk and rock and roll, it would be a learning experience.
I had revived my interest in my fiddle and played it, mandolin, guitar, and bass. Bubba Fowler and Ron Cornelius played guitar, and Bob Johnston played harmonica and organ. We had two backup singers, Corlynn Hanney and Susan Musmanno, and with Leonard’s gut-string guitar, it was the perfect backup group to match the complicated persona of Leonard Cohen and his unique and fragile music.
We played a few dates in the United States and embarked on a five-country European tour. Leonard and the rest of the band flew from Nashville to Holland, where we would open at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Bob Johnston had to go through New York on business for a day and asked me to go with him. We would fly over and join the others the next day.
I was sitting around the hotel room in New York when Bob called and asked me if I’d like to come down to Columbia Studios and play bass on an impromptu recording session with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and a studio drummer named Russ Kunkel. Of course I wanted to, and the four of us spent a relaxed and pleasant day just doing whatever song Dylan felt like doing. We cut old songs and new songs, none of which could be released by Columbia Records because George Harrison didn’t have current working papers.
It was the neatest day and one of my all-time-favorite musical memories. Dylan even took requests that day. You could just name one of his songs, and he’d go into it.
George was a really nice little guy, friendly and conversational. It was right after Paul McCartney left the band, and he jokingly asked in his thick Liverpudlian accent, “
Do you want to be a Beatle?”
He asked me who played steel guitar on Dylan’s albums, and I told him it was Pete Drake. George was just about to go into the studio in London to record his All Things Must Pass album and said he’d like to have Pete come over and play on it. I got a contact number, gave it to Pete’s office, and the rest is history. But that’s not the end of the story; I’ll get to it in a while.
The next night Bob and I caught a plane to Amsterdam and joined the rest of the band to start the tour. I was amazed at the popularity of Leonard Cohen in Europe. He sold out the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Olympia Theater in Paris, caused a near riot in Hamburg when he raised his arm in a misunderstood “Sieg Heil,” and enchanted hundreds of thousands of people at two o’clock in the morning at the Isle of Wight Festival.
Earlier in the evening at the Isle of Wight, I stood in the wings of the stage watching Jimi Hendrix perform, having no idea that in about two weeks he would be dead.
Not long after I got back to Nashville, I got a call from Pete Drake’s office to ask me to play on an album that Ringo Starr was coming to Nashville to do. It seemed that while Pete was in London playing on George Harrison’s album, he had run into Ringo, who expressed a desire to do a country album. Pete told him to come on over to Nashville and get it done. If you look at the picture of the musicians on the back of Ringo’s Beaucoups of Blues album, you’ll see a young Charlie Daniels sprouting the beginnings of the beard I’ve worn ever since.
CHAPTER 22
YOUNGBLOOD AND NEW GROUND
The music business is wheels within wheels. One thing leads to another, and you never know when something mundane and ordinary is going to lead to something exciting.
Bob Johnston was hot and in demand. And when he was approached by a San Francisco group called The Youngbloods, he told them that he didn’t have time to produce an album for them but had a friend in Nashville named Charlie Daniels who did.
The upshot was that The Youngbloods wanted to have a face-to-face meeting and talk it over, so I boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where the band was already at RCA studios, working on some tracks without a producer.
They were a three-piece band that sounded much bigger. Joe Bauer was the drummer, a guy known simply as Banana played guitar and keyboards, and one of the best singers I’ve ever worked with, Jesse Colin Young, handled most of the vocals and played bass. I hung out in the studio with them for a while. We had lunch and talked, and they decided they wanted to work with me. I went back to Nashville as proud as a peacock. A few weeks later, I headed out to California to produce an album for The Youngbloods.
The first problem we faced was that the RCA studios in Hollywood were built to record movie soundtracks with a seventy-piece orchestra. They were so big that you could have played a game of touch football in them.
We built a room out of sound baffling in one end of the studio so that The Youngbloods’s three pieces wouldn’t look like an island in a lake, and we started to work on a project called Elephant Mountain.
It became clear very early that there were two factions in the band. There was Jesse, and there was Joe and Banana. Most disagreements about sounds and mixing divided along those lines, which left me in the unenviable position of taking sides. That’s why I’m opposed to a band not having a clear-cut leader; otherwise, you’re floundering around and arguing and nitpicking every time there is a decision to be made.
When I came on board, the band was working on one of Jesse’s songs called “Darkness, Darkness,” which was to become my all-time favorite Youngbloods song. With Joe locked in on drums, Banana’s smoking guitar, and Jesse’s magnificent voice floating over the top, and with the addition of the fiddle work of a player they brought in from the band Kaleidoscope, it was an impressive piece of work.
We finished a few tracks and broke for Christmas. When we came back, we moved to a much smaller studio on Vine Street that suited the purposes of a three-piece band much better.
We started cutting a track for another one of Jesse’s songs; it was a breezy piece called “Ride the Wind.” It needed a light, airy treatment, and try as we might, we just couldn’t get it to feel right. Finally, on the sixth day of tracking that one song, I pushed the talk-back button and said, “Gentlemen, I think we’ve got a track,” and it was a good one.
In fact, the whole Elephant Mountain project was a fine piece of work and the first album I produced that made the Billboard charts.
The next project I worked on with The Youngbloods was a live album named after Jesse’s “Ride the Wind” song and recorded at Fillmore West in San Francisco, Fillmore East in New York, and a pop festival in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Something unique happened at all three venues.
Fillmore West was the first time I had ever heard Chicago. They were on the bill with The Youngbloods that weekend and nothing short of great. I was in the recording truck outside the venue. It was a Sunday night, and Bill Graham, who had just come in from New York, got onstage and said, “About three o’clock this morning, upstate New York found out about Santana.” It was Woodstock weekend.
On a Saturday night at Fillmore East that featured The Youngbloods and Jefferson Airplane, Bill Graham got ticked off at the opening act, a group who called themselves the New York Rock Ensemble, and fired them on the spot, leaving the show an act short. Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, the bass player and guitar player for the Airplane, brought in a couple of guys and took the spot, the advent of Hot Tuna.
In those days, a pop festival was a three- or four-day event featuring maybe twenty or so bands. The one we recorded live in Baton Rouge was no exception, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Chicago, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and of course The Youngbloods, among others.
Most of the bands were staying at the same motel, and it was shortly after the Easy Rider movie came out. You talk about a nervous bunch, sitting right there in the Deep South with all that long hair and those weird-looking clothes. It was as if danger lurked around every corner, and somebody was going to show up and have a mass lynching.
Being from the South, I thought their attitude was funny, and it got me thinking along the lines that led to the song “Uneasy Rider.” Wheels within wheels.
Working with The Youngbloods was my first venture into the San Francisco rock scene but was not to be my last. Jerry Corbitt had been a member of The Youngbloods until he opted out for a solo career, and he was ready to make his first album for Capitol and was looking for the right producer. After Jerry had a conversation with Jesse Colin Young, who gave me good grades on The Youngbloods’s project, he contacted me about working with him.
A deal was struck, and I was on my way back to California, this time to help Jerry Corbitt make his first solo album in, of all places, crazy Berkeley.
CHAPTER 23
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
Berkeley was not your typical middle-American city in the early 1970s. Just about every far-left radical organization had a presence on the West Coast. It was a mecca for fringe groups and oddballs, and there were some pretty far-out people walking the streets, some of them truly committed to one cause or another but a lot of them just along for the ride.
One morning on the way to the studio, I stopped at a drugstore for something. There was this dingy little guy with tangled rat’s-nest hair trying to buy a bottle of cheap wine but he was short a dime. Somebody in line behind him paid the ten cents for him, and he bellowed, “Thank you, brother, the revolution will be won on ripple.”
Now, what kind of revolution was going to be won by a man who couldn’t even find his way to a shower and was out buying a bottle of rotgut at ten o’clock in the morning? Certainly not one that I’d want anything to do with. That was a problem with the hippie movement. Some of the people involved had ideas and causes, although some of them were seriously misguided, but most of them were just clones who grew their hair out and came to the Bay Area to get high and participate in the free love movement.
The album I
produced for Jerry Corbitt was not successful sales-wise, but I had made a lifelong friend, and as a result of our relationship, something would happen that would change the course of my career.
Jerry and I met Jerry’s manager, Donald Rubin, in Los Angeles and went by Capitol Records to play some rough mixes of the music we were working on for the record company executives. At the end of the meeting, Donald said, “Charlie, why don’t you play some of your songs.” I picked up a guitar and played some of my music, and a really nice gentleman named Carl Ingerman signed me to Capitol Records on the spot. I walked in a record producer and walked out a recording artist.
It was a time for some serious soul searching. I could make an album for Capitol and continue to pursue being a record producer, songwriter, and session musician. Or I could get back in the game, put a band together, and go out whole hog to try to make it to the top of the charts and the big concert circuit. One would mean a fairly settled life; I would be at home most of the time. The other would mean going back on the road, playing whatever venues we could get into, opening shows for anybody who would have us, and building a new following from the ground up, entering an implacable world where the competition is unrelenting and you only get so many chances to shine before you’re banished back to the bush leagues.
I had tried. I had worked hard and established a toehold and had a chance at a future in the behind-the-scenes end of the music business. But to be honest, it could never compare with the thrill of walking on stage in front of a crowd of people and turning them on with a live performance.
In the end, I had to follow my heart and admit that I’d never be completely happy until I had proven to myself and everybody else that I had some world-class music in me and the guts and tenacity to meet the competition head on and breathe the rarified air of sweet success in the business that I loved so very much.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 10