by Randy Owen
Another signature song from the beginning was “Mountain Music,” a pure Alabama song in every way. It took me three years to write it, and I wanted to get my own experience of growing up in the mountains in the lyrics. This came together in such very specific lines. Take, for instance, the stanza that begins “swim across the river, just to prove that I’m a man.” When I was a kid, if you could make it across the Little River and back in one fell swoop, well, that was a big deal. It doesn’t look that wide today, but back then it seemed like an Olympian challenge.
Another key lyric is “playing baseball with chert rocks, using sawmill slabs for bats.” Chert rocks are a kind of hard gravel you find in the mountain ridges in this area. Since the soil here is very sandy, chert rocks are mixed into the surface of dirt roads and make the going a lot easier. During the rainy season, you don’t end up in as many ditches as my granddad used to fifty years ago.
We loved to use those rocks as baseballs, since real baseballs were hard to come by, so I stuck that detail into the song. Not that everybody got what I was talking about. I remember one interview after the song came out where this woman asked how my mother liked that song. I said, “She likes it fine,” and the interviewer replied, “Well, being such a Christian woman, I bet she especially likes the line about the ‘church’ rocks.”
Chert rocks almost got me in a lot of trouble, or so I thought at the time. After Alabama hit the big time, we were invited to a very elegant dinner in New York with the president of RCA Records. As a butler served up the food, our host, the executive who basically controlled our commercial fortunes, asked me about the song “Mountain Music,” especially the line about “chert rocks.” I started to tell him the story of using them on the roads back home, and he stopped me and said, “Well, I don’t know what you call them back there, but ‘chert’ is really not a word.” He said this like he was 100 percent certain he was right. I said, “Well, sir, I think it is a word and I think it is spelled c-h-e-r-t.” He then tells the butler to get a dictionary so he can look it up and prove his point.
I’m sitting there thinking, What if it really isn’t a word and the president of RCA thinks we’re a bunch of idiots and kicks us off the label? The butler brings back the dictionary and shows it to the man, and praise the Lord, there it is: “chert—a compact rock consisting essentially of microcrystalline quartz.” I was right and he was wrong. And though I’m sure it had nothing to do with the chert controversy, eventually he left the company.
Anyway, after “Tennessee River,” then “Why Lady Why,” then “Old Flame,” then “Feels So Right,” then “Love in the First Degree,” then “Mountain Music”—all No. 1 songs before the end of 1981—we focused on turning out a string of No. 1 hits for the next twenty-one songs. We were a hit machine. That was the whole goal. No. 2 or 3 wasn’t good enough, or at least so we thought at the time. A good way to grasp our goal it is to compare us with NASCAR racers today. No one lines up at the starting line of the Daytona 500 to come in second. Every driver has only one thing on his mind—being the first guy to see the checkered flag. We were the same way. We knew we made music that an increasingly large audience responded to, and we were there to deliver that audience bona fide hits.
And, hey, getting those publishing royalty checks in the mail wasn’t bad. I remember receiving my first royalty check like it was yesterday. We were still playing in Myrtle Beach, and I walked out to the mailbox one morning and saw an envelope clearly marked BMI, the performing-rights organization that distributes royalties to songwriters, long run by an incredible, loving woman named Frances Preston. Anyway, I saw that envelope, and my heart started pounding. Oh, boy, I thought, this is royalty money! I tore it open and saw two checks—one for $.25 and one for $.75. I was so proud. All I could think was that I had a dollar more than I had when I went to the mailbox. The checks got bigger, of course—in fact, an advance from Frances allowed us to build the house we live in today—but that first one will always stay with me.
As I said, from our earliest Bowery days we were an audience-oriented band, so we crafted our songs to appeal to two audiences—the radio audience and the live one. We’d record a song one way to make it radio-friendly, then open it up and provide a completely different experience onstage. That might mean segueing out of nowhere into a few bars of “Country Roads,” if we were in West Virginia, or getting the audience involved in clapping, chanting, or singing all the lyrics themselves. The point was to say to every audience in every situation, “Hey, we’re aware of you, we love you, and we appreciate that you’re spending your money to be here because it means a lot to us and our families.” That’s a much different attitude than thinking you’re doing the audience a favor by showing up and running through your radio hits, oblivious to what they are bringing to the party.
Responding to that audience, night after night, along with that NASCAR-driver obsession with winning every race, forced me to maintain a laserlike focus on what I was doing. This probably explains why I never got sidetracked by drugs or alcohol. There was plenty of dead time on the road—getting to a gig, waiting around for a gig to start, getting to the next gig—where I certainly had the time for some recreational imbibing. But I had to write another hit song or do another interview or make a friendly call to another radio station or—something I still do to this day—answer another fan letter. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe it was because of my strict upbringing. Maybe I didn’t want to blow it. Or maybe I just enjoyed feeling good and not hungover or wasted when it was time to hit that stage.
As we continued to turn out the original nonstop string of No. 1 songs, I almost felt guilty because we were writing most of them while all of the writers in Nashville were trying to get their songs to us to record. In one sense, it was an honor to have perhaps the best songwriting community in the world beating down your door with new songs because they thought you could make them a hit. On the other hand, you’re faced with the pressure of publishing companies and record executives pushing you to record a song simply because they knew it could be a hit with your name on it. There’s a line that’s crossed when you end up releasing a song that’s catchy and clever but has absolutely nothing to do with who you are, where you came from, or what you truly want to say. Soon you’re putting commercial success over creativity, identity, and roots. And in doing so, you’ve watered down your music and made it less special.
I’m afraid, at least from my own perspective, that Alabama began to cross that line in pursuit of always being number one. It threw us, as a group, musically off kilter; it threw me, as a singer-songwriter, into a lot of second-guessing about what I was doing with my life.
There really isn’t enough space in this book to talk about all the Alabama hits and misses, the ones I loved and the ones I didn’t. That will have to wait for the more definitive Alabama book where we all can weigh in about our collective songbook. I can tell you this, though: every Alabama song I wrote or co-wrote was monumental in my life. Each one connects to me deeply, either because it is directly autobiographical, like “Tennessee River” or “Feels So Right,” or because it comes from personal observation. “Lady Down on Love,” one of my favorites to this day, is a song that carries a back story with it, a story I often relate in concert to the audience before I perform it. Here’s that story, briefly.
In 1976, when we were still called Wildcountry, we were booked to play at a Red Carpet Inn in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Those were the days when we more or less did what the guy paying us told us to do. This guy, I remember, wanted us to wear matching leisure suits, a horrible experience, and he wanted us to go out and talk to the customers and find out what they’d like to hear. So I walked up to this table of young women and asked them what the big occasion was, and they pointed to one of their party and said, “We’re here to celebrate her divorce.” We all laughed about this common scenario, but then I spotted the new divorcée down at the other end of the table and noticed that she didn’t seem too happy. I asked her about that,
and she said, “I’m not happy. I’d really rather be at home, be with my husband, and still be in love.”
This comment really stuck with me. Usually a woman in that situation would say that she was glad to get rid of the sucker and be “free” again, and all her friends would chime in about what a loser the guy really was. But not this woman. She gave me a surprisingly frank, heartfelt response. And the next words out of her mouth became the first line of the song I wrote about her. “You know,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve been out on the town like this since I was eighteen years old.” The song begins with:
It’s her first night on the town since she was
just eighteen, a lady down on
Love and out of hope and dreams.
The ties that once bound her now are broke away,
and she’s like a baby, just
Learning how to play.
I ran back to my motel room and wrote that song as fast as I could. I thought if I could just get it to Johnny Rodriquez, a huge star at the time, I would have a No. 1 country hit and be on my way as a songwriter. I even switched the lyrics of the last verse to tell this sad story from the man’s point of view, with a guilty plea that “I gave in to lust, and she just couldn’t live with a man she couldn’t trust.”
It didn’t work out with Johnny Rodriquez, I’m happy to report, and we recorded it for the first time soon after for the Wildcountry album Deuces Wild in 1977. Later we rerecorded it as Alabama, and I’ve always felt that I finally got to do it exactly the way I wanted—the exact right guitar-solo intro, the exact right string arrangement by Kristin Wilkinson, the exact right Alabama harmony, the exact right feeling I felt the first time I met that young lady. It wasn’t overdubbed, overdone, or overanything.
My favorite Alabama album, if you were dying to know, is Just Us, which came out in the middle of the 1980s Alabama prairie fire, in 1987. This was a period when I was personally consumed with the possibility that we were making hit records one after another but in danger of losing our soul in the process. This one album helped me get over that worry. “Face to Face,” off of that album, I wrote up in Dale Morris’s office. I had this tune bouncing around in my head, a very romantic tune about two young lovers. I had the feeling, but I didn’t quite have the line I needed to convey the depth of that feeling. I walked around with this problem for weeks, until I was up on the third floor of our house one night, and it came to me—the simple phrase “face to face.” The fact is, the most important thing when making love to someone is that you are fulfilled with that person and want to look at him or her, face to face. If it’s not there when you are face to face, then it’s probably a one-night stand. It’s not going to last long. As the song says, “We happen face to face.”
Another song on that album that was a high mark for me is “Falling Again,” co-written by me, Greg Fowler, and Teddy. I thought it was a hit from the moment we recorded it; Teddy was not so sure. It ended up becoming the BMI Song of the Year, a very prestigious award based on how many times a song is actually played on radio within a given time frame. It is the only song I ever wrote that was given that award, and it is still a source of considerable pride.
But the most personal song I wrote that ended up on Just Us, in fact one of the most personal songs I’ve ever written, was “Tar Top.” Tar Top was a nickname given to me as a kid because of my thick black head of hair. The song is 100 percent autobiographical, a look back to our Bowery days, and I originally conceived of it as kind of a present to Teddy and Jeff and our early years together. The central line is, “Where are you going, Tar Top?” It was a question I often asked back then—“Where is this music thing going to lead?”—and was still asking at the very height of Alabama—“We’re a hit, that’s for sure, but where do we really want to take this music?” It goes like this:
It was July hot ’cross Georgia
On my way to Myrtle Beach
I just got my diploma
so I set out in search of me
The honeymoon was over
And Alabama was far away
From being little more
Than just a Southern state
I got a gig down at the Bowery
I played for tips and watered drinks
Just a novice in a business
That’s seldom what it seems
And where are you going, Tar Top?
Where’s J.C. and the Chosen Few?
I saw the Flash without T. Gentry
and B.V. left the Malibus.
Those cryptic references in that last verse were touchstones for all of us. Jeff Cook (J.C.) had a group called The Chosen Few. Teddy (T. Gentry) once played with the previously mentioned Bickerson Flash. Ben Vartanian (B.V.), our drummer in those days, did his time with the Malibus.
Together we decided to put it out as a single, and it didn’t make it to the top. I think a lot of people kind of laughed at it, never taking the time to stop and listen to the words and focus on the imagery we were trying to evoke. The record company people hated it. It was not their choice, and I don’t think they exactly went out of their way to make it a hit. It broke our string of consecutive hits at the time. The next song released, “Face to Face,” hit No. 1, followed shortly by “Fallin’ Again,” another smash. “Tar Top” was no hit, but to me it was one of the most important, and memorable, songs we ever released.
Simply put, it wasn’t a song that just anyone could sing. Only we could do that song, because it was about our lives, our identity, our music. Many artists have songs so personal to them and so identified with their lives that it’s hard to imagine someone else singing them. James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” comes to mind. It’s about a special girl, Suzanne, and a specific event that only he truly understands. That’s how I feel about “Tar Top.”
And, for what it’s worth, the video of “Tar Top” is, in my opinion, the best video we ever did. Directed by David Hogan, it has a special place in my heart because my son, Heath, all of four years old, is seen riding his bike in the video.
“Tar Top” and the album Just Us resolved a lot of my problems about getting too solely commercial for our own good. It helped me get past those singles that might have been good for Alabama, and all the people who made money off of Alabama, but really weren’t about Alabama. I have never for a minute regretted all the success that Alabama was blessed to have, due largely to the people who bought our records and came to our shows. I would be the worst kind of ingrate if I felt any other way. I thank God in my prayers every night for all the good fortune He has given us, and I just hope I’ve done an adequate job of repaying Him and our public for their many gifts. I’m still working at it.
As the Alabama Express kept moving down the track and we turned the corner on the 1990s, the pressure, exhaustion, and constant, never-ending workload began to take its toll. The success didn’t stop. From 1990 through 1993, we had another eleven No. 1 hits on country radio and kept up the grueling pace of hundreds of shows a year. If you look at one of Barbara’s booking sheets from 1991, say, from March through the middle of December, it is a blur of inked-in scribbling of fifteen to twenty dates a month. In September, for instance, there are seventeen appearances scheduled, from York, Pennsylvania, to Jackson, Tennessee, and three days marked in big black letters, “Jeff off.” I’m sure he was happy about that. I loved looking at that sheet and seeing, somewhere, “Randy off.”
But, as Dale said, we were making hay while the sun was shining, and we knew this was a unique opportunity that might never come again. We weren’t about to let anyone down or blow anyone off, from the fans in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, to Dick Clark. Every night we would go onstage and sing about many of the things we loved the best—the Tennessee River, family dinners at home, even playing for tips and watered down drinks—and occasionally we even got to go back home to remind ourselves about why we were working so hard. As crazy as life on the road could be—and it got plenty crazy—I was blessed to be grounded in the one sure thing in m
y life—a loving family.
CHAPTER 7
THE FAMILY
Me and my woman’s done made our plans
On the Tennessee River, walkin’ hand in hand
Gonna raise a family, Lord, settle down
Where peace and love can still be found.
“TENNESSEE RIVER” BY RANDY OWEN
Kelly remembers the exact moment when she knew our home life was about to change and most likely change for good. We were still living in the little brown house on Baugh Road with the wood-burning stove for heat. Our daughter, Alison, born in December of 1977, was about five, and our son, Heath, born in 1981, was still an infant Kelly was carrying around on her hip. The house, to repeat, was primitive. Besides having no heating system, it had no insulation, and it was ice cold in the winter. The wind came through the cracks in the floor and ceiling. Unless you were huddled around the fire, you were miserable.
Our solution to this thorny problem was to nail old carpet wherever we could to cover those cracks. Teddy and I had worked at one point as carpet layers, and so we used our carpeting skills, I guess you’d say, to cover the walls in one bedroom and the kitchen with carpet scraps to keep out the cold. It looked a little weird—cheesy carpeting running up a wall like furry wall paper—but it did the trick. No one froze to death.
One other detail about that house worth mentioning was its TV setup. Kelly and I had bought a used color TV in Myrtle Beach from Don and Belle Tyler at the Century House, and since this was long before cable or satellite television, plus we lived way back in the woods, we had to erect an antenna on a long pole in the front yard. The problem was, the antenna had to be pointed in just the right direction to get the closest stations in the area—places like Chattanooga, Huntsville, or even Atlanta. Each of those locales demanded a different antenna position. If we wanted to watch the Atlanta news broadcast, say, Kelly or I would have to run outside in the cold and turn the pole toward Atlanta. It worked best when we were both at home—one of us could fiddle with the pole outside, while the other stayed inside and yelled, “A little farther that way, no, back the other way…” Then the pole turner would run back in, we’d snuggle up against the carpet walls, and watch TV.