Al Sussman chats with Bill King about his days covering popular music, as well as some of the big names that are featured in the book “LARGE TIME: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986” (available on Amazon).
For those who may not be very familiar with you apart from Beatlefan, how did you go from writing for the University of Georgia’s newspaper in 1973-74 to reporting on pop music for a major newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution, just a couple of years later?
I was a journalism major at UGA and was hired by the Constitution straight out of college. After about a year and a half of working general assignment stories, in a suburban bureau and writing obituaries, the morning Constitution and its sister paper, the afternoon Journal, decided to combine their Saturday editions under the name WEEKEND and have a Leisure Guide tabloid supplement that focused on entertainment.
I asked the editor in charge of the combo whether he’d like some record reviews and, since the paper did not have anyone covering pop music, he said yes.
That was in the fall of 1976, and it turned into a weekly gig doing reviews and a column called Quick Cuts. I became a copy editor four days a week, and the fifth day they let me devote to my music pieces.
A couple of years later, Leslie and I started Beatlefan as a side gig.
Your first “trial by fire” at the paper came in August 1977, when you were sent to Memphis to cover the aftermath of the death of Elvis Presley and then to the town of Elvis’ birth, Tupelo, Miss. And then, two months later, the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. How did those experiences help to shape your career as an entertainment reporter?
Trial by fire, is right. When Elvis died, and the next day’s paper sold extremely well, the editors decided to keep on top of the Elvis story in a big way. A reporter was sent to Memphis to cover the mass public mourning and funeral, and Elvis was on the front page every day that week. We kept selling more and more papers.
Early that Friday evening, the city editor came out of a meeting and approached me on the copy desk. “How’d you like to go to Memphis in the morning?” he asked.
They wanted me to interview people who knew Elvis, and to gather hometown memories for the cover story of a special Elvis-themed issue of the Leisure Guide coming out the next week. “Take Leslie with you,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
Frankly, I was scared to death. This was easily the most important assignment I’d ever been given. They told me to go home early and get ready for the trip, and so I spent the rest of the night reading everything I had on Elvis.
Then, we flew to Memphis and, with my wife driving and me trying to figure out where we were going, we spent the next three days there and in Tupelo tracking down Elvis stories (our adventures are in my book). When we returned, I wrote the cover story, which attracted a lot of attention.
The managing editor was so impressed with our Elvis sales (and my article) that he decided the paper needed something it hadn’t had before: a fulltime entertainment writer. And, starting a few weeks later, that was my job for the better part of 10 years.
The Skynyrd crash was a much different experience. By that time, I was on the music beat and I was at home on the night of Oct. 20, 1977, when someone on the wire desk at the paper called to tell me of a report on one of the news services that an aging twin-engine Convair 240 plane carrying the band had gone down near the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
They wanted me to work my sources to see if I could find any additional information. So, whereas with Elvis I was on the road and running down people associated with the King, for the Skynyrd story I reverted to my news reporter training and basically covered the story by phone from my kitchen table.
While I’d never met or interviewed any of the Skynyrd members and wasn’t as connected to them as I was to other Georgia-based acts, I immediately thought of one name: Sharon Lawrence.
Lawrence was a former journalist and music industry publicist who had worked with numerous performers, including Elton John, David Bowie and Skynyrd, and who recently had settled locally as publicist for the Atlanta Rhythm Section. I had interviewed her in late 1976 and she had talked extensively about Skynyrd, whom she called her “babies.” She wasn’t too pleased with the Southern-punk-hotel-wreckers image that had become attached to the band.
So, after giving the wire desk some background on Skynyrd and its career up to that point, I called
Lawrence at her Atlanta home. She was trying to get in touch with the band’s family members.
Later that night, shortly after the morning paper’s main home edition had closed, Lawrence called me back. She’d gotten ahold of one of the family members and had learned that six people had been killed in the plane crash, including three members of the band: lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie, who was one of the backing singers.
I immediately called the wire desk and told them what Lawrence had said. Not long after that, confirmation of the deaths moved on the wire services, and I believe they replated the paper (a process where they stopped the press run to make a change). They put my byline on the story.
For the Saturday edition, I was assigned to do a follow-up story, and I wrote that members of the band’s entourage had said that the plane that crashed had been in “run-down condition” and that some of those on board had raised the possibility of refusing to fly on it anymore.
Fortunately, most of my time on the music beat was not spent covering rock ’n’ roll deaths!
What’s your definition of “Southern music”? Is it as difficult to define as rock ’n’ roll?
It’s much broader. Back in 1977, when Capricorn Records released a collection dubbed “The South’s Greatest Hits,” I wrote that there really is no one genre that is “Southern music.”
I know many people outside the region figured that if you mentioned Southern music, you were talking about the Allman Brothers’ brand of jammy Southern rock — which, of course, was pretty diverse music itself, incorporating elements of country, Western swing, R&B and jazz with more traditional rock ’n’ roll.
Southern rock covered a lot of territory, ranging from country-rock to hard rock to blues-rock to the jazz-rock fusion of acts like the Dixie Dregs. And then there were the Southern new wave acts, such the B-52s and the Brains.
But Southern music also included the rockabilly of early Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins; the piano-banging rock ’n’ roll of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the prototypical funk of James Brown, the smooth pop of Tommy Roe and the Classics IV, the bluegrass-bred country-pop of Dolly Parton, the New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong, the classic rock of the Atlanta Rhythm Section, the Caribbean-influenced pirate rock of Jimmy Buffett, the countrypolitan guitar of Chet Atkins, the funky soul mixed with sweet ballads of Lionel Richie and the Commodores, the jangly guitars and obscure lyrics of R.E.M., the psychedelic-orchestral R&B of Isaac Hayes, the soaring African American gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the gritty Memphis soul of Stax Records, the toe-tapping Southern gospel of Hovie Lister and the Statesmen Quartet, the contemporary Christian pop of Amy Grant, the raw, risqué soul of Millie Jackson, the mainstream “Nashville sound” of Conway Twitty and Bill Anderson, the ’60s-infused rock of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the country-rock of Alabama, the fun dance music of the B-52s, the frat-party soul-rock of Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts and the Swingin’ Medallions, the boogie-woogie of Fats Domino, the country-soul-pop blend of Barbara Mandrell, the blues of B.B. King and the wide-ranging mix of country and pop favored by Willie Nelson.
Those acts cover a lot of musical territory, and it’s tough to lump all of them into one category … except to say, it’s all Southern music! Really, if you think about it, most American music originated in the South or was inspired by the music of the region.
During my years on the music beat, I wrote about popular music in general — rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, gospel and even a little jazz — and got to interview three Beatles and such big names as Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick, Grace Slick and Roger Daltrey. But since I was in Atlanta, Southern music acts were a mainstay of my coverage, and that’s why, after I retired, I decided to do a book on the subject.
A lot has been written recently about Phil Walden, particularly his support for and relationship with Jimmy Carter. What was it that made Walden such a pivotal figure in the Southern rock/R&B community?
Well, as a manager, he guided the careers of Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers, with the latter being the top act on Walden’s Capricorn Records label, which kind of launched the whole “Southern rock” thing in the 1970s, so that’s a big part of it right there.
And then, as you alluded to, he organized fund-raising concerts featuring Southern stars, which gave the Carter campaign a boost in its early days.
And after the original Capricorn had gone under during a tough time in the record business, he relaunched the label in the early 1990s, finding success again with another wave of young Southern bands, including 311, Cake and, most notably, the jam-rock favorite Widespread Panic (from my hometown of Athens).
Walden finally sold Capricorn in 2000 and, with his son and daughter, started a new label, Velocette, focusing on such indie rock bands as Jucifer, Beulah and the Glands.
I think the Australian rocker Billy Thorpe (whose “Children of the Sun” was released by Capricorn), summed Walden up nicely in a comment he posted on a Quick Cuts blog I wrote after Phil’s death in 2006. Thorpe said Walden “understood the role of music and understood musicians better than just about anybody I have met in 40 years as a musician.”
You devote a chapter to “beach music,” the “other” beach music. How would you define that, and who would be the best example of it?
When I was first preparing to write about it, I was told the first thing you need to know about Southern beach music is that it has absolutely nothing to do with little deuce coupes or California girls.
When you hear the term “beach music” in the deep South, particularly the Carolinas, it means a happy-go-lucky brand of R&B — popular at beach resort dance pavilions — that is perfect for doing the shag, a sort of slowed-down jitterbug. Bobby Tomlinson, one of the original members of the Embers, a popular beach group based out of Raleigh, N.C., told me: “If you can’t do the shag to a song, it ain’t beach music.”
The Southern brand of beach music became all the rage in Atlanta in the early 1980s. For a while, nightclubs devoted to this regional craze became the hottest thing in local nightlife, targeting aging frat boys and sorority girls who wanted to dance to the likes of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs or the Tams.
The term really dated to the early 1950s, when rhythm ’n’ blues records by Black artists rarely made it onto the radio in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. Whites only got to hear those tunes on jukeboxes at the beach, so they called it beach music.
For a major story on the 1980s beach music craze, I traveled to the place of its birth, Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Tunes you would find at that time on beach jukeboxes there included Willie Tee’s “Thank You John,” Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay,” the Swinging Medallions’ “Double Shot,” the Catalinas’ “Summertime’s Calling Me,” the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk,” the Showmen’s “39-21-40-Shape” and the Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time.”
You devote a couple of chapters in “LARGE TIME” to two bands who broke out of your hometown of Athens, Ga., several years apart — the B-52s and R.E.M. What were your first impressions of those two groups and what set them apart from the acts within the Athens music scene?
I first interviewed the B-52s in 1978 at a vegetarian restaurant in Athens where one of them worked. This was before they had a national record deal. “Rock Lobster” had come out on a small Atlanta-based label and they were still playing their punky dance music at local clubs in my hometown, as well as in New York City.
I remember thinking that, while even the band members themselves probably had trouble drawing the dividing line between what was a pose or put-on and what was just a natural reflection of their love of ’60s kitsch, there definitely was more to this group than just a good time.
In fact, the determined, businesslike way they had handled their career, while unorthodox, should be a case study for other aspiring young bands.
Contract offers from major record companies, including Sire Records, had come to the group by the time we first talked. But, unlike most eager young bands, they had turned down the deals.
“We’re holding out for the right offer,” lead singer Fred Schneider told me assuredly at the time. “The basic contracts that are offered to new groups just aren’t what we’re looking for. We don’t just want money; we want to maintain total creative control over our music.”
I think the fact that the B-52s are still around — they recently played a concert in Athens that opened a new arena, which is home to a minor-league hockey team named the Rock Lobsters — is testament to them having done things the right way.
As for R.E.M., I first encountered them during the summer of 1981, when I spent several days in my hometown, working on a package of stories about the burgeoning Athens new wave music scene. I met members of numerous bands, including Pylon and Love Tractor, but the group that everyone in town unanimously said stood the best chance at making the big time was R.E.M. As one person put it, “They’re the only band that the artsy crowd and the frat boys both love.”
During that 1981 Athens visit, I sat down with the members of R.E.M. in a house where a couple of them were living on Barber Street, one block over from where I attended seventh grade, and I remember thinking that, unlike most of the Athens musicians I’d met that week, who primarily were interested in having fun, these guys were serious about the music business.
As it turned out, the last concert review I ever did for the Journal-Constitution was R.E.M. at the Fox Theatre three years later. By that time, they were a college radio favorite around the country and just on the verge of breaking out into the commercial mainstream.
That Fox concert showcased the characteristics of R.E.M.’s music that early on separated the group from others in the Athens dance-art music scene — the dreamy, layered vocals, Michael Stipe’s intriguingly (and sometimes frustratingly) indecipherable lyrics, Peter Buck’s ringing, melodic guitar work and a recognition of the benefits of exploring other tempos besides a simple, frenetic dance beat.
I always was very proud that such an original, forward-looking group came out of my hometown.
Why was Bill Lowery known as “Mr. Atlanta Music”?
Because, for several decades, almost every recording act to come out of Atlanta had some sort of tie to Lowery. A former disc jockey, he became a manager, record producer, song publisher and studio owner, and was a key figure in the early growth of Georgia’s capital city as a music center.
Lowery’s music publishing catalog included “Be Bop-A-Lula,” “Young Love,” “Dizzy,” “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy,” “Games People Play,” “Down in the Boondocks,” “Ahab the Arab,” “Key Largo,” “Traces,” “Stormy,” “Imaginary Lover,” “I Knew You When” “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” “I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round),” and even The Beatles recorded a song published by Lowery — “Mr. Moonlight.”
Lowery also was co-owner of the famed Studio One in Doraville — recording home of the Atlanta Rhythm Section, Lynyrd Skynyrd and many others. Without him, a lot of Atlanta musicians would have had a harder time getting their careers off the ground.
As you mention in the book, the Allman Brothers Band’s peak years happened before you became an entertainment reporter, but you did cover the band at a particularly unique moment in its career. What was that like?
Kinda strange, but fun. As you say, their heyday was while I was still in high school and college, and they had broken up, but I had encountered various members of the band doing their individual music projects ever since I’d been on the music beat.
However, the first time I saw the Brothers perform was at Phil Walden’s August 1978 Capricorn Records picnic near Macon, where the four original members surprised us all by taking the stage together late in the day for an unannounced reunion performance. My brother Tim and I were sitting on the lawn next to Martin Mull when that happened.
Then, in early 1979, I was invited to spend a couple of days in Miami Beach, interviewing them in a mansion where they were staying while recording their reunion album at Criteria Studios.
Two memories stuck. One came when we all sat around the living room, and they started passing a hash pipe around. They offered it to me a couple of times, but I politely declined. So, thereafter, when the pipe made the circle again, they just passed it over me.
The other memory is chowing down on huge slabs of coconut cake with a very stoned Gregg Allman in the mansion’s dining room as he regaled me between bites about a recent “juice cleanse” that he’d gone through.
Then, a couple of months after my trip to Miami Beach, the Brothers came to Atlanta’s Fox Theatre on a tour promoting the “Enlightened Rogues” reunion LP, which I had reviewed as “a good bit better” than some of the material they had released in the last couple of years before their breakup.
The night of the Fox concert, I went backstage before the show to chat. I’ll never forget how nervous Gregg was, bouncing up and down on a backstage stairway. “I’ve got butterflies, man,” he said. “I’m the butterfly man!”
The butterflies seemed to fly away as soon as he took the stage. The concert was a triumph, with the mostly 20-something fans cheering the newer material and dancing in the aisles to the older tunes.
Indeed, it was heartening in an era of homogenized, boring disco music to see the Allmans’ brand of blues-rock go over just as big as it did in the early 1970s.
I’d like to get some quick impressions of some of the people you cover in the book. Let’s start with three-quarters of the Highwaymen, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.
I enjoyed chatting with all three. I interviewed Cash in Georgia on the set of a TV movie he was making with Andy Griffith (another of my heroes), and he talked at length about the whole “Man in Black” thing and how it came about. Many years later, when Cash died, it was long after I’d quit being an entertainment writer and moved into editing, but the paper quoted from my 1982 interview, reprinting the portion about why he always preferred to wear black. I was just happy I could be a part of memorializing one of country music’s greatest performers.
I saw Willie in concert numerous times and interviewed him twice, once backstage at the Fox Theatre after a 1980 benefit for Jimmy Carter and then a couple of years later as we sat on his tour bus in Chattanooga, and he toked up a real purple haze while we talked.
Interviewing him was almost as much fun as listening to him play that battered old guitar and sing in that jazzy-country style of his. I think I best can sum him up by saying that I don’t think I’ve ever run across anyone who doesn’t like Willie Nelson.
As for Kristofferson, who was helped along in his career by Johnny Cash, I sat down with him in a hotel suite in Savannah in the summer of 1980, as he rolled his own. What followed was an engaging conversation with one of the more thoughtful and candid music stars I’d ever encountered. He talked about how hard it was to recover from the breakup of his marriage to Rita Coolidge, his dual careers in music and movies, and dealing with stage fright as he returned to the concert trail. But he summed up his current state of mind by saying, “the quality of my life has improved drastically in the last year. I was a miserable S.O.B. last June, and I ain’t miserable anymore. The pluses outweigh the minuses.”
James Brown?
I spent a day with him in Augusta, and it resulted in one of my favorite stories I did while on the music beat. During that day, the Godfather of Soul focused his undivided attention on an audience of one: me. It was a vintage James Brown performance, only minus the distinctive gliding dance moves.
We sat and talked about his career, his upbringing in Georgia, his businesses and our mutual support of the Georgia Bulldogs. His career wasn’t in great shape by that point, and our day together was a full-on public relations effort, but I still found him fascinating.
Brown talked sort of like he sang, in short, sharp riffs periodically interrupted by bursts of laughter and exclamations. He had his daddy serve us a fried chicken lunch, drove me around town to meet folks who could tell me how great he was, and he introduced me to his “protégé,” a young Al Sharpton.
He might not have been onstage, but the Hardest Working Man in Show Business pulled out all the stops, and I left Augusta totally charmed by him and thankful that I had been given the chance to spend a day with a man who deservedly has been called one of the most important figures in R&B music.
Dolly Parton?
I interviewed her in a Beverly Hills hotel suite in connection with a film in which she was starring. She was a lot of fun and obviously very ambitious, but totally unpretentious, as was evidenced when she suddenly stood up, mid-interview, and declared, “I gotta pee!”
Roy Orbison?
I chatted with him in Atlanta five years before the Traveling Wilburys gave his career a final return to stardom. We were in a motel room not far from a country music venue that originally was a grocery store, where he was playing later that evening. He seemed very shy, but we discovered in casual conversation that his road manager was from the same rural Georgia county as my father, and that seemed to open things up a bit.
And at that night’s performance, his voice was unforgettable and spine-tingling, as always.
Jimmy Buffett?
In August 1978, Buffett decided to record most of a live album at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. I was given remarkable backstage access to him over three days, and we got to talk at length. He was very friendly but there was no doubt who was in charge.
Buffett was known for his my-way-or-the-highway control of his affairs, and at the time of our Fox encounter he’d recently signed a very lucrative new deal. When I asked whether money was the main inducement to renew his record deal, he grinned wickedly. “Another scam,” he said. “I got ’em again. Took ’em to the cleaners.”
Carl Perkins?
Carl was one of the most engaging music business personalities I ever met. He loved talking, and he especially loved talking about The Beatles, which, of course, was right up my alley.
He told me about being on hand when the Fabs recorded one of his songs. And he talked at length about the previous year, when he had traveled to Montserrat for work on Paul McCartney’s “Tug of War” album, and how he’d written a tune, “My Old Friend,” for Paul, and it made Macca cry.
The next year, when Carl came to town to perform a show, I was there, and between sets he and one of his sons took me out to their tour bus, where they performed “My Old Friend” (which had not yet been released at that point) for me. Another high point of my years on the beat.
Kenny Rogers?
I interviewed Rogers three times over the years, and he was married to a woman from my hometown. Also, Kenny was one of my father’s favorites and during one of our chats I told him that, for tune-ups, Pop took his car to an Athens service station run by Rogers’ father-in-law. I felt the Athens connection helped me get him to open up just a bit more than in the typical interview.
Jerry Lee Lewis?
I met the man known as the Killer in December 1981, when he came to metro Atlanta for a show at a country music nightclub. We chatted backstage in his dressing room while his daughter, who lived locally, snapped photos.
He was gaunt, having survived a severe illness a few months earlier, but seemed as energetic as ever. And just as egotistical. “I’d look good dead,” he said. “But the thing about it: I’m a livin’ … lovin’ … wreck! Legend! Genius! Name the trip, I have done it.”
I asked questions, but mostly it was a monologue, punctuated by obscenities and crudities, that rose in tempo and volume as Lewis warmed up. He spat the words out in a single breath, sometimes running them together in a sort of country jive that was increasingly difficult to decipher as he became more excited.
At other times, he made masterful use of the dramatic pause and inflection. He might not have been onstage yet, but he was performing. And loving it.
B.B. King?
I unfortunately never got to meet King in person, but I did do a couple of phone interviews with him. He loved talking about the blues genre of music and how he wanted to boost its acceptance by a wider audience.
He did concede, though, that one reason for his wide acceptance was the difference between his approach to the blues and that of some of his contemporaries.
The key, he said, was that he saw the blues musical form, which features fewer chord changes than other styles, as needing “some coloration. You have to put quite a bit into it to keep it interesting.”
Chet Atkins?
I talked to him once on the phone, and then we chatted in person a few years later, when he did a show at Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Ga., in connection with a celebrity golf tournament he headed up.
They called him the Country Gentleman, and I think that was a very apt description of Atkins.
Of the names on that list, only Willie and Dolly are still with us. From a distance, has your impression of either of them changed?
Not really. Willie is still a superbly talented, totally ingratiating personality, based on what I’ve seen, and he’s still a joy to listen to.
And, if anything, I respect Dolly more than ever for her philanthropy, including donating $1 million to COVID-19 research at the height of the pandemic.
They’re both very deserving of their folk hero status.
Finally, does “Southern music” still exist, or has it been swallowed up within the 21st century pop music mega-universe?
Considering the broad spectrum that “Southern music” covers, I don’t think it ever will be swallowed up. It just continues to evolve.
There’s the whole hip-hop scene, of which Atlanta is the center, which came along after my time on the music beat. And folks like Usher keep a Southern presence in R&B. There’s a new generation of Southern rockers, such as Blackberry Smoke. There’s the jam band scene revolving around Widespread Panic, which maintains its roots in the South. Ditto, the Americana brand of alt-country-folk-rock. And while country music now has global appeal, the vast majority of its stars still originate in the Southern part of the U.S.
So, no, I don’t think Southern music is in any danger of disappearing.
Bill King’s “LARGE TIME: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986” is available on Amazon to U.S. customers. Those outside the U.S. and those who would like a signed, numbered copy can order it directly from The Good Press Books. The cost is $39.99 each postpaid in the U.S., $69.99 each postpaid outside the U.S. Add $10 to the cost if you’d like a numbered, signed copy. Send a check, money order or credit card information to: The Goody Press Books, 3009 Delcourt Drive, Decatur, GA 30033. Credit card orders must include address, expiration date and CVV number. You also can pay via PayPal to goodypress@gmail.com, or via credit card at 404-713-6432.
