HM: How’d you go from writin’ songs to producing records?

AR: I met Jack Clement early on, and he was a producer, a songwriter and an engineer … all these things. So I think I caught on pretty early that it was natural to do more than one thing in the music business. For me, thinking about producing was just as natural as was performing and writing.

HM: How’d you actually get started?

AR: When I moved to Beaumont, Texas, where Jack had built a studio, I arrived just in time to help shellac the echo chamber, and then I expressed an interest in learning to run the console, and Jack was okay about that. It was an old Gates rotary-type console and everything was mono back then, so it was pretty easy. I learned how to run that and was soon able to go in and record demos and mess around in the studio.

HM: So you started as an engineer?

AR: Well, I think it was producing that always fascinated me. Maybe because I like to be in control (laughing). And I guess I'm cocky enough and ornery enough that I always had the attitude that I could do it better. When we were working in the studio, I was always looking at it from the point of view of: learning and experience, and asking: why did he do that? And thinking: I could have done that better. Every part of making records appealed to me and the production part was a way of being independent and a way of removing one more someone from the thing.

HM: Did you feel a need to "produce" the demos of your songs back then? You know, give em your own interpretation?

AR: Yeah, I began to feel that way because the songs I would write weren't turning out in the studio as cool as the ones I was hearing in my head. I later learned that some of the problems were in the songs (laughing) … they weren't as cool as I thought they were. But yes, initially, I was enthusiastic about the songs I had and was trying to make demos work. They didn't always turn everybody else on, but I got hooked on the process. I just loved it. And I loved working with musicians.

HM: What’s the toughest part of your job as a producer?

AR: I come to producing from the standpoint of being a songwriter, and I still think the most important ingredient in a recording session is the material. So my hardest work is always done before I get to the studio to record, because the hardest work is finding the material that you need. Really good songs remain relatively rare. This has never changed in all my years of producing. And then you have to go one step further when you find those songs: you have to learn that just because it's really good and rare, doesn't mean that it's a great song for the particular artist you’re working with. You have to find the right great song for that artist! I have never met an artist who could sing every great song and pull it off. So, over the years, that's made me say to artists: "Don't agree to do a song I bring you just because I say it's a great song. It has to be your great song".

HM: Who were the first acts you produced in Nashville?

AR: The first person I worked with in Nashville was Dickey Lee. He and I were co-producing him, and we got him signed to RCA. The second thing I did was with a group called Smoke Ring that Dickey and I had produced in Memphis. We had leased those recordings to Bell Records and then, somewhere along the way, Certron Records had absorbed Bell, and Aubrey Mayhew had become the head of Certron, and he asked us to do an album on them. So we brought them to Nashville and cut an album on them. I also did a little work with Albert Collins who was a blues guitar player. Bill Hall asked me to do some of that with him.

HM: Wow, I didn’t know you worked with Albert Collins ... that’s cool. When did you start producing on your own?

AR: After Jack started his record label (JMI), the first thing I did "solo" was with Susan Taylor … you know, "Pie" (Susan Taylor Pie). I had met Pie and Don Williams both when they were still together as the Pozo Seco Singers. In fact they cut a song Dickey and I wrote. Then they broke up, and Don moved to Texas and went into the furniture business with his father-in-law. But Susan was still here, and I just loved her voice

HM: Yeah, she’s a terrific singer … and songwriter.

AR: Yes, she is, and I really pursued her, but she wasn’t really too interested. She acted like she didn’t want to be in the music business. I think she was just that jaded by then. But I prevailed and signed her to Jack’s label and produced an album on her. That was the first sole project that I did. I guess the second was Don Williams.

HM: How’d that come about?

AR: Susan kept talking to me about Don. He was down in Texas dying in the furniture business, wanting to come back. She thought we would like one another, and at some point she said Don was coming back for a visit and she’d love to get us together. So I made an agreement to have dinner with him, and we hit it off … just like Susan had thought. Don was rather vague about whether or not he was gonna move back to Nashville … or when, and I told him if he decided to move back up here, to let me know and I’d try to work something out with our outfit. He was talking about … maybe in six months, but gosh, it wasn’t thirty days, I got a call saying he was here with a truckload of his belongings and his family! And so I did sign him as a writer and hired him to work for Jack Music.

HM: Was Don’s first record a success? I loved it, but did it sell?

AR: It didn’t sell hugely because JMI was truly an independent label, but it was a hit! The first single was a song Don wrote called Don’t You Believe. He wrote that at Jack Clement’s studio. He’d just bought a new little guitar that he loved, and I had showed him the G tuning … he was fascinated with that. There was a bunch of us working there in the studio, and Don went off upstairs or somewhere, and in a little while he came back and sang me that song. I said, "that’s really neat". Then he went off again, and in a little while he came back and sang me another song he’d just written. That song was called The Shelter of Your Eyes, which would become his second single on JMI. It charted well, and the next record was Come Early Morning which Bob McDill wrote, and the backside was Amanda, also written by McDill.

HM: How did a song as strong as Amanda end up on the backside?

AR: Jack wanted to put Amanda out as the next single, and I thought we were one record away from being ready to put Amanda out. I felt as strongly about the song as Jack did, but Jack thought Amanda was gonna make his company, you know, and so we compromised by putting a two-sided single out. It was a big success and both sides got lots of airplay.

HM: Then JMI was a success?

AR: Well, we were exciting, and we had a sound. And that’s what we wanted … to develop a sound. Cowboy (Jack Clement) wanted to have a hit sound, not just a hit record.

HM: Those records sure sounded different than the records being made in Nashville at that time … uh … more real. How do you account for that?

AR: Well, it was Don and the songs, but it was also the band. That whole band that played on Don’s first album was the result of Jack Clement. By then he was booking his own studio one day a week … a whole day … three sessions, 10, 2 and 6. He’d book different bands because he was looking for a band that had a certain attitude … and wouldn’t start playing the song before you’d finished playing it for them the first time. He wanted to find some musicians who would listen. And we wanted to find a band that would give us some dynamic range, because at that time records were … they were just like … level sonicly, and we wanted some peaks and valleys in the dynamic range. In the course of doing that, Jack would invite friends and the songwriters who wrote for his company to come to the studio to play. And he would play and sing … and have different groups of musicians each time. And it was that effort that found Kenny Malone on drums and percussion, Joe Allen on bass, Jimmy Cobar on guitar, Chuck Cochran on keyboards, and Lloyd Green on steel and dobro. These were not the front line players at that time, but they were great players. And they dug it when we said, "Listen to the song and then just play your instruments. And then listen to the song and then listen to it again and don’t get in a hurry … let’s get ready and get into this. And then … it only takes three minutes to cut a hit record!" It didn’t matter if we spent the whole day and only got one thing we couldn’t stop playing and couldn’t stop listening to … that was great! And those musicians became the core group … along with Buddy Spicher on fiddle … that provided the tracks on Don Williams Volume 1. Then Don continued with that band for several years. And I used that same band with some variations with Crystal Gayle for several years of her career. And they did have a sound! I will always ponder that because it was so rich.

HM: Who were the writers signed to Jack Music at that time?

AR: Wayland Holyfield, Don Williams, Jim Rushing, Dickey Lee and Cowboy and me … and let’s see … Bob McDill … Dickey and I had signed him and brought him here.

HM: Wow! What a group of writers!

AR: Yeah, a hell of a group of writers. There was a nice excitement in the company.

HM: With such great writers I assume you weren’t lookin’ for songs at that time. Did you listen to outside songs back then?

AR: On Don Williams Volume 1 … I don’t recall soliciting songs from publishers. We had so many songs that we thought were great songs, and we weren’t even getting to first base pitching them around town. No, I don’t recall listening outside of Jack Music. With the songs in that company and a few songs we just knew about or found on our own … well, frankly I didn’t have to. And I still love everything about that first album, every song. And it was fun!

HM: Were you still writin a lot when you first started producing records?

AR: Yeah, at that point I was still thinking of myself as a writer who wanted to do some producing and had been doin’ some because I liked it. I really was sort of bitten by that bug, but I was still thinking of myself as a songwriter.

HM: So did producing affect your writing?

AR: Yeah, the further I got with producing, the less I wrote; the less I was able to write ‘cause I was spending more and more time soliciting songs and listening to songs … trying to find things for the album or the project at hand. And once you find them and record them then you go around thinking about them and what to do to them to make them into a finished record. So, you listen to them a lot, ‘cause you’re listening to the details, and asking yourself: Have I got the best performance here? And do I take it and build on it, overdub and add things to it? Or do I still need that primary performance? Or is this really a good song? Is this the best song? Thinking things like that. Anyway the more I did that, the less time I had to think about being a writer. And also the more it kind of blocked the writing process. Like I’ve told you … when I would write I would kind of "check out" from listening to most music, and then I would start … it would just be natural … I would start making up songs. The busier I got, the less I was able to do that.

HM: I recall you sayin’ that you got into a "rejection mode" when you were listening to songs … hittin’ the "fast forward" or "off" button on the machine … and that after a while you couldn’t get past that when you tried to write.

AR: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s like … in order to work your way through when you’re writing, you sit down to write and start doing whatever it is that gets you started. Like Harlan Howard … he would just sit down with a blank tablet and start playing with words, any words, or phrases until something would send him off on a path toward an idea. With me it was usually musical first. I would just sit and look for something melodically or a feel … a melody or feel that would turn me on … and then words would start coming. That’s kind of the way I wrote. I would sit down to write and, you know, maybe I’d sit there for an hour and everything’s dumb and unoriginal and unexciting, and then suddenly I’d turn a corner and there’s something that makes me think: oh this is nice. Well, as a producer my "reject" mechanism became so strong that when I’d try to write I’d sit there and be working my way through this dumb stuff, and I’d just "reject" myself (laughing) … and get up and leave the process instead of working my way through it. ‘Cause I’d become so used to doing that with tapes … you know, listening to thirty seconds and like it or reject it.

HM: Yeah that makes sense to me. And it also brings me to another question: Do you often reject things quickly when you’re listenin’ to songs?

AR: Yeah, ‘cause you know, you’re lookin’ for something that you need or don’t have yet. And often you can tell immediately whether of not something fits. For instance … in all the time I ever worked with Crystal Gayle we never did a "cheatin’ song"; we never did a "barroom song"; and yet I got just loads of them for her. I mean deep into the years that I worked with her, I was being pitched things for her that were just hard-ass barroom, cheatin’, drinkin’ songs, and I would think: Why are they sending me these for Crystal? It didn’t take long to reject those ‘cause they just didn’t work for her.

HM: I’ve listened to a lot of McDill’s "work tapes", and he gets such a great feel on em. When you recorded those songs in the studio … say with Don … you always seemed to capture that feel on record, but have you ever come across songs that you really liked and couldn’t get the feel right in the studio?

AR: Yeah, a song that had something that appealed to us, but we just couldn’t get it. I don’t know that there’s any one explanation for that … it’s like "chemistry". When you’re producing it’s not just how you feel about the song, it’s also how the artist feels about it at a given time. And it’s the band that you’ve got on a given day. During that first album with Don, we cut a song of his called My Woman’s Love and we tried cutting that with the band that I was talking about earlier, and it just wouldn’t happen. But I loved the song, and it was Don’s so I felt like it was good in his hands, and I wanted to give it every chance. Because he had a feel when he would sit and sing it and play his guitar, I suggested to Don that we book just Kenny Malone and Joe Allen, bass player and drummer … book them for six hours so that we could work on that song. That’s two sessions. I thought maybe we’d find it that way. Well, we worked a whole session (3 hrs) and didn’t get it, so we decided to go to lunch, and while we were at lunch … Kenny, Joe, Don and me … we’re talkin’ about it, you know, and at some point I’m trying to explain and Kenny goes "Ooohhh!"… you know, the light goes on. And we go back to the studio, and cut the song! We got it with just those three guys, Don, Kenny and Joe. But it took that much effort to get that song to come together the way it was feelin’ to me when I heard Don sing it with his guitar. And then we added other things to the cut after we got that basic rhythm track.

HM: So it was worth the extra effort?

AR: Yeah, but not always. We tried a song with Kathy Mattea that we just never got. There may have been more that one, but I particularly remember one song … I can’t remember the title, but I liked it. And she liked it. We were both a little frustrated, and in that case we didn’t try again ‘cause I figured … it seemed to me … that there was some basic structural flaw in the song. It came to feel to me like it was really two songs that were stuck together in some way. One of them had a certain kind of rhythm feel and the other one had a different kind. And we just couldn’t make it into a record. And I’ve never heard that song as a record, so maybe no one else ever liked it, or maybe no one else was able to make it into a record. That’s funny how that will be sometimes; it can be elusive. But I learned along the way not to be too stubborn about that … to write it off sometime and say: Well it’s just not the right thing.

HM: Have you found songs that you really liked, quality songs that just wouldn’t work in the country format?

AR: I’ve always believed that the country music genre was pretty broad, and that the country music audience was pretty broad. Every experience I ever had with fans of country music indicated to me that it was real broad. It ranged all the way from Grandpa Jones to Eddy Arnold and Patsy Cline. That’s about as broad as I can imagine. So I never felt real constrained about any particular song that appealed to me. There may have been a few songs I thought were "just too pop", but, generally speaking, if it was a good song, I always felt there might be a way it could be stated so that it worked fine for country. I also remember Waylon Jennings making a statement that was kind of like this … I don’t know if this is verbatim, but he said: "Country is the singer, not the song. I’m country. I can sing anything I want to!" And I thought: damn right!

HM: Like Waylon singin’ Jimmy Webb’s song, MacArthur Park?

AR: Yeah! When Waylon sang it, it wasn’t pop … it was Waylon! Waylon was country. And Waylon was his own brand of country, you know. So, any way, that’s the way I always looked at it. I don’t recall ever having to sidestep a song that I liked … as long as it would work with the artist. Everything depends on that.

HM: When you were lookin’ for songs, did you prefer good quality work tapes or full-blown demos?

AR: I always preferred the simplest presentation. As long as it had a good feel to it. I’ve told a lot of people about Bob McDill and how he, for most of his career, didn’t go to the studio to make demos … it would be just him and a guitar, and then he might overdub a harmony part and some pretty rudimentary, but effective, licks.

HM: Of course he’s a good singer and an excellent, very creative guitar player, right?

AR: Yes he is. But still it’s basic presentation … simple and uncluttered. I think I’ve told you one of the devices that I always used … and felt was so valuable … was doing work tapes with an artist before we actually went into the studio to make a record. So, the artist and I looked for songs; then we’d take the songs that we liked and thought we might want to make a record of into the studio with just a guitar player or piano player. We’d find the right key, move it a half step or whole step or whatever up or down to find the key that felt magic and record the song with the artist and one musician. And if it was right … if there was "chemistry" there … I’d get "bumps" just like it was fully produced. And then what I liked to do most of the time when it came session day … instead of playing the writer’s or publisher’s demo for the band … I would play the work tape we’d made … just the artist and one instrument. That way the band didn’t have their minds cluttered with somebody else’s thoughts. They were just hearing the singer and the song. Then they could bring their own ideas to solving the problem: how are we gonna make this record? I always enjoyed doing that because I thought that was the best way for the band, the studio band, to hear the song. Then it served the secondary purpose of getting the singer to learn the song and having their performance on a tape they could listen to, so they could be more confident, more prepared when we went in to make the record. And some songs got eliminated that way … songs that either I or the singer was a little bit hung up on, you know. We’d listen to our "work tape" and maybe decide there really wasn’t as much to that song as we thought there was, or it didn’t work for that artist as well as we thought it would. So yeah, I always liked the simplest kind of demo I could get. Einstein said everything should be as simple as it can be and no simpler. And that’s what I mean about the simple work tape … you can be too rough with it, but it should be as simple as it can be.

HM: I remember hearin’ a work tape of Billy Kirsch’s song, Is It Over Yet? … I think it was just Kirsch on piano and John Wesley Ryles on vocals, and it absolutely gave me chill bumps. It had "magic", and I wondered if that song might have been lost with a full-blown demo.

AR: That’s a good point, ‘cause the odds are very good that you can take five songs in to demo, and one of them will be magic with that band, and the others will be hurt more by the presence of the band than they’ll be helped. And you’re less likely to have that experience if you take someone who can sing it well and play one instrument well, and you record in the studio where the quality of the sound is good enough. Of course, I’ve gotten a lot of tapes over the years that were cut on some tiny little cassette player where just the noise … the tape noise and room noise … was so bad you could hardly hear the song. That’s really stretching it. It should be a good quality presentation, but still simple.

Just click on the links below to visit the web sites of:

Taylor Pie

Don Williams

Kathy Mattea

To learn more about any of the folks (or companies) mentioned in this conversation, just go to www.google.com and type in the appropriate name.

Bob McDill (Nashville Songwriters Hall of fame)

Waylon Holyfield (Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame)