I was thirty-four years old and starting all over again, going up against guys ten years younger and ten times better looking than me, but none of them could possibly want to make it more than I did. As the old Southern saying went, I was “eat up with it.” I determined that if I had to work harder than anybody else, I was going to make my mark on the music world as a recording and concert artist.
I waded into making that first album for Capitol, using some of my favorite Nashville pickers: Karl Himmel on drums, Bob Wilson on piano, and Tim Drummond on bass. Jerry Corbitt and I had really clicked while I was producing his album, so I asked him to produce mine.
The album was simply titled Charlie Daniels and had some good songs; the players were exceptional, the arrangements were catchy, and the performances were solid. But there was one thing missing, and it was a glaring and important one. The vocals were all over the place, with no originality, reminiscent of the many artists who had influenced me during my years on the nightclub circuit.
In the world of copy bands, where I had spent the first thirteen years of my career, the closer you sounded to the artists whose music you were playing, the more popular you became and the bigger crowds you could attract to the clubs you worked in.
My first attempts at developing my own vocal style were a hodgepodge of pilfered licks that my voice naturally fell into when interpreting a song of one style or another. My original music covered a wide range of genres.
I put a new band together. Taz DiGregorio had spent two years in the army since we’d last worked together. He was working with a club band playing copy music and was ready to come on board and help create some original stuff. The bass player, Earl Grigsby, was from Kentucky, and the drummer, Jeffrey Myer, was from California.
I signed a management and publishing deal with Donald Rubin and his partner, Charles Koppelman, and we were ready to hit the road.
In the early 1970s there were lots of clubs around the country that featured bands who were promoting their albums, trying to build a following, and establish airplay in the area. The biggest concentration of these venues was in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and the dozens of small towns that make up the Bay Area. It was a tacit requirement to play these venues if you were trying to break a record. With my newly formed band, we hooked up a U-Haul trailer on the back of my car and headed that way.
On the way we stopped in El Paso and picked up my old friend Bill Belcher, who would be our roadie and road manager.
Lewis Perles, who worked the West Coast for Koppelman-Rubin, booked us in several of the venues around the Bay Area. We sweated it out night after night in the clubs, trying to make a dent in the crazy and highly competitive left-coast music scene. The band got tighter, and the people who came to see us play got into the music. But it became evident that my first album was not going to be a hit, and Capitol Records dropped me like a hot potato.
One thing I got out of the deal was that the advance from Capitol Records had gone into a down payment for a house we built in Wilson County, Tennessee, and we moved in just in time for Little Charlie to start first grade at Lakeview Elementary School, away from the hassles of a big-city educational system.
In the meantime, Donald Rubin and Charles Koppelman were looking for a new record deal for me. They found one with Kama Sutra, a label run by a human dynamo named Neil Bogart and a truly nice gentleman named Art Kass.
Donald and Charles wanted us to come to New York and record in the late Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios with one of their associates, Gary Myers, producing. They rented us a big three-story house in Hampton Bays, Long Island, for the band to live and rehearse in.
It was wintertime, and the area was practically deserted. We left our instruments set up and worked on our music any time of the day or night we wanted to. After a few days of putting the finishing touches on the arrangements, we began driving into the heart of Manhattan five days a week to record our first album for Kama Sutra.
Te John, Grease, & Wolfman was released in 1972. Again, there was good material, the musicians played great, and the arrangements were inventive, but I still hadn’t really found myself vocally. It was better but not there yet.
We headed back to California and more showroom gigs and radio promotions, and this time we made a little more headway. Sometimes we appeared alone, and other times we opened for Elvin Bishop, Mike Bloomfield, Stoneground, and others.
If there was ever a music junkie, it was Jerry Garcia. When he was not on the road with the Grateful Dead, he would put together combos and play the same venues we were playing. Jerry was a down-to-earth, nice guy, and I liked him a lot.
Elvin Bishop was a mainstay in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, and he always kept a top-notch outfit. He had a great sense of humor and was always fun to be around. Our paths would cross many times through the years.
We signed with a couple of different booking agencies, trying to find one that could deliver meaningful work. We needed the kind of shows where we could get in front of lots of people and play our music, opening for headliners and influential listening clubs. But that’s what everybody at our level was trying to do, and the competition for those kind of gigs was fierce. It took effort from the booking agency and support from the record company to make it happen.
I’ve always ascribed to the theory that if you can’t get what you want, take what you can get and make what you want out of it, and we tried to make the best situation we could out of whatever we were presented with. If there were only twenty people in the place, you played for those twenty people. If what you do pleases them, they’ll be back and probably bring somebody else with them. And it snowballs. That’s how you build a following.
Bring your “A” game every night, and never look at the empty seats.
CHAPTER 24
GEARING UP FOR THE LONG RUN
Jeffrey Myer left the band to join Jesse Colin Young, who quit The Youngbloods to start a solo career. I always liked the two-drummer sound of The Allman Brothers Band and decided to give it a try. I met a gentle, long-haired kid in California named Freddie Edwards and was still looking for one more drummer when Buddy Davis called, the same Buddy Davis who had left me in a lurch in Tulsa back in 1964. I was leery about hiring Buddy after he had left me without notice, but he wanted the job so badly that I gave it to him.
It was 1973 and time to go back into the recording studio and cut another album. I decided to produce this one myself. We moved our gear into a studio in Nashville and started work on Honey in the Rock, which contained our very first bona fide hit, a novelty song called “Uneasy Rider,” and it was back on the road to try to capitalize on it.
Earl Grigsby, our bass player, came to me and said that for deep personal reasons he felt that he had to leave the band. We parted friends and remained so until Earl passed away a few years ago.
We used interim bass player Ted Reynolds, and Billy Cox, Jimi Hendrix’s old bass player, worked with us for a while, but things were kind of unsettled in the band, and it was pretty obvious that we would soon be making some changes.
Buddy Davis, the drummer, quit, confirming my theory of not hiring people twice. I replaced him with a Nashville drummer, Gary Allen. I also hired a guitar player from Nashville named Barry Barnes and a bass player from the eastern shore of Maryland named Mark Fitzgerald. We were whole again, well-rehearsed, hot and ready to go, and around Nashville we were coming to be known as The CDB.
In the winter of 1973, the East Coast got hit with the biggest snowstorm in its history, crippling the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. I got a call from Wade Conklin, our local Kama Sutra promotion man, telling me that the opening act for the Quicksilver Messenger Service show, scheduled for Nashville that night, had gotten weathered in on the East Coast and the promoter, Joe Sullivan, was looking for a replacement. Would I be interested?
Of course we were interested. I got the band together, and we went down to War Memorial Auditorium and played a smoking set of CDB music, and the crowd just love
d it.
I went out of town that weekend, and when I came back I had several messages from the promoter, Joe Sullivan, on my answering machine. I called him back, and we set up a meeting where he told me that he wanted to go into artist management and had been looking for a band with star potential. After seeing us at the Quicksilver show, he felt we were what he was looking for. He was very enthusiastic and convincing.
Well, there sure wasn’t anything super exciting going on in my career at the moment, and I thought that Joe Sullivan, with all of his genuine enthusiasm, might be just what we needed. But I had one problem. I was still signed with Donald Rubin. That didn’t even faze Joe; he said he would work something out with Donald.
A few days later when Joe went to New York to meet with Donald Rubin, I flew up to meet with Kama Sutra about promoting our new Honey in the Rock album. I found out to my delight that our single “Uneasy Rider” was taking off all over the country.
There is nothing in the world like watching a hit record happen, especially in the days when most of the radio stations were locally owned, operated, and programmed. When the program directors for the individual stations decided for themselves which records to play, they would then start making noise in the smaller markets and work their way through to the biggest stations. “Uneasy Rider” was doing just that, and I was flying high until I received some heartbreaking news.
At noon on April 13, 1973, my mother called and told me that my dad had died suddenly from a heart attack. I couldn’t believe it; he was only fifty-six years old. I had to hang up the phone and get myself together before I could even continue the conversation. When I regained my composure, I called back and told her that we’d be there as soon as possible.
Hazel, Little Charlie, and myself were all devastated as we caught a flight for Wilmington. I made the funeral arrangements. There would be a service in Wilmington, and then Dad’s body would be driven to Elizabethtown, where there would be a graveside service and internment at the Daniel family cemetery near the old home place in Bladen County.
Even after the funeral it seemed so unreal; he had died so suddenly and unexpectedly. There were loose ends to be tied up, and I went around Wilmington settling my daddy’s last earthly affairs.
When you lose a parent, it’s unlike any other experience you’ll ever go through. When you realize that the person whose face you saw from your cradle is gone, never to be a part of your earthly life again, there’s a sense of heavy loss, and then there’s always the guilty feelings.
Why didn’t I go see him more often?
Why didn’t I call him more often?
What could I have done to make life better for the one who took me hunting and to football games, the one who taught me so many lessons about life and about values and work ethic, who encouraged me in pursuing a career in music? It was so ironic; now I was on my way to having my first hit record, and my dad didn’t live to see it. The Honey in the Rock album was on his turntable when he died, and had he lived just another few weeks, he would have been some kind of proud as “Uneasy Rider” climbed the charts.
I picked out a headstone for Daddy and wrote the epitaph. The inscription, nestled among a garland of pine boughs, reads, “Tall whispering long leaf pine trees play his song.” He had spent his life among the trees, and it only seemed proper for him to be remembered that way.
A couple of days after the funeral, Joe Sullivan, who indeed had worked out a deal with Donald Rubin to take over our management, called and asked me to go back to work. At first I was a little insulted to be asked to start working again so soon after burying my father, but it turned out to be a good thing to get back in the race. It helped ease the pain.
About the time I signed with Joe Sullivan, a brilliant young lady named Pat Halverson came to work in his office and played a big role in my career for many years to come.
Pat was just one of those people who had a knack for anticipating trouble and dealing with it before it happened. She was always working ahead of the curve: a problem solver, and a quick study, learning about the internal workings of a traveling band and becoming a part of our day-to-day operations. She was also good for a quick plane reservation or whatever it took to help us get to the next gig.
Pat was my first introduction to a truly capable office person who left no loose ends and organized everything that came across her desk into practical increments. She was resourceful and tenacious and played a major role in my management team and would set the bar for those to follow.
I joined the band in Atlanta for a week-long stand at a place called Richards. It was one of those listening rooms where the up-and-coming bands played and attracted a young, hip crowd. It was a good place to start building a fan base in Atlanta. Of course, you needed airplay to have a hit record, but a fan base was the foundation of a successful career.
We would play Richards many times over the years. Atlanta is a major market with a number of meaningful radio stations in the city and surrounding area. In the daytime I’d hook up with our local Kama Sutra promotion man and we’d work the stations, doing live interviews and hanging out with the on-air personalities, which was a vital part of promotion in the days when stations did their own programming and playlists.
That was basically standard procedure in whatever market we were playing. And in those days, at some of the more progressive album stations, I’d take along a guitar and play songs on the air for an hour or more.
It was a wonderful time for music. If you had a good record, you could get it played on its own merit.
Neil Bogart, the head of Kama Sutra records, was a man capable of thinking outside the box. He was bright and innovative and responsible for the very first video I ever remember when he did one for our “Uneasy Rider” song. We didn’t call it a video. It was in the days before MTV, and there were few places to expose it, but Neil had the idea and whatever Neil wanted, Neil usually got.
CHAPTER 25
A LONG ROAD AND A LITTLE WHEEL
Uneasy Rider” is the story of a long-haired hippie traveling through Mississippi who has a flat tire, gets himself into a tough situation in a redneck bar, and gets out of it by using his brain. We acted out the story in a joint in Nashville, complete with a hotrod Chevy and a character named Old Green Teeth.
We had no idea that what we were doing would become a major promotion tool in a few years when MTV would create a whole twenty-four-hour-a-day channel for nothing but videos.
The single climbed to the top ten in charts across the nation. We sold a lot of singles, but the Honey in the Rock album only experienced moderate sales. “Uneasy Rider” was a novelty song, and although very successful, it was not the kind of song that made people want to hear the rest of the album it was on.
In the heyday of AOR, or album-oriented radio, and in the days before the national consultants muddied the waters, if the station liked an album enough, it would play as many as two or three cuts, which gave the listeners more of an idea of what the band was about, motivating sales.
What we needed was a solid hit album, and I was constantly working on material that would help us reach that point. I still wasn’t happy with the way I was singing, but I was working on that too.
Our record label leased two Ford vans for us to travel to concerts and promote our records. We also needed support personnel, and I hired a young man named Jesse Greg to be our roadie and road manager. He did everything from drive the van to collect our money at the end of an evening’s performance. In addition I hired a kid from Nashville named David Corlew to help out, and we would soon add Leo Kiserow to help with the equipment and mix our sound.
I’ve always had a special bond with my road crew. They work harder and put in more hours than anybody in the outfit. They are the first ones to get to the venue and the last ones to leave, humping tons of equipment around the country, constantly setting it up and tearing it down, sometimes sleeping a few hours and making an early stage call while the band is still asleep at the hotel.
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As we added personnel and gear, the vans got too small, and we needed a larger form of transportation. After shopping around for something we could afford, we settled for a 1950s vintage Scenicruiser double-decker bus that had already been driven five million miles by the Greyhound Bus Co. and then been bought by Tommy Overstreet and customized with bunks and couches.
We christened it Uneasy Rider, which turned out to be a most appropriate name.
We got the Uneasy Rider on a Sunday afternoon and were completely taken with it. No more sleeping on the hot floor of a van and switching off drivers in the middle of the night. We had bunks, a bathroom, and our very own full-time driver, and all of the band equipment fit in the bays underneath.
We headed for Cleveland, where our driver, Jimmy Klein, bumped into a shuttle van at the Holiday Inn where we were staying, earning him the nickname Crash Klein on his first trip.
CDB has played more dates with The Marshall Tucker Band than any other act we’ve ever worked with. In 1974 and 1975 we were constantly on the road together. Their debut album was a smash, and they were in demand all over the country.
We hit it off right from the start and really enjoyed working together. The original band was Toy Caldwell on lead guitar, his brother Tommy on bass, George McCorkle on rhythm guitar, Paul Riddle on drums, Jerry Eubanks on sax and flute, and Doug Gray on vocals. They could flat honk, and they tore the crowd up every night.
Our shows would end in a gigantic jam, with both bands onstage blowing the roof off the venue, to the delight of the fans. We’d have three drummers onstage at one time, and we kicked out all the stops. To this day, no two bands I’ve ever heard could rival the jams MTB and CDB had back in the day.
Promoters weren’t paying us very well for the dates we were doing with Tucker. We were a great addition to the show, and the crowds really got off on us, but we’d only had one hit single and our marquee value was not too high.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 11
