CHAPTER 44
NEXT OF KIN AND SIMPLE MEN
I had been asked to write a couple of songs for a Patrick Swayze movie called Next of Kin, a story about a mountain boy who joined a big-city police force and what happened when his mountain kin came into the city to settle a score.
I wrote two songs. One was a slow, high mountain fiddle tune called “My Sweet Baby’s Gone,” and the other was an attempt at the title song, “Next of Kin.”
They accepted the fiddle tune but turned down “Next of Kin.” In doing so, they did me a huge favor that would propel our next album to gold status.
We went back into the studio with James Stroud and went to work. Working with James was always a fun experience. He had a great sense of humor and was good-natured about the practical jokes we were always playing on him.
With the help of The Oak Ridge Boys, we did a remake of the Jimmy Dean classic “Big Bad John.” I went to the studio one morning before James arrived and dubbed in a vocal replacing the lyrics. It was a version called “Big Fat James,” which included a verse that went like this:
He didn’t say much. He was short and rude.
And everybody knew you had to hide your food.
From Big James
Big Fat James.
When James came in, we played it for him and he almost had a laughing fit. He loved it and played it for just about anybody who would listen.
We made some great music together, and some of my fondest memories in the recording studio include my friend James Stroud.
The song the movie had turned down became the title song for the album. I just changed the title from “Next of Kin” to “Simple Man,” changed a few lyrics, and recorded it. When it was released it started climbing the charts, but not without the usual gaggle of critics who always come forth when you mention anything that they don’t consider politically correct. “Take them rascals out in the swamp, put ’em on their knees and tie ’em to a stump and let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest” sure didn’t qualify.
Some radio stations wouldn’t play “Simple Man” and called me all kinds of names, which didn’t bother me at all because that was exactly how I felt. I was sick and tired of seeing someone who had stood over a defenseless person and pumped a couple of rounds into his head be pitied because he had been raised in a bad environment.
How about the person he shot? I was a lot more concerned with seeing him get justice. Besides, the CDB fans knew exactly what I was talking about and agreed with me.
I had a line for the naysayers that I’m sure really scalded them even more. “When the wind and the rain have washed the last vestiges of your name off your tombstone, somebody, somewhere will still be doing a CDB song.”
Regardless of the backlash at some radio stations, “Simple Man” got a lot of airplay and pushed the album to sales of more than five hundred thousand copies.
I had always dabbled in writing. But I’d never gotten serious about it until several years before, when Ron Huntsman had said kind of offhandedly one day, “You write story songs. Why don’t you write stories?”
Well, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I went into a motel room one day, sat down, and wrote a story about our “Uneasy Rider” song. That seemed to open the spout, and I went on to write a few more short stories following the story line of one of our songs. Then I started branching out, writing fictional short stories about characters and situations I dreamed up. Most were humorous and some had a small degree of autobiographical content.
I loved writing and lived the stories as I made them up. It was great being able to take the plot anywhere I wanted to, with just as much outlandishness as I wanted. I even wrote one story about Santa Claus being real. And one about a super talkative redneck fisherman who out-fished the local hotshot and his fancy boat and tackle while sitting on the bank with a cane pole and crickets.
When I had written fifteen pieces, it was decided to present it to a publisher. Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta released a book of short stories called The Devil Went Down to Georgia and Other Stories by Charlie Daniels.
And just like that the weak-eyed fiddle player, who had barely gotten through high school, was a published author. Go figure.
I have always been up for trying new things and discovering talent I didn’t know I had. I would never have played fiddle if I hadn’t been adventurous about accepting new challenges and breaking new ground
When The Nashville Network came on the air in 1983, it was an exciting time for Music City. For the very first time, country music would have its very own network. It would be programmed by Nashville people with local personalities and originate in Nashville.
For the first time TNN would be blasting out country-related programming twenty-four hours a day across the nation and eventually in other parts of the world. The possibilities were enormous, and the efforts to fill the airwaves around the clock began in earnest.
There would be trial and error, as some of the early programming was pretty shaky. But what turned out to be the flagship program was a prime-time variety show hosted by long-time local broadcast personality Ralph Emery called Nashville Now.
Nashville Now had a great house band made up of some of Nashville’s excellent studio pickers. The guests ranged from Randy Travis to Henny Youngman, from the newest country music sensation to the long-time established stars from the Grand Ole Opry.
My first real experience of hosting a television show was when I was asked to host Nashville Now occasionally when Ralph Emery took a night off.
I found it was something I could handle—introducing the guests and interviewing them and reading commercials off the teleprompter, which could be challenging, but I grew to enjoy my time before the cameras.
There was a show on TNN called Talent Roundup that had been hosted by several different music industry personalities over the years. In 1994 Allen Reid, the producer, was looking for a new host and approached me about taking the spot.
The time was no problem schedule-wise. The show would tape on weekdays, with three shows per day for four days and the last one in the series on a day by itself. In total it was five days per season, so I decided to give it a shot.
It was called Charlie Daniels Talent Round Up and worked this way.
After going through a series of auditions, the singers, duos, and bands who won got to come to Nashville for a shot at being judged by professionals and heard by industry people who could further their career.
So with a co-hostess, a lovely lady named Lisa Foster, Charlie Daniels Talent Round Up was launched and ran for three consecutive seasons on The Nashville Network.
It was an enjoyable and educational experience. It broadened my horizons and bolstered my confidence, and I discovered another talent I had never explored.
We worked with James Stroud on our Homesick Heroes and Simple Man albums. It was some of the most fun I’d ever had in the studio.
Both albums were successful. I credit James with having a lot to do with it by bringing in a talented engineer named Lynn Peterzell, creating a fun atmosphere in the studio, providing his musical suggestions, and doing the outstanding postproduction work he’s so good at.
But the next album we did, Renegade, didn’t do as well. It seemed like the enthusiasm at our record label was starting to sag a little. We had had a great run at Epic. We’d been very successful and sold a lot of records, but the prospect of overstaying our welcome seemed to be at hand.
I’ve had several occasions over the years when a business relationship just seems to run out of steam. I have found it best to cut bait and move on. So, after fourteen years with Epic Records, we decided to change labels.
Jimmy Bowen was a renegade, insofar as mainstream Nashville was concerned. He did things in an unorthodox fashion and didn’t particularly care what anybody thought about it.
He came to Nashville from a varied background. He had been a recording artist in his early years and had worked his way
into the corporate end of the record business. He became an extremely successful producer working with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr.
He came to Nashville to run Warner Brothers. Then he went to MCA, where he had worked with Hank Williams Jr., Reba McEntire, and George Strait. But he had recently taken over Capitol Records, where he lit a fire under the label about a young guy they had signed from Oklahoma by the name of Garth Brooks.
I liked his style. You couldn’t argue with his track record, and he wanted to sign CDB. So, after a lot of thought, we left Epic records and signed with Capitol. Actually, it was the Liberty label, the imprint Jimmy Bowen started there.
The first album we did was titled America, I Believe in You. Jimmy Bowen produced it, and the title song was a single. We had full advantage of the Nashville Capitol office, releasing a video and working well with the promotion department run by Bill Catino.
There was another advantage to signing with Capitol that we weren’t even aware of.
I had always wanted to do a gospel album, but major labels like Epic didn’t have a gospel department, so we hadn’t been able to.
CHAPTER 45
THE DOOR
Promoting and marketing gospel music is a much different undertaking than the methods used for mainstream music. It is a different genre of radio and TV entities, different print media, and different retail outlets. You are basically dealing with a different set of values and principles in content and relationships.
So the major labels left the Christian music to small independent labels, who had developed the experience and expertise to get the job done.
One of the most successful of the Christian labels was a Nashville-based company named Sparrow, which was owned by EMI, the same corporate conglomerate that owned our new label. When we signed with Liberty, the folks at Sparrow asked if we’d be interested in doing a Christian album to be released on their label.
Billy Ray Hearn had started Sparrow and worked hard and taken a lot of chances to make the company one of the top gospel labels in the business. Billy Ray was one of the good guys and respected industry-wide. Along with his son Bill, he had built a company that reflected his character.
Of course, it was a long-awaited desire of my heart. We accepted, and I went into a period of intense writing. I don’t ever remember working harder on any project I had undertaken.
I had waited a long time for this opportunity and was determined that it would be special. So I wrote, polished lyrics, and worked out rhyming schemes and arrangements until I had an album’s worth of music I would be pleased to call our first Christian project.
Now I needed a producer who had experience in gospel music. It had to be someone who had not only the musical savvy and technical know-how but also someone who understood the parameters on that side of the business.
Peter York and some of the executives from Sparrow came out to our studio to listen to the music we were going to record for the album. They brought along a guy from their A&R department named Ron Griffin.
After spending a few minutes in conversation with him and getting a cursory knowledge of his experience and background, I thought, This is the guy I’d like to produce our first Christian project.
He had been around the gospel end of the business for a number of years in different capacities, and he liked our material. I got the impression that the deskbound job he was involved in didn’t hold the same fascination for him as being a part of the creative process.
He had a full-time job at Sparrow Records, and it would require taking time away to be involved in the long hours that went into the CDB recording process. But I told him I’d like for him to work with us on the project.
Long story shortened, Ron worked it out with Sparrow and immediately got involved in the preproduction process. He was going over material with me, engaging an engineer, and renting some much-needed outboard recording gear, as our studio was pretty primitive at the time.
We began work on our very first Christian album, and when I say “work,” I mean just that.
Ron was a perfectionist and paid attention to every note of music we recorded as we cut the tracks. One off-time drumbeat, one slightly bent bass note, or anything that didn’t fit perfectly was identified and replaced.
When we started overdubbing guitars and keyboards, we took hours with each instrument, coming up with licks and sounds, rejecting them, looking for the pitch-perfect and intricate cluster of notes that would enhance what the rhythm section had done.
The vocals and background vocals were the most tedious and exacting I had ever done. But I knew the result was well worth the effort when I heard the finished mixes of the album we would call The Door.
We had a couple of number ones on the country gospel charts and won our first Dove Award that year.
I literally had people ask me, “What are your fans going to think about you doing gospel music?”
It was a sort of silly question since we’d been doing gospel music as part of our live show for years, and our fans loved The Door.
We were getting ready to do another album for Capitol-Liberty when Jimmy Bowen got sick, sick enough that he had to leave his post as label head. His position was taken over by Scott Hendricks, and I knew our days at Capitol were numbered.
Scott had had success as a record producer, having hits with major artists like Faith Hill and Deana Carter, but he was from another time and another musical world. He neither knew, nor I think cared, about an aging Southern band that paid scant attention to the musical styles and fads that came and went so quickly in the contemporary country-music business.
We were an anomaly, a self-contained band who wrote our own music and did our own arrangements. We were a hard-rocking jam band that didn’t fit into any cookie cutter anybody left at Capitol Records could come up with.
One thing led to another, and the pressure mounted for me to make a record with a successful Nashville producer and Nashville session players. What it basically came to was to do it their way or hit the road.
Don’t get me wrong. I had the greatest respect for Nashville producers, and as far as I was concerned, the Nashville session players are the best in the world. But there’s a sameness about records made that way. They just don’t have that unique individuality of music made by a band of guys who make their living playing to people instead of microphones. There’s not that spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment, “Hey, listen to this” excitement of a player who comes up with a hot lick that can turn the whole arrangement around.
But, for better or worse, I yielded to the pressure and agreed to their terms. I was paying off a two-million-dollar debt and needed all the help I could get from having a song on the radio.
The one bright spot for me, and the only person at the label who seemed to really care, was a talented and personable young lady in the A&R department named Renee Bell. She seemed sympathetic to my situation and tried to soften the landing by helping me through the confusing situation.
She spent time with me talking about songs and writers and helped me with the process of picking the right producer. I’ll never forget what her attention and kindness meant to me.
We talked to several producers, and I settled on Barry Beckett, who cut his teeth in Muscle Shoals, playing keyboard on some of the most classic R&B records ever made.
My friend Herky Williams suggested some writers he felt I’d be comfortable with. I worked with several top writers like Chuck Jones and Craig Wiseman and had an album’s worth of top-notch material. Barry Beckett had hired the best pickers in town, and we went to work on an album we would call Same Ol’ Me.
The album sounded great. It sounded Nashville. It sounded current, but it didn’t sound like the CDB. I vowed to myself that come what may, I’d never again go into a studio under duress by a record company and be forced to do a project without my band around me.
End of story.
CHAPTER 46
SAYING GOODBYE TO MOMMA
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sp; After my dad passed away in 1973, my mother sold her house on Wrightsville Avenue in Wilmington and bought a small place next to her parents in Brunswick County, near the town of Leland.
She retired from her job, and after both of my grandparents passed away in 1989, she moved to Tennessee to a small place on Twin Pines. Being close to Hazel, Little Charlie, and me, making new friends and a new life, she was the happiest I had seen her in years.
She would occasionally go on the road with us. She got to go to a lot of places she’d never been, lived a full and eventful life, and enjoyed every minute of it.
Her place was at the entrance leading up to our house, and the driveway went right past her door. So anybody coming up to our house had to pass her place.
There are two gates at Twin Pines. One is at the entrance, which is open in the day and closed at night. An inner gate is across the drive to our house, and that stays closed all the time.
One day some guy drove into the driveway to the inner gate that was closed, and he walked up to my mother’s house and knocked on the door.
When she went to the door, the guy said, “I need to see Charlie. I’m his brother.”
Whereupon my mother said, “Well, I’m his mother, and I don’t remember him having a brother.”
Poor guy!
In 1992 we found out that my mother had pancreatic cancer and knew it would be just a matter of time. I remember the night I dealt with the fact that my mother was going to die. I was on the road by myself in the bedroom of the bus when I admitted to myself that we had done all we could do. Medical science had run out of options, and it was in the hands of God.
I remember falling to my knees and crying bitter tears, accepting and reasoning with it, and finding a measure of peace.
The last few years of my mother’s life had been a constant joy, being close to her family, going places, and doing things she had never experienced before.
Roger Campbell had a mobile home next door to her at that time, and they became big buddies. He was always checking on her and spending time with her. She loved Roger, and she loved all my employees and was at her best at a CDB show.
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