20 Years After Album of the Year Win, The Kentucky Headhunters Are Still Rocking

The Kentucky Headhunters have released seven studio albums, two compilations, and twenty singles (including four straight Top 30 hits in the early 90s) with a cover of Bill Monroe’s “Walk Softly On This Heart of Mine,” “Dumas Walker,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Angel” and a Top 10 cover of Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me.” The band even earned a GRAMMY for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (1990), the Best New Vocal Group award from the Academy of Country Music (1989), and the Album of the Year (1990) and Vocal Group of the Year (1990, 91) awards from the Country Music Association.

The Headhunters are now coming full circle two decades after their 1989 debut album, Pickin’ On Nashville, was recorded for a measly $4,500. That record was meant to be a demo, but went on to sell Double Platinum and spent an amazing 147 weeks on the charts. (That’s almost three years for the mathematically challenged.)

While the band never recreated the commercial success of its first album, the group has stayed true to its own course, recording music that inspires and touches its members; come hell or high water, Richard Young (rhythm guitar, vocals), Fred Young (drums), Greg Martin (lead guitar, vocals) and Doug Phelps (bass guitar, vocals) have together consistently bucked the music establishment. Now, on the 20th anniversary of that first album, the Authorized Bootleg Series on Mercury records premieres a brand new album, The Kentucky Headhunters Live/Agora Ballroom … 1990.

The 9513 had a chance to sit down with Richard Young and talk about the new project.

KEN MORTON JR: How’d this new release come about?

RICHARD YOUNG: We’ve been playing together with at least three of us since 1968. We had a rock and roll band called Itchy Brother, which kind of morphed into the Headhunters in the mid 80s. Over the years, we’ve collected all these recordings, and since we’ve maintained control of all the production of our recordings over those years, we’ve wound up with a lot of material. We were talking together back this January about putting out a new album this year. It’s been three years. I said, “Guys, lets hold up on that for one more year.” We have so many multi-track recordings that I have in storage in my house. The ceiling on my second floor is about to cave in with all these tapes.

I wanted to get some of this stuff out for the fans. That way people will remember the Headhunters in the height of our success–in our heyday or whatever. We had this specific recording in the Angora Ballroom in Cleveland in 1990. They happened to have an Atlantic Records truck there at the time and they happened to record it. So I went back after the show and asked him what he was going to do with all the multi-tracks. He said, “I don’t know. You want them?” So I took them home and put them in storage and they’ve been stored in my house for almost 20 years. I think it was an obvious place to start with some of these records we’re going to release. A Johnny Johnson blues record will be the next one to come. We’ve even got one Itchy Brothers record under our belt that we recorded back in the 70s that’s going to come out. We just want to get some of this stuff out where people can enjoy it.

I told the guys on the bus the other day, “Man, if something ever happened to us, this stuff is just going to go to the four winds.” Enough of that stuff happens when people are trying to preserve it, you know? I think it is a good place to start and we were certainly hitting on all eight cylinders that night. We were really on, and the crowd is jamming. It was really an exciting night. We took the tapes and baked them, turned them over to digital and came up here and mixed them. I was really tickled with it. It’s a lot of hard work. I went into the label and showed them what we had done and they sent me to the California office. And they have this authorized bootleg series division. And they were all about it and we went to work on it and got it out.

KMJ: This album kind of comes full circle to your first album, Pickin’ On Nashville. I still can’t fathom how what was essentially a demo album stayed on the charts for nearly three years. What was it about that album that resonated so much with people?

RY: Gosh, I just don’t know, Ken. I think that the Headhunters had been in rock and roll a lot of years, and we almost got a deal with Capricorn until Ronnie Van Zant and the guys crashed. They were working with Jimmy Carter, trying to help get him elected, and that kind of put a stalemate a little on southern rock. And in the 80s, we were messing around with Led Zeppelin’s label and then John Bonham dies. We would have been the first American band on that label. In the mid-80s, we just kind of morphed into the Headhunters. I think a lot of things had to do with it. I think we maybe had a little more rural sensibilities than some of the other southern rock bands at the time. There was Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam. Even Hank Jr. was starting to boogie. So there was a movement there that allowed a little crack in the door that allowed this band to come out. There needed to be a band associated with this scene and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We had been doing this so many years, we saw a really weird reaction from people when we were playing little bars and things. There was some kind of magic. Maybe it was the commonality of the guys. The band was different, it was innocent. It was different from anything else. It was a little risqué in terms of what Nashville was used to. Everybody loved it because it was fun. It was just fun–that’s it.

KMJ: It was received so well in the early 90s on radio–what changed on the country music landscape that made subsequent releases not as welcome across the airwaves?

RY: I can tell you what caused it. It was two things. The first is that the Kentucky Headhunters grew more back towards their southern rock roots on the second record. And the other thing is didn’t sound like anything else out there. Radio’s not in the business of selling music, they’re in the business of selling advertising. And they only play music to have people listen to advertising. It really is hard to fit us in with everything else out there. For a while, it worked. You hear “Dumas Walker” come on the waves and people are at first, “Wow, what is this.” But when you hear more of it, it’s almost too different sounding and too much of “What is this.” It didn’t fit in with the mold of the scene. Everybody at first jumped on the bandwagon and said that it was the greatest thing since cotton candy. But then radio came to its senses. There wasn’t going to be another one of these kind of bands. There wasn’t any more of us to make it work or smooth out. That’s the main thing. It was just so different from everything else on the radio to work. All the radio people and disc jockeys loved it, but they had a different job to do. We respect that even today. Naturally, we’d like to be on there 24 hours a day. But it wasn’t to be, because of the difference of the sound.

KMJ: You guys have walked that fine line between southern rock and country–do you think that line has blended more over the years?

RY: It has happened in country music before and I’m starting to see it again. There’s a gleam of hope there. I think the Kentucky Headhunters took this town, shook it up and turned it up on its ear awhile. Normally, they take five guys that they can market that are all similar. I’m not saying they’re completely alike, they’re just similar. That’s a lot easier to get everyone on the same team. You can’t have one rogue group like the Headhunters. You couldn’t even try to recreate that. There were other bands that came out, but they weren’t like the Headhunters. They were good bands and they had great singles. Most of them even had more hit singles than we had. But the live thing is where we succeeded most. Because we played live so much, people sat back and thought we needed more of that to come along. It gave a glimpse of what Nashville could be if it got out of its own way sometimes. I think the Headhunters broadened the thinking of the industry.

KMJ: Lee Roy Parnell called you guys “Heavy Metal Bluegrass.” Is that a fair title?

RY: I think at the time, he was exactly right. The only thing he missed out on was the blues part. It was heavy metal, blues and bluegrass. I think, at the time, the way that the sound was, it was correct. If you want to stay in the business, you have to continually recreate yourself. The Headhunters have done that, but not necessarily to the liking of the industry. But it’s for the fans. We have always found a way to create a new little twinge to our sound to draw more and more fans into it. One album might jump into a little more bluegrass and country roots and then the next album might go into the blues more. Or even doing a total southern rock album. Sometimes, we’ll even mix them all up. But we’ve always tried to give a little bit of everything to the fans of the Headhunters.

KMJ: Is that how you can go from a rock and roll tune to something by Bill Monroe so easily?

RY: Well, I’ll tell you how that got started. Back in the 70s, we didn’t want to be a cover band and wanted to play original music. But at the bars we played, they said, “Sure you can do some original music, but we need you to do some covers too.” We were so determined to be original, that we would take a song like “Drive My Car” by the Beatles and take it and make it our own. Of course, nobody’s going to out-do the Beatles. But we did something to it that made it our own. And when we became the Headhunters that just came right along with everything else that came along. We were able to take a Bill Monroe and do something we’d loved. We did an album for Sony Music a few years ago. They called us up and asked us if we’d take some old songs from the Sony catalog and Headhunter-ize them up for their movie soundtracks. And it was wintertime and we didn’t have much going on. So we got the catalog–it was vast. I went and picked up the catalog and it was hundreds of CD’s. In the first wave, we narrowed it down to 300 songs that we liked. It was harder picking the songs to do than doing the actual songs.

KMJ: They weren’t interested in letting you guys do a big boxed set of movie covers at that point, huh?

RY: (Laughing) No one even thought about it. We just thought it was a good way to expose the band to a bigger audience through movies and such. But if you ever get a chance to hear it, do it. We did a cover of “Walking After Midnight.” It was great the way Patsy did it, but I always heard it as a Tarantino song. We did it in a minor and made it a spooky song for Halloween. Stuff like that is what always gets the Headhunters in trouble. We can’t leave well enough alone sometimes. When they got the stuff, they said that they needed to put it out as an album. It went out on a small sub-label of theirs. It was a lot of fun, but boy did we get slammed in the press for that one. The press kept saying that the Headhunters can’t write their own stuff anymore and that all we could do was covers. And we were just doing it for fun. It wasn’t meant to be a record. It’s called Big Boss Man, an old Jimmy Reed song. We did a video on it that was a little risqué that we shot in a coal mine with some pretty girls. CMT wouldn’t play it but I was just noticing now that it is on their regular playlist. Sometimes it just takes downtown a little time to catch up.

KMJ: You’re just ahead of your time.

RY: I wish. I don’t know if we’re ahead of our time or just headless. (Laughing) I don’t know what it is, but we just love doing things that haven’t been done before. Somebody once asked me why we do these things to ourselves. And I told them that you can’t look back at the end of your career and say that I did exactly what somebody else told me to do. Money is a great thing and it keeps us moving around in the world but it’s not the most important thing. Being happy is the most important thing and we’ve never been sad a day in our lives. We might have been broke, but we’ve never been sad. It started that way when we were kids. My dad didn’t make us get a job or cut our hair. I wasn’t going to do it for Nashville. If I wasn’t going to do it for my dad, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for anybody else. We wound up being who we are. There was a time, three or four years ago, where it all started to make sense. It was kind of like walking through a rainstorm after all these years. The sun came out. There’s a rainbow now. We got through it and we’re still who we are. People still love to see us come play and sure as hell, we still do it our own way. We’ve lived a charmed life. We have great families. We’ve always played our music exactly the way we wanted to do it. How many guys can play BB King at Times Square and then the next night be on a tractor feeding hay in Kentucky. If we weren’t around tomorrow, we would have lived a thousand years. It’s all been great. For those that have thought we had some bad luck, I just say “it’s life.” Everything can’t be a bed of roses. That’s what gives people strength and gives them character. If there’s ever been mud thrown at us, it has just made us stronger and more determined.