SHENANDOAH
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Recording 'The road not taken'
Making it home late last night from the incident in Texas with our van burning, only our singed eyebrows to show for it, we were ready to get in the studio and record some hits!
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’.
Robert and Rick in the control room.
Making it home late last night from the incident in Texas with our van burning, only our singed eyebrows to show for it, we were ready to get in the studio and record some hits!
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’.
Jim playing electric guitar on the session
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 just one of Robert’s demos. Robert wrote it with Will Robinson. 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 re-record it….we couldn’t have made it better. So Marty just put his vocal on Robert’s demo. I think this song set the precedence 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 anybody has ever heard.
“Mama Knows”…….Written by Tim Minsy and Tony Haselden, 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! haha That’s the way I feel about it anyway…. One of the things I remember about the recording of ‘Mama Knows’ is that Ralph’s mother had died not long before we found the song.
Ralph playing bass on the session.
Robert had just played it to us at the studio but Ralph wasn’t there that afternoon. He was at home. So out of respect for him, we just dropped a copy by and said, ‘Listen to this song that Robert just found’. He told us later how much he appreciated us doing that because he said he cried like a baby.
I used to be a manager of the football team at the University of Alabama when Coach Bryant was still there and a lot of you that are as old as me will remember the commercial Coach Bryant did for the phone company. He was saying how he always told his players how important it was to call home and let your family know how you are doing. At the end of the commercial he said, “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine”. Well that’s what we all did after hearing the song ‘Mama Know’. We all called our mama’s…..everybody but Ralph.
Mike singing background vocals
“Church On Cumberland Road”……I remember Robert told us that Rick HATED this song when he first played it to him and he fought so hard to keep us from doing 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.
Cutting the wedding cake at our #1 party. We finally got Marty to the ‘Church On Cumberland Road’
And when the label picked it for a ‘single’, I remember Rick not liking that and just really raised 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. We broke some kind of record with it as I recall….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. You’d think we would be in a bus by this point. This is a TOUGH business!
“Sunday In The South”……Written by Jay Booker, this is without a doubt the band’s favorite song we EVER did! I’ll tell you a couple of things I remember about this song. First, (and again 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.
‘Sunday In the South’ video shoot at the courthouse in Tuscumbia.
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 Ricks 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 in Tuscumbia. 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 Bud was in it…even my old friend Bobby Tomberlin.
Mike, Mike’s sister Jan and Marty at the ‘Sunday’ video shoot.
And the shot of the woman holding the baby to her cheek is Jim’s then-wife Judy and his, then-infant son Jake (who is now 21…and plays a MEAN bass himself). Not to mention other 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 make it seem like a real ‘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’.
“See If I Care”…..Written by Robert Byrne and Walt Aldridge. The ONLY thing that disappointed us about this album was that they released this one instead of ‘The Road Not Taken’….even tho it was a radio hit. Nothing against ‘See If I Care’….. we (the band) just wanted ‘Road Not Taken’ SO badly to be released next!
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. That song was really HIS life.
“Two Dozen Roses”…..This is one of the most loved songs we ever recorded. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot a video on it. 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 few of years ago. Robert Byrne had died and it broke ALL our hearts. We all felt like a brother 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 Phil 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’. 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 McAnally, co-writer on Two Dozen Roses.
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. So he got up and put it on tape and when he got to the studio, he played it to Robert 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!
Robert Byrne in happier days.