A Conversation with Alabama’s Randy Owen – HuffPost 10.15.14
Mike Ragogna: Randy, the latest is titled Alabama & Friends At The Ryman. What is it about Alabama that has attracted so many friends and fans over the years?
Randy Owen: If I knew that exactly, I could make billions of dollars! Honestly, I think it’s a combination of a bunch of things and I’ll name three or four of them. First of all we came up the hard way. We paid our dues, brother. Nothing ever came easy. We were the underdogs and in some respects I still feel that way. As far as people who critique the music and all that stuff, we’ve never gotten any praise for that, and that’s fine. The people who like us like us for what we are. I think the common down-to-earthness that we really are and we really portray. We don’t run away from it and try to be somebody in Hollywood or whatever. We’re Southern, it’s just what we are. I think that is important to people: The authenticity of being who you really are. I also think we were very lucky that we could write and that the songs that we wrote appealed to people from a generation and a half of people, and now it’s a three generation thing. And then there’s the live performances. We put so much into rearranging songs from the record they would play on the radio into something to cater to our particular audience. It was about entertaining people, making them feel like they were important, which in our eyes they are the single most important thing. I think that’s all why we’re still here.
MR: I think you’re being modest when you say you’re not the critics’ darling. A lot of people admire you. I think you resonate so well with your audience that it leaves critics asking, “What’s the sensationalist story here,” not that you’re the most successful country band of all time.
RO: I agree with you.
MR: What is the creative process like when you get together and write?
RO: At that time, it didn’t seem like good fortune but we tested a lot of those songs one night in a college crowd with these coal miners from West Virginia, people from Tennessee, South Carolina. We got to test those songs for a live club audience that was paying tips. We got to see, “Hey, they like it,” or, “They don’t like it.” But I remember the girls who worked as waitresses and dancers down on the Grand Strand, we all got to be friends and buddies because we all worked on the waterfront and we all worked for tips. I remember that we would work on Saturday afternoons sometimes and the girls would not be working so they’d come by and even request songs that we had written. I remember a young lady from New York–I’ll never forget that–she requested “Lady Down On Love” over and over every time she came to The Bowery. She said, “Someday, that’s going to be a big hit for you.” It did give us a chance to test songs. I remember the first night we did “My Home’s In Alabama,” this big wrestler who was there from Tennessee came up to the stage and he said, “That’s the best damn southern rock song I’ve ever heard in my life.” I thought that was interesting because he was from Tennessee.
Then I realized we’d just gotten back from California a couple of weeks ago and we did two shows there and we played “My Home’s In Alabama.” Everybody knows we’re from Alabama. We’re really from Alabama, we’re not from Nashville, we’re not from New York, we’re not from LA. We still live in Alabama by choice. We really got to test our music. This is not me bragging about it, but we knew “Mountain Music” was a hit before we ever recorded it. We did “Old Flame,” written by Donny Lowery and Mac McAnally, we put it on the album and we saved “Mountain Music” because we knew we had one for the next CD. We saved that cut because the reactions that we had gotten from the audiences at The Bowery and Myrtle Beach showed us that we had a hit. That song has endured; in fact we still close our shows with “Mountain Music.” I worked on just the intro chords for that song for a month. The arrangements that we did on songs may sound simple but they’re anything but. It’s interesting to hear people cover the songs because sometimes it’s like, “Uh, they missed those parts.”
MR: [laughs] I’m sure you’ve heard some Alabama karaoke as well.
RO: Uh-huh. But I love it! I think the greatest tribute you could ever have is to have someone karaoke or cover one of your songs. If they record it for real like a real artist or if they just sing it in a club or they’re singing it to their girlfriend or whatever it’s a special thing for me as a writer or just a performer of one of the songs recorded by Alabama, that they care about the music enough to do that.
MR: You have such a freaking large catalog!
RO: Yeah, I read one of the critiques of one of the shows that we did and it said we acted like we had all the time in the world to perform the songs and we just kind of drug them out even though there were forty-three number one songs to pick from. To me it was like, “Hey dude, have you stopped to think about how long it takes to perform forty-three songs?” An hour and a half is a pretty good while to perform, and I’m very grateful that those songs are there but at the same time, pick one. We just try to pick the ones that we think are the most popular with the audience. We don’t know, we were in Canada and we thought, “Well we might not should do ‘High Cotton’ because they probably don’t grow cotton in Canada.” Well, we went ahead and did “High Cotton” and those folks were singing. If they want to sing we let the audience sing, we’ll let them do a chorus of the song and when you hear it, it just touches your heart. It’s not about if you grow cotton, it’s that these guys have lived it. They’ve picked cotton, they planted cotton, they’ve lived in a cotton patch and they learned how to sing in a cotton patch. They learned their craft by working. I was just talking to my mama yesterday about some picture that she had. One of the pictures is me and my mom and my sister with our pick sacks in the cotton field. We did a lot of singing even though we were working our butts off. We did a lot of singing and family harmony and stuff like that, which was done by people working in the fields.
MR: You were talking about family a bit there, that was your introduction to music?
RO: Yeah, my daddy taught me how to play the guitar, it was a Stella. Then he bought me a Harmony Archtop, and then my mother who had done without a piano for a few years got a piano. Of course my mother can still tear up a piano. She’s eighty-two years old. That’s how she and daddy met, at a singing school at the little Westland church on the corner less than a mile from where I’m talking to you. She was the pianist there and fifteen years old and my daddy was the guy out with the mule plowing in the field. He saw this pretty little brunette and she saw this pretty little dark-headed guy and next thing you know they hitched up and there I am.
MR: Randy, how many songs have you written to that? I bet there’s more than one.
RO: Well, I wrote “Food On The Table” a long time ago and it was dedicated to my daddy. It described by life with my daddy, I just think he’s the best man I ever knew. I saw him do a lot of wonderful things in this world. My mother’s still living and as soon as I get done talking to you I’m going to take her a fresh cup of coffee and sit down and chat with her.
MR: Is that the ritual in the morning?
RO: Yeah, man. After a while you’ve done this and done that, but with us you’ll see we have mamas–we did have, Jeff lost his dad, Teddy lost his mom and dad, I lost my dad but I still have my mother–we understand people and what you go through. I’m going to go over and see that little girl. When she answers the phone I always say, “Is this the prettiest girl on Lookout Mountain?” and she always says, “No, I don’t know where she is.”
MR: [laughs]
RO: She don’t like me to do that, but I think she really likes it, too.
MR: Sweet. So we’re talking about growth. You’ve been with Alabama from day one. What’s been the biggest evolution for the group over the years?
RO: I think we’ve grown into understanding that we need one another and only we understand each other. That understanding of being “in battle” together, I won’t tell you what Teddy texted me at the last show but I texted him back, “That’s why I love you.” He was having severe cramps in his back during the show, I knew he was hurting, I didn’t know what was wrong but you don’t stop a show and say, “Hey man, my back’s hurting!” We’ve been in situations where one of us is sick or we’re going through something–I’ve been going through this deal with my father in law, he got injured so bad in a freak fall he had at his house and of course what bothers my wife is hard for me. We all know that kind of stuff. Jeff just texted me yesterday that his test had come back and he was cancer-free. Those kinds of things you know. ONly we understand the feel of stuff that we come up with. Sometimes we’ll have the pickers play it, but we’re not detached from what they’re playing, if you understand what I’m saying. The studio is not my favorite place to be. My favorite place to be is on that stage entertaining people who need entertained and need some relief.
MR: And you guys are lifelong friends.
RO: Absolutely. I knew Teddy because he was as poor as I was. We had one baseball and we had one catcher’s mitt or maybe two sometimes. We would play catch because there wasn’t anyone around to play ball with and the rest of the time we were out working. When I got to put my first uniform on when I was a senior in high school and play real baseball, that was one of the happiest times I had as a kid. I’m a baseball fan. I love baseball. I played center field. I wasn’t much of a stick, but I was a great glove.
MR: Hey Randy, what advice do you have for new artists?
RO: Well that’s a very individual thing. If you’re talking to artists and they’re serious I would hope that they have the chance to face some of the audiences that hate them like we have. Back in the early days when you were on stage, you could tell if they absolutely hated you and wished to hell you weren’t on stage. I can tell just as well when I hear people start singing that they’re great singers, but they have no grit and no soul in what they’re doing. I think it’s great to go back and cut your teeth on some adverse conditions. I’m not talking about where somebody’s trying to kill you or something. I’m talking about the places where when you leave they try to kill you. I left the Bowery so many times with enough tips in my hand that I’d think, “I’m gonna get killed before I get home.” Then, of course, I remember a lot of the clubs where you’d get out of the way of fights as you were leaving the door. Not that everybody has to do that, but I just think you appreciate stuff better if you do. And it’s always good to try to write, and if you can’t write then that’s okay, but you sure need to have an idea.
And if you’re going to work the United States, you have to go to the United States and work. I remember a guy told me something I’ll never forget as long as I live, he said, “Once you’ve toured the United States you’ll have a much better idea of what you need to do to write a song that’s commercially successful.” That’s true. It may not be my favorite song but it might be a song that works for the entire country. There’s people who spend their whole time working in one city, and they’re great, they do really good there, but they never open up and try to do something that works in Seattle, or that also works in Detroit. And don’t forget about the northeast. And I’m talking about country music. We made a point to try to do as many shows as we could in the northeast because folks in the Northeast love country music too, you’ve just got to take it to them. I think it’s the same story there as it is in California. The people are the same. I look at the crowd and they may look different or be dressed a little different in one place or the other but why are they there? They’re there to hear your music. I’ll never forget what Eddy Arnold told me: “Find you a good-looking girl and you sing most of your songs to her, as if it’s just you and her in the studio.” I will never forget that. Eddy did pretty good.
MR: What would you say is the anthem of the group Alabama? Maybe “Mountain Music?”
RO: Probably. “My Home’s In Alabama,” “Feels So Right,” “Dixieland Delight,”…
MR: “Dixieland Delight,” Ronnie Rogers’ song.
RO: Brother Ronnie! That’s a funny story, too. I wanted to cut that like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or whoever was involved–You never knew with them. I said, “Let’s just sing it all the way through with harmony and acoustic guitars.” It’s flat, sharp, up and down, guitar’s maybe a little bit out of tune, but next thing we know we stop off in Macon, Georgia and the guy with RCA says, “I want to tell you boys something.” We’re like, “What?” and he says, “‘Dixieland Delight’ just became the most added single in the history of country music.” We said, “Single? Are you kidding?” Anyway, it’s always been funny to me, every time I get to thinking about how that song was done. And we left it that way, we didn’t try to make it pretty. I am not a fan of pretty music. I like music that speaks to me. I’ve cut my share of sweet ones, but they didn’t turn me on as much as the ones that are raw and have some emotion to them.
MR: Alabama has a legacy that one day they’ll leave behind them. Predicting four or five decades from now when Alabama finally retires, what will you want people to remember Alabama for?
RO: I think we changed the approach to country music to look past the star standing on the stage. The heroes like Hank Williams and stuff like that, we did it our way. I was told so many times, “Hey, you need to get out on stage and forget about all that stuff.” I wanted to be part of a band. I didn’t want to leave my bandmates behind. I still remember that day that me and Jeff and Teddy practiced at Jeff’s house. We practiced at the old house down in Bonham, Alabama when I was going to school. It’s just something that we put too much effort into. I just felt like there was something offered there that had never been offered before.
MR: What’s Alabama up to in the future?
RO: Right now, we’re writing new music and we’re going to put out a new CD. I’m hoping that we still have the time. That’s always an issue after you get successful; time. I spend enough time away from my family already. But I want to do some Alabama cuts, and I hope the guys feel this way too. Whether they’re singles for the radio or whatever, I want to do “My Home’s In Alabama” and “Tennessee River” and “Mountain Music.” The songs that we worked on arrangements for a week on the same damn song. I worked on the guitar sound for two or three days and then I’ve still got that same guitar. I’ll tell you something that’s funny, Brad Paisley did that single “Old Alabama” and they said, “Will you do that lick that you did on ‘Mountain Music?'” and I said, “As a matter of fact, I still have the guitar.” He’s like, “Oh, we don’t need the guitar, I can make mine sound that way,” and I said, “No you can’t.” It will not sound like my guitar. So I get the old Musicman guitar, take it over to the studio and hit one lick and Paisley says, “That’s the guitar.” I said, “Yes it is.” It has its own sound, that’s why I played it on all those early records. I played my daddy’s acoustic Gibson, I still have it, too. Then I have the guitar–it’s the hall of fame–The Micro-Frets that we played in the club days. I didn’t realize when I put it in the hall of fame put I still had the receipt on it and I hadn’t cleaned the strings, so it was just like it was the last time I played it. I didn’t realize it was such an unusual guitar. It’s a great guitar, but nobody’s ever heard of a Micro-Frets guitar. I got it because I like to have a wound third string. I like to play big strings. Those little strings sound little to me. I like to play the guitar slightly out of tune with just a little effect on it because when we were doing those early things you could make a guitar sound bigger and at the same time you could run it through something else and get the natural sound. Working on those effects also enhanced the harmony, too.
MR: I think the Randy Owen legacy might just be that he was a real music man and a great center fielder.
RO: [laughs] So many of the songs we did, it goes unnoticed by a lot of people but I’m the guy playing the song on the guitar they did the effects on. The engineers would say, “Well that’s got a roar to it,” and I’d say, “Okay, I don’t care.” This is the sound that I have for this song. I know when we did “My Home’s In Alabama,” “Mountain Music, “Tennessee River,” “Lady Down On Love”… I actually shut everybody out of the studio when we did “Lady Down On Love” and I just recorded it by myself. Everybody had gone to lunch so I got to keep the sound of the guitar. Anyway, we worked on Jeff’s guitar and Teddy’s bass and put a little different sound on them when they were recording. Anyway, if there’s a legacy, I think what’s been totally unnoticed is what we contributed with those guitars and fiddles and pianos. On the first stuff, Jeff’s actually playing piano. We cut everything with a drummer and the three pieces. I sang as it was going down. It was fun.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne