SHENANDOAH
Official Page
Gearing up for the road
During the time these first songs were being released, we had to find a manager and a ride so we could go out on the road and 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 nearly as impressed after being told week after week that we’d all be millionaires in two years only to barely be hundred’aires by the time he was gone. I don’t know why we chose him. He’d never done anything at that time but sing backgrounds on the road with his brother.
We let everybody convince us though 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 Fred just needed the source of income his commission would make on our bookings. After a while you realize that as the artist you are just the ‘mule pulling the wagon’.
Our little white van we bought from Noro Wilson. We put many a’mile on that thing.
But we bought a little white conversion van from Noro Wilson, one of the old-school record producers and got a little trailer to pull behind us and we were ready for the interstate.
Noro Wilson. The guy we bought our little white van from. Noro wrote ‘The Grand Tour’ for George Jones and ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In the World’ for Charlie Rich
We were still playing the clubs in Muscle Shoals to make ends meet while they were trying to put shows together for us on the road. We had since left the MGM club and gone down to a club called the ‘Lamplighter’ in a neighboring town called ‘Littleville’ (an appropriate name). At one point Marty had fired our sound man without thinking about a replacement first. I had been dating a girl named Deanna Dees that I had become smitten with from the Lamplighter and had told her in conversation that we needed a sound man immediately for the weekend and she told me her brother-n-law Brent Sparks ran sound at local churches.
Brent Sparks and me when we were still working at the Lamplighter in Littleville.
So out of desperation I called him to see if he could do it for that first night just so it would buy us time to find a ‘real sound man’. But he did such a good job that we decided to keep him through the weekend and then just until we were on the road full time and then…and then…and then. And 10 years later he was still our sound man and one of the very BEST decisions we ever made. (Technically I guess it was a decision we NEVER made because we never technically ‘hired’ him) All I know is he was like a member of the band to us just like Robert Byrne was. He drove that van every night after shows and made us laugh made us sound great and was one of the best friends I have ever had. His kids still call me ‘Uncle Mikey’ and they are grown now. Brent and Donna and all their kids are like family to me.
Since those days he’s worked with Faith Hill, Gary Allen and lots of other folks. As of today he’s running sound for Eric Church and we are all extremely proud of him.
So we got a booking agent and took our little white Chevy van and hit the road. Our first ‘official’ Shenandoah gig was in a neighboring town called Winfield, AL at the high-school baseball field.
Winfield AL baseball field where we did our first ‘official’ show as ‘Shenandoah’.
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 20 or so people there in which about 19 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 Riverwalk and it was cold as the dickens.
The San Antonio Riverwalk. This stage is where we played our first ‘official’ Shenandoah show that wasn’t in front of just friends and family It was a REAL show.
It was on that show that we met and became friends with Bill Cody, who hosts ‘GAC Classic’ on GAC-TV every morning.
Our old friend Bill Cody from San Antonio that finally had his Nashville dreams come true. Here he is interviewing another old friend, Joe Nichols
He was the DJ at KKYX, the radio station that interviewed us to promote the show in San Antonio and 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 Jerry King, the station manager and the entire staff there. You meet a lot of people in this business and at some point it all becomes a blurr, but Jerry and Bill have always been real ‘friends’ to us. 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.
At Christmas time of that year management had set it up so we would go (at our own expense) and play the ACM (Academy of Country Music) Christmas party out in Los Angeles. I guess it was basically to introduce all the ‘brass’ out there to who we were in hopes that some day they would nominate us for something. What I remember most about that trip was that it was the first time any of us had ever been to California so it made a real impression on us. We might as well have been the Beverly Hillbillies. The event was a real swanky place called ‘The Castaway’ up in Burbank overlooking the city and it was a breathtakingly-beautiful view at night from up there.
This was the view from the restaurant ‘The Castaway’ where we played the ACM Christmas party in 1987.
So we played for these folks and as I remember we didn’t sound very good. We got no soundcheck and the sound system was sub-standard too. You’d think a party for the ACM would have decent sound, but NOT!
We did eventually get nominated out there and even won ACM ‘Group of the Year’ in 1990 but looking back it took a LOT of ‘schmoozing’. Later when we were going through all the legal and financial problems over the name, we were nominated for ‘Group of the Year’ but couldn’t afford to fly out there. Robert Byrne was there though and overheard one of our record label execs tell the main guy at the ACM’s that CBS offered to pay for our flights but that we refused to come. What a LIE! We told them we’d love to go if they’d fly us out there but that we didn’t have the money. We were never nominated for an ACM award again. Politics is in everything I reckon.