Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  No place on earth more poignantly documents man’s inhumanity to man than Yad Vashem. It is the Jewish Holocaust museum, where the murder of six million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis is commemorated in stark and graphic fashion. There are heartbreaking pictures and even boxcars that were used to transport Europe’s Jews to their final destination at Buchenwald, Auschwitz, or whatever death camp the Nazi monsters designated.

  The slogan at Yad Vashem, and for the whole nation of Israel, is “Never Again.” They mean it. No amount of political pressure will ever again remove them from their Holy Land.

  When you hear about forcing the Jews to go back to the 1967 borders, the gravity of the situation could not possibly dawn on you unless you have been there and seen the borders being referred to. They would include a goodly portion of the old city of Jerusalem, where there are many important Jewish and Christian holy sites. Plus, it would dissect extremely valuable newly developed commercial property.

  They didn’t suffer through so many wars and conflicts and live every day of their lives in the shadow of Islamic terror to give back ground with so much Jewish blood on it.

  Never again.

  Every Jewish teenager, boy or girl, when reaching the age of eighteen serves at least two years in the Israeli military. Even when they’re off duty, they take their guns with them wherever they go. They are ready to fight for the homeland at the drop of a hat, whenever and wherever it happens.

  One of our trips was during the Feast of Tabernacles. I was asked to play a song with the band they had assembled for an event sponsored by the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, a week-long event held every year at this time.

  I rehearsed “I’ll Fly Away” with the band in the afternoon and told them that right before we did it that evening, I would be doing a short piece with the fiddle. That night, right after being introduced, I stepped to the front of the stage and did a solo fiddle version of “Ha Tikva,” the Israel national anthem.

  It was quite a surprise to the crowd for a hillbilly fiddle player from Tennessee to play their national anthem. It made me glad I had taken the time to learn it.

  I have developed a deep and abiding love for the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

  My whole family has been baptized in the Jordan River, had Communion at the garden tomb and the Mount of Beatitudes, and walked on the Via Dolorosa where Christ carried His cross to Calvary.

  Israel is a mixture of the ancient and the ultramodern, with state-of-the-art shopping malls next to the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, modern hotels on the shores of the Dead Sea, and superhighways winding through desolate areas where Bedouins still wander the wastelands mounted on camels and living in tents.

  The Bible speaks of a day when “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35:1). That succinctly describes modern-day Israel. Due to wastewater recycled in Tel Aviv and pumped out to the dry areas, the arid lands of the Negev indeed do bloom and blossom. Rank desert becomes productive due to Israeli ingenuity and innovation.

  It’s a wondrous land, ever fascinating. It is so full of history, with millennia of suffering, victories, and defeats. Home of God’s greatest miracles, it is the place where the last few pages of human history will be written and carried out and where Jesus’ foot will first touch the ground at His second coming.

  I used to wonder why the Jews were called God’s chosen people. Now I know. The Bible says that salvation comes to the world through the Jews. The roots of the entire Judeo-Christian faith originated in the land of Israel.

  God chose the Jews to bring His salvation to mankind.

  The Bible tells us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

  I do it.

  CHAPTER 42

  FALLING DOWN AND GETTING UP AND DIGGING OUT

  In the mid-1980s the music business was changing again.

  Our once-dependable album-oriented radio format had achieved a lot of success. The advent of FM receivers in cars and portable radios had vaulted the better-sounding, formerly-shunned FM radio stations to the forefront of broadcasting. This attracted the attention of major companies and mass programmers who snapped them up, fired personnel, and changed formats, which seriously shortened playlists.

  Stations that once played everything from James Taylor to Weather Report had their parameters shriveled and their record libraries gutted. The jocks and programmers fortunate enough to survive the takeovers found themselves under the thumb of a tight-fisted consultant in some distant city; someone else controlled their playlists and discouraged the individuality that had once been the keynote of the freewheeling album-oriented stations.

  Things had also changed at our record company. MCA had offered Ron Alexenburg a deal any sane person could not refuse. He was given his own label, offices in New York, and the freedom to sign and hire anybody he wanted to. Plus, he was guaranteed an amount of money that would go a long way toward securing his family’s future.

  Don Dempsey took Ron’s place at the helm, and we had success under his watch. But when Don retired, things started falling apart for us at Epic Records in New York.

  This was also in the midst of the independent promotion fiasco. A handful of independent promotion men had gained so much power at most of the meaningful radio stations that a company could not get a record played on those stations without going through them.

  The ante for this dirty little game started at around thirty thousand dollars and went up from there, which meant that if you wanted to get a record played on the most powerful radio stations, you had to pony up the asking price.

  It was never conclusively proven that cash changed hands between the indies and the radio programmers, but there were major-league rumors. There are a lot of guys out there who have to live with the burden of being part of an evil partnership that wreaked havoc on record companies and artists alike.

  The record companies could not afford to pay the ransom money to the independents and continue to pay their own promotion staffs. A lot of good people lost their jobs. These were guys who had been with their record companies for years; capable, dedicated employees who fell victim to this disgraceful arrangement.

  We were no longer a priority. CDB had lost our main source of airplay, as we didn’t fit the mold now imposed on programming and stations. Where we had been a mainstay, now they were forbidden to play our music by the bean counters and number crunchers.

  And due to major personnel changes in the upper echelon, we had lost our juice at Epic Records in New York.

  This basically meant that the only source of meaningful airplay was country radio, and it seemed that the sensible thing to do would be to move our account to the Epic branch in Nashville.

  It was not as if we didn’t have credentials in the country format. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” had made number one. “Boogie Woogie Fiddle Country Blues” made top ten, and several of our other songs, going all the way back to “Uneasy Rider,” had done well on the country charts.

  Thankfully, the independent promotion scam had not reached country radio, and I had a couple of old friends on the promotion staff. Jack Lameier and Rich Schwann, who I had worked with in Los Angeles and St. Louis, had been transferred to Nashville, which meant a lot because we’d be working with a whole new roster of promotion people around the country.

  Another serious situation was unfolding around this time.

  When I had signed a management agreement with Joe Sullivan back in 1973, Joe was a successful concert promoter. Sound 70 Productions promoted practically all the meaningful concerts in the Middle Tennessee area and had a constant cash flow.

  In addition, we had started Hatband Music, a publishing company to handle my catalog and any other writers we happened to pick up along the way, since our Epic deal contained a small production budget for any artist we wanted to record, Sir Charles Productions.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time to form a partnership between Joe and me invo
lving both of us in all of the companies. Money was flowing in from Sound 70 and Hatband Music, and CDB’s tour dates were hugely successful. So Joe and I decided to basically split most of the companies down the middle and each become co-owners in them all.

  Things went well for a while. Then Sound 70, the concert division, started to slide as other promoters started bringing shows into the area. The saturated market became soft and unpredictable, with a lot of the real money-making shows being promoted by bigger promoters who had more juice with the booking agencies. That left Sound 70 with the smaller, less profitable acts.

  Sound 70 turned from a cash cow to a cash pig, gobbling up money with every losing venture it attempted. In a short while, all of the companies I owned half of, which had seemed to have such a promising future, had become a drain and a financial burden. The only entity that was bringing in money was the band.

  CDB was becoming the only revenue producer we had left. We were constantly accepting any kind of booking that came along just to stay afloat, and because of our ready availability, the price we could charge for concerts went steadily down. We had a conglomerate of companies and a plethora of employees who worked in our lavish corporate headquarters on the fifth floor of a Nashville office building with its own drive-up private parking lot. With less money coming in, we went a little further in the hole every day.

  There were people working at the office who I didn’t even know what their jobs were, more than many companies twice our size employed. The payroll was a back breaker, not to mention the exorbitant rent we paid on the suite of offices.

  Well, the one thing we had was good credit, and we kept borrowing to sustain the status quo. We let a few employees go, moved into a smaller suite of offices, and cut a few corners. But still the bills piled up, and the bottom line was that every month that went by would see us further in debt.

  It was depressing. The band was working all the time, playing every smoky, smelly joint that offered us a payday. Still, because of our excessive availability, our per-show price was dropping, and we were losing ground every month.

  We finally had to face the truth. We were slowly drowning in debt and sinking so deep that the time would soon come when we would not be able to swim back to the surface.

  When our debts were tallied up, we found we owed about two million dollars.

  It was time for a day of reckoning, a time to face the reality that things could not go on this way. As a team, Joe Sullivan and I had gone about as far as we could go. It was time to part ways.

  We had a meeting between Joe, me, and our lawyer. The upshot was that all of the companies would be dissolved with the exception of CDB, which would revert to me. Hatband Music would be sold to pay some of our debts.

  I would assume all of the debt, the whole two million dollars. I didn’t have to, but I wanted out. I wanted to make a fresh start in a hurry, so I agreed.

  The mountain of debt I had signed my name to was a tangled web of intercompany borrowing and a spider web of bookkeeping nightmares. I knew it would take a heavy-duty accounting outfit to figure it out.

  We hired Kraft Brothers Accounting from Nashville, and Lee Kraft and company set about the tedious task of untying this fiscal Gordian knot that was so tightly wound around my neck.

  We owed everybody from bus repair shops to American Express, from thirty-dollar union dues bills to hundreds of thousands of dollars at banks.

  David Corlew had started out as a roadie with the CDB in 1973. He had guts, savvy, and a hard-earned knowledge of how the music business worked. He was a quick study and a tough, tenacious bargainer. He was just what I needed to manage the next stage of the kind of career I had plans to pursue.

  J. B. Copeland traveled with me as road accountant. He was honest, meticulous, capable, and loyal. He had experience and a history with the band, and he was the perfect one to devise a method and a means to eliminate this monstrosity of debt.

  Paula Szeigis worked for Sound 70, but when the split came she wanted to go with me. I was extremely pleased and fortunate that she did. She is one of the most talented and well-liked publicists in the business. People love to work with her.

  In the days to come, Paula would become our full-time, in-house publicist. But in the meantime she would be our girl Friday, handling whatever task came up that needed doing.

  And that was the staff. David Corlew was manager. J. B. Copeland was office manager and head of all finances. Paula Szeigis was handling publicity and whatever else came down the pike.

  We set up two desks and a telephone line in my pool house, and the CDB was back in business.

  But there was only one piece missing. Bebe Evans had gotten so frustrated and disillusioned with the working conditions at the old office that she had quit and gone to work for BMI.

  She had told me when she left that if we ever decided to split, she would like to come back. And a couple of weeks after the pool house/office was set up, David said, “Let’s go get our girl back.”

  I set up a meeting with Bebe at the Opryland Hotel and talked it over. It was a short conversation. Though I couldn’t match the salary BMI was paying her, Bebe was anxious to get back in the game, and she has been running our touring department ever since.

  Nobody brings more energy to a project than Bebe Evans. She is competent and efficient and covers every detail of whatever she’s working on.

  We needed more office space. The double-wide mobile home at the entrance to Twin Pines was empty. We picked up and moved, tripling our office space and giving everybody a little elbow room.

  Now we were complete, ready to go out and conquer the world. Although we knew we had a formidable task in front of us, we knew, with the help of almighty God, that we were up to it.

  CHAPTER 43

  HOMESICK HEROES

  Larry Hamby was head of A&R for Epic Records in Nashville and played a big part in helping me feel my way around. Although I had lived in the Nashville area for more than twenty years, our recording account had always been either in Los Angeles or New York and I wasn’t familiar with the infrastructure in Music City.

  The faces had changed since the days when I was a part of the Nashville scene. New producers, new studios, and a whole new slate of executives were at the record labels.

  I had material for an album, and Larry set up appointments with some of the top producers in town. They were all successful and capable, but I’m attracted to energy, and the most energetic of all the producers I talked to was a guy named James Stroud.

  James really wanted the project, and that went a long way with me. Plus he was a musician and knew what it was like to work with a band.

  I settled on James Stroud to produce CDB’s next album. We booked a studio and started the final phase of rehearsals in preparation for cutting our first record for Epic Nashville.

  In 1985 we had a change in the band when Freddie Edwards decided to move back to California to be near his only child, Justin.

  We had dropped the two-drummer mode when Jim Marshall left the band. We hired a snappy young player from Niagara Falls named Jack Gavin to take Freddy’s place.

  We were rehearsed, refreshed, and pumped up to begin this new project. It would be titled Homesick Heroes and, thanks to a single called “Boogie Woogie Fiddle Country Blues,” become our first successful album for the Epic Nashville folks.

  Things were looking up. We had established ourselves as a viable artist on the Epic Nashville roster and raised our profile at country radio.

  But the debt we were under and the steps we would have to take to eliminate it were much more complicated and would take a lot more effort and sensible actions.

  Thanks to a long-standing relationship with two bankers, Phil Smartt and Billie Sue Agee, we were able to consolidate our bank debt and make one payment a month.

  I called the people we owed and assured them that I was not going anywhere and that every cent we owed them would be paid. Not a single one of them said they were worried about not getti
ng paid. I was determined that, with God’s help, we would, as my friend Larry the Cable Guy says, “get ’er done.”

  The next thing we decided was that the band would not play any more dates for the ridiculously low price we had been working for. We set the bar higher and informed our booking agency that we were not available for bargain-basement prices any more.

  Then we went to work.

  J. B. Copeland is a big fan of Dave Ramsey, the radio financial guru who has helped get so many people out of debt. Dave believes in taking the smallest debt you owe and putting all the extra money you can come up with toward the balance until you retire it. Then repeat the process with the next smallest bill.

  And that’s what J. B. did from the day he took over the financial reins until we burned the paid-off bank notes in my front yard at the annual Christmas party.

  Thank you, Lord!

  Tommy Crain came to me one afternoon in 1989 and said, “Charlie, I just want to go home.”

  Tommy had given me fourteen years of musical excellence and been prominent in developing our sound and style.

  He loved the band. But when a musician becomes burned out on the road, there is nothing for it except to leave it.

  With some trepidation, I set about looking for a replacement. Our drummer, Jack Gavin, suggested that I listen to a young man he knew named Bruce Brown. I auditioned several guitar players at the time I auditioned Bruce. But I knew after I heard him play that he was the one, the one who could come into the band and fill a very large pair of shoes.

  CDB has to have versatile musicians. We play so many different styles of music, which can stretch from bluegrass to jazz in the course of a few minutes, and Bruce Brown had all the moves and fit right in.

  The year 1989 was rolling along. It was time for another album, and as so often happens, you’ll set off in one direction, change horses in the middle of the stream, and the whole thing turns into something better than you had envisioned it.