by Randy Owen
The first night of our honeymoon was spent in a Motel 6 in Montgomery, Alabama—Kelly was still under 18, so she got to stay for free—and our first meal as newlyweds was a Whopper at Burger King. We went from there to Panama City, Florida, for three days, and then I dropped Kelly off at my folks, and I went back to work. Our life together was starting out in much the same way it would continue for the next thirty years.
Kelly moved in with my parents because it didn’t make sense to put her into an apartment in an area where she’d never lived while I was on the road so much. Since both of my parents worked at the time, she’d try to help out as much as she could, like fixing dinner when they came home. It’s not as if we had a lot of belongings to crowd into their house, so we didn’t feel like we were imposing. Kelly never owned even a wedding dress, let along a large wedding trousseau. Kids today, like our recently married son, Heath, and his new bride, Cara Hudson, are given showers where they get silk linens and sterling silver and espresso coffee-makers. Our wedding haul amounted to a couple of Pyrex dishes and some Tupperware. Not that we complained. In fact, Kelly still has some of that Pyrex today.
From the moment we were married and had our abbreviated honeymoon, Kelly understood something intuitively that many young wives might have to struggle to accept. If I had any chance of making it in the music business, then one basic rule applied: the music came first. That didn’t mean that I loved her any less or, as the years went by, that I loved my kids any less than a stay-in-town dad. It simply meant I was embarking on a demanding and unpredictable course in life, a profession that didn’t always make allowances for anniversaries or birthdays or a two-week vacation in Panama City. This wasn’t a lifestyle to me. This was a way to make a good living. I wasn’t in it for 3:00 a.m. room service in expensive hotels and meeting groupies after the show. I was in it to make good music and support my family.
I had to get on a bus or van and take off thousands of times in our marriage, but what I wanted from Kelly, and she so lovingly provided, was a home to come back to. I wanted a place where I could be sure that every day when the kids came home from school, someone they loved would be waiting to greet them. At times it would be hard—very hard—for her not to get down and feel deprived and put upon in my absence. Raising three kids isn’t easy even when both parents are around all the time. It’s an even tougher job under the circumstances we faced, and it takes just the right person to pull it off. Thank God I found that person in that bar in Myrtle Beach early in my life.
Alison, the oldest of our three children, was born on December 13, 1977, which just happens to be the very same day on which I was born. We weighed the same, were the same length, and were both born in Fort Payne. I don’t really know the cosmic significance of that, but it’s easy for me to remember her birthday.
Anyway, the three of us settled into a trailer in Myrtle Beach, and the work of Wildcountry/Alabama forged on. Besides Myrtle Beach, we also had winter-season gigs that helped keep money in our pockets. There was a little club in Greenville, South Carolina, called Chief’s Restaurant and Lounge—run by two diehard supporters and friends, Chief Jordan and Billy Bullock—that gave us steady employment between Labor Day and springtime. We also played at a club called the Split Rail in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Brewery in Knoxville. No wonder we later built the Alabama Theatre in Myrtle Beach and consider all of the Carolinas like a second home. The whole region kept us alive for almost a decade.
Staying in one place for so long and building a solid, always-revolving fan base gave us a definite leg up when we began to record our original music. There was a whole underground of people around the South, people of all ages, who had heard about or had seen Alabama at the Bowery and would go home and tell their friends. Many successful rock bands—Bob Seger, Dave Mason, even Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band—built on a base of live performances in their home region to generate multiplatinum records. When we arrived in Nashville, we may have been new to the kingmakers there, but a whole lot of regular people already knew who we were.
We actually recorded three albums before we finally signed with RCA Records in 1980 and released the album that put us on the musical map. The records were, in order, Wild Country (1973), Deuces Wild (1977), and Alabama 3 (1978). A label called GRT released a single called “I Wanna Be With You Tonight” in 1977. It made it onto country radio and even broke the Top 80 on the music charts, but it wasn’t a smash hit by a long shot. It hung around at the bottom of those charts for the longest time. It may have set a record for the longest song stuck at position No. 99.
The GRT contract, a one-record recording pact, was engineered by a man named Dick Heard whose company, unfortunately, didn’t work out. We then decided to record our own album and pay for it, plus we needed to come up with some funds to buy our drummer at the time, Bennett Vartanian, out of his part of the contract. Jeff and I had to mortgage our cars. I took out a secured loan on my trusty yellow Camaro, and Jeff did the same with his 1972 Buick. Teddy, unfortunately, didn’t have anything to hock, but we didn’t hold it against him.
It was after this financial finagling to pay off our drummer that we made a telling decision. Jeff, Teddy, and I agreed never to bring in another partner or coequal member of Alabama, ever. The group would belong to the three of us, and that was it. It would be our name on the contract and no one else’s. And that’s the way it still is today.
The next big turn in the road was signing a management contract with a man named Larry McBride, a decision that turned out to be a colossal mistake. Mr. McBride took a song we had self-produced, “I Wanna Come Over,” and got it released on a small label out of Dallas called MDJ Records. Through MDJ, “I Wanna Come Over” reached No. 33 on the country charts. In 1980, our signature song, “My Home’s in Alabama,” off the same record, broke the Top 20.
To make the long and frustrating McBride story short, after we signed a record deal with RCA Records and started making some noise, we began the laborious process of extricating ourselves from our management situation. It took us a lot of time and a lot of money—almost $2 million when all the dust settled—before we succeeded in getting out of that arrangement. When I look back upon that period, I’m almost bitter about this contractual entanglement and the stress and pain it caused in all of our lives. But we survived it, thank God, or I wouldn’t be here today telling you this story.
Musicwise, what happened was that the same MDJ album, called My Home’s in Alabama, was bought and rereleased on RCA Records, and if you read the fine print, it lists the producers as Alabama; our dear friend and record producer Harold Shedd; and Larry McBride. If you look in old record bins at flea markets today, you might be able to find a copy of the album on MDJ and another copy on RCA. Alabama’s first two No. 1 hits, “Tennessee River” and “Why, Lady, Why,” came from that record.
Around the time we were making My Home’s in Alabama, two people entered our lives who became essential to our success. One was Barbara Hardin, the woman who booked the band almost from day one, and the other was Dale Morris, the manager who took our career from zero to a hundred almost overnight.
To hear them tell the story—and I trust their memories more than my own—it all started when Harold Shedd made a tape of our album and passed it along to his friend Dale because he thought Dale would appreciate this exciting new group he was working with. Dale, who I’ll talk about more in a minute, then passed the tape on to Barbara, who had been working for him in various administrative capacities for the previous three years. Barbara was a Nashville native who had worked for an agency owned by Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn before coming to work for Dale. She was in her twenties and looking for something to put her career in high gear.
Barbara started listening to the tape and couldn’t stop. She claims to have played it over and over for three or four straight hours. She walked into Dale’s office the next morning and announced that she wanted to become a booking agent and that she wanted her first booking ac
t to be Alabama. At the time, Barbara worked in country but rarely listened to country music at home. She was a rock-’n’-roller by taste. She is not the last person who would claim, “Until Alabama, I didn’t even like country music!” Every time we heard this, we knew we might just be onto something.
Soon after, Barbara, as probably country music’s first full-fledged female booking agent, began booking us with Mr. McBride still as our manager, and as our relationship with him grew worse, our relationship with her grew more intimate. She became a sympathetic ear to our many complaints about how we were being handled, or mishandled. We had made no money in producing the record with him and barely survived on our cut of the stage shows. We were getting nowhere fast. She would ask Dale, already a very successful manager in the music business, for his arm’s length advice and pass it on back to us. We soon realized that Barbara and Dale were people we could trust and work with for the long haul.
There is more to the McBride fiasco, but like I said, I am good at blocking out bad memories, and this was one of the worst. After we broke off with him, McBride got into some serious legal trouble, and around 1980 he ended up going to prison. Even though we were pretty burned out with managers by that point, it became increasingly clear that we needed a steady, creative hand to help us navigate the jungle of Nashville, and Dale Morris was that hand. It was probably the smartest business decision we ever made.
By late 1979 or early 1980, things started to feel like they were definitely moving. Barbara now had her hands full booking us into clubs outside of our usual stomping grounds. The MDJ edition of My Home’s in Alabama was getting some notice and some chart action. After years and years of relative obscurity or at least a low-key regional reputation, we were finally getting national attention. A big, big turning point came in the spring of 1980 when Barbara booked us on the New Faces of Country Music Show, a showcase for emerging talent that was part of an annual Nashville event called the Country Radio Seminar. Reba McEntire, also just starting out, was on the same bill. It was a big gig for both of us.
The Country Radio Seminar, or CRS, is a big doing in the country-music business and has been since it began in 1969. It’s essentially an around-the-clock, three-day cocktail party for country-radio personnel and country performers to rub elbows and exploit one another. Radio programmers from all over the country converge on Nashville to meet artists, established and new, get to know them up close, and get them to tape promos like, “Hi, I’m George Strait and you’re listening to my favorite station in Birmingham!” Many fresh new country stars first meet the radio people who are so important to their rise at the New Faces Show. Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, and, of course, Reba are all former New Faces.
We got to our big New Faces showcase, and the people who ran it, steeped in an old style of country performing, made us do it their way. They wouldn’t let us use our drummer because they had a studio group playing all the instruments. The three of us were forced to perform “My Home’s in Alabama” without instruments, like we were a traditional country male trio. The guys in the house band had no idea how to play our music according to our arrangement, and the arrangement of Alabama music, then and throughout our long career, was always as critical to the feel of the song as the melody or the lyrics.
It was a nightmare. Teddy tried to show the house drummer exactly how to play the song, but the guy didn’t even have a foot pedal to keep the beat. In mainstream country songs at the time, a foot pedal was rarely called for. We had no choice but to do what we could and sing our hearts out. We got through it, but it didn’t sound much like the record. I don’t mind saying it now—I literally cried when we got off that stage. I thought that we had blown our one big chance of turning the corner in our career. What we performed didn’t sound remotely like “My Home’s in Alabama” or “Tennessee River.” We had been hamstrung by the old Nashville ways.
Heartbroken, we dragged ourselves back to Myrtle Beach, feeling totally defeated. The very next morning we got a call from Nashville that three labels—RCA, Capitol, and Columbia—were bidding for our services. Money aside, RCA sounded pretty good to us. Three people there, it turned out, were instrumental in getting us noticed—the legendary Tony Brown, Sheila Shipley, and Jerry Bradley. We were exposed to Joe Galante, later to become the president of RCA in America, and they wanted to sign us and rerelease My Home’s in Alabama on RCA.
RCA had a sterling name in country music. It was the label of Chet Atkins, among other greats, and they had been savvy enough to sign Elvis Presley in 1955, after his early days with Sun Records, for $35,000, an unheard of amount in those days. RCA, originally the Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, was the company that had sent a man named Ralph Peer to Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927 to record an obscure country group from the hills of Virginia called the Carter Family and a singing brakeman and yodeler named Jimmie Rogers, a seminal event in the history of recorded country music.
The old Nashville players at the New Faces gig didn’t get what we were up to, and some of the people at RCA were a little baffled as well. When it came time to release “Tennessee River” as a single, they made us water it down a bit and drop the second verse to make it more palatable for country radio. It was a compromise I didn’t want to make, but they held all the cards. When you hear the song in concert, you’ll always hear the arrangement we created, including that second verse.
With My Home’s in Alabama already making some waves and the corporate machine of RCA on our side, we were right at the starting gate, if not a little bit down the track. The single of “Tennessee River,” our first megahit, was released in early 1980, following our signing with RCA a few months before. We played our last regular show at the Bowery on July 12, 1980. We’d come back a thousand more times to Myrtle over the next twenty-five years to see our fans and play on our home field, so to speak, and we later built the Alabama Theatre on Kings Highway there to cement the connection. But our seven-year apprenticeship with Bouncing Betty and playing covers at the Bowery was at an end. We were headed on down the line.
Unfortunately, in the worst kind of irony humanly possible, an event happened that would not only color the early years of Alabama, but also color the rest of my life.
I drove the van back to Alabama
To find my mama alone
She said, “Son, he’s run a good race.
And he’s in a good place.
Yea, a good place now.”
“GOOD” BY RANDY OWEN
CHAPTER 5
G.Y.
My dad was a big man with a will that was tough
He was at his best when the going got rough
He made a living for the family and never had to cheat
To keep food on the table and shoes on our feet
“FOOD ON THE TABLE” BY RANDY OWEN
The year 1980 was shaping up to be big. My baby sister, Rachel, was about to graduate from high school and was planning a big wedding for April when she would marry Ricky Carroll, a man from the Sand Mountain area of Alabama. We were fixing to sign a record contract with RCA; our single, “My Home’s in Alabama,” was getting a load of airplay and moving up the record charts. I had a great wife who had stood by me during the uncertain years of the late ’70s and a beautiful three-year-old daughter, Alison, who gave me all the more reason to get back home every chance I could. The general plan in the back of my brain—make it in the music business, raise a great family, make my daddy proud—was definitely taking shape, almost miraculously. I could feel God’s hand directing me down the exact right path.
Alabama had just finished up a big event in Nashville in April, and we were about to head off for what would be our final summer at the Bowery in Myrtle Beach. It was a perfect time to get home for a day or two before we headed east. Kelly and I flew in, and Mama and Daddy picked us up at the Gadsden, Alabama, airport. Mama was driving our old Chevy van, as usual, as we rode back to Fort Payne. I told Daddy all about what was going on with the band. I said, “Daddy,
I feel that things are fixing to happen; in fact, some good things already are happening.” And I remember him saying, “Well, son, it’s about time. You’ve worked awfully hard. You deserve some success.”
That night Kelly and I visited with my grandparents, and while we were at their home, Daddy apparently had some kind of spell and didn’t feel too good. When we got back home, he was lying on the couch and looking a little peaked. At that point I didn’t know much about the history of his health, certainly not the recent history of other such episodes. I hadn’t been around all that much since I first took off for college and then joined Teddy and Jeff in Myrtle Beach to plant the seeds of Alabama. Mama never told me that he had had these spells before when I wasn’t there. Neither of them thought much about them, I guess. He’d be out working somewhere, start to feel bad, come home and rest a while, and then feel fine again. It was part of their general outlook, honed by years of poverty and tough times, not to complain or overreact to passing health concerns. He had never complained about his health when I was around between gigs, and he wasn’t complaining now. He figured it was just part of getting old.
He also wasn’t interested in getting checked out, before or now. Kelly, for one, was a little baffled that he didn’t go to a doctor, but he figured that these little episodes that came and went were simply something he should endure, with God’s help. My parents weren’t Christian Scientists—they weren’t opposed to doctors—they just saw such visits as an unnecessary expense, like going to a dentist every time you had a toothache.
That next day, as he seemed to be feeling better, I told him I had to go back to Myrtle Beach because we were about to start up again. I remember he was sitting in his bedroom, leaning on this chair, and he said, “Well, fine, go ahead, I’ll be alright, don’t worry.” I said, “Daddy, I really don’t want to leave you like this,” but he wouldn’t hear of it. My sister Rachel and her brand-new husband, Ricky, were around when this all happened, and they didn’t seem that concerned either. As usual, we all took our cues from Daddy. He was not about to let me interrupt what looked like a rising music career because of a few temporary chest pains.