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TWO DOZEN ROSES & AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
CBS wasted no time in releasing the Robert Byrne and Mac McAnally penned song ‘Two Dozen Roses’ after ‘Sunday In the South’ reached #1 in August of 1989. We didn’t shoot a video on this song but looking back I sure wish we had’ve. ‘Two Dozen Roses’ has been a fan favorite ever since it’s release and still is to this day. As a matter of fact every poll I’ve ever seen says it’s THE #1 favorite song of all our songs to the fans. We’ve always liked it a lot too.
Mac McAnally told the story once at Robert Byrne’s wake after Robert had died. We were at Phil Vassar’s house where we were all celebrating Roberts life. They had set up a little PA so songwriter buddy’s of Robert’s could get up and play something they had written together and tell a story. Well Mac was up there and told how when our recording session for the ‘Road Not Taken’ was going on, Marty had, in conversation told Mac, “I sure wish you would write something for us that I can really sing my teeth into”. Mac said he went to bed that night with that thought on his mind. He said in the middle of the night he woke up just having dreamed the first verse and chorus of ‘Two Dozen Roses’ and reached over on his night-stand where he kept a recorder and just sung it into the recorder and went back to sleep. The next morning he played it to Robert and they sat down and wrote the second verse. That afternoon we recorded it. Little did we know what impact that song would soon have on all of us.
Marty singing ‘Two Dozen Roses’
Over the years friends and fans alike have shared with us that they have proposed to their wives with “Two Dozen Roses’, gotten back together with it and even walked down the isle with it. What a testament to a song. I’m just honored that I had something to do with a song that great! By December it had gone all the way to #1…our third #1 in a row.
AUSTIN CITY LIMITS AND A PACKED BUS TO CALIFORNIA
It turned out that some of our crew guys were invited to be a part of a little ‘deal’ that was happening behind our back with management, our merch guy, and our bus driver. I can’t remember exactly what they were doing but once we found out about it we cut the cord right then and there.
Jim picking the solo on ‘Steamroller Blues’ on Austin City Limits.
We were suppose to be leaving that night for a LONG trip through Austin, TX for the ‘Austin City Limits’ tv show taping on August 23 and then on to California and back. All those guys laughed at us saying, ‘You guys will never be able to pack all your gear on that little bus and you’ll never find a driver this late.” And if it hadn’t have been for Randy Edwards we might not have.
Randy was in Nashville at the old Shoney’s Restaurant on Demonbraun Avenue and he met some tall skinny guy named Bobby something that he overheard talking about being a truck driver and that he had been fired and didn’t have a gig. Randy asked him if he’d ever driven a bus and he said ‘no’ but that he thought he could. So Randy called us and said he’d found us a driver for the run out west. But he didn’t tell us this guy hadn’t showered in weeks but you KNEW it!
Good-ole Ralph playing bass like nobody else could.
The next problem was getting all our gear on that little 35 foot MCI bus with no back lounge and very little bay space below and getting it from Nashville to California and back. We put what we could underneath and then piled everything else in bunks, in the front lounge and in the walking space in the area where you normally walk through the bus. And off we went to Austin.
Mark Hood, our first ‘real’ road manager. We had never met before we picked him up in Austin.
Once we got to Austin, we picked up our new road manager Mark Hood, who we had never met before and got set up for the tv show. I’ll have to admit, we were HOT that night.
I saw a tape of the show not too long ago and I’ll have to say, Jim Seales is amazing. They never really showcased what he could do on our records with his guitar, but I think that tv show changed everybody’s perception of how good he really is.
Mike and his million-dollar mullet holding down the beat.
Even Vince Gill and Steve Warner have told me they thought Jim was in the top 10 best guitar players that ever came through Nashville. That’s saying a lot when you consider how great they are and start to think about players like Chet Atkins, Brent Mason, Albert Lee and Merle Travis! Brad Paisley is another one that we found out later was a big Jim Seales fan. I can’t help but think that ‘Austin City Limits’ show must’ve been on in their living rooms at some point for them to know how good Jim is.
At that time we had some big hit’s but we still had to fill our show with some cover songs too and we always tried to showcase Jim’s playing. On that show we did ‘Uncle Pen’ (made famous by Bill Monroe), ‘Steamroller Blues’, (a version we heard James Taylor do on a video tape one night) and also we did a VERY fast version of ‘One Way Rider’ that showcased not only Jim but Stan Thorn also who was another ‘monster’ player (when he wanted to be)!
We were pretty proud of ourselves when we left Austin that night headed for California. We knew we had knocked it out of the park and couldn’t wait to see it when it aired on tv. And we weren’t disappointed! As a note, that episode included an up and coming country singer from Oklahoma named Garth Brooks.
Stan tickling the ivory on ‘Can’t Stop Now’.
So off we went, headed west. We climbed over a mountain of gear all those miles out there and all those miles back, but we did it! Everybody thought we wouldn’t make it, but we made it. I guess we showed them!
After that run we ended up doing a long-term lease on a bus we affectionately called ‘Ole Blue’. It was our home away from home for quite a few years and there was no more bus problems after that.
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