Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  One night Tommy Caldwell came into our dressing room and wanted to know why we weren’t staying in the same motel the Tucker band was staying in. I had to tell him that the truth of the matter was that we simply couldn’t afford it. Tommy reached down in his boot, pulled out a thousand dollars in cash, and handed it to me and said, “Pay it back when you can, and if you can’t, don’t worry about it. But from now on, I want to see y’all at the same motels as us.”

  That was typical; both Tommy and Toy were generous and loyal friends, and I loved them both. By the way, we did pay the loan back. I hear a lot about bonding these days; for us it came as natural as falling off a log. The Tucker boys were family to us.

  My road manager, Jesse Greg, leaving was no surprise. Some people are just not cut out for the rigors of the road, especially when a band is going through the process of building a name. It’s a tough row to hoe, and only the most dedicated stick it out. You’ve got to take it like it comes on the road; whatever the situation is, you’ve got to cowboy up and conquer it. If it means crawling out of your bunk on an icy night when the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, flagging down a ride, and finding a mechanic or renting cars and a U-Haul to get the band to the next show, you’ve got to rise to the occasion. Everybody didn’t have that in them, but I thought I knew somebody who did.

  I promoted David Corlew to road manager and hired Sonny Mattheny and Gene Key to work with the road crew, and shortly afterward Michael “Mule” Sanderson and Wayne “Skinny” Smith came with us. Gene and Sonny would soon leave, but when Roger Campbell joined us, we had a road crew that would basically stay intact for years.

  When The Marshall Tucker Band went into the Capricorn Studios in Macon to make a new album called A New Life, they called and asked if I’d come down and play fiddle on a couple of cuts. I played on “Blue Ridge Mountain Sky,” and when I heard the track to “24 Hours at a Time,” I nearly flipped. What a great piece of music!

  Tucker’s producer was a laidback good ol’ boy from Alabama named Paul Hornsby. I met him when I worked on Tucker’s records and liked his style. He’d done a great job with Marshall Tucker’s records. CDB could sure use some help with our records. I liked the thought of working at Capricorn Studios, and I thought perhaps Paul Hornsby was just what we needed.

  CHAPTER 26

  RED HOT CHICKEN AND THE ADVENT OF THE VOLUNTEER JAM

  Macon, Georgia, was the mecca of what was becoming known as Southern Rock in those days. The Capricorn label had two of the hottest bands in the country with The Allman Brothers Band and The Marshall Tucker Band. The studio was state of the art, and the recording engineers were young and hip and capable.

  The city of Macon was Southern to the core, with restaurants ranging from genuine home cooking at Momma Lowe’s to the continental menu and extensive wine list of Le Bistro. And where else could you get a Nehi peach soda and a barbecue sandwich at two in the morning?

  There was one place that didn’t even open until midnight, and they served one dish, Red Hot Chicken. It sure lived up to its name. La Carousel also had light bread and beer. Not having a beer license didn’t bother Hidges, the owner, at all; he’d sell you as many Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys as you wanted to cool your burning palate.

  Eating Red Hot Chicken would have been torture if it didn’t taste so good.

  We found a perfect place to stay at an old 1930s-style motel called the Courtesy Court. The owners, Jimmy and Dot Hammock, treated us like family. We were set in a comfort zone and ready to cut a record.

  I put a lot of thought and effort into writing the songs and rehearsing the band. I also made my mind up that this time when I was ready to do vocals, I’d just open my mouth and let whatever was there come out naturally, without any coaxing from the ghosts of the past from my club years. Good, bad, or indifferent, this time I was determined to sound like whoever I was and nobody else. We loaded into Capricorn Studios and went to work.

  On this album I wanted to include two live cuts recorded in front of an audience, so we scheduled a show at the twenty-two-hundred-seat War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville. When it sold out in advance, WKDF, the local album rock station, wanted to broadcast it live. My manager, Joe Sullivan, came up with the name Volunteer Jam, which of course referred to the Volunteer State of Tennessee, never realizing it was a name that would be heard around the world.

  The first Volunteer Jam was supposed to be a one-time event. I casually invited some buddies to drop by for a jam, and three of the Tucker boys and Dickey Betts from The Allman Brothers Band came that night. Both bands were red hot in the Nashville area. When I surprised the crowd by introducing them, the roof almost came off the place, and it became evident that we were onto something special.

  The show took on a life of its own, a special kind of excitement you can’t create. It just has to happen naturally. Due to the live radio broadcast and word of mouth by the twenty-two hundred people who had attended, it was the most talked-about show of the year. It became evident that we should plan on doing another Volunteer Jam the next year.

  The 1975 version would sell out thirteen thousand seats at Murphy Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But we’ll go more in depth about the Volunteer Jam a little later on.

  We went back to Macon and recorded and mixed the album in thirteen days. All that was left to do was come up with an album title and get the packaging designed.

  The cover art was done by a very talented visual artist named Flournoy Holmes. When I first saw it, I loved it. It fit so perfectly into what the music on the album was about. Flournoy had nailed it. Now I had to come up with a killer album title.

  Sometimes that’s one of the most difficult parts of the process. I agonized and walked the floor as the deadline approached, thinking of and rejecting ideas. All at once out of the blue, it came to me.

  Fire on the Mountain!

  Thank You, Lord!

  We finally had the whole package, and we knew it. It was by far the best production, the best selection of songs, the best cover art, and the best instrumental performances. Finally and at last, I was happy with the way I had handled the vocals. No fluff. No flourish. No impersonations. Just me, organic and unadorned, and, for better or worse, my own natural vocal sound.

  It was obvious even before Fire on the Mountain was released that it was special. Our new producer, Paul Hornsby, and the folks at Capricorn Studios had lived up to all expectations.

  The two live cuts, “No Place to Go” and “Orange Blossom Special,” were hot. There were blazing guitar songs like “Caballo Diablo” and fiddle on “The South’s Gonna Do It Again.” Dickey Betts’s classic dobro solo on “Long Haired Country Boy” was nothing short of brilliant.

  What we needed was a blockbuster at radio. The kind of response that would lead them to play two or three cuts off of our new album. So, Wade Conklin, our local Kama Sutra promotion man, had a prerelease listening party for some of the Nashville radio folks. When I saw the reaction of Ron Huntsman, the program director of WKDA, our local album station, I started dreaming about a big record.

  Everything was positive, including the reaction of the promotion department and label executives at Kama Sutra in New York. The only thing left was to put it on the street and see what John Q. Public thought of it.

  When Fire on the Mountain was released, a Kama Sutra promotion man, Bill Able, and me took off flying across the country on an extensive promotion tour. Stopping at major-market radio stations across the nation, it soon became obvious that this was going to be by far the most successful album CDB had ever recorded. At many of the stations, the individual disc jockeys played whatever records they wanted to on their air shift, and at others, the program directors added music at their own discretion. They were liking some of the cuts on our new album, with “Long Haired Country Boy” and “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” getting a lot of attention.

  Pop radio stations had only played the hits up until the 1960s. The industry standard was that when you had
cut enough hits to make up an album, they’d release one. AM stations were the successful ones, with FM stations relegated to playing mostly elevator music or the classics. FM sounded better, but you couldn’t take it with you or play it in your car. But that was all about to change with the advent of FM car radios and the radical programming idea of a guy named Tom Donahue at KSAN FM in San Francisco. He started playing album cuts by some of the more progressive rock bands. The Bay Area went crazy over it, and soon the idea spread across the country. Album-oriented radio was born, and FM stations started pulling large audiences and selling records.

  These stations were our bread and butter, and they were playing Fire on the Mountain.

  Even more importantly, the album started walking out of the record stores and showing up on the charts. CDB still had a lot to prove, but we finally had a foot in the door.

  I ended a successful promotion tour in Los Angeles and joined the band in Tucson, Arizona, for a live broadcast and got really busy. I was playing shows with the band at night and going around to radio stations in the daytime, sometimes flying ahead of the band to a new market to work the record before the show. I was hitting it hard.

  And loving every minute of it.

  CHAPTER 27

  ALWAYS WORKS OUT FOR THE BEST

  I don’t think Barry Barnes, Gary Allen, or Mark Fitzgerald were ever completely happy in the band. They had their own ideas about how things should be run and the music we should be playing. They all left to start their own band, and I needed a guitar player, drummer, and bass player muy pronto. As it turned out, the changes only made the band better.

  The last thing you want in a band are dissatisfied musicians, and I had three of them. Even though they constituted half of the band, I knew that the sooner I could replace them all, the better off we’d be. I set about the task immediately.

  The only musician I ever hired sight unseen and without ever hearing him play was a bass player from Holt, Alabama, named Charlie Hayward. I called our record producer, Paul Hornsby, and asked him if he knew of a good bass player, and he recommended Charlie. I called him, and he said he was interested. We were playing in Tuscaloosa with Lynyrd Skynyrd a few nights later, and Charlie got on the bus and left with us. He’s been here ever since, for more than forty years now.

  We hired a drummer from Maryland named Don Murray, who walked onstage with us, without any rehearsal, and performed the set as if he’d been playing with us for years.

  Another piece of the musical machine in place and clicking.

  What we needed now was a well-rounded, red-hot, Dixie-fried guitar player, and I thought I knew where to find one.

  Tommy Crain was a local Nashville guitar player who I’d been hearing about for a while. When I asked him if he’d like to work with us, he came out on the road, and we broke in all three new players at the same time. It only took a few shows for me to realize that I had the best band I’d ever had. Freddy Edwards and Don Murray on drums, Charlie Hayward on bass, Taz on keyboards, and Tommy Crain and me on guitars, and of course me doubling on fiddle.

  I had used the fiddle in a limited sort of way on some earlier albums, but on Fire on the Mountain we stuck it right out front with a couple of showcase tunes, and when I listen to it I realize that a lot of my fiddle playing style started right there.

  The heart of any band is the rhythm section. If you haven’t got it covered there, all is for naught. No matter how good your singers and soloists are, if the drummer and bass player are not locked in, it’s like building a house on a rotten foundation.

  Don Murray and Freddy Edwards laid down the beat, and nobody I ever played with locks in on a bass guitar like Charlie Hayward. His playing over the years has become an intricate part of the sound this band has developed. He’s solid as a rock onstage and off.

  Taz DiGregorio was the best singer I ever had in the band. He had a great set of pipes and a soulful feeling for the bluesy stuff, while his keyboard playing was innovative and energetic. He came up with some of the signature licks and dynamic rhythms that we used so much in the formative years.

  Tommy Crain’s guitar playing was a couple of cuts above anybody I had ever played with, and playing beside him inspired me to greater heights. We had some memorable nights together, pushing each other higher and higher, with the rhythm section in high gear. We were lighting up stages all over the country and getting the reputation for being a hot band.

  For the first time we were developing a musical personality, a consistency of style, and an identifiable sound that separated us from other bands. The sound of a band is always the sum total of the players, with each member contributing his or her individual musical talents. We had found a combination that worked for us, and it felt good. That feeling went spilling off the stage every night, blazing new trails and making new fans as we went.

  There were weekly network TV shows that featured up-and-coming bands, shows like Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. An appearance on these shows meant mass exposure and could cut a lot of corners in breaking a musical act, and we started getting calls to play them.

  The first time we were invited to play Midnight Special, they told us to be there at 7:00 a.m. We thought that seemed a little early for a Los Angeles TV show to start taping. But that’s what we were told, and a few minutes before 7:00 a.m., the Uneasy Rider was sitting at the front gate of the NBC Television Studios in Burbank, California.

  The guard at the gate didn’t know anything about a band from Tennessee in a vintage Scenicruiser being at the gate of NBC Television at such an early hour. He didn’t have our name on the list to come in at all, so we pulled over to the side and waited.

  Sometime later in the day, an employee of the show arrived and informed the guard that the boys from Tennessee were indeed supposed to be there that day. But he didn’t know why we had arrived so early since the show didn’t tape until the afternoon.

  The upshot is that we did go through the gate, we did do the show, and we did inform the Midnight Special folks that we were country boys. Unlike a lot of the rock and roll acts they were used to dealing with, if told to be there at 7:00 a.m., we would be there at 7:00 a.m., and we would be on time no matter when it was. And, should there be a next time, we would appreciate a more timely stage call.

  There were next times, many more next times. We played Midnight Special several times over the years.

  CHAPTER 28

  DEMISE OF THE UNEASY RIDER: NEW RIDES

  Things were going really well for the CDB, except for our transportation. The old Uneasy Rider, after rolling on the Greyhound line for around five million miles before it passed into our hands, was truly on its last leg. We could hardly get past the city limit sign before it would break down. Plus, with the addition of several new road crew members, it was starting to get crowded.

  It was a bold step and a lot of debt to go into, but we ordered two brand-new MCI buses. And we bought a box truck that we promptly dubbed the Gray Ghost. The only problem was that until we took delivery on the new buses, we were stuck with the Uneasy Rider. It seemed like the old girl was taking revenge by breaking down even more often, a frustrating experience to say the least.

  To add insult to injury, I got behind the wheel one night and drove around the parking lot of a truck stop. I scraped into a hinge on the back of an eighteen-wheeler and tore the side of the bus open. We went down the road in our embarrassing wreck with a big rip on the side and the insulation showing through until we got it covered with a piece of sheet metal. But we still looked like a rolling junkyard.

  We were jumping around all over the place trying to play in front of as many people as we could. Shelley Grafman, the program director for KSHE, the big rocker in St. Louis, invited us to play at a listener-appreciation event called the KSHE Kite Fly. We were immediately exposed to fifty thousand people. It gave the band a lot of credibility in St. Louis, which turned out to be one of our biggest markets over the years.

  KSHE was king of S
t. Louis rock radio in those days, and the Kite Fly was the beginning of a decades-long relationship with the station and friendship with Shelley Grafman and his family.

  On July 4, 1975, we were asked to open for the Rolling Stones in Memphis. I still run into people who remember the music we played that afternoon.

  When we finished at the Rolling Stones show, we caught a plane for Austin to play at Willie Nelson’s picnic. I can’t come up with a better description of the music The Charlie Daniels Band plays. A rock show one afternoon and a country show the next night. We don’t fall into any one genre of music. We’ve always been all over the board, and just when somebody thinks they’ve got us figured out, we do something different.

  That’s just my musical personality. I guess I was exposed to so many types of music in my formative days that when I write original stuff, it bleeds into my creative process and comes out in a variety of styles, sometimes within the confines of one song.

  I’m constantly asked what kind of music CDB plays, and I always say American music. We play country, bluegrass, gospel, rock, blues, and jazz—the genres of music that America gave the world. It’s just our style. We don’t follow trends or fads. We just follow our own hearts and musical instincts, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

  We needed a road accountant to handle the financial side of touring. Things were happening fast. David Corlew couldn’t handle demands of being road manager and the additional job of handling all the finances and the paperwork that went along with it. We hired a sharp young man fresh out of college named Robert Stewart to help ease the load.

  We shared a tradition with The Marshall Tucker Band. When anybody in the band or crew had a birthday, we hit them in the face with a pie. Everybody got it, me included, and it just so happened that Robert Stewart’s first day with us was also his birthday. We were on a plane flying to Austin, and American Airlines served little individual pies for lunch. I welcomed him to the CDB with a face full of pie, much to his and the stewardess’s surprise; it was probably the first time she had ever seen it happen.