SHENANDOAH DIARIES

GENESIS

In the beginning...we were just a bar band in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This is the story of how we all got together and ended up being ‘Shenandoah'.

In September of 1984, there was a club here in Muscle Shoals, AL called the MGM club that’s house band was about to be replaced. The club owner, Ken Murray, in whom we are deeply grateful, had found Jim playing in a bar just down the street and told him he wanted to hire him but that he was about to fire the current band and put another one in, and wanted Jim to stay on as the guitar player. Jim had just moved down from Moline, IL to be a studio player at legendary FAME recording studio. So Jim went down and played for a couple of weeks with those guys while the new band was being put together on the side.

The MGM club had actually opened a few years earlier with a guy named Eddie Moore as the leader of the house band. Business had been good, but after a couple of years, Eddie had left and business had gone down. So it was he that Ken Murray called to come back and put a band together to replace these other guys and hopefully rebuild business back to what it was when it first opened.

I (Mike) had played a couple of weekend gigs with Eddie a few years earlier so it was me that Eddie called to play drums. Next he called Stan Thorn from across the state line in Mississippi to play keyboards. To round things out, the bass player ended up being ‘Big Al’ Jones, another local musician.

After giving the other band the news that they were ‘out’, we got together for our first rehearsal. We had to come up with enough material to play for at least 5 or 6 hours, so we had a lot of rehearsing to do. Keep in mind that most of us didn’t know each other at all. And we’d NEVER played together before.

Jim likes to tell the story of his first encounter with me. Jim says, “I was in the bathroom doing what you do in the bathroom, and Mike walks up beside me, looks at me and the first words out of his mouth was, ‘You know what I hate about taking a dump? After you wipe your butt, you ALWAYS gotta look at the toilet paper....and you KNOW what’s on it. But still you gotta look at it.” Jim says the first thought that crossed his mind was, ‘WHAT have I got myself into?’

Anyway, we learned our songs and played together for almost 4 months before the club owner called Jim during the Christmas holidays and said he was making some changes . He was about to let Eddie (the singer) and ‘Big Al’ (the bass player) go, but that he wanted to keep Jim, me and Stan. He asked Jim to find replacements. Jim hadn’t been in the Shoals long enough to know many singers, but he had played with a guy named Sonny Swift months earlier. So it was Sonny he called and Sonny brought ‘Dumpy Joe’ Hamilton with him. ‘Dumpy Joe’ was Hank Jr.’s bass player for a long time so we were excited about having him in the band. But about all we got out of him was ‘Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot’. He couldn’t sing much else. That got old quick!

We played together for a little over a year until a new club opening up across town called wanting to hire us away from the MGM club. We all declined because Ken Murry had been good to us and liked us and we felt we had ‘job security’ (if you can have that in a nightclub). Anyway....in the end, they offered Sonny a LOT of money to come work over there and he just couldn’t turn the money down. It was sad to see him go, because we were all very close by this time. We did however, make him take ‘Dumpy Joe’ with him. We couldn’t take ‘Toot-Toot’ any longer.

In September of 1986 we were back to ‘square one’. We needed a new singer. I had met Marty Raybon in Nashville working on ‘Printer’s Alley’ a year or so earlier. Marty was literally living on canned corn up there and just about to starve to death when my brother Bud befriended him and let him move in with him rent free in exchange for keeping his house clean. So it was on my visits up to Nashville to hang out with my brother that I got to know Marty. As a matter of fact, the band Marty was playing with once came down to Muscle Shoals before we started playing together and played in a neighboring club for a weekend. In their band was Brian Prout (Diamond Rio’s drummer) and John Marcus (Tim McGraw's bass player).

Knowing Marty already, I went over to their hotel to meet the guys in his band. I remember the conversation getting around to ‘lighting farts’..hehe.. and they didn’t believe it could be done. Well being the idiot I am sometimes, I laid down in the floor, hiked my rear end up in the air and out came the prettiest blue ball of fire you ever saw. We all laughed our butts off. (What is it about me and ‘first impressions’?)

Anyway....when the job came open for a new lead singer, I called Marty to see if he wanted to work with us. All Marty needed to know was that it was ‘steady’ work and that he could live with me in my apartment. That nailed down, it was time to find a bass player.

Ralph Ezell was the studio manager and played bass down at FAME so all of us knew him from there. Everybody worked down at FAME during the day writing and playing on song demos etc... Ralph moonlighted down at another club up the street called ‘Babe’s’(an all night joint) and having club experience we figured he was a logical choice. So all the sudden there we were, Marty, Jim, Ralph, Stan and me....SHENANDOAH... we just didn’t know it yet......

DISCOVERED

We had been playing together for quite a few months and had really put together a pretty hot little band. At least the community thought so. We had the biggest crowds in town and everybody from miles around used to come hear us play.
It was around this time that I had become pretty good friends with Robert Byrne. Robert had just started writing songs for Rick Hall, the legendary record producer down at FAME where we all worked during the day. And in conversation one afternoon I told him he should come down to the MGM club and hear us play sometime. Well he came down that very weekend. It was on a Friday night I saw him come in and sit at an open table. After our set, I went over and visited with him until time for us to go back up and play. He stuck around and stuck around and kept going on and on about how great the band sounded and what an awesome singer Marty was.

I was a little surprised when he showed up the very next night.with friend, Tommy Brasfield. After our set, we all went over to say ‘hey’ and they told us they wanted to talk to us about something. Both of them had had a lot of success as songwriters over the years and it turns out Rick Hall had put together a deal with both these guys to go out and find someone talented enough to get a recording contract and he would fund the project in hopes of getting a recording contract. They told us that they had been looking all over the country for months and hadn’t found anyone they’d rather produce a record on than us. We were flattered of course but we really weren’t interested in going on the road. We told them, ‘Take Marty and cut a record on him’. But they told us that Rick had already talked to the record president of CBS records in Nashville and he had told him they were looking for a band. It took Robert and Tommy a couple of weeks, but they finally convinced us to give it a try, even though we didn’t expect much to come out of it. We just thought maybe we’d pick up some extra cash playing in the studio and maybe get a song or two on the project. But we all agreed to do it.......

GETTING THE RECORD DEAL

It turned out that Rick Hall had made the same deal not only with Robert and Tommy, but with a few other VERY talented songwriters from the area too. They ALL were looking for someone to produce a record on and CBS was gonna give ‘first refusal’ to all of them. In other words, if it was something close, he’d sign their act. One of those guys was Walt Aldridge. Walt had been involved with FAME as a singer/songwriter and had had a lot of hit songs recorded by this time; most notably‘There’s No Getting Over Me’ by Ronnie Milsap. Anyway...Walt put a band around himself because he is a fine singer, and they called themselves the ‘Shooters’. Remember this, because it’ll be relevant in a minute.

So....we started looking for songs to record and were getting ready to go in the studio. One day out of the blue, Robert came to us and said he wanted to run something by us. He said, ‘I’d like to invite Rick Hall to co-produce this stuff with you guys because if we ever need him to ‘go to bat’ for us down the road, he will’. We never expected anything to happen with all this record stuff anyway, so we told Robert to go ahead with whatever he thought best.

Well the ‘Shooter’ and us finished recording about the same time and they took both our projects up to Nashville at the same time. I remember being on Music Row with Marty on the Wednesday afternoon they were playing our stuff to the label. We kept waiting and waiting, looking at our watches because we were gonna have to leave by 5pm to get back to Muscle Shoals in time to work that night. Finally we got a call from Rick and he told us they wanted to sign us. We couldn’t believe it!! We were getting signed by a major record label! As it turns out, it wasn’t us at all that they wanted to sign. They really wanted to sign the ‘Shooters’, but Rick twisted their arms and told them if they wanted the ‘Shooters’, they had to take Shenandoah as well. They didn’t want us, but agreed to sign us just to get the ‘Shooters’. So Rick Hall DID ‘go to bat’ for us, just like Robert said he would.

But when it came time to sign the record deal, Rick wanted us to sign his ‘production contract’ first. We told him we needed to take it to an attorney, but he insisted that if we didn’t sign it that day, that we’d end up losing our chance to sign with CBS the following day...just like another band he had did months before. We all talked it over and I suppose that it was because we didn’t expect to have any real success that we went ahead and signed it without the advice of an attorney. That was the worst mistake we ever made.

We didn’t have a name yet....we were referred to as the ‘MGM Band’ for months while we looked for a name. It wasn’t until the Friday before our first single was going to be pressed the next Monday that we ‘got named’. WE had settled on ‘Diamond Rio’ but Rick said ‘It’s not a commercial name and it’ll never sell’ and wouldn’t let us name ourselves that. He said, ‘I’ve come up with a couple of names I kind’a like....’Shenandoah’ and ‘The Rhythm Rangers’.” Well all we could think was ‘the Rump Rangers’ and felt like we didn’t really have much choice. So he called the label president on his speaker phone and said, ‘The guys like ‘Shenandoah’. We just rolled our eyes and CBS said, ‘Fine...talk to ya later’.

RELEASING OUR FIRST ALBUM

We finished recording the last few songs on the album (yes, we actually had a ‘album’), shot the album cover and turned it into the label. We felt is was ‘so-so’ at best, and Rick decided to release what WE thought was the worst record on the whole album....a song called ‘They Don’t Make Love Like We Used To’. It wasn’t that the song itself was bad...it was actually a well written song, written by my dear friend and room-mate Billy Henderson, we just didn’t like it as a band. It was kind’ve a 50’s ‘do-wap’ kind’ve thing. But Rick tends to push his weight around whether you like it or not and we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time, so we just went with it. As a note...Robert didn’t like it either. But they put it out there and it peaked at #58 on the Billboard charts....just about what we expected out of it.

I do remember however hearing it on the radio for the first time and being SO proud. There's nothing like hearing yourself on the radio. We cheated a little bit tho...we called in and requested it. hehe We probably wouldn't have heard it otherwise. I remember me and my room mate, Bobby Tomberline (who ended up writing 'One More Day' for Diamond Rio and 'A Good Day To Run' for Daryl Worley) went outside in my car to hear it. I don't know why I didn't have a radio in my apartment. But we went out there and a few minutes later, there it was! They said, 'Here's a new song by a local group called Shenandoah'. That was really a hoot!

Next we released one of the songs that Robert had found and produced. Rick and Robert co-produced, but they both had their favorites and tended to let the other kind’a take the reins on the ones they liked best. It was a song called ‘Stop The Rain’ and was a really awesome song, and the the whole band fell in love with it. It probably would have been one of our biggest hits if it had been released later. However it peaked at #28....but it finished up better than our last.

Part of the problem with these releases is that our label didn’t really want us and hardly put any promotion behind them. Remember the ‘Shooters’? That’s who they were behind. Their first single I think made it into the top 10 but their second and third and forth singles kept doing worse than the previous one. Ours was just the opposite. So when our third single ‘She Doesn’t Cry Anymore’, written by Robert, made it to #9 with hardly any promotion, our label kind’ve woke up and said, ‘Hmmmm, maybe Shenandoah is better than we first thought’......

GEARING UP FOR THE ROAD

During the time all these songs were being released, we had to find a manager and a ride so we could go out on the road a do some shows. First we found a manager, Fred Conley. I think we were impressed that he was Earl Thomas Conley’s brother. We weren’t as impressed after being told week by week that we’d all be millionaires in two years only to barely be thousand aires by the time he was gone.

We got convinced that we had to go on the road within weeks of our first single release, even tho it didn’t even make the top 40. Looking back we all thought our manager must've just needed the source of income his commission would make on our bookings. So we went out and bought a van and trailer, got a booking agent and hit the road....our first ‘real’ Shenandoah gig was in a neighboring town called Winfield, AL at the high-school baseball field. I’ll never forget the local radio station was giving away ‘Dinner With Shenandoah’ as a promotion for the show, and Jim’s 1st cousin won it because there was only about 40 or so people there in which about 39 were our families. 3 of us grew up within 30 miles of there.

Our next show was in San Antonio, TX. I remember it because we played the beautiful San Antonio River Walk and it was cold as the dickens. It was on that show that we met and became friends with Bill Cody, who hosts ‘GAC Classic’ on GAC every morning. He was the DJ at the radio station that interviewed us to promote the show. I remember him telling us he hoped to end up working in Nashville someday. We really hit it off, not just with him, but with the entire staff there. I don’t know if they thought we were just really nice guys or if they saw that we didn’t know what the heck we were doing and just felt sorry for us. But they came out every time we played the San Antonio area for years and years to come. And nobody was more proud of our success than them.

VAN BURNS

The ‘Top 10’ success we had with ‘She Doesn’t Cry Anymore’ started bringing us more dates. By the time the year was over, we had been gone from home 310 days. Matter of fact we had t-shirts made up, which I still have one of, saying ‘I survived 310 days with Shenandoah’. Toward the end of that single we had been on a run down in Austin, Texas and we were on our way home pulling our trailer behind our van to record what became the biggest album of our career; ‘The Road Not Taken’.

It was a Sunday morning, I’ll never forget, because we had to be in the studio the next day; Monday. It was just after sunrise and we were just about to cross the state line into Arkansas....about 15 miles from Texarkana....New Boston, TX to be exact. We all slept on top of each other in that van and I had just woke up and crawled over everybody to get up between the front seats when Marty, who was driving, looked in the side mirror and said, ‘Man! I think we’ve blown an engine. Smoke’s just boiling back there’. So we pulled off the side of the interstate and opened up the side door only to be pushed back by the flames that were blazing up from underneath the van right in front of the door. We yelled ‘FIRE!’ and woke everybody up to get out. None of us had shoes on because we had just woke up and we all jumped through the fire to escape.

Once out, we knew we had to unhook our trailer from the van. All of our gear was in there and if we didn’t get it off it would burn up. So we all got back up there behind the van and started trying to pry the trailer from the hitch, when all the sudden BOOM!!!! Man, we scattered like a ants on an anthill thinking we had surely gotten blown up! We thought we’d gone to ‘Hillbilly Heaven’. As it turned out, it was only one of the tires blowing from the fire. So we got back up there and 3 more times the same thing happened. Of course it scared the crap out of us everytime. But we finally got the trailer off and rolled it back to safety.

I remember us standing there on the side of the interstate barefoot, while cars whizzed by, looking at that van blazing right in front of us and not really knowing WHAT we were gonna do. Some guy pulled up behind us and said he had been coming down the interstate from the other direction and turned around because he saw us driving down the road with a huge fire underneath us and wanted to know if he could help. That’ll just go to show you that people are ‘good’ at heart. At least they are in Texas...I believe everywhere tho. There was an older couple too, that had a house next to the interstate and saw what was going on and they brought a bucket of water and an old timey pitcher to drink out of and gave us something do drink. And that interstate was HOT on our bare feet by then. Wasn’t that nice?!! I’m tellin’ you folks are ‘good’ at their core...for the most part.

Anyway....that guy that had turned around, it ends up owned a trucking company down the road and drove us down there so we’d have a place to make arrangements to try and get home. It was Sunday, remember? So there was no car rental places open...there was no airport there...nothing! And we didn’t know HOW we were gonna get home. We were still 500 miles from home and were suppose to be in the studio the next day and we didn’t know HOW we were gonna get there.

After exhausting ALL options, there was this kid there that worked at this guy’s trucking company named Eddie McGill that volunteered to drive us all the 500 miles home, back to Muscle Shoals. So we all piled into his Bronco II. 8 of us in a Bronco II. Have you ever been in a Bronco II? We might as well have been piling into a phone booth like they used to do back in the 50’s. 3 of us were behind the backseat and the hatch door (myself included). It wasn’t very comfortable, to say the least! But ‘ole Eddie...he saved the day. If it weren’t for him, we might not have been able to record “Two Dozen Roses’ and ‘Church On Cumberland Road’. So let’s ALL thank Eddie! THANK YOU EDDIE!!! Eddie has gotten into EVERY show he’s come to since, for FREE! Always will.....

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Finding ‘hit’ songs it not easy! We had spent months looking for some. And we didn’t care if WE wrote ‘em or if somebody else wrote ‘em. We just needed a hit to follow ‘She Doesn’t Cry Anymore’. If you have one REAL hit off an album, you’re lucky! Two and you’ve really done something. We had five ‘real hits’ on ‘The Road Not Taken’ album....‘Mama Knows’, ‘Church On Cumberland Road’, ‘Sunday In the South’, ‘Two Dozen Roses’, and ‘She Doesn’t Cry Anymore’. ‘She Doesn’t Cry Anymore’ was actually on our first album, but the label wanted it to be included on this album as well....guess they thought it would help sell albums. With that many hits, it’s hard to tell it’s impact, but it did sell 500,000 copies +. And it was our first ‘Gold Album’...thanks to country radio and country music fans everywhere. Thank you ALL! The ONLY thing that disappointed us about this album was that they released ‘See If I Care’ instead of ‘The Road Not Taken’....even tho it was a radio hit, I didn’t include above because it wasn’t what we consider a REAL one. We (the band) wanted ‘Road Not Taken’ SO badly to be released! If you’ve never heard that one, try and find a copy....you’ll see what I mean. It’s one of the best songs we’ve ever recorded....and one of the MANY songwriting contributions of our DEAR DEAR friend and producer Robert Byrne. He was a sixth member of our band in a LOT of ways! We always felt he was anyway!

Deciding on which songs to record...that’s tricky! I’ll tell you a little story on each of these songs and how we came to record them.

“She Doesn’t Cry Anymore”......well that record was really one of Robert’s demos. He was SO talented as a producer and had already put together tracks on it after he wrote it and we didn’t need to record it....we couldn’t have made it better. So Marty just put his vocal on it. I think this song set the precedent for how Robert did vocals with Marty. I used to sit in the control room and listen to them do vocals and it was more of a collaboration. Marty sang great and Robert made him sing GREATER! He was a singer too! An AWSOME singer! And they just connected as vocalists and came up with some of the BEST vocal performances I’ve ever heard.

“Mama Knows”.......Robert found this song and played it to us and we were just blown away! Anybody that has a mama and don’t love this song don’t love their mama! That’s the way I feel about it anyway.... One of the things I remember about the recording of this song is that we had just finished recording vocals on it and we left for a show up in Portsmouth, Ohio and we were gonna be leaving from there going out to California (in our van) on a three week run for what we lovingly call ‘The Hay ride to Hell’ tour! Anyway...we were doing the show in OH and Rick called our road manager and said Marty and Jim were gonna have to come back to fix some stuff before they went to California. So Marty and Jim get on a plane (that we had to pay for) after the show and fly back to Muscle Shoals. Jim and Marty said Rick had accidentally erased part of Marty’s vocal and part of Jim’s guitar and they had to come back and fix it. Since Marty’s vocals were different, the harmonies that I sang didn’t work anymore, so Marty had to resing the harmonies too. The only thing I sung that was still left was the line ‘But I’ve got this feeling’ on the end of the channel. The rest of the harmonies are Marty. Jim says he tried to match the sounds of his guitar but never could quite get it and to this day has a hard time listening to that record because the guitars don’t match.

“Church On Cumberland Road”......I remember Rick HATING this song and fighting so hard to keep us from recording it. But Robert really thought it was a hit and went to bat for it. So we cut it anyway....this one was one of Robert’s baby's. And when the label picked it for a ‘single’, I remember Rick throwing another fit over it and just really raising cain! Thank goodness it was what it was. It was our FIRST #1 record. As a matter of fact it stayed #1 for two weeks. And I can’t remember what it was, but we broke some kind of record with it....something like, it was the first time an artist’s first #1 stayed there more than one week. That sounds funny don’t it? Well re-read it...hopefully it’ll make sense! I DO remember us going to the #1 party....we were STILL in our van, despite having had a couple of top 10 hits at this point. This is a TOUGH business!

“Sunday In The South”......Probably the band’s favorite song! I’ll tell you a couple of things I remember about this song. First, (and I don’t mean to sound like I’m running Rick down, because he’s obviously done SOMETHING right; he recorded hits on ‘Aretha Franklin, Wilson Picket, Clarence Carter and LOTS more...AND he’s responsible for us being here), but I remember when Robert brought us the songwriter’s demo on this song, we loved LOVED it. The imagery in this song is just awesome But I remember Rick telling us after we had decided to record it that the songwriter, Jay Booker, wanted to re-write some of the lyrics. We were sick over it, because we loved it as it was. In particular, the line about ‘the man with the gospel gun’...that was one of the lines he said Jay wanted to change. Every re-write that we got back just wasn’t as good as the original and one day Marty said, ‘You know what Rick...I’m not singing this any other way than the original way... Well, we all made a conference call in Rick's office and he got Jay on the speaker phone and said something about us not liking the changes that he’d made. And he said, ‘Well Rick, I liked it the way it was’. And we said, ‘We did too’. Turned out, Jay told us later, Rick was telling him we wanted the song re-written and all the while he was telling us JAY wanted to re-write it. Hmmmmmm Whatever that means!

The other thing I remember about this song is shooting the video. We shot the video right here in the Shoals at the county court house. All of our families were in it. Marty’s son, Stan’s son, my grandpa and Jim’s dad playing checkers, my niece and nephew on the shot at the end, my dad (who died in 01 of Alzheimer's disease, which REALLY makes it priceless) and my brother was in it. And the shot of the woman holding the baby to her cheek is Jim’s wife Judy and his, then, infant son Jake (who is now 17 and is now Jim’s guitar tech on the road with us...and plays a MEAN bass). Not to mention friends that we had there. They had announced on the radio the day before that we were shooting a video and asked everyone to bring some food to immulate ‘Sunday service and dinner on the ground’. Well everybody showed up and brought food....and what they didn’t know is while they thought the film crew was setting up, they were actually filming everybody being themselves and capturing priceless footage of a REAL ‘Sunday In The South’.

“Two Dozen Roses”.....This is one of the most loved songs we ever recorded. It was written by Robert and Mac McAnally. I’ll tell you a story on this song I didn’t even know myself until a couple of months ago. Recently Robert Byrne died and it broke ALL our hearts. We all felt like one of the guys in the band had died....and in a real sense, they did. It was kind’ve like the song Don McClean wrote, ‘The Day the Music Died’. It will never be the same without him. Robert didn’t want to have a funeral so we all had a ‘get together’ instead to remember him by. And when I die, I can’t imagine a better way to leave here that to leave being remembered the way he was. All the guys that had written songs with him over the years got together at Phill Vasser’s house and we all told Robert stories and then at the end,there was a little PA set up and we all got up and sang songs co-written with him and told a little story about him. Well Mac was there and he asked me and Marty to get up with him and sing ‘Two Dozen Roses’ with him. While we were getting our mics set up, Mac started telling the story of how Marty had asked him during our recording session to write something he could ‘sink his teeth into’. Mac said, he thought about it that night and then went to bed. He said he woke up the next morning after having just DREAMED the first verse and chorus and he got up and put it on tape. When he got to the studio, he played it to Robert and and together they finished writing the song. They put a demo down and played it to us and we recorded it later that day. How appropriate that this song was a dream. Tell ME God don’t exist! Thank you God...Thank you Mac...and Thank you Robert! We MISS you!

SHOOTING OUR FIRST VIDEO

By now it was 1989 and the past two years had kept us away from our families for .over 600 days...AND we were still in that little cramped up van. Some of the guys had babies that were born during this time and being on the road had caused them to miss ‘first steps’, ‘first words’, birthday parties, and ball games. That part of it was HARD for them. But we were ‘hittin’ on all eight cylinders’ as far as radio goes. We were having #1 record after #1 record. We were on top of the world and it seemed nothing could go wrong.

I remember when we were getting ready to release ‘Church On Cumberland Road’ and they told us we were gonna shoot a video on it. WOW! A video! We were in ‘hog-heaven’ and so excited.

So when the day came, we drove up to a little town just north of Nashville (can’t remember the name of it), but there was this little church up there that art department at our label wanted us to shoot this at. So we got up at 4am and arrived at the church around daylight.

The video company was already there setting up and they immediately took us to makeup. Now we’d never worn makeup before and that took a little getting used to. I remember we sat there and watched each other getting a little ‘base’ and then a little powder, and we sat there and giggled like 13 year old girls while the one in the chair sat there embarrassed as they could be. Of course we had to get our hair done too, but that wasn’t so bad.

Once we finished up with all that ‘girly’ stuff, they took us to wardrobe to pick out what we were gonna wear. They had all kind’s of stuff to pick from but we pretty much got to pick out what we wanted to.

Not having shot a video before, we didn’t really know what to expect. We didn’t know there was gonna be so much ‘hurry up and wait’ on these things. Once we had one thing shot, they had to tear all the cameras down and set up for the next shot. It takes a LOT of time to do that, and I really felt for those crew guys.

I think the first shot we did was the close ups of us in that ole red truck. Marty, Jim and me were in the cab, and Ralph and Stan got stuck in back on that ole flatbed...and it was cold outside. While it looks like we’re driving down the road, we were actually hooked up to another truck by a tow-bar and they were pulliin’ us down he road. The camera crew and director were in the truck in front of us getting all the shots.

As I recall, we all looked kind’a goofy as none of us are actors. They just told us to act like we were driving down the road in a hurry to get Marty to the church to get married....we were suppose to be running late. So we found a map in there and opened it up acting like we were lost on top of it. Marty said, ‘Open that map up and hold it in front of your face while you’re driving.’ So I did and Marty grabbed the steering wheel like I was about to run off the road.

They had to shoot some close up stuff too...the key in the ignition, the empty fuel gage and Marty stomping my foot on the gas pedal as to ‘hurry up’. Well that HURT! My foot had a bruise on it for a week.

Then there were the ‘individual shots’. On EVERY video we ever shot, it was these that we dreaded the most. ‘Individual shots’ are where they single you out of the band and shoot shots of JUST you! We didn’t know what to do or how to act with the camera on us by ourselves and it was just very intimidating. But it was on this video shoot that we learned how to make it work.

I remember Marty doing his and they were trying to get him to smile and be upbeat. So when they ‘took-five’ he came over to me and said, ‘Man, can you stand over there in front of me and make faces and just do something to make me smile?’ So me and Jim both went over there and made a fool of ourselves trying to make him smile. It worked! So that's what we always did. When it was my turn, it was the rest of the guys acting like idiots to make me smile. If that video company had been smart, they’d have gotten some of the best shots of the video just by turning the camera around.

By now, we were about to wrap it up and it was just about dark. We had been there all day and we were exhausted. So we drove back to our hotel not having a clue what this thing was gonna turn out like. Nothing was shot in sequence so we didn’t know what to expect.

About a week later we got to actually view it as a finished video. We couldn’t believe how good it looked. Of course there were all the expected laughs, smiles and pats on the back.

A few months later ‘Church On Cumberland Road’ made it’s way all the way up the charts to #1. It was our first one and we were so proud....so VERY proud!!

MORE TO COME!