Born Country

by Randy Owen

  In any case, while playing college ball at Samford, the team would play the University of Alabama Crimson Tide every year on their home field in Tuscaloosa. And every year, without fail, Heath would step up to the plate and out of the PA system would come an Alabama song, played at maximum volume. The home-town crowd would go nuts, thinking this was the cleverest way to taunt and rattle an opponent ever invented. Heath thought it was dumb and tacky, which it was.

  At his last game at U of A, Samford beat the Tide, and Heath had a really good day, going two for three with two doubles. At his last at-bats in that game, when the music started up yet again, it was all he could do to keep from turning to the crowd, taking a bow, and flipping them off. He held himself in check. He didn’t want to come off as the smart-ass son of a famous singer.

  Randa, now a sophomore at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, got the biggest share of the late-Alabama or post-Alabama view of my life. As with all of them, I tried to arrange my schedule so I wouldn’t miss a baseball or football game or a school play. With Randa, a lover of livestock and animal husbandry, I wouldn’t miss one of her beauty pageants or cattle shows. “Punk,” we call her, as in the sitcom character Punky Brewster. And Punk loves the country life.

  Growing up when she did, Randa is a little mystified by all the star talk. People ask her what it’s like to have a famous dad who goes on tour all the time, and her answer is: “I look at them, and I’m like, you know, he’s my dad. He goes to my football and softball and basketball games, you know, like a dad. He’s a shoulder to cry on; he’ll call you up and give you hell if you get out of line. Sure, he goes on tour and performs onstage and sings with all these amazing artists, but at the end of the day, he comes home. And he’s just my dad.”

  My bonding time with Randa is on the ranch. She loves the fact that I can be on the phone with a music producer one minute, then hang up and the next minute be examining a cow and talking about pedigrees. I love that too. I love having a daughter who finds the cattle business as rewarding and relaxing as I do.

  One of Randa’s fondest memories of being with me, and one of mine, too, occurred at the Alabama State Junior Heifer and Steer Show just last year. It was her last year to show because she was about to graduate high school and become ineligible. She had started showing at eleven, and I remember how excited I was that at least one of my kids had a passion similar to my own boyhood passion and of course my daddy’s lifelong passion.

  In any case, it was her last year, her last shot, and she was showing a Hereford mixed-breed steer, called a Hereford Influenced steer, named Romeo. And she won! Romeo brought home the blue ribbon. And as Randa remembers it, as she stood out there in the show ring, I came running out and grabbed her and gave her the tightest hug I’d ever given her. I don’t doubt it. It was such a proud moment for me. With my help, mostly cheerleading, she accomplished something she had set out to do, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Randa says we just stood out there forever until other people started to stare at us like we were a little crazy. I couldn’t have cared less.

  Randa, a.k.a. Punk, won National Champion Hereford Heifer this year at Kansas City and is now majoring in animal science at Auburn with an eye on becoming a veterinarian. Like both Alison and Heath, she is out there pursuing her own dreams, in the same way I did when I took off for South Carolina after college, and here’s hoping they all reach them.

  Randa’s interest in all things country as a kid only helped reenforce all the pleasure I got from having a different work life on the ranch away from the demands of the music business. From our days in Myrtle Beach, Kelly and I would come home on weekends and hop in the pickup truck and take hay to my daddy’s cattle. They were commercial cattle—stockyard cattle—but he loved to tend to them, and so did we. My dream, as I mentioned, was to be able to buy him some registered cattle to own and swap. After he died, I decided to fulfill that dream in part by going into the cattle business myself.

  Kelly and I started with three registered Herefords and built the business from that. We now have six hundred head of Herefords and Angus plus a number of crossbred cattle. I profit from this enterprise in so many ways that go beyond money. It connects me to the land. It connects me to the rhythm of the seasons and the life cycles of the animals, to the memory of my daddy, and now to my children and the legacy of this mountain property I hope to pass on to them and their children. And the cows don’t care who I am. If I don’t feed them and take care of them, they are going to bawl.

  And my dogs didn’t care who I was, either. Two of the most memorable dogs we had during this period were two bulldog puppies named Pooterst and Chillynx, a tribute to the imaginary friends Reba and I had as kids. Chillynx, the female, didn’t get along too well with humans, but Pooterst, the male, was one of the most beloved animals in my whole life. Then he wandered away one day and broke my heart. I offered no less than a $10,000 reward for his return. When I got no takers, I offered the same amount for even information about his whereabouts. No one ever stepped up.

  During the constant comings and goings of Alabama, I tried to invent ways where I could stay close to home and still keep the music coming. One of the best ideas we came up with was the June Jam.

  The June Jam was a one-day, outdoor, multiartist music festival—all for charity—we began staging annually every June in Fort Payne starting in 1980. After it got rolling, it was a regular lollapalooza. Over the next sixteen summers, it turned into the biggest continuous outdoor charity event ever staged, certainly in country music, and maybe ever will be. It was one long sixteen-year party.

  The event started out on the wrong foot, as things often do. A promoter called us to say he wanted to put on a concert in Fort Payne and give all the money to charity. We showed up and did our part, and he disappeared. I’m not sure where any of the money went. We didn’t like to see the community burned like that, not to mention our being tricked, so we decided to continue the event and run it ourselves. That way we could invite artist friends to participate, and they knew they weren’t about to be sucker-punched.

  The first June Jam took place in the Fort Payne High School football stadium. As it grew, anywhere from fifty to eighty thousand people would show up to fill this converted hay and practice field adjacent to the high school. Overnight, a huge, free-standing, multitiered, two-stage set would spring up. Greg Fowler once said it was like “standing on the deck of the Enterprise.” The onslaught of people and stars would take over the town of Fort Payne for that period, much like the Woodstock Festival took over the small community of Bethel in Upstate New York. This was a Southern Woodstock for the whole family.

  At its height in the mid to late 1980s, June Jam was a huge operation, one that demanded its own staff apart from our crew that was on the road full-time with the band. It involved coordinating the schedules and demands of dozens of artists to come and perform—for free—as well as all the logistics in accommodating these huge crowds. Gaynelle Pitts, formerly our fan-club president, ran the show year-round with the tireless help of Denise Stegner, production manager Brent Barrett, stage coordinator Ed Turner, and big Steve Boland, our longtime road manager, running interference. The long weekend usually started with the annual VIP softball game—the band and crew would be one team; pro players, celebrities, and local politicians, the other. Then there would be the Randy Owen Celebrity Golf Tournament. There was also a parade through the middle of downtown Fort Payne, plus tours of the Alabama Museum in town, fan-club get-togethers, a special Gospel Jubilee performance, and Jeff’s fishing tournament.

  On concert day we would have two fully-rigged stages going at once, with the most sophisticated setup imaginable. At one point we had to bring in closed-circuit TV so a band waiting in their bus could see when an act onstage was wrapping up so they could get ready to perform. There was never any reset time between acts. When one performer finished on stage one, another started up on stage two, and all the people in the field had to do was reposition their blankets o
r lawn chairs.

  The greatest names in country music showed up year after year to play for free and help us raise money for area charities: Alan Jackson, Charlie Daniels, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks. When Willie Nelson came to perform, he showed up with a broken hand. He had apparently injured it in a bicycle accident just before the concert date. Thousands of people had come to the event just to see Willie, who is renowned for doing long, three-to-four-hour jam sessions onstage. I went to his bus that day and said, “Willie, we are so honored to have you here, and a lot of people specifically came to see you. Would you mind playing for at least an hour?” He said, “An hour? Sure, no problem,” and went onstage and did a fantastic hourlong set, broken hand and all.

  Among the most anticipated appearances at June Jam were Dolly Parton and Billy Ray Cyrus at the point when “Achy Breaky Heart” was the hottest song in country music. Only two performers in the sixteen-year history of the Jam asked for payment, and I won’t tell you who they were. You have to remember that this event took place right in the middle of summer, the busiest touring season of the year for any performer. Alan Jackson or Garth Brooks could have been playing some giant arena for serious money. Instead, that night, they were playing in a hay field in Fort Payne for free.

  We coordinated the schedule of June Jam to occur around the same time as Fan Fair, the giant gathering of stars and fans in Nashville. That way people could drive down for the day, or our plane would fly them down, and then head back that night if they wanted. Other fans camped out in Fort Payne, filled up every area motel room from Gadsden to Chattanooga, and through the good graces of local citizens, parked in driveways and slept in front yards.

  The June Jam was the biggest ongoing performance of the year for Alabama, even when we were at our very hottest. One year we had twenty-eight acts perform on one day. It was like going to the CMA awards and every nominee in the audience got onstage to perform.

  There’s a travel video on YouTube that gives the feel of the event—aerial shots of tens of thousands of fans sitting in the hot sun, little kids riding on floats in the parade down Main Street, Marty Stuart or Charlie Daniels or Wayne Newton onstage, me in the shortest of short shorts (very fashionable in the 1980s) getting thrown out at home plate in the softball game. As the video concludes, “What better way to spend a few days in June?”

  Over the years, we were able to raise over $4 million for charity through June Jam proceeds and gave most of it away close to home. We helped underwrite many improvements at the football field at Fort Payne High School, gave much-needed funds to area fire and police departments, and helped revive school music programs being cut from school budgets everywhere in and around Alabama. One year we gave $68,000 to the local school system so that kids could get new math books.

  We also set up a program for granting individual scholarships to worthy kids to be able to go on to college. I took charge of this end of things and loved the interaction with possible recipients. I’m not great with names, but I’ll never forget the kid who was the co-valedictorian of his high-school class but was actually homeless. He wanted to be the best naval officer ever. Or the girl who walked into my office in a dirty dress with lint all over it, a sure sign she had to work in the sock mills to help her family. She was third in her high-school class and dreamed of college, but her American father had passed away, her Japanese mother could barely speak English, and she looked completely defeated. I got her a start-up scholarship to Northeast Alabama Community College, and the next time she came in to apply for a full scholarship, she was dressed up, ready to tackle the world. It was a stunning transformation.

  For most of its duration, the June Jam event had the wholehearted support of the local officials and people of Fort Payne. But after sixteen years it finally came to an end for a variety of reasons but principally because the mayor and his staff at that time thought it was too much of a burden for a small town to handle. To us this was both baffling and hurtful. We were bringing millions of dollars of business into the area every June, not to mention the highest-paid country performers on earth, and they saw it as one big drain on city services like street cleaning and garbage collection. They increasingly made life miserable for us, we had a parting of the ways, and in 1997 the June Jam went dark.

  But the spirit of June Jam still lives on through two operations: the Alabama June Jam escrow account, a way of continuing to dole out proceeds to worthy organizations, and the annual June Jam Songwriters Showcase, a place for accomplished songwriters to expose their work to the public. In 2008, the showcase took place at the Northeast Community College in Rainsville, my alma mater, and all proceeds went to John Croyle’s Big Oak Ranch for boys and girls, three separate Northeast Alabama facilities for abused, neglected, and wayward children.

  So my steadfast partner in life, Kelly, my growing family, the cattle business, and music-related events like the June Jam kept me close to home and for the most part grounded in a place and a way of life I understood. But, that said, breaks at home didn’t completely eliminate the pressures of Alabama. Our ascendancy from Holiday Inns to traveling two hundred or more days a year was so fast and our commercial success so constant and prolonged that the stress was clearly building, even though I was so focused on the job at hand that I wasn’t all that aware of it.

  I was aware, of course, that I often had to say yes to some commitment or some marketing strategy or even some soon-to-be hit song when I wanted to say no. I was aware that I was one of a band of four who spent untold hours together, on and off stage, who didn’t always see eye to eye on things, but who had to keep working as a unit for the sake of the whole enterprise, an enterprise responsible for the livelihoods of dozens of people. And I was aware that once I left the mountain, I had no privacy and no real freedom to go somewhere with the family and be left alone. I could see these distinct day-to-day pressures, but I wasn’t cognizant of the bigger picture and the cumulative effect of those multiple sources of tension.

  Kelly, at a slight distance, could see things building much better than I could, but then again, the Alabama phenomena was as new to her as it was to me. At some point, under this kind of constant pressure, something had to give. And that something was my health.

  CHAPTER 8

  BREAKDOWN

  Now there’s a sad lookin’ moon

  Shinin’ down on me

  There’s a sad lookin’ sky

  As far as I can see

  “SAD LOOKIN’ MOON” BY RANDY OWEN, TEDDY GENTRY, AND GREG FOWLER

  By the early 1990s, I was sitting on top of the flagpole. The whole group was up there, in fact, and looking back, I don’t think this was something that was widely acknowledged in the media at large. Our fans knew who we were, as did country radio, every aspiring writer of country songs, and the country-music business in general. Dick Clark and the American Music Awards sure knew who we were, along with the Country Music Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, and the Grammys. We had won the CMA Entertainer of the Year three times in a row in the 1980s and the ACM Entertainer of the Year five years in a row, and to top off the decade, we were awarded the prestigious ACM award for Artist of the Decade in 1989.

  We had sold a lot of records and walked across a lot of award stages by then, but we really weren’t heralded in the mainstream media for many of our accomplishments. We were well on our way to becoming one of the top twenty best-selling popular music acts of all time and all genres, but I doubt if too many people who weren’t big country music fans knew that. In many ways, we operated under the radar of the national press.

  The reason for this is probably pretty simple. We didn’t cause scandals, the mother’s milk of the entertainment media. We weren’t seen out partying in New York or Los Angeles or throwing furniture out of a hotel window in Paris. We didn’t move to Nashville or participate in the publicity-generating social world there. We didn’t have public fallings-out or lawsuits or hateful tit for tats in the National Enquirer. We were three working musicians wh
o did our job, gave great attention to our fans, then went home to Fort Payne and tried to lead normal lives. We were big business, but we were a very grounded operation. Success in the entertainment business and notoriety in the tabloid press are not the same thing. You never saw a picture of me, with a hat pulled over my head, sneaking out of the Betty Ford Center.

  When you’re on top of the flagpole, you get pulled in a lot of directions. People want you to show up at their fund-raising events, come to their inaugural balls, talk to their morning drive-time radio DJs at six in the morning, be in their newspapers, and even sing at their weddings. A reporter from a Birmingham newspaper casually dropped in on my mama one day, chatted with her for a while, asked her a lot of questions, then published a big feature story about her. She considered it a complete affront to her privacy that anyone would do such a thing. I always saw stuff like that, at least when directed toward me, as just part of the job, but sometimes all the personal appearances and other demands on your time become the job itself, and the music almost becomes what you do between all the other “must appears” on your schedule.

  The one way I’ve always dealt with stress was with stress of another kind. I could get rid of a lot of the emotional and psychological stress with the physical stress of performing or, when I wasn’t in the performing mode, with good old-fashioned exercise. Doing a three-hour show in front of twenty thousand people is definitely a workout. I don’t just stand there onstage with a guitar, singing and smiling. I’m jumping around, singing loud, taking off one sweaty T-shirt and pulling on another, and in general putting on a show, and it can be very physically demanding. I would often walk off the stage having lost four or five pounds just in sweat alone. I felt like Chipper Jones after a playoff game. Performing is definitely an athletic exercise.