A Conversation with The Outlaws’ Henry Paul – HuffPost 9.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Hello, Henry!

Henry Paul: Hey Mike, how are you?

MR: I’m pretty good. How have you been?

HP: I’ve been great, man. We’ve just been busier and busier than I can really elaborate on.

MR: It’s been quite a while since you guys have put out a new album, huh?

HP: It has, and it’s been a strange sort of way to get here. But we’re excited about it, and we’re very proud of our effort.

MR: This album, It’s About Pride, is like a new start for the band.

HP: It is like a new start. People know about the band, obviously, from years and years of being a part of the landscape of popular music. But it’s been a long time since we’ve had music out. So that in and of itself is a challenge, to try and gain acceptance and introduce everybody to new music and have them embrace it.

MR: Let’s get into the topics of some of the songs, like “Tomorrow’s Another Night.” It seems to be, “Hey, you know this is happening and that’s happening, but tomorrow’s another night!”

HP: Well, yeah, it’s a play on “tomorrow’s another day,” but it is an optimistic view in the chorus, laid against the backdrop of the history of the group, because the first verse, “The Space-Coast Cowboys,” we started out in a club over in Cocoa Beach and we gained a popularity in the second verse. And in the third verse, we lose some friends and we have some, not regrets really, but sort of a short wish list of wishing to have had the opportunity to say goodbye to our friends before they were taken so early.

MR: Right, right. And we’re talking about Hughie and… ?

HP: Well, Hughie, yes, especially Hughie, and, of course, Billy and Frank. We lost three out of the five original members of the group at a very young age.

MR: Henry, you’ve been sort of the flag bearer. The group has had a few permutations through the years, but this album seems to be about “pride,” as you say, and you even have a song, the title track, which seems to be the theme song to the album.

HP: Yes, and I’m speaking for the individuals in the group and this is a band, this is not a solo act. It is clearly a six-piece group, and aside from Monte, who started the band with Hughie and I and Frank and Billy back in ’72; Billy Crain, Chris Anderson, Randy Threet and Dave Robbins as well. This is sort of a new beginning and a reason for wanting to do this. At one point later in your career, it stops being about numbers and success from a perception standpoint and more about character, and more about your legacy.

MR: From all these years of touring and all that, you’re aware of the relationship between you and your audience, right?

HP: Oh, yes. They have very distinct opinions about what The Outlaws are, what their music should sound like, what the shows should represent. It’s been built over decades of consistency of quality, so to go out there today with a band called “The Outlaws,” it damned well better be great, and if you’re going to write a record, you’d better write a good one.

MR: So let’s talk about It’s About Pride. It sure was about pride, wasn’t it.

HP: Yes, it was. And there again, like we were speaking earlier, it’s about being a part of something that was bigger than you were, and it’s about surviving that and looking to the future, because we feel like the band is relevant. And we feel like, aside from the people that love the group, there’s a generation of people that will discover the group and embrace us, and that’s sort of our dream.

MR: Now I remember your first few albums were out and hits like, “There Goes Another Love Song,” “Green Grass And High Tides Forever,” and, of course, “Ghost Riders In The Sky.” I was in Tampa for a bit there, your old town, and it seemed that there was a lot of pride about two things there — The Buccaneers and The Outlaws.

HP: Well, we were the local band that seemed to make good. Tampa has a very rich history of success. Blues Image was from Tampa, but they got their start in Los Angeles. Tom Petty was from Gainesville, but got his start in Los Angeles. Stephen Stills was from Tampa and he, again, got his start in Lost Angeles. So The Outlaws were from Tampa and they got their start there at home and I think people just sort of adopted the band from the standpoint of affection and, in a sense, a pride, that the group could come from Tampa and actually make a national impression.

MR: That’s right, you didn’t rely on another city to bring it home, so to speak.

HP: Right. And I think that sort of inspires a lot of affection for the group from the local audience, especially people from our generation that watched the band grow up from the clubs and supported it in the North Tampa area. We have a lot of great memories of that.

MR: Also, speaking of coming back home, we have “Nothing Main About Main Street,” another song on the new album. It’s story is so true, isn’t it.

HP: Well, it seems as though it is. The advent of the computer and the smart phone and a lot of the things sort of separate us as a communal group of people, as social connection, and puts us into our own little Cyberworld and we’re sort of operating in our own little orbit. When I was a kid, we all got together on a Friday night in the town green and we schemed up some fun and we found out that there was a party here or there and we went and bought a bottle of Thunderbird and shared it and cruised around in circles in our car. But one way or another, we were always communing with one another socially out in the open. Now it seems as though that’s gone and the town itself has sort of closed up and the vitality of the social scene from teenagers back in the mid-sixties has been replaced by something, I don’t know what, but something different.

MR: Also you could apply that to the older generation as well, because sometimes it’s hard to keep local stores alive because you’re competing with greater prices on the internet.

HP: Exactly, and greater mega-discount stores. I remember the character of a small business in the town where you grew up supporting it, and people knew you by name, and a lot of that personalization of friendships, of business relationships, and of life relationships seems to have been depersonalized. This is an odd example, but going to war now sometimes is so impersonal because of drones and people sitting at computer desks in Langley, Virginia, with something happening a half a world away. For me, “Nothing Main About Main Street” was just the embodiment of that social gathering of people and ideas and the fun that we used to have as a group.

MR: You’ve gone back and forth to Tampa over the years. What is it like going there these days versus having grown up there?

HP: Well, you know, it’s a hard question to answer… only that things have changed so much. Things continue to change. They changed before we got here; they’re going to change after we’re gone. For me, I go by places I used to hang out, I look at them and I have fond memories, but again, the sort of soulful and social importance that they used to represent has evaporated. You drive by the drive in that you used to drive around in circles in your car and try to scheme on chicks and have a little fun on a Friday night, and that’s been bulldozed down. It’s just an ever-changing world, not to sound silly, but things continue to change. I think that in our hearts, some things always remain the same and I think that’s what inspired us to write that song.

MR: While we’re going back in time, will you refresh our readers on how when Arista Records was formed, you were one of the first acts that Clive Davis went out of his way to sign.

HP: Right. It’s funny because Phil Walden had Capricorn Records and he had The Allman Brothers, he had Wet Willie, he had The Marshall Tucker Band, he had Elvin Bishop and a couple I’m overlooking. But his label sort of embodied the Southern Rock movement early on, and then MCA signed Lynyrd Skynyrd and then The Outlaws came along just a year or two behind them and Clive wound up signing us to Arista. So like every major label wanted to be in that business so that they would claim their own band to represent them in that musical phenomenon.

MR: And don’t you guys have an anniversary coming up?

HP: 2012 marks forty years from the year we started out as a group. So we’re in the middle of a forty-year time marker. In 2005, we did a reunion tour for the 30th anniversary of the release of our first record. Hopefully, we’ll get to the point where we can do a fifty-year reunion. That’s kind of our goal.

MR: Henry, how did you approach creating this album?

HP: Six of us got in a room and Monte was set up in the middle and we were all set up in a circle around him. If you notice, the album has no fades on it. Every song has an ending, and we rehearsed these songs and played a lot of them out live in front of our audience for a prolonged period of time, and we got in a room and we recorded it sort of like a live record. Once we got these great tracks done on the record, we would come back and Billy and Chris, for instance, would come to my studio in my basement, and the co-producer, Michael Frank, and I would sit in the room. The guys would come in, we’d set them up in different rooms and isolate their amps and they’d go in and they’d play their solos along to the arrangement that they knew so well, and it all sort of went down spontaneously together and live. One of the characteristics about the record is it has a very energetic and familiar, almost old-fashioned feel to it from the standpoint of its musical personality that way.

MR: You can tell the difference, especially in the vibe, when a project has been made with the players recording together group in a room versus overdubbing forever through emails.

HP: Yes, and I think that it’s important to mention that The Outlaws certainly had a very identifiable musical personality and we’ve tried very hard to remain true to what that was. It didn’t mean a lot of overdubs, it didn’t mean a lot of smoke and mirrors, and it did not mean anything other than what you were going to go see when you were going to buy tickets to the band. What you’re going to hear on that record is what you’re going to go see live.

MR: You have a song on It’s About Pride called “Trouble Rides A Fast Horse,” perfect imagery for a band called The Outlaws.

HP: Here again, that title goes back to writing a record that we thought was true to The Outlaws’ musical personality. If you’re in a band called The Outlaws and you write a song called “Trouble Rides A Fast Horse,” it has a certain similarity. Same can be said for “Last Ghost Town.” So being in The Outlaws, it gives you a lot of symmetry as a songwriter to work with. These titles, “It’s About Pride,” “Tomorrow’s Another Night,” all these titles — “Born To Be Bad” and “Trail Of Tears” — they all sort of allude to an Outlaws personality. So “Trouble Rides A Fast Horse” was a title that we constructed. We wrote really about the old west. It was lyrically very connected to almost like a western movie.

MR: The image of the band and your writing brings up thoughts of a western town although you guys are very southern. It’s an interesting integration.

HP: Yep, yes it is. But I think that you always put The Outlaws first, the Southern Rock phenomena sort of came second. It was almost like a marriage between The Eagles and The Allman Brothers. The Outlaws sort of sat directly in the center of those two bands stylistically, so that sort of defines the musical personality that we stumbled upon.

MR: Henry, what advice do you have for new artists?

HP: Well, you know, I think that some things never change, and I think commitment to your career is probably the most important. There are a lot of road blocks, and there’s a lot of nay-saying and a lot of negativity on the way. But if you, in your heart, believe that you have something worthwhile, I think that you have to stick with it and push through some of the barriers. Aside from that, have honesty in your lyrics and integrity in your effort. I think that it’s important that you put your artistic agenda first and as far as fame and fortune and any of that, I think you can pretty much write that off as a dream, because with the exception of a handful of people that we know by name, this is more of a job and more of a life’s work rather than just a get-rich-quick scheme.

MR: Nicely said, it’s a life’s work and it becomes a lifestyle.

HP: It does. While some people have taken a different path in their lives and are enjoying a steady paycheck and they’re enjoying healthcare benefits and more of a predictable sort of lifestyle, as an artist, a lot of times, you go without, and a lot of times, you’re on the outside looking in on people living that life. But at the end of your artistic endeavor, hopefully, you wind up with a body of work that you can be proud of and a musical sort of contribution that can be taken seriously and embraced.

MR: It’s About Pride.

HP: And it is. And I do want to say this for all of the people in this band — Billy Crain and the hard work he put into this record as a songwriter and Chris Anderson as well and Dave Robbins and Randy Threet and Monte Yoho — these people put a lot of hard work into this and for me to represent the group to a certain extent is an honor. And I speak for those other five guys when I say that we’re very proud of what we were able to accomplish here and we hope people really embrace it.

MR: This album took about four years to make, right?

HP: It did, and that was a luxury of time that we enjoyed, not unlike the first Outlaws record and not unlike the first Henry Paul Band record or not unlike the first BlackHawk record. But again, having the luxury of a little time on your hands to conceive of these songs and to work them all out was a gift to us, and I think we took full advantage of it.

MR: Want to talk about one more song?

HP: One of the songs I absolutely love on the record is “Last Ghost Town.” I just absolutely love that song. That’s the song that Billy wrote by himself and it was one of the first songs he brought in for consideration on the new Outlaws record. I heard it and absolutely loved it and put a vocal on it and we just flipped. So we knew we wanted to record that when it came time to make the record. I think the record we cut on that song turned out exceptional
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MR: Henry, I wish you all the luck with It’s About Pride, and I thank you for your time. Thanks so much.

HP: All right, and thanks for saving our planet by operating your radio station on a renewable energy source. Thanks for your love and affection for the band.

MR: Oh man, thank you so much for saying that! Henry, thanks man.

HP: You be good, boy.

MR: (laughs) All right, you too.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne