To be truthful, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was just a cruel rock-and-roll rumor that somebody had started. But I went down to the stage level and found my friend Shelley Grafman, the program director of KSHE radio station, and asked him to check it out for me. I went back to the dressing room, called the band together, and told them what I’d heard. We had a few moments of silent prayer before we went to the stage to start the show.
Right before we walked onstage, we received the awful news. Yes, there had been a plane crash. Yes, there had been fatalities. But nobody knew how many or who until the notification of the next of kin. I called the band together and shared the news with them. I told them that if that had been us in the plane crash, we wouldn’t want Skynyrd to blow a show over us, and that Skynyrd wouldn’t want us to blow a show over them. We were going to go onstage and do our show.
What a strange feeling it was walking on the stage of Kiel Auditorium that night. We were pretty torn up. I remember that Tommy Crain was on the verge of tears. He said, “Charlie, I don’t know what to do.” I said, “I know what we’re going to do. We’re going to go on that stage and play these folks some music.” They had bought tickets and deserved the best we had. God willing, we were going to give it to them.
And we did. I don’t know how long we played that night; I only wish I had a recording of the set. We jammed and stretched out. We took solace the only way we knew how, in the music that bound us and all of our brothers together. We didn’t mention anything about the tragedy to the crowd that night. Even after the show was over, we still weren’t able to find out who had been killed.
Ron Huntsman had resigned his radio job and was working full-time with us as our in-house promotion man. We were spending the night in St. Louis and flying out the next morning to start a promotion tour for the new Midnight Wind album. After we got back to our hotel, we called around well into the night, trying to find which of our friends we’d lost. But there was no news forthcoming until about two o’clock in the morning. We found out that Ronnie Van Zant had been killed, along with Steve and Cassie Gaines, Dean Kilpatrick, and the pilots of the plane. Some of the others were seriously hurt but alive.
I truly cared about all the people who had met such an untimely and tragic end that night, but Ronnie was my buddy. A cloud of depression settled over me and would linger until I took steps to do something about it.
I have a special feeling for those who, like me, travel the highways playing our music. We have a kind of kinship that goes deeper than friendship and, more than just being in the same business, a kind of fraternity bound together by the music we play and the late-night hours we share after the spotlight has faded. I would never share those hours with Ronnie again. My small world had been diminished by one and that was way too many.
We immediately started getting calls from radio stations wanting a quote about the tragedy and the death of Ronnie Van Zant, but I just wasn’t ready to talk about it. I couldn’t think of anything that would come close to expressing the depth of my feeling until I walked into a hotel room in Phoenix, took a piece of hotel stationery, and started writing. When I had finished, I felt that I’d done about all I could do and felt better.
A brief candle; both ends burning
A weary mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonely times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
That we’re all part of everything
The present, future, and the past
Fly on proud bird; you’re free at last.
Writing this simple poem that we gave radio stations who asked for a comment somehow helped lift some of the depression I was feeling and gave me at least partial closure on the death of my friend. When I attended Ronnie’s funeral, I sang “Peace in the Valley” and read the poem. I gave it to Ronnie’s wife, Judy, and was deeply honored and moved when she had it carved into a bench that sits outside Ronnie’s tomb.
The 1978 Volunteer Jam was truly special because it included a performance by the remaining members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, at least the ones who had healed enough to play. They played a few songs and went into an instrumental version of “Free Bird,” hanging one of Ronnie’s signature gambler’s hats on a microphone. When some thoughtful spotlight operator hit it with a spotlight, it was one of those special, spontaneous moments that just happen sometimes.
CHAPTER 31
A MILLION MILES, A NEW FACE, AND THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA
We had done five albums at Capricorn Studios with Paul Hornsby and had been successful, but it was time to make a change. Sometimes a fresh approach can breathe new life into a project. After calling Paul and ending our arrangement as friends, I started looking around for a new producer I felt could help us reach the next level.
I have special requirements for someone who produces for the CDB. I don’t work with tyrants or egomaniacs or know-it-alls. First of all, we are a six-piece band, and the sound of our instrumental music is an important part of the songs we record. We don’t want to sound like anybody else; we just want to be us.
A producer has to understand that and, in essence, become another member of the band. Pooling his ideas with ours and working within the bounds of our sound and musicianship helps to bring out the best in not just me but all the players.
It was time for a monster album for the CDB. We had come close, had made great inroads, and had a concert following. We had forged relationships with radio stations across the country and just needed to come up with something that would make their request lines light up.
I talked to some producers. But there was nobody I felt could really get with the program, share in the excitement we generated when we played together, and help us record the blockbuster we needed. Somebody brought up John Boylan, a name I was not familiar with. He had a track record with Linda Ronstadt, Michael Murphey, and others. John worked in the West Coast office of CBS, and when we went out to play the Forum at the end of a tour, John came by my hotel room. It was obvious he had done his homework.
He had listened to our records, offered some valid criticism, and said, “I’m an obstetric producer. I deliver your brainchild.” I really liked this guy. I liked his honesty and his approach to working with a group, and I wanted to make a record with him. John would soon come to Nashville and check out studios. We would go into rehearsal mode and get ready to make a new album.
My approach to songwriting in those days was different from the way most people did it. I almost always started with a melody or a guitar riff. I would get together with the band and it would morph into a piece of music. We would write and arrange whole songs without as much as a title. I have been known to put the finishing touches on the lyrics right before I was getting ready to sing them in the studio.
It was standard procedure for me, but nobody had told John Boylan that. After we had played him the songs we were planning to record and asked him what he thought, I think he was a little bewildered that a lot of the songs had no lyrics. I assured him that the lyrics would be forthcoming and not to be concerned. On this premise, we moved our gear to Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, John brought in a twenty-one-year-old genius engineer from Los Angeles named Paul Grupp, and we got ready to make a record.
John Boylan had written a really good song called “Behind Your Eyes” that everybody agreed had good airplay potential. We were moving right along cutting the tracks when we came to the glaring realization that we needed a fiddle song for the album. Why we hadn’t come to this conclusion during the writing and rehearsal phase of the project, I just don’t know. The decision was made to move the equipment into a rehearsal studio and write one.
I think that when you have a God-given talent to write songs, you tend to, maybe even subconsciously, catalog scraps and pieces of song ideas and pull them out at a time when you need them. I don’t know where the phrase “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” came from or why it entered my mind that day in the reh
earsal studio. I don’t even know where the song idea came from. Possibly it was from a Stephen Vincent Benét poem called “The Mountain Whippoorwill” that I had read in literature class in high school. But when it started coming, it came in a gush. The band grabbed ahold, and when Taz came up with the signature keyboard lick behind the devil’s fiddle part, we knew we were on to something.
You have to understand the chemistry that started bubbling when the six members of the band got together to create original music. I would throw an idea out, maybe a riff or a chord progression. Freddie and Jim would start trying out drumbeats. Charlie Hayward would experiment with some bass part, and Taz, Tommy, and I would slide in trying and rejecting parts until we found something that worked. Sometimes we’d just sit there and jam until something popped out at us. Sometimes we’d head off in a totally different direction from the original idea.
We’d spend hours and hours putting music together, and the fruits of our labor can be heard on the albums we recorded together. Surprisingly, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” took a lot less time than a lot of the other songs on the album. We got our arrangement down, and I finished the lyrics. We moved the gear back into Woodland Sound and set to work to bring our new fiddle song to life.
The devil’s fiddle part presented a challenge. We wanted a dark, ominous, intimidating sound and hit on the idea of multiple fiddles. Nowadays, that part would most likely be done electronically, but in 1979 we were basically on our own. I played seven different fiddle parts, one of them a specially rigged eight-string fiddle. Paul Grupp worked his magic and made the devil’s fiddle solo just what we wanted it to be.
I had written the original lyrics with a line that went, “I done told you once, you son of a bitch,” which I knew the album stations wouldn’t have any trouble with. But just in case the song should break into the Top 40 area, we also did a “son of a gun” version.
We had written a song about the untimely deaths of Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, and Ronnie Van Zant that we called “Reflections.” We named the album Million Mile Reflections, which was a nod to both the song and the miles the band had traveled.
I wanted a unique cover. We used an artist’s rendering of the band standing with our backs to an empty concert hall, with a highway leading out the back and disappearing in the distance.
I was happy with the cover, the band’s performances, the songs we had written, Paul Grupp’s engineering, and John Boylan’s production. The music was a cross section of what the CDB is all about. It mixed genres and styles with all the controlled wildness that came out when we played together. I was happier with it than with any album we had ever done.
The first single release from Million Mile Reflections was “Behind Your Eyes,” the song John Boylan had written. It did fairly well. Then we released “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and things started popping. The song started climbing the charts on the album stations, with Top 40 and country soon falling in line. Soon the album was selling more and much faster than anything we’d ever released.
It crossed formats without a wrinkle. I heard about at least one gospel station playing it, the sanitized version, I’m sure.
Ron Huntsman made a special trip to one of our concerts to deliver the news in person that Million Mile Reflections had just gone platinum. A year after its release, it had sold more than two million copies and was still moving.
CHAPTER 32
URBAN COWBOY
In 1980 our office got a call from a movie production company that was shooting a film in Texas. They were interested in having us come out and appear in it as ourselves and play some of our songs.
They sent a script of a project they called Urban Cowboy starring John Travolta in the title role and newcomer Debra Winger in the female lead. The setting was at the world’s biggest honkytonk, Gilley’s in Pasadena, Texas. The story was about the ups and downs of a newly married redneck couple and their rowdy friends.
Well, all right! Let’s go to Texas and shoot a movie!
You hear a lot of things about Hollywood people, and being a novice on a movie set, I had no idea what to expect. But my apprehensions were soon relieved when, shortly after arriving in the parking lot at Gilley’s, John Travolta and Debra Winger both came out and spent some time on the bus with us.
The director, James Bridges, treated us with respect and was friendly and patient. Of course, Mickey Gilley and his crew showed us some good ol’ Texas hospitality.
Pasadena, Texas, is as hot as blue blazes in September. Since the air conditioning at Gilley’s interfered with the filming and had to be turned off, we sweated our way through take after take of our tunes. A shot from the front, tear down, and change the lighting. A shot from the left side, tear down, and change the lighting. And so on.
Movie making is repetitive and tedious from my point of view, and I didn’t have to do anything but play my fiddle.
We went to the premier of Urban Cowboy in Houston. It was pretty neat when the first scenes opened with John Travolta driving to Houston in a pickup truck listening to the CDB’s recording of “Texas” playing on the radio.
Urban Cowboy depicted the nightlife in a Texas honkytonk, complete with the two-step, fisticuffs, flirting, loving, leaving, separation, reconciliation, and even mechanical bull riding. It was obvious to everybody that Debra Winger was going to be a star. She played the part of a hard-living party gal to a T.
John Travolta did a great job of going from the fleet-footed, hip city slicker in Saturday Night Fever to the beer-drinking, snuff-dipping, two-fisted cowboy who worked at a refinery in the daytime and spent his nights hanging with the regulars at Gilley’s.
I’ve been asked many times in interviews just what impact Urban Cowboy had on country music.
I think one of the most positive things that happened is that the popularity of John Travolta, especially among the younger people, somewhat legitimized a genre of music many of them had considered corny and unhip. Some of the crowd who had stood in line at Studio 54 headed over to the Lone Star Cafe, New York’s first Texas-style honkytonk, to have a go at the two step.
People in large urban areas started wearing Western hats and cowboy boots, and new country music radio formats started popping up around the country.
Of course, part of this was fad. There are the camp followers who wear Stetsons one month and the next have orange hair and rings in their noses. But some people found out that the music they had always deemed to be a couple of cuts below their sophistication level had substance. It told stories, reflected everyday life, and could move the heart and the feet.
They came on board for Hank Jr. and in the process discovered Merle Haggard.
CHAPTER 33
BIG SHOW, BIG CROWDS, BIG CREW
In 1979 we prepared to do the biggest tour we’d ever done. We would be playing major venues, carrying sound and a custom light system, three tractor trailer rigs, and three buses. We were adding a horn section and three female backup singers from Los Angeles; we called them the LA Reflection Section. We also took Ben Smathers and the Stoney Mountain Cloggers, a Grand Ole Opry dance troupe. Altogether this added up to fifty people.
We needed someone to coordinate concert and backstage security. So we hired Rick Rentz, a former Green Beret who owned a concert security company in Connecticut, and he traveled with us full-time.
I needed an assistant to help arrange my schedule, handle meet and greets after the concerts, fly with me on the promotion tours, and handle the retail record-store appearances I was doing so much of, so I hired Bill Yarbrough, who we called Bill Bro, and he went everywhere with me.
As things got crazier and more hectic, we added Junior Rose as a second security man.
It made for a tremendous show, but looking back I can see that we fell into the same trap that a lot of young artists who taste real success for the first time do. We thought bigger was better. The entourage was indeed impressive coming down the road with three trucks and two of the buses all painted up
with the band name. The show was an extravaganza. But what the people had heard and come to see was The Charlie Daniels Band. Everything else was just icing on the cake and a lot of extra expense.
I see young artists nowadays doing the same thing, adding stage settings, elaborate lighting systems, and extra personnel and vehicles. In many cases, they are totally unnecessary and super expensive, eating up the bottom line every time a wheel rolls over.
I’m all for expanding and enhancing the show, but I think there’s a happy medium in between the things that actually improve a show and the point where the ego takes over and it becomes superfluous glitz.
Just one of the many lessons I learned and will pass on as I go along.
We were selling out big arenas and getting a lot of attention from the media. The 20/20 television show sent a crew out to travel with us for a few days and do a segment about life on the road with the CDB. We did Austin City Limits, The Fall Guy, and the network music shows that were so popular in those days.
The Million Mile Reflections tour continued hot and heavy through the end of 1979 with basically the same personnel. We did make some changes in the LA Reflection Section, one of the changes involving a young lady who replaced one of the backup singers in late 1979.
Her name was Carolyn Brand. Later on, in October 1983, her name was to change to Carolyn Corlew when she married my road manager and friend David Corlew.
Carolyn would go on to sing with the band until 1995, when she had to go home and put their daughter Taylor in school. She still comes and helps me out when we need another harmony voice.
We were in Los Angeles doing TV, and I got a call from George McCorkle of The Marshall Tucker Band telling me that Tommy Caldwell had been very seriously injured in an automobile accident. He was in a hospital in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the outlook was grim. I stayed in touch with George and Paul Riddle as to Tommy’s condition, hoping against hope as the news got worse and worse.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 14
