Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  Taz and I had spent more than forty years of our lives together. The send-off we gave him, although we did all we knew how to do to honor him, seemed so insignificant compared to all the experiences we’d shared and all the memories we’d made. Taz’s memory will always be alive to us who knew him well, as there’s never a shortage of stories and anecdotes that happened along the way.

  The old-timers remember a long denim duster and an old cardboard suitcase Taz had on the road in the early days. He carried an iron in those days, and it seemed he could never get the cord to his iron in his suitcase. I can almost see him now, running across the parking lot at some motel in Sioux Falls or some such little town, trying to make it to the bus by leaving time, with that duster tail flying and the ironing cord hanging out of that old cardboard suitcase.

  Or the time he broke his arm and, for some reason known only to Taz, painted the cast blue and had to play one handed.

  We did a PBS special from Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and some lady watching the telecast called in and wanted to know why we made our keyboard player tie his arm up that way.

  I had known Taz for so long that the idea of my world without him in it was a strange and foreign thought. We had experienced so many things, been together in life-threatening situations, and shared some of the most joyous moments of our lives together.

  Taz had been working with me when Little Charlie was born. We’d been everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of the Middle East, climbed a lot of mountains, and walked a lot of dark valleys together. Now, just like that, in the blink of an eye, he was gone forever.

  Taz left a lasting impression on our music and the CDB fans. It’s surprising how many people have memories of him, some little kindness he showed them, or something he said that stayed with them.

  The first few nights the band played after his death, I would catch myself about to turn stage right and half expect to see him sitting behind his organ, his black cowboy hat slouched low over his face.

  I wouldn’t even face the fact that I was going to have to replace Taz for a while. We just played our shows with the five of us. I knew I was going to hire another keyboard player, but I just wasn’t ready.

  After about five weeks, we began the process of auditioning a new player. It was a short process because the first guy to audition was Shannon Wickline. He was exactly what I had been looking for, musically and personality-wise. I cancelled auditions and told Shannon he was the new CDB keyboard player.

  CHAPTER 61

  I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT SONG

  In the flurry of hit records and superstars and the glitz and glamor of the music business, many times the most essential elements fly below the radar insofar as the public is concerned, the piece of the process without which the whole business would come to a screeching halt and disintegrate.

  I’m speaking of course of the men and women who write the words and music, who create the songs and start the ball rolling.

  Songwriters are so many times the unsung heroes whose names appear in miniature on record labels. They are rarely known by the public, although they are the sparkplug without which the engine would never even get started.

  The act of writing songs is the art of making something out of nothing. It is pulling ideas out of thin air, trial and error, trying to find words that rhyme and still make sense. It is striving to get a whole thought across in a single line of lyric and stuffing a whole storyline into a few verses and a chorus.

  Songwriting is a joy like no other when the chords are fitting together and the lyrics are exploding like popcorn, falling into place like the pieces of a puzzle. But if you’ve got an idea you know is worthy of being a song and you just can’t get past the first few lines, it can be some of the hardest mental work you’ll ever do.

  Everybody has their own method of writing songs. I went through several different phases and methods, and they all worked for me in their time.

  Some of the most successful writers in Nashville keep writing appointments with other writers. They go around Music Row with guitar case and notebooks in hand, going from appointment to appointment and turning out hit songs, in what I would suppose would be the Tin Pan Alley of Nashville.

  Some prefer to write alone, best handling the creative process without any outside influence.

  I have written with cowriters, some very fine ones, and have turned out some good music. I’ve attempted to work with some I jived with and some I didn’t. I have written with my band at a time when I was going through a phase in which I wanted an instant beat, bass part, or keyboard lick, accepting and rejecting ideas as we put the music together line by line.

  We would create whole songs, complete with arrangement and solos, without as much as a title. Then I would take the music off by myself and do the lyrics.

  That is viewed by most people as a very strange way to write songs, but there was a time when it worked for me. I’m a big believer that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it works for you, go for it, proper etiquette and tradition be damned.

  I was blessed that I basically served an apprenticeship under Bob Johnston. Our writing sessions were long, laborious, tedious, and exacting. Bob was a demanding taskmaster whose work ethic fell somewhere between Jerry Rice and Simon Legree. The clock didn’t exist. It made no difference if it was daylight or dark, morning or night. As long as there was one imperfect chord or one word that didn’t rhyme properly, it was back to the drawing board, time after time, until it all came together.

  But when you wrote a song with Bob Johnston, when it was finished, it was something you could be proud of.

  Bob’s intransigent approach to creativity and his never-say-die work ethic left a lasting impression on me. It is one that governs my approach to songwriting to this day.

  In my opinion, a good song can’t be rushed. You can ruin a perfectly good idea by settling for less than the song deserves simply by giving in to music or lyrics you know aren’t your best.

  Of course, sometimes after struggling for hours to get it right, it still evades you, and it’s best to put it away. You can get back to it when you’re fresh and can approach it from a different direction.

  But whatever you do, don’t ever discard a good idea. If it really is good, you’ll find a way to make it work somewhere down the line. I’ve kept song ideas in my head for years before something finally clicked and I was able to finish it.

  In fact, I always have several bits and pieces I’m working on. It may be part of a guitar riff, a few notes of fiddle music, a title idea, or a couple of lines of lyric. I know they are worthy of being part of a song but so far just haven’t jelled with any of the ideas I’ve tried to put with them.

  Then, one day an idea hits. You go back and start pulling out those old bits and pieces. One of them starts falling into place, and a song begins to take shape. You know where you’re going; you’ve just got to go through the tedious process of trial and error to get there.

  As I’ve said, most of my songs start with a guitar riff, a set of chords I work out, or a catchy line of lyric. But there are times when lyrics and music are happening at the same time. Other times the lyrics are put on hold until I get the melody worked out.

  And when I do finally settle on a melody, I’ve developed the ability to run a loop of the music through my head at will and fit the lyrical ideas together, even before I go to sleep at night or before I get out of bed in the morning.

  Though I enjoy working with other writers, these days I prefer working alone most of the time. It’s a lot easier being critical of yourself than it is of another person, and it’s no fun when two people have two different ideas about how a song should be written.

  The first song I ever wrote was when I was about seventeen; it was called “Does Your Conscience Bother You.” It was the most trite, ripped-off, cookie-cutter piece of garbage you’ve never heard. But you’ve got to start somewhere. It’s all part of the learning process. Crawl, walk, run.

  I b
elieve that evolving as a songwriter is much like building up a muscle. The more time you put into it, the stronger it gets. As you develop your discernment by accepting and rejecting lyrics and musical ideas, you get to the point when you know you’re finished. You’ve got your idea across so that other people can understand or at least have an interpretation of it.

  I am never without a few unfinished ideas running around in my head. I’ll sit and work with a lyric line I’m not happy with, trying different words that rhyme until I’m satisfied. Or I play a lick or a guitar riff over and over until a lyrical idea starts coming to me.

  I seem to write well under pressure when there’s a deadline to meet. When we were on the major labels and had to deliver a new album every year, I wrote constantly until I had enough songs I felt would make a good album.

  In 1983 I got a call from Lou Bantle, the president of US Tobacco, who was involved with Hal Needham in the production of a movie about NASCAR racing. It was titled Stroker Ace and starred Burt Reynolds and Lonnie Anderson.

  It seemed the movie had been shot and was ready to go into final postproduction. All the pieces were intact except one. They had not found a suitable title song and needed one right away.

  I got a videotape of the latest cut of the movie in my hands on Thanksgiving Day. After having dinner with my family, I retired to the basement by myself to see what I could do about a title song for Stroker Ace.

  I sat and watched the movie a couple of times, and a line started surfacing.

  Stroker Ace was born to race.

  I sat there for a couple of hours, and when I got up, I had the whole song ready to record, which we did a few days later at Woodland Sound in Nashville.

  It started off with Tommy Crain and me on twin five-string banjos. It worked on into the story of a country boy who learned to drive fast by hauling moonshine, going onto dirt tracks, and finally onto the big stages in Talladega and Daytona.

  We played the song at the premier of Stroker Ace in Charlotte, where we met Burt Reynolds and Lonnie Anderson. Jim Neighbors, who played Stroker’s sidekick, was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.

  I’ve written special songs for the Nashville Predators hockey team, the Tennessee Titans football team, and the National Finals Rodeo. Bits and pieces of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” have been adapted for TV commercials and even Monday Night Football.

  I enjoy having an idea pitched at me and making a song out of it.

  I think the most pressure I was ever under as a songwriter was when I wrote the songs for our first gospel album, The Door.

  It was such a special project to me. I wanted it to be much more than just another gospel album. I wanted the lyrics to have impact and hopefully speak to some of the people who, like me, had such a hard time understanding the gospel message and were falling through the cracks.

  I wrote, rewrote, rejected, accepted, started over, changed, and rearranged the songs until I was satisfied with the words and how they fit into the music. It was worth all the effort.

  The Door would give us our first Dove Award.

  A song that took a kind of roundabout way into existence was “Saddle Tramp.” It was originally meant to be an instrumental and was all finished and arranged and ready to take into the studio.

  I was in Miami on a promotion trip, riding in a car when the lyrics started coming to me. It was a lonesome story of a horseback drifter, riding here and there, looking for something he’d never find but still riding on in search of it.

  We went back into rehearsal and combined the lyrics with the instrumental. “Saddle Tramp” was born; it was the title song for an album that would eventually go gold.

  A similar situation occurred with a song called “Carolina (I Remember You).” It’s about growing up in my native North Carolina the way I remember it.

  The song was recorded and finished, except I had decided to add a string section to the arrangement. As the players were setting up and getting sounds together in the studio, I had an idea.

  Years before, I had written a piece of prose that was also about growing up in Carolina. I got to thinking it would be great if the song and prose could somehow be put together into one piece of work.

  But one part was sung and the other was spoken. One rhymed and one didn’t, and it just wouldn’t make sense.

  I don’t read music and know nothing about writing string scores, but I had a wild idea.

  I told Bergen White, the string arranger, “Take the first part of your score and have your players double the value of each note. A quarter note will become a half note, and a half note a whole note, and so on. And let’s see what happens.”

  They tried it. I read my recitation over the music bed it created, and it worked perfectly. We spliced the recitation onto the first part of the song, and it sounded like it had been written that way.

  My advice to anyone who finds they have a basic talent for rhyming lines of lyric and putting them to music: no matter how primitive that talent or how trite and terrible your first efforts may be, stick with it. Ride it out and take the time to explore your God-given abilities, to hone and sharpen them and develop your discernment level, always being honest with yourself about what’s good and what’s not.

  You may have the makings of a songwriter, and songs are the fuel that drives this music business. There will never be a time when new songs aren’t needed.

  CHAPTER 62

  WE’VE TRAVELED OUR HIGHWAYS AND TOASTED OUR TIMES IN ROTGUT WHISKEY AND FINE FRENCH WINES, OLD FRIEND WE’VE BEEN A MILE OR TWO TOGETHER

  In August 2015 I received a sad phone call that my dear friend and mentor Bob Johnston had passed away. It came as quite a surprise. I knew he had been having some health issues but had no idea they were that serious.

  Bob had been such an influential force in my life. He was the person who had brought me to Nashville and who had taught me the importance of discipline and sweat equity when it came to writing and recording. He had been a part of my life for fifty-six years and had been responsible for so many of the good things that had happened to me. Bob was like my older brother, and I truly loved him.

  I told his wife, Joy, and his son Kevin that we would do a memorial event in the near future. The people in the CDB office joined forces with the folks at BMI and organized an event for March 16, 2016, that I feel Bob would have been proud of.

  People came in from as far away as California to be a part of it. We paid tribute to a man who had produced Patti Page, Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong, Simon and Garfunkel, Marty Robbins, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash.

  He had written multiple songs for Elvis Presley and had songs recorded by Brenda Lee, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, and many, many more. With a career that stretched more than sixty years, he was a part of creating some of the most beloved and durable music ever recorded.

  Bob had come to Nashville in 1967 to replace Don Law, and Nashville had never seen anything like him.

  When Bob had mentioned to the Columbia Records brass that he was thinking about trying to get Bob Dylan to record in Nashville with the local players, the executive he was talking to told Bob that he would fire him if he attempted such a thing.

  But in typical Bob Johnston fashion, he defied his boss and proposed it anyway. The results are there for the world to hear. John Wesley Harding, Blonde on Blonde, Nashville Skyline.

  Fresh off big records by Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, he hit Music City like a thunderbolt, unmindful and uncaring of how anybody else did it. He was taking sessions into expensive overtime, working through the night into the early morning hours, and expecting everybody else involved to do the same.

  It was said that one of the Nashville recording engineers complained to an executive of the company about the hours Bob was working them and some of the unorthodox things he did.

  I understand the reply came back something like, “If Bob Johnston tells you he wants a microphone on the ceiling, you need to start looking for a very tall la
dder.”

  The memorial was a celebration of the life of a man who had left wide and indelible footprints across the landscape of American music. He touched the lives of countless people and left the business he loved a better place for having been a part of it for more than a half century.

  There were speeches, live performances, and videos of Bob in the studio. It was a truly nice night of remembering my friend.

  But something else happened that night that I only wish Bob Johnston could have known about.

  CHAPTER 63

  ICING ON A VERY SPECIAL CAKE

  After the memorial I had to go by the Country Music Association, which was only a couple of blocks away, and take a picture for some publicity thing or another that they had going on.

  We said goodbye to all of the people who had gathered to honor Bob and headed over to CMA headquarters, where there was a set and a photographer, and prepared to take the picture they had asked for.

  Sarah Trahern, the CMA president, came in the room to say hello, and in an almost offhand way she said, “I know you think you’re here to take a picture, but what you’re really here for is to be told that you’re being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.”

  At first I was afraid I had misunderstood her. Then it dawned on me that she had really just told me that I was going to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

  Hazel was standing next to me, and I almost fell into her. Then came the emotion and the tears. As the astounding realization of what had just happened hit me right between the eyes, the whole scene turned almost surreal.

  The Country Music Hall of Fame!

  That’s the one you don’t even dare to dream about. It’s the one you can’t lobby for or compete for, the one you have absolutely no control over, the one with the secret list of voters who are rotated every three years, the one you’d best not even spend too much time thinking about.