Born Country

by Randy Owen

  I look forward to it and always have, because I always feel good after a big show. I’m exhausted, but I’m also exhilarated. After a few years of this kind of aerobic work, I realized that the healthier I was when walking onto the stage, the better I felt afterward. I didn’t start out to be heath conscious. It just turned out that way. Which was another reason drugs and alcohol never appealed to me much. They might offer one form of pleasure, but they definitely detracted from another form, the pleasure of pushing myself onstage. My parents never had a drink of alcohol or an upper or a snort of coke in their lives, but some of my extended family weren’t so pure—a few of them both abused alcohol and were abusive because of it. Let’s put it this way—I never met a drinker or drug consumer who was a good role model for the practice.

  Using stress to eliminate stress was a healthy thing to do, and I increasingly tried to benefit from living and eating right, but it wasn’t a magic pill. In retrospect, it seems I could not have avoided what now looks like an inevitable crisis. Kelly calls it the Big Kahuna.

  It came in May of 1994. One evening, we flew back to Nashville from Los Angeles after the annual ACM Awards. Dale had an old car he let us use occasionally, so I decided to drive from Nashville to Fort Payne so I could once again sleep in my own bed. As I drove home, I felt completely exhausted and was probably dehydrated, though frankly at the time I didn’t really know what “dehydrated” meant. I just knew I needed rest.

  In bed that night, I was abruptly awakened by one of the commercial jets headed for the Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta. Atlanta is ninety miles away, but the jets heading east get pretty low when they fly over the high point of Lookout Mountain and can sometimes be so loud they almost knock you out of your bed. See, even way up here in Northeast Alabama, you can’t quite escape from civilization.

  When that jet woke me up out of a dead sleep, my heart was beating very fast. It definitely frightened me, especially since long after the noise was gone, it was still beating at a dangerously high rate. Kelly awoke and said that I had “a real funny, pasty color.” I told her I thought I was having a heart attack. She took my pulse. It was sky-high.

  Kelly called a friend of ours who was a registered nurse, and she told us we should head down to the ER at the local hospital in Fort Payne. We did as told, but when we got there, the hospital staff went into such high gear that it scared the hell out of me all over again. They were just doing their job—looking for signs of a heart attack or some other kind of pulmo-cardiac malfunction—but since they had no instant answers, I stayed stressed. They hooked me up to an IV, gave me a stress test, ordered up some nitroglycerine to expand my blood vessels, and concluded there was no apparent sign of a heart attack.

  The next morning we made the decision to go to Birmingham to see a cardiologist for a more definitive diagnosis. There they administered an arteriogram, or angiogram, an X-ray test where they use a special dye to see how blood flows through your heart and arteries. During the procedure, I could hear the doctors talking about my heart canals and arteries, and I remember one doctor saying, “Well, that one’s perfect. I bet the other’s the same way.”

  Under the anesthetic they had administered, it seemed to me that the lead cardiologist, Dr. Randy Harrison, had eyes as big as saucers. That worried me. Maybe the other one wasn’t the same way, I thought. Then Dr. Harrison said, “Your heart is fine, Randy. In fact, it’s really something. Your arteries look like a baby’s arteries.”

  “Is that good?” I asked, anxiously.

  “Yes,” Dr. Harrison said, “really good.”

  Apparently my problem wasn’t a damaged heart. His advice was simple: if you want to go fishing, go fishing. If you want to go hunting, go hunting. Exercise if you want. But if you’re off to exercise or hunt or fish and someone wants to stop you and distract you with some urgent matter, that person is not your friend. “Don’t stop,” he said, “to talk to people and be responsible for everything that’s going on in the world. If you continue to stop every time to solve every problem that comes along, you’re going to end up destroying yourself.”

  So I didn’t have a heart attack, it turns out. I had an attack of exhaustion, both mental and physical but probably more mental than physical. That doctor did me a huge favor. He explained what was obvious to him: my body was shutting down.

  By this time word had gotten out that something was wrong with Randy Owen. The media started showing up at the hospital, and Greg Fowler, along with a very competent public-information staff on-site, had to step in and run interference. Kelly remembers being in the hospital room and looking up at the TV newscaster reporting, “Randy Owen has apparently suffered a heart attack.” We had to dodge the cameras and stamp out those kinds of reports at the same time that we were alerting Nashville to what was actually going on. Whatever Alabama had scheduled in the coming days wasn’t going to happen. As I mentioned before, a lot of people, probably in excess of a hundred or more, were now dependent on the band for a salary check, but I had to let that thought go for once. I was hospitalized until the doctors told me differently.

  Kelly then did something she rarely did in the last two decades of nonstop Alabama-related obligations and appointments. She stepped up and said no. “I’ve never stood in the way before,” she let it be known, “but I’m standing in the way today.”

  As the doctors explained, I was exhausted, worn out, spent. Remaining in this state could lead to something much worse, like a stroke or genuine heart failure. I now thank God this emergency happened, because it was clearly an early warning of more dire consequences to come. And if you are of the mind-set where you feel superresponsible and superdriven to make sure everything, all the time, is satisfactory and smooth sailing to a roomful of people—that is a difficult mental habit to break. It’s probably a harder habit to break than a drug habit, though I’ve never had the latter. It was not selfish for me to start thinking about taking care of myself. It was mandatory.

  We stayed in the hospital for a couple of days, often trying to convince people who dropped by that the problem wasn’t my heart—in fact, had never been my heart—but my pace and my attitude. Still, some people didn’t quite understand. If I was just tired, they concluded, then all I needed was a little bed rest and I’d be back on the same schedule. Otherwise, I’m dragging my feet. It got to the point where if someone from the business side called me at home, Kelly would tell the person she wasn’t even going to give me the message. When someone said, “Oh, there’s nothing really wrong with him,” that person could only hope that Kelly wasn’t within hearing distance, or they’d catch some serious blowback. Without her at that time, I don’t know what I would have done.

  You can begin to resent it when you feel you’re being misunderstood like that, or worse, taken for granted. It works on your insides, breeding anger, self-doubt, and depression. That’s exactly how I began to feel: resentful.

  You can ask anyone—Dale, Kelly, Greg, anyone—and each will tell you I was not the easiest person to be around in the period following that scare. I tried to withdraw and understand what my body was trying to tell me at the same time others were trying to pull me back into the endless routine and worries that had put me in the hospital in the first place. It was a clear and plain disconnect between what I felt inside and what was expected of me outside, and I hated it. I was more than out of sorts—I was in a state of mental pain and confusion—and it was best to keep your distance. I was on a short fuse.

  As Kelly has remarked, there was the added pressure of everyone thinking that because three of us were cousins, Alabama as a group always got along and, as she says, “were happy, happy, happy all the time,” and that of course just wasn’t true. We didn’t make a point of airing our differences in public, but we had them, for sure, and in this period, I took it all very personally.

  Dale remembers how difficult it was, or should I say, how difficult I was. “It got to be,” he now recalls, “where Randy would go out and perform, and
I’d make a special effort to come to the show, and he wouldn’t even see me at his dressing room afterward. He completely cut me off. He wasn’t seeing anybody. And, boy, that killed me. Because, you know, you feel like you’re the father of this troupe, trying to take care of everything, and you feel that coming back at you. It was tough. It was tough on all of us.”

  Barbara Hardin is even more blunt. “He was funky and mean, but we just loved him anyway. He was mean as hell. He didn’t speak to any of us for like three months. They were playing at Opryland that year, and I would just show up every night anyway. I’d just stand in the corner and smile at him so he’d know I was still there.”

  Kelly contends that I was the first one to go down in the group because I was the one who felt too responsible all the time. “Hell,” she would say to me, “maybe you should think about doing a little more drinking and acting up, and that way you might be still out there running around. Maybe a bad habit like that would be good for you. You might just miss one of those all-important meetings you never miss now.”

  The kids had to experience all of this as well. Heath saw the uncertainty in my outlook. “When he had the panic attack, it was one of those things where he was down because he really didn’t know what to expect. He was worried about what might be next. Is this just a prelude to something much worse about to happen?”

  Whatever the source, I was emotionally raw, that’s for sure, and withdrawn and unpleasant and surly and quick to anger and, in general, one unpleasant bastard. During this dark episode, I began to realize something I never really thought about for the preceding fourteen years. It wasn’t just the pressure of the business or the disagreements with the other people in the band that was pushing me over the edge. It was also something I had failed to do for a decade and a half—mourn the loss of my father.

  It made perfect sense. My daddy had died suddenly of a massive heart attack. In the midst of this overpowering career of mine, I had what I thought was a massive heart attack. I felt the connection, deeply, before I was ever conscious of it. It was also like I had to experience, in some way, what he had experienced to feel the full measure of his loss.

  The people who knew me best could see this, and that probably helped them see beyond my sullen behavior. Dale, to whom I was and still am extremely close, saw this clearly. He called that mourning period “just about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” It was painful for him to watch and painful for me to endure. I guess the grief, and maybe the guilt, had been building up for all those supersuccessful years, and it just had to come out when I hit the wall like that. Grieving takes time—it is not something you can simply turn on and off like a light switch. I had to learn that lesson in the worst of circumstances, when few people around me understood and a lot of close associates simply needed me to carry on with the show.

  When a person is in a state like this, inevitably a doctor will suggest medication of some sort. Something my parents would never consider—have a problem? take a pill—is now the way most of us live. I was clearly suffering from some sort of depression, perhaps even a bipolar condition, and I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I signed up for a series of medications but didn’t feel right about it. Kelly and I began to educate ourselves as to the possible downside of these drugs, and the more I learned, the queasier I felt about becoming dependent on them to sleep, to calm down, or anything else. Later, after the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger, I saw that three or four of the meds he had been taking had been prescribed to me as well. One was Xanax, another Inderol. At the time, I took them and hoped they would bring me out of my funk. I was wrong.

  I remember being at the June Jam that year and feeling really out of sorts and difficult to be around. Why do I feel this way? I kept asking myself. It took me awhile, and some insight from the books we read, before I realized I didn’t need these medications and they were in fact counterproductive. I felt bad. They made me feel even worse.

  Again, it was by God’s mercy, by the help of someone watching over me or praying for me, that I made the decision to pitch them into the wastebasket. I kept remembering what the doctors in Birmingham told me. Because I never smoked and had always done physical labor, my arteries were healthy, my heart strong, and my blood pressure low. One doctor said he wished his blood pressure was as low as mine. There’s no reason, they said, that I needed to do anything other than rest and stop carrying the weight of Alabama on my shoulders. So that’s what I tried to do, despite all the depressing and angry moods I fell into. I waited it out, you might say, and never developed any dependence on prescription drugs that often ends up controlling a lot of good people’s lives.

  In the process, I developed a more skeptical view of doctors, a view my parents always had. The sad part is that doctors are some of the most wonderful and big-hearted people in the world. But they are also people who can give you things that might end up killing you, if you don’t watch it. Your health is your responsibility. They are just your medical advisers.

  I switched from doctors who treat ailments to a wellness doctor, one who helps me design the right way to live and keep away from self-induced practices that would impair my health. I like to protect myself against illness instead of simply waiting until it happens. That’s a critical lesson I learned during this bad stretch—take your own health seriously, and maintain a watchful eye over habits, including the habit of working too hard, that can only lead to trouble. I believe it’s a sin to go out and just try to kill yourself, and I don’t plan on doing it anytime soon.

  Now, at the advice of my wellness doctor, I have a glass or two of wine when I want to. It’s not something I grew up doing, but there are genuine health benefits to wine, not to mention the taste. In fact, as I write this, I am planning to start my own vineyard up here on Lookout Mountain. I’d love for my daddy to be around so I could toast him with the first glass of Owen-produced wine.

  It took me a couple of years to come out of this whole episode, all the time touring and recording, and outside of a small group of people, no one had any idea about what was really going on. I didn’t write a book about becoming burned out at forty-four or waiting fourteen years to grieve for my beloved dad, then going on Oprah to talk about it. I prayed and kept working. By this point Alabama had at least thirty-six No. 1 hit records, and the touring and recording demands were still intense. We were a well-oiled touring machine, a small group of professionals—from the players onstage to the extremely proficient and creative people backstage—and despite my being, in Barbara’s words, “mean as hell,” we kept moving forward.

  The next turning point probably came the summer I decided I wanted Kelly and the kids on the road with me. It was toward the end of summer, well after school let out. They probably spent a month with me on tour, going on a big Midwestern swing through places like Michigan and South Dakota, and it was wonderful. We had never traveled as a family like that. I had never come off stage in a distant city, night after night, to see the four of them waiting for me in the wings. Alison was a junior in high school by then, Heath was a freshman, and “Punk” was still a punky five or six.

  That extended family adventure, I think, was the occasion where my bad feelings about my life started to fade and I began to feel almost normal again. Whatever healing I had needed, physical or mental, had slowly happened, and I was ready to resume the responsibilities of my career without resentment or reservation. I may have been less malleable after that and much less anxious to make sure that everything was hunky-dory all the time. From 1996 until we decided on staging the American Farewell Tour in 2003, Alabama kept up a rigorous schedule of touring and recording, and I did a much better job of balancing that work with other passions in my life.

  Barbara has said that she thinks Kelly and I are the most grounded people she has ever met. I don’t know about that, but I clearly lost my footing during that period and became as ungrounded as I have ever been. Again, I thank God and Kelly and everyone else for allowing me to stumble around until I reg
ained my equilibrium. I’d say I’m the better for it.

  Kelly feels that I got stronger through that experience, and she is probably right. I had a much better grasp of how I was going to conduct myself going forward, protect myself from the pitfalls and pressures of this life, and preserve my energy for the important things like performing and my ever-increasing charity work. Kelly says I even sounded more powerful onstage: “It was not like somebody who had been reborn, but just somebody who had really gotten a new strength, spiritual as much as physical, and was now totally committed to using it. He certainly didn’t lay back—in fact, I’ve never seen the man lay back. He just had a whole new way of doing things.”

  Kelly has a saying—“It’s hard to hide real people.” What that means, I think, is that your real nature is going to come out in some way, whether you’re trying to hide it, even from yourself. “Real” people simply accept this fact and try not to disguise who they are with pretense, money, fame, drugs, alcohol, or any other diversion. You get up, and you are what you are. Otherwise, as someone said, when you’re not yourself, you have to go around remembering who you were when other people said they liked you. It’s a simple lesson—drop the idea that you have to be all things to all people all the time. We are all imperfect. If you screw up, fine. You’re not alone.

  I knew we weren’t finished with what we set out to do with Alabama, and I knew I would forever feel bad if I just gave in to the pressure and quit. Or gave into the pressure and let myself go. By the mid–’90s, we were certainly back in high gear, and as I said, few people knew there was even a slight pause in our momentum. “Staying Power” read the cover of Country Weekly in June of 1997, summing up our then seventeen years on top and more No. 1 hits like “Give Me One More Shot” and “She Ain’t Your Ordinary Girl.”

  By the end of the decade we had been recognized in ways unimaginable to anyone in the music business and especially to this group of four self-trained musicians—Jeff on lead guitar, Teddy on bass, Mark on drums, and me on lead vocals—who had remained a solid unit since 1980, through thick and thin.