SHENANDOAH
Official Page
Getting our 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, CBS would sign their act. One of those guys was Walt Aldridge.
Walt Aldridge
Walt Aldridge was the founding member of the Shooters and was my mentor as a songwriter in our early days at FAME. He had been involved with FAME as a singer/songwriter and had had a lot of hit songs recorded by this time; most notibly ‘There’s No Getting Over Me’ by Ronnie Milsap and ‘Holding Her And Loving You’ by Earl Thomas Conley. 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 relevent in a minute.
The Shooters….the band signed the same day as Shenandoah at CBS.
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’d been thinking and wanted to run something by us.
Rick Hall
He said, ‘I’d like to invite Rick Hall to co-produce this stuff with you guys because I have a feeling 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 ‘Shooters’ and us finished recording about the same time and they took both our projects up to Nashville and played them both for the label in the same meeting. I remember being on Music Row that Wednesday afternoon with Marty at Rick Hall’s Nashville publishing office which is now part of ‘Curb Records’. 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 at the club.
The ‘Curb Records’ building on the right on16th Avenue used to be where Rick Hall’s Nashville publishing office was. In the 2nd story office right underneath where the ‘CU’ of ‘Curb’ is the office me and Marty were standing in when we got the call that CBS wanted to sign us.
Finally we got the call from Rick and he told us they wanted to sign us. We couldn’t believe it!! Wow! We were getting signed by a major record label! As it turned out, it wasn’t us they wanted to sign at all. They really wanted to sign the ‘Shooters’, but Rick twisted their arm and told them if they wanted the ‘Shooters’, they had to take Shenandoah too. (However we weren’t called ‘Shenandoah’ yet. We were called the MGM Band at that time) 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 thought he would. Looking back that was a VERY insightful move on Roberts part. We wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
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 to look at it but he insisted that if we didn’t sign it that day 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 Mondy that we ‘got named’. WE had settled on ‘Diamond Rio’ but Rick said ‘That’s not a commercial name and it’ll never sell’ and wouldn’t let us name ourselves that. He said he and his wife had found the name ‘Shenandoah’ in some ‘Time-Life’ book on the wild west and just liked the way it sounded. So the day we had to decide he said, ‘Here’s your choices….’Shenandoah’ and ‘The Rhythm Rangers’…..pick one”
Well all we could think was ‘the Rump Rangers’ and felt like we didn’t really have a choice. Honestly we didn’t like either one of them. I guess we just didn’t like ‘The Rhythm Rangers’ more. So he called Rick Blackburn, the label president, on his speaker phone and said, ‘Blackburn…the guys like ‘Shenandoah’. We just rolled our eyes and he said, ‘Fine…talk to ya later’. And that was it! From that moment on, we were ‘SHENANDOAH’.
The following Monday our first single called ‘They Don’t Make Love Like We Used To’ was being pressed with the name ‘Shenandoah’ on it. Letting them hang that name on us without running a trademark search on it was the second biggest mistake we ever made. But we didn’t know any better. It cost us millions later. And we couldn’t anticipate the storm that was coming up ahead!