Born Country

by Randy Owen

  I don’t think that if Dale had survived that terrible day at Daytona, he would have continued to race full-time for too many more years. Something I always respected about him was his love and devotion to his wife—in the face of all the temptations and distractions of his celebrated life—and I think he could see the day when racing would take a backseat to spending more of his life with her. Remember, I said that our lives in many ways paralleled each other’s. About the time Dale died was the time when I and the rest of Alabama were thinking about making a critical transition in our lives and the life of the group.

  We had reached the twenty-fifth year of an amazing musical journey, our silver anniversary. It was time for what came to be known as Alabama’s “American Farewell Tour.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE FAREWELL TOUR

  I wish we could’ve played one more

  We hope you remember

  We’re just the boys in the band

  And what keeps the fires a burnin’

  Is always, you, the fans.

  “THE FANS” BY RANDY OWEN, TEDDY GENTRY, AND GREG FOWLER

  As the new century began, none of us—Teddy, Jeff, or I—had the thought that it was time for Alabama to hang it up because we were over the hill or had worn out our welcome. None of us felt our time was up, nor did Dale Morris or RCA or all the people who supported Alabama. We had enough hits under our belt, and the ability to generate more, that we could have gone on touring for years to come. In fact, at a long three-plus-hours Alabama concert, we could perform a whole playlist of nothing but No. 1 hit songs, one after another, and still have a bunch left over. Plus, there were timeless non–No. 1 songs we love to do, like “Angels Among Us” or “Dancin’, Shaggin’ on the Boulevard” or “Tar Top” or…you get the point.

  When we were touring in 2000 and 2001, we could look out at the audience and see two or three generations of people staring back at us. The kids who used to wear the Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts when their parents brought them to a concert in the early ’80s were now sitting next to their kids wearing Coldplay T-shirts. And the women who got chills during a performance of “Feels So Right” in 1994 were still turning and smiling at their husbands. We were still packing them in.

  Professional musicians are a lot like professional boxers or athletes of any kind—they never know quite when to step away. I’m a fan of Roger Clemens, who formally retired from baseball, then kept coming back for four more seasons. Muhammad Ali probably went back for one too many fights. It’s a tough call. I’m also a huge Packer and Brett Favre fan, and I sure respect his wanting to play, now with the Jets.

  For Alabama, by 2002 we had reached a point of decision about how to carry on what by then had been a twenty-two-year tradition as a recording group and a good seven or eight years before that as Myrtle Beach’s own Wildcountry. We had done enough and gathered enough memorabilia to fill up a fair-sized Alabama Fan Club and Museum in downtown Fort Payne, open three days a week. We could have easily gone on touring, maybe forever for all we knew, but what we did know was how we didn’t want to end up. We didn’t want to keep going until the luster and distinction had completely worn off the name Alabama. We didn’t want to become a nostalgia band or end up playing smaller and smaller rooms in Las Vegas or Branson. We’d already done our stint, a long one, as a bar band. We didn’t want to end up a high-class bar band in a bigger, glitzier version of Myrtle Beach.

  Personally, I wasn’t quite sure what to do at that point. After decades of continual touring, my instinct was just to stop for a while and let the next move come about in some organic way. I wanted to take a year off and see what would happen. I felt I had lost the focus I had always had when it came to music, and I wanted to get that back. Other members of the group had their own ideas about what to do next, but I thought stepping away was the right way for me to gain a new purpose and passion.

  Kelly and I had many long talks about exactly what to do. She kept reminding me what a big transition was coming up no matter what we did. It was a little like jumping off a cliff. That’s why I kept thinking about a sabbatical instead of a clean break. After structuring almost my entire adulthood around being on the road, giving that up was frankly a bit frightening. I could sense the relief in not thinking about Alabama every minute of the day, but I could also sense the loss. Family aside, Alabama was my life and my identity. It was not something I could just casually let go of.

  Like most things to do with Alabama, the Farewell Tour evolved as the right way to end one phase of our career and enter the next one. Dale puts it another way: “It happened because I talked them into it,” which is true. We didn’t want to break up as a group—we didn’t break up as a group and haven’t broken up as a group to this day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that to reporters. The idea of a big farewell tour was simply a way of focusing on our accomplishments to that point, giving our fans a chance to see us at the very top of our game, playing our best songs, surrounded by the best production possible, and walking away from touring as champions, not as people who had stayed too long at the party. We wanted to bow out with style, grace, and enough raw energy to still blow the roof off the house.

  Again, by doing a farewell tour, we were forging new ground in country music. Country fans, as had been said to the point that it’s a cliché by now, are the most loyal fans on the planet. You win over a country fan, you’ve generally got a fan for life. For this reason, country acts tend to keep going until they expire onstage. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see Merle Haggard or George Jones in person, no matter how old they are? They are timeless songwriters and performers. A “farewell tour” is a tradition among rock and pop groups, except for the Rolling Stones, of course. Think of The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz. Think of Cher’s Last Tour, in 2002, after forty years in the business. The Judds had done a final tour in the early ’90s when Naomi Judd was diagnosed with hepatitis, but that was an exception. In the same way country record labels in 1980 said, “Sorry, we don’t sign bands,” a lot of people in the business in 2002 said, “What? You can’t have a farewell tour! You’re still big stars!”

  We announced the Alabama American Farewell Tour during the May 2002 telecast of the Academy of Country Music Awards and announced it to none other than our great friend ACM producer Dick Clark. It was a bittersweet moment. Sure, I’d finally have time to spend with my wife after almost thirty years of a marriage where the music always came first, and a major burden was about to be lifted off of my shoulders, but at the same time, an era of my life was ending and certainly in terms of musical accomplishment, the best years of my life.

  Enlisting the help and guidance of Marc Oswald as well as Dale, Barbara, Greg, and our merry band of stone pros, we spent almost two years planning this massive tour. Initially the plan was to do forty cities in 2003 and call it a day. After we did the first forty, we realized we weren’t quite through, given the enormous response we had received, so we scheduled another forty shows that took us through 2004. In all it was a four-year operation from start to finish, and it brought all the satisfaction and sense of completion that we all hoped it would. It was a kick-ass way to say both thanks and goodbye.

  The first forty-show leg of the Farewell Tour—lasting most of 2003—took us to large-scale venues in major cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, DC. There are so many highlights of that year that I don’t really know where to begin. Probably the single most moving event of the whole year took place in Washington in August. With the help of the Veterans Administration and a lot of other fine people connected to the military, we scheduled a special performance at Nissan Pavilion in nearby Bristow, Virginia, to honor all the soldiers fighting on the two battlefronts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

  We had long done events to salute our military, such as performing with Bob Hope a number of times, the most memorable to me being a patriotic event at Constitution Hall in Washington. What has always stayed with me was a trip we made afterward to t
he National Vietnam Veterans Memorial, “The Wall.” It was snowing that day, and Mr. Hope was quite old, but he nevertheless got out of his car and walked right up to the wall to pay his respects. When I mentioned how much I admired him for doing that, he gave me a sage piece of advice. He said, “Listen, if you are going to err, err on the side of your country.”

  On every stop of the Farewell Tour, we paid special tribute to the troops and often brought soldiers in the audience on-stage to be recognized for their service. After all, Kelly was an army brat, and we’ve always been close to people who devote their lives to, and sometimes give their lives for, our country. Kelly enlisted Mack Cooper and Danny Mack Hughes to ship free socks to the troops overseas, courtesy of UPS. At one point we sent a batch of socks directly to her brother, Col. Jason Pyle, then serving in Iraq. It was great to hear directly from Jason what those socks meant to his comrades over there. As I write this, Jason has just returned from his second tour of duty in Iraq. He has also served in Afghanistan. His service brings those wars, and all the men and women fighting them, very close to home.

  In any case, the event at the Nissan Pavilion was the culmination of our longtime support of American soldiers, at least in terms of Alabama on tour.

  It was actually just one part of two incredible days interacting with the military. At the concert itself, we set reduced prices for all military families and then bussed in several busloads of injured soldiers from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. As part of the show, we invited twenty to thirty “wounded warriors,” as the military rightfully calls them, onstage where they introduced themselves individually, along with hometowns, and told where they had fought. As they stood beside us, we performed and I sang “America the Beautiful,” which is Kelly’s very favorite patriotic song. It was an indescribable moment.

  That same night we were given two very special awards for our ongoing efforts to support the men and women in uniform—the USO Rising Star Award and the Pentagon 9/11 Medallion.

  The next day we were again honored by being asked to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. I had personally done this once before a few years back, but in the wake of 9/11 and the two wars going on at the time, this ceremony took on even more urgency and meaning. The Tomb Guards, who wear no insignia of rank, patrol the tomb twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was just an honor to get to meet and talk to them.

  Finally, I visited both Bethesda and Walter Reed that day and talked at length with other injured soldiers just returning from the front. It’s hard to put into words the impact of this sequence of events. Greg Fowler has said that “the whole days, to me, personally, were the two finest days I’ve ever spent as part of Alabama.” I’d have to concur.

  Because of the wartime circumstances, we started getting requests from soldiers who were about to leave the country to come onstage and publicly propose marriage to their sweethearts. Word must have gotten around, because this started happening at every show, sometimes two or three times. By the end of the tour we were batting 100 percent—not one of them got turned down in front of thousands of witnesses.

  Another special moment of that first part of the Farewell Tour happened in June of 2003. Teresa Earnhardt, Dale’s widow, was trying to figure out some way to pay tribute to Dale and raise money for the Dale Earnhardt Foundation. One of the major projects of the foundation was the Dale Earnhardt Legacy Forest, a direct outgrowth of his love of the outdoors. Teresa and I came up with the idea of a daylong music festival to take place right on the grounds of the Daytona International Speedway, the site of his death. No one had ever used the speedway for this purpose—a big music show—and we figured if there were ever an occasion to break with tradition and use the place for a nonracing event, this was it. The speedway people agreed, and so did a whole number of major country and rock stars who interrupted their summer tours to join us, including Brooks and Dunn, Kenny Chesney, and Sheryl Crow.

  The event dovetailed nicely into the Farewell Tour, in that we were all saying farewell to Dale in a positive public way. Logistically, on the other hand, it was a nightmare. We had long before booked Farewell Tour stops in Nashville and Birmingham for the exact same weekend as the Daytona concert, but the Daytona date was the only one available in the middle of racing season to allow drivers like Dale Jr. to attend. On that Friday night, we played Nashville. The next morning we hopped a plane to Daytona. That afternoon we played the Dale show, and as soon as the last note was hit, we caught a van to the airport as a major thunderstorm gathered overhead, flew to Birmingham, got a police escort to the hall, and walked directly onstage and starting playing. My mama would have said we only made it because of God’s hand, and she would probably be right.

  Because the Farewell Tour was a one-time-only, never-to-happen-again event, we created a special ticket package—only a hundred tickets available per show—that involved a front-row seat, a signed photo with the whole group, and a special limited-edition Les Paul Jr. “Alabama” electric guitar, autographed by the whole crew. In general and as always, though, we tried to keep both tickets and merchandise within a reasonable price range for our fans. We just figured that you shouldn’t have to get a loan from the bank to bring your family to the concert. There was sometimes a problem with pricing of merchandise at Alabama shows. Years ago, local concessions contractors would want to step in as middlemen and jack up prices to line their pockets. When we saw this coming, we simply withdrew our merchandise from the venue. This didn’t make the local operators too happy. In fact, one night Greg Fowler was onstage in Hartford, Connecticut, explaining this situation to the audience, when the venue people got so mad they just pulled the plug on all the power. We didn’t really care. We were there for the fans, not the promoters.

  The Farewell Tour, as originally conceived, officially ended at Rosemont Stadium, or Allstate Arena, in Chicago at the end of 2003. But we weren’t through yet. Because of the ticket demand, we decided to do one last forty-show tour in 2004 that would hit many of the smaller venues missed in the first go-around. In early 2004, right before we began to tune up for this tour, I was hit with another health crisis. This time it wasn’t something that had anything to do with a possible heart ailment. This time it hit me in the head—vertigo.

  And like the attack in 1992, this one happened at home. We were just about to take off for San Antonio, Texas, and the San Antonio Rodeo and Livestock Show. We were also about to receive the 2004 Country Radio Broadcasters Career Achievement Award. I was at home on the floor exercising, stretching my neck, that kind of thing. And then, all of a sudden, the whole world starting spinning around at a breakneck speed. It was shocking and frightening. It was as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve ever had. I genuinely thought I was going to die or maybe even had already died.

  Kelly, working out right next to me, jumped when she heard me holler as the world around me was spinning out of control, and her first thought was that I was having a heart attack. She could see that I was pale and my eyes were darting back and forth. When I described the spinning, she immediately said, “You’re having vertigo.” She would certainly know. In the early 1990s, she was diagnosed with inner-ear trouble and occasionally has vertigo-like symptoms. Later I found out that Dale Morris had also suffered from recurring episodes of vertigo. Like anxiety and depression, it is often something people just live with instead of going for help.

  Kelly got me on the bed and gave me some of the medication, called meclizine, that she had been prescribed for her inner-ear disturbance. It is a highly concentrated antihistamine that will dry up any fluid that’s in your eardrum. People often take it while flying to combat altitude sickness. It seemed to do the trick, at least temporarily.

  It took me awhile to even stand up, but the episode soon passed. The idea that I was going to get on a touring bus and travel all day and night to San Antonio seemed ludicrous. Any constan
t motion like a moving bus would certainly set it off again, I thought. And then there was the possibility that I’d have such an unnerving attack while in the middle of a song onstage in front of twenty thousand people. I could just see me falling off that stage in a state of complete delirium and panic.

  I ended up missing the Country Radio Broadcasters ceremony—Teddy, Jeff, and Mark took the stage without me—and we had to cancel the San Antonio show. Reba McEntire stepped in at the last minute to replace us. Doctors immediately began to experiment on me, for lack of a better term, to find out what exactly was going on. They knew right away that it was much more than a “dizzy spell” brought on by twisting my neck too quickly. In the same way that chronic depression is not to be confused with occasionally feeling blue, chronic vertigo is far more complicated, and dangerous, than occasionally feeling dizzy. It’s not something that you can just “snap out of.”

  Vertigo, they explained, as opposed to lightheadedness or dizziness, can be caused by a number of underlying disorders. There is something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), a common form initiated by head movements. Maybe that’s what I had. Dale felt that his vertigo was aggravated by the loud reverberations of a stadium full of screaming fans. Maybe twenty years of ear-piercing music and crowd noise had finally caught up with me. Or, more seriously, there’s something called Ménièere’s syndrome, which can cause abrupt, severe vertigo along with ringing in the ears and temporary hearing loss. My first episode, and subsequent ones, were certainly abrupt and severe. Or, even worse, vertigo can be a symptom of something catastrophic like multiple sclerosis. It can bring about vomiting, difficulty with speaking, and severe headaches.

  In my case, they could never pin down just one explanation. We went from one doctor to another and test after test and never came home with a definitive answer. The thing that bothered me the most was that at least a couple of these doctors seemed to be more interested in experimenting with different drugs and therapies than in treating my problem. No matter what they did, the episodes kept occurring and in fact still come back, even today.