by Randy Owen
Asked about her favorite song, Sue replied, “Oh, ‘Feels So Right.’ I just knew Randy was singing it for me. But don’t tell Kelly.”
If someone back then had compared us to the Beatles, I would have laughed out loud, and looking back, it’s still a major, major stretch. But we did strike a different chord in country music, I think it’s fair to say, and early on we had some industry fans who proved to be enormously helpful in getting our music heard. Very high on the list was Dick Clark.
Dick Clark booked us for the first time on American Bandstand, the most popular TV music show at the time, on October 4, 1980. American Bandstand was a pop music show for teenagers. It featured every genre of American popular music that Dick Clark thought his teen audience would like. We appeared on the show that also featured Tanya Tucker. President Jimmy Carter had declared that week Country Music Week, so Dick booked a whole week of crossover country acts.
Dick had been featuring country stars on American Bandstand since the 1950s. The only act who ever turned him down, he says, was Porter Wagoner. Porter was booked, but when he got to Philadelphia for the taping, they told him they only paid scale, so he left. By the time we were asked to do Bandstand, we would have paid Dick to let us play. It was exposure that money couldn’t buy.
Dick seemed to understand what we were about from the very beginning and knew that our music had an appeal far beyond the then-existing boundaries of the country genre. “They were one of the first groups to blend rock and country music,” he later said. “They had broad appeal. Plus, they were true to their music and devoted to their fans. They kept the ship all together and treated it like a business, in addition to a career in music. They had it all.”
Our relationship and friendship with Dick stretched from that day in 1980 all the way through the 1980s and ’90s to today. Through the great help of Dick, Gene Weed, Bill Boyd, and others in his operation, we appeared on many of his shows, including the Academy of Country Music Awards, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and others, and he even graced us with his presence at one of our June Jam festivals in Fort Payne in 1986. And Dick is quick to point to our success in winning the American Music Award, an award ceremony he himself created. All told, we ended up being honored with twenty-three American Music Awards, the most in the history of the award, even ahead of legendary winners like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. In myriad ways, Dick Clark opened the door to our exposure to millions of fans who had never heard of Hank Williams or George Jones.
We were so fortunate to arrive as a group when we did. For whatever reason, our timing was just right. As I have often said about the era of music we walked into: “Thank God for disco.”
Disco music had dominated much of the popular music business in the 1970s. There were many other things going on in music, from the Eagles to Willie and Waylon and the Outlaw movement in country to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and the Moody Blues. But disco was huge for millions of radio listeners, and when we arrived, it was waning, and a lot of kids were looking for some alternative. We didn’t fit the standard mode of a live-fast, die-young rock-’n’-roll group, we weren’t traditional country, and we sure weren’t disco. Disco was dance music, with lyrics that were generally either self-referencing—“Let’s dance tonight!”—or inane or both. We entered the fray with story songs. It’s a long way from “Get Down Tonight” to “Tennessee River.” And a lot of music fans were ready for that change.
It didn’t take long for us to realize we could do shows and sell tickets on our own, without being part of a multiact lineup. We only did about ten shows as an opening act. We quickly built to the point where we were our own opening act and closing act. Initially, we worked with all the big regional promoters who would pay us a flat fee and reserve most of the profit, if there was a profit, for themselves. But soon you could no longer “buy” Alabama, that is, negotiate a fee for our services. We joined forces with our own built-in promoter, Keith Fowler, who made all the appearance arrangements for the group. If you wanted Alabama at your local arena or civic center, you had to go to Keith to make the deal. Soon we were competing with the biggest music promoters in the business for bookings. We did it all ourselves—booking, ticket sales, merchandise sales, the whole show. I personally didn’t know how other bands did it, but I knew that’s how we did it, and Dale, Barbara, and Keith oversaw everything. Soon we added our own music publishing company—called Maypop—to the mix. It gave us all the more creative and financial control of our lives. (The Maypop, in case you were wondering, is a flower–passion fruit indigenous to our corner of the world.)
We didn’t play big stadiums in this superhot period because that wasn’t much of an option in those days. We might play a stadium in conjunction with a football game, say, in Denver or Texas, but mostly we played arenas and a lot of state fairs. We also hit as many small towns as we could. We never hesitated to go anywhere we thought there was an audience who wanted to hear us.
As Dale has said, “In our business, you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. And we continued to make that hay in the sunshine for almost thirty years.”
The point when I personally began to understand that what we were doing was making bigger waves than I ever imagined came in West Palm, Florida, sometime in 1980. We were on tour at the time, doing mostly small clubs, but this was an arena situation. Backstage the noise we heard from out front sounded like a jet plane fixing to land. It was a constant roar. I remember being back there and asking, “Wow, who else is playing here tonight? They must be big. Listen to that.”
Then we walked out onstage, and it was mayhem. The place was packed, and kids were screaming and yelling, throwing things, pitching underwear onstage, just completely going wild. The noise was overpowering. We didn’t have a sound system that could possibly compete with that kind of crowd noise, but the crowd didn’t seem to care. Even though we only had one certified hit at the time, “Tennessee River,” they seemed to sing along to every song we played, and they were singing a hell of a lot louder than we were. It was crazy and a little disorienting, but it was fun.
That experience began to be repeated pretty much all the time. We would walk into a place like the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, and it would be so loud and rambunctious we could barely hear ourselves sing and play. We were still only getting anywhere from $3,500 to $5,000 to perform, but we knew it was no longer about that particular payday. It was about the amazing energy and enthusiasm of the people who came to see us. And in those early days, we were as eager to play small-town venues of 2,500 people as we were to book the big-city ones with 25,000. It was a smart strategy—we went to where the fans were, and they appreciated it.
Greg Fowler joined us full-time as our publicist and all-around problem solver in 1981, and he remembers that transition from an Alabama performance to an Alabama event. Once we got to playing arenas, all we had to do was announce we were coming to your town to play, and the ticket rush was on. “I mean,” Greg remembers, “word got out, and it was over. People would camp out to get tickets, and I don’t mean camp out overnight. I mean camp out for days and days. They would hold their places in the ticket line with their chairs and blankets night and day, whether it was snowing or not. This was before the Internet or online buying. You had to physically go get a ticket. And they did.”
Once inside, we tried to give them a show. When we arrived in San Diego for the show with Marc Oswald, we were all in that one smelly Marshall Tucker bus. Within a year or so, we’d pulled into Minneapolis or Gainesville with four or five tour buses and six or seven beautiful fly trucks full of equipment, all necessary for a tightly organized high-production-value stadium show.
Largely due to the influence and insight of Dale, we aspired to create a show that rivaled any major rock act at the time. I remember one time I went to a Bob Seger concert in Memphis to see his kind of stage production and how much it inspired me to be more creative in mounting our own show. Thanks to people like Ricky Farr, who brought
in our high-powered light-and-sound tech, we ended up with some of the most innovative stage lighting for the period, moving lights that would spotlight each of us onstage as we took a solo. We had all kinds of stage rigging, from elevator lifts to big drop curtains, called Kabuki curtains, that we would emerge from behind. We finally found a sound system big enough to handle that kind of massive crowd environment. We’d turn it up loud, and the kids would want it louder. Some of the more traditional country fans who came out to see us probably had to adjust to the mayhem, but they kept coming. As Dale once said, “We’d put the sound on eleven even though it only went to ten.”
As we ventured further and further away from our Southern base, we had to confront one sticky issue: the rebel flag. If you look at certain Alabama album covers, beginning with My Home’s in Alabama in 1980, you’ll see the Confederate flag somewhere in the picture. Early on we took our cues on this from the Alabama state flag, which is two thick red lines crisscrossing against a white backdrop. Call us naive, but where we came from in the backwoods of northern Alabama, that symbol was simply a matter of regional pride and identity and nothing else. We didn’t use it as a signal about our feelings about black people or to make a political statement or anything, anymore than someone would wear an Oklahoma Sooners sweatshirt to piss off people in Texas. Before it became a controversy, we left any sign of the flag off all of our branding and stuck with our unique graphic of the word “Alabama.”
We sure didn’t want to limit our audience to people who were still fighting the Civil War. If our music wasn’t traditional country, it wasn’t traditional Southern, either, and certainly not in its appeal. We love living in the South, no doubt about it, but we came along when people outside of the South still saw the South in stereotypical ways—to put it bluntly, ignorant, racist, backward—and we thought it was important to take our music elsewhere and maybe open a few eyes. I hope we did. All I can tell you is audiences loved us in the Midwest, among other regions, and they were probably people who had never picked a boll of cotton or eaten a piece of sweet-potato pie.
We got our knocks in the press that we were too country, not country enough, too slick, too pop, or too commercial for the cause of good music, but when we walked onstage, what we saw was a place packed to the walls with people going crazy and having the time of their lives, and they could pick up a reasonably priced T-shirt or hat on their way out. We were playing many of the same basketball-game-sized buildings, to many of the same people, as the biggest rock acts of the day—acts like Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, Alice Cooper, Styx—sometimes with two shows in one day. And we could fill those buildings as fast as anyone.
A whole army of people helped make those shows happen over the years, from Terry Cologne and his family, who were instrumental early on in the design and marketing of our merchandise, to all the wonderful promotional people at RCA. At one point we had one whole bus full of nothing but people involved in the merchandise end. And we had concert promoters like Bob Romeo and his dad handling events like rodeos and fairs, and others like George Moffitt, Barry Fey, and Jimmy Jaye who were vital in getting us into the right venues.
When we came to a new place to play, we had a system that ensured we’d be as accessible to both the media and the fans as possible. Around 4:00 p.m. on a performance day, we’d hold a press conference, and we’d all be there to answer any and all questions and try not to show favoritism to any media outlet, big or small. Then we’d have some pictures taken and sign some autographs for special guests, like radio call-in winners, then we’d do a sound check onstage, cool off a little, and then do the show. After every show would be the big autograph session. We would sign autographs after every single show, and we wouldn’t leave until the last person left. We’d be at, say, the Minnesota State Fair or an arena in Richmond, Virginia, and people would be lined up all the way around the venue or all the way down into the fourth turn of a milelong raceway, and it could be cold or rainy, but we’d happily stay out there and sign every poster, T-shirt, or back of the program. Sometimes the road crew would have completely torn down the stage set and packed it into the trucks, and we’d still be smiling for pictures with the last bunch of fans. We might start with a press conference at 4:00 in the afternoon and end with one more autograph at 2:00 in the morning. To us, it was just part of the show—meet the fans afterward.
But most people didn’t come to a show mainly for the lights, the sound, the autographs, or the T-shirts. They came for the music.
Writing songs like “Face to Face” and “Lady Down in Love” is both a matter of inspiration and craft. I was always very proud about how we could craft a song in a way that made it both memorable and exciting. When I started writing back in high school, I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew what I liked. I liked songs with a unique, individual sound, a signature lick or phrase, or, to use the common musical language, a hook. This could be either a guitar or other instrumental hook or a lyrical one. A lot of the songs I loved as a kid, both country and rock, had that kind of sound in which the minute the song came on the radio, you knew what it was. For instance, a song I really liked while growing up was “Secret Agent Man,” by Johnny Rivers. “There’s a man who leads a life of danger…” If you know the song, the minute you even read the title, you start singing it in your head. It has that one-of-a-kind hook to it.
This is equally true with a country classic like Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City,” also known as “I Wanna Go Home.” The minute you hear the phrase “I wanna go home,” you’re singing along. The lyric line is unforgettable, as is the recurring low guitar lick. The difference between this and “Secret Agent Man” is that the latter is a song about a make-believe spy “swingin’ on the Riviera,” and “Detroit City” is about a man stuck in a factory job who wants to go back home in the South. It’s a real story.
Signature licks or hooks are hard to create and if you’re lucky enough to find the right ones to fit a melody and lyric, that song can have a long, long life. Most of the big Alabama hits have a definable hook. Take “Tennessee River.” As I mentioned earlier, the lyrics of this song refer to my own experience of seeing that river with my daddy on the way to Scottsboro, Alabama, every first Monday of the month. The lyrics generalize from that and talk about things we hope for in our lives—to relive the good times of growing up and settling down “where peace and love can still be found.” Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, when wars raged and a president and other leaders were assassinated, peace and love were longed for by millions.
But, musically, the first thing you hear in “Tennessee River” is some eerie background sounds and a single guitar. It’s a kind of futuristic-sounding rhythm guitar that to me sounds like you’re going underwater and then back to the top again, like you were swimming in a river. When you hear that strangely melodic opening, you know the song that’s coming. It sounds like a small thing, but successful three-minute popular songs are made up of many small things.
Then the song begins with its slightly up-tempo Southern-rock melody. You’re singing along, hopefully enjoying the feeling of being in that peaceful country place, when all of a sudden, the tempo completely shifts, and you’re tearing it up with a hell-raising bluegrass fiddle. It is almost two songs in feel, like you were lying by the river and suddenly decided to get up and dance and kick your heels. Now imagine hearing that song in an arena full of 18,000 rowdy fans. They are just waiting for that shift when Jeff kicks in with that fiddle and we blow the roof off of the house. When I wrote the song, I had Jeff’s playing firmly in mind; in a sense, I was writing the song to build to his solo.
Other songs have other hooks and feature other aspects of Alabama’s versatility, like adding a bass solo by Teddy to “My Home’s in Alabama,” but that sudden shift in tempo in many of our songs was entirely new to country music at the time. Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” makes me think of this. Rock songs often altered rhythm and melody in the middle of a song, but to country-radio programmer
s, it sounded a little strange. Plus, we were mixing rock instruments with fiddles. This was a period when country music was increasingly pop oriented in its sound—the so-called country-pop movement—and we were told that country radio was trying its best to get rid of bluegrass. Bluegrass was old music and reminded people who didn’t like it of hillbillies in overalls with chews of tobacco in their jaws and a car on blocks in the front yard. They didn’t want to hear banjos, mandolins, and especially not fiddles. There were no fiddles in the music of Olivia Newton-John or Anne Murray. Fiddles were old school.
So we come along with a song that suddenly breaks into a pure bluegrass fiddle riff, not watered down with strings or overdubbing or any other softening effect. From the perspective of today, where the most popular country artists will proudly include anything from steel guitars to mandolins to stand-up basses and celebrate the whole history of country music in their songs—where Gretchen Wilson will proudly evoke the name of the great George Jones—it seems kind of silly that having a fiddle in the band caused any controversy. We got the song past the naysayers, even though they removed a verse to make it acceptable to radio, and by the time it hit No. 1, the controversy was over. And the audience never even knew there was a controversy.
We kept Jeff’s fiddle at the heart of our music. When we released the song “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band),” though we didn’t write it ourselves, we certainly gave the fiddle its due. When it became our fourteenth straight No. 1 country song, I doubt if there was a person in the country-music business who was mumbling, “They might really make it if they’d just drop that damn fiddle from their sound.”