The July 7, 2006 Paul Finebaum Interview with BUDDY BUIE http://www.finebaum.com
Paul: And we bid you hello. As we set off for the weekend on a holiday week and what better way to kick back. If you're heading to the lake, coming back from the lake or to the beach or just chilling out on this afternoon talking to one of our favorite guests. We had him on a couple of months ago. Didn't have enough time. We said we'd get him back and he is here. Buddy Buie, the famed songwriter and producer trecked up here from the Dothan area.
Buddy: Eufaula
Paul: Excuse me, Eufaula area. The Dothan area going a little deeper into...
How far is Dothan from Eufaula?
Buddy: Dothan is about 50 miles south of Eufaula.
Paul: O.K. Well, you didn't have to go to Dothan then to get here.
[Laughter]
Buddy: But I was born and grew up in Dothan.
Paul: Something tells me you're near the lake.
Buddy: Yeah, I'm on the lake.
[laughter]
Paul: I had a guess!
Well, Buddy, of course, has a storied career and you grew up in Dothan.
Buddy: Yes.
Paul: I'll get that right eventually.
We hung around a couple of hours a few months ago talking about some of the great classics and you have a new release, which we will get to later on, entitled THE DAY BEAR DIED.
There's so much to talk about and I know we'll have a lot of phone calls as well. We're glad you're back.
Buddy: It's good to be back. It really is. I really enjoyed being here last time and brings back a lot of old memories coming back to Birmingham. We used to come to Birmingham so much. Made the first record I ever made in my life here in this town.
Paul: I didn't know that.
Buddy: Yeah. Heart Recording Studios. It was over a blood bank downtown.
Paul: What was that?
Buddy: It was just a little recording studio owned by a guy named Ken Shackleford and Bobby Goldsboro and all us came up from Dothan and made the first recording we ever made. You know, just a little band out of Dothan. Coming up here, being so excited about actually cutting a record. Nothing we cut there ever did anything but at least it was the first exposure we had to the recording industry so Birmingham is kind of near and dear to my heart.
Paul: Now you grew up with Bobby Goldsboro. Which one of you started in music first?
Buddy: Hmm, I think pretty much, probably simultaneously, I mean, we were in high school and we both liked the music. He played guitar and had a little band and I was a big music fan and so we kind of started our careers together.
Paul: You've had so many hits. We were chatting off the air with one of our younger guys, trying to see if we could connect the dots between your big hits and today and one of your songs which made the charts with two different groups. Made the charts with the Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1979 but it first hit the charts, got all the way up to I think #3 in '68 with The Classics IV. People will recognize this one.
Buddy: Yeah.
[SPOOKY plays]
Paul: When this song came out in the late Sixties, obviously Buddy, you did it again with ARS about 11 years later, was it much different in terms of the arrangement?
Buddy: Actually, not a whole lot of difference. Main difference was it was a guitar solo instead of a saxophone solo. You know we had one more. We had a #1 jazz record with David Sanborn.
Paul: I didn't know that.
Buddy: Yeap,we did. That was only about five years ago. It was a #1 jazz record released around Halloween, of course.
[cell phone rings loudly]
Buddy: My goodness! I forgot to turn my phone off!
Paul: That's the loudest phone I've ever heard!
[laughter]
Paul: I thought that was a new solo on SPOOKY or something!
[laughter]
Buddy: I am sorry.
Paul: It's Billboard saying you're back on the charts!
While waiting to hear......
Buddy: No I was turning it off!
I don't know who that was but I turned it off.
Paul: Wow!
It's interesting because songs like yours and we'll obviously go through the charts as we move thoughout the program and somebody out there has a special one they'd like to hear before we get it, go right ahead but they're timeless. Just a few minutes ago, we have a couple of music staitions here, I heard SPOOKY. I think it the ARS version, not that I could tell. Last night I'm driving home flipping around. TRACES. I mean you just don't have to look very hard to find your music.
Buddy: Well, those songs, that's one thing we're proud of is ,you know, like Spooky was written in 1967 so, God, that's almost 40 years. Lacking one year. Right?
Paul: Pretty close.
Buddy: That's scary. I started real young.
Paul: How old were you when you penned your first song?
Buddy: Actually, the first song I wrote about my wife, Gloria, and it was a song called IT SEEM SO STRANGE. It's never been released. Nobody's ever heard it.
Paul: In the vault.
Buddy: It's in the vault.
Paul: There's a reason you haven't come out with it!
Buddy: Exactly!
Paul: Is there something in there maybe that's not...
Buddy: No not really.
[laughter]
Paul: She's blushing by the way!
Buddy: I wrote songs in secret for a couple of years.
Paul: In secret.
Buddy: Yeah, because of the fact that,yeah, you just don't wake up one day and tell your buddies,"Hey, I'm a songwriter!"
Paul: No.
Buddy: I mean, they look at you eschew like, "Lord, you are what?!!!!"
"I'm a songwriter."
[laughter]
Paul: Right in the middle of football practice, you're in the huddle...
Buddy: Exactly! It's kinda....
So I wrote and would keep 'em to myself. Finally a boy by the name of John Rainey Adkins in Dothan. He and I started talking about songs and he played guitar and he took me seriously and we started writing songs so...
Paul: Who influenced you during that time?
Buddy: Well,of course, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, all the ones you would probably think of, oh, Roy Orbison. Fortunately I had a long....
I worked with him a long time but before I knew him, I was...
Paul: You got out of high school what year?
Buddy: '59.
Paul: As Elvis was really firing up the charts.
Buddy: He'd already in '55, '56, '57.
'57 was a big year.
Paul: So you got to high school about the time Elvis was ...
Buddy: Exactly.
Paul: Knocking 'em dead!
[Laughter]
I could see how he could be an influence!
Buddy: Yeah I wore pink and black. Back then, guys would come to school with pink shirts, black pants and a little white belt- little thin white belt and that was an Elvis fan.
Paul: We all know and I grew up in the same town that he was in and it's hard to get away from Elvis Presley but how important was that sphere to young people?
Buddy: It was The Holy Grail. It was...
I mean Elvis Presley impacted my life and I suppose everybody, most everyone, like my class in school. He was just...
If you were really into music, he was THE MAN!
I saw the Prime Minister of Japan and President Bush at Graceland. I thought that was cool.
Paul: In your career and obviously you started writing during this period. You had hits on the charts as early as the mid to late Sixties. Did you come in contact with Elvis at all?
Buddy: No, I talked to him. I had been fairly hot as a songwriter and a guy by the name of Red West...
Paul: Oh yeah! Sure!
Buddy: that worked for Elvis called me and said, "Buddy, E wants to say hey."
Just blew me away.
[Buddy imitates Elvis]
"Hey man, we'd sure like for you to write us some songs. We're going over to Memphis to record."
So that's when he went over and did the great work with my buddy,Chips Moman, over in Memphis.
Paul: He was on the phone?
Buddy: He was on the phone.
Paul: Red West, I remember him.
Buddy: Did you ever know Lamar Fike?
Paul: No, I didn't know these people. I just remember their names.
[laughter]
Buddy: I knew a lot of his people.
Paul: I knew one. My next door neighbor as an infant was a guy named Marty Lacker.
Buddy: Oh yeah! Marty Lacker, huh...
Paul: He was part of the Memphis Mafia. So I was two years old I didn't jam with him too often.
Buddy: I saw him in Vegas. His producer at that time when he was in Vegas at the Hilton was Felton Jarvis. This was after Chet had produced him.
By the way, did you know that Chet Atkins produced all the Elvis things.
Would you believe if I told you that Chet Atkins quit recording Elvis Presley?
You know what the reason was?
Because they recorded at night!
[laughing]
Chet says,"Elvis, I love you and we're making some great stuff but I can't handle this late night."
[laughter]
That's what you call CONFIDENCE!!!!
Paul: I guess at this point in your career....
This was not the peak of Elvis' recording career.
Buddy: You know, in retrospect, that trip to Memphis and those recording sessions at Memphis had SUSPICIOUS MINDS and IN THE GHETTO.
Paul: Late Elvis.
Buddy: Yes. Late Elvis. The best late Elvis. Elvis was really trying...
He'd done all those lame movie songs for so many years, you know, early Elvis is Elvis to me except for that brief period where he went to Memphis and Chips Moman recorded him on those great songs. Those songs now are....
I know the Prime Minister of Japan the other day, the songs he was singing...
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Paul: Did people compose and write songs for Elvis? Obviously, he didn't....
Buddy: I didn't get a song on the session unfortunately. I'd loved to. I sent songs but they didn't do 'em.
I good at taking a "NO!"
You have to be thick skinned in my business.
Paul: You had to feel pretty good though. You had a few on the charts when he wasn't on the charts.
Buddy: Yeah and like I said, his producer in Memphis was good friend of mine so when he asked Chips about songwriters, Chips named four or five songwriters that he should call and he called some of the best around Memphis and I'd already had a hit with Chips for a girl named Sandy Posey. A song called I TAKE IT BACK. My first BMI award. It went to about #19 in the country. Yeah, you know that whole era of music and when Elvis came back strong, it really meant a lot to a lot of people and those songs today are big for him. I loved DON'T BE CRUEL. All those things that were playing while I was in high school '57, '58,'59.
Those are my favorites but he really did some good work late that a lot of people don't recognize.
Paul: It's interesting to wonder... What (laughs)
We're talking about Elvis Presley but if he had not done so much time doing movies, what kind of...
I mean to say he didn't leave a legacy would be the most ridiculous statement I ever made but there was a big gap.
Buddy: There was a gap between the early and he did all those movie songs. Those were such lame songs.
Paul: VIVA LAS VEGAS! (laughs0
Buddy: VIVA LAS VEGAS was one of the better ones.
Paul: BLUE HAWAII. What were some of the others?
Buddy: Yeah, BLUE HAWAII, but there were a lot of things he did that he hated and he would just go in and do 'em by rote. I know this from talking to people who were around him. Gosh, I don't remember the year. What year did he go back to Memphis? It was in the 70s and cut those things. You know those movie songs he made, everybody kind of laughs at 'em but do you know how big those things were? I mean...
Paul: I remember seeing some of them...
Buddy: I did too. I never missed one!
But we used to laugh a lot.
Paul: Well we shouldn't feel sorry for Elvis. He had a pretty good career.
Buddy: I'll tell you, you know, when he died...
It hit everybody.
I can remember the exact moment, the exact place I was. I was writing at Lake Eufaula, matter of fact, for the Atlanta Rhythm Section at Lake Eufaula. My buddy, Dean Daughtry went up....
We didn't have a telephone there. On purpose.
Back in the cabin, a little trailer where we wrote and we were working on Champagne Jam album and Dean went down to the store to get us some hot dogs and came back and said,"Man, you won't believe this. Elvis is dead!"
Paul: Umm.
Buddy: I never will forget it
Paul: Back with much more...
Paul: And we bid you hello. As we set off for the weekend on a holiday week and what better way to kick back. If you're heading to the lake, coming back from the lake or to the beach or just chilling out on this afternoon talking to one of our favorite guests. We had him on a couple of months ago. Didn't have enough time. We said we'd get him back and he is here. Buddy Buie, the famed songwriter and producer trecked up here from the Dothan area.
Buddy: Eufaula
Paul: Excuse me, Eufaula area. The Dothan area going a little deeper into...
How far is Dothan from Eufaula?
Buddy: Dothan is about 50 miles south of Eufaula.
Paul: O.K. Well, you didn't have to go to Dothan then to get here.
[Laughter]
Buddy: But I was born and grew up in Dothan.
Paul: Something tells me you're near the lake.
Buddy: Yeah, I'm on the lake.
[laughter]
Paul: I had a guess!
Well, Buddy, of course, has a storied career and you grew up in Dothan.
Buddy: Yes.
Paul: I'll get that right eventually.
We hung around a couple of hours a few months ago talking about some of the great classics and you have a new release, which we will get to later on, entitled THE DAY BEAR DIED.
There's so much to talk about and I know we'll have a lot of phone calls as well. We're glad you're back.
Buddy: It's good to be back. It really is. I really enjoyed being here last time and brings back a lot of old memories coming back to Birmingham. We used to come to Birmingham so much. Made the first record I ever made in my life here in this town.
Paul: I didn't know that.
Buddy: Yeah. Heart Recording Studios. It was over a blood bank downtown.
Paul: What was that?
Buddy: It was just a little recording studio owned by a guy named Ken Shackleford and Bobby Goldsboro and all us came up from Dothan and made the first recording we ever made. You know, just a little band out of Dothan. Coming up here, being so excited about actually cutting a record. Nothing we cut there ever did anything but at least it was the first exposure we had to the recording industry so Birmingham is kind of near and dear to my heart.
Paul: Now you grew up with Bobby Goldsboro. Which one of you started in music first?
Buddy: Hmm, I think pretty much, probably simultaneously, I mean, we were in high school and we both liked the music. He played guitar and had a little band and I was a big music fan and so we kind of started our careers together.
Paul: You've had so many hits. We were chatting off the air with one of our younger guys, trying to see if we could connect the dots between your big hits and today and one of your songs which made the charts with two different groups. Made the charts with the Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1979 but it first hit the charts, got all the way up to I think #3 in '68 with The Classics IV. People will recognize this one.
Buddy: Yeah.
[SPOOKY plays]
Paul: When this song came out in the late Sixties, obviously Buddy, you did it again with ARS about 11 years later, was it much different in terms of the arrangement?
Buddy: Actually, not a whole lot of difference. Main difference was it was a guitar solo instead of a saxophone solo. You know we had one more. We had a #1 jazz record with David Sanborn.
Paul: I didn't know that.
Buddy: Yeap,we did. That was only about five years ago. It was a #1 jazz record released around Halloween, of course.
[cell phone rings loudly]
Buddy: My goodness! I forgot to turn my phone off!
Paul: That's the loudest phone I've ever heard!
[laughter]
Paul: I thought that was a new solo on SPOOKY or something!
[laughter]
Buddy: I am sorry.
Paul: It's Billboard saying you're back on the charts!
While waiting to hear......
Buddy: No I was turning it off!
I don't know who that was but I turned it off.
Paul: Wow!
It's interesting because songs like yours and we'll obviously go through the charts as we move thoughout the program and somebody out there has a special one they'd like to hear before we get it, go right ahead but they're timeless. Just a few minutes ago, we have a couple of music staitions here, I heard SPOOKY. I think it the ARS version, not that I could tell. Last night I'm driving home flipping around. TRACES. I mean you just don't have to look very hard to find your music.
Buddy: Well, those songs, that's one thing we're proud of is ,you know, like Spooky was written in 1967 so, God, that's almost 40 years. Lacking one year. Right?
Paul: Pretty close.
Buddy: That's scary. I started real young.
Paul: How old were you when you penned your first song?
Buddy: Actually, the first song I wrote about my wife, Gloria, and it was a song called IT SEEM SO STRANGE. It's never been released. Nobody's ever heard it.
Paul: In the vault.
Buddy: It's in the vault.
Paul: There's a reason you haven't come out with it!
Buddy: Exactly!
Paul: Is there something in there maybe that's not...
Buddy: No not really.
[laughter]
Paul: She's blushing by the way!
Buddy: I wrote songs in secret for a couple of years.
Paul: In secret.
Buddy: Yeah, because of the fact that,yeah, you just don't wake up one day and tell your buddies,"Hey, I'm a songwriter!"
Paul: No.
Buddy: I mean, they look at you eschew like, "Lord, you are what?!!!!"
"I'm a songwriter."
[laughter]
Paul: Right in the middle of football practice, you're in the huddle...
Buddy: Exactly! It's kinda....
So I wrote and would keep 'em to myself. Finally a boy by the name of John Rainey Adkins in Dothan. He and I started talking about songs and he played guitar and he took me seriously and we started writing songs so...
Paul: Who influenced you during that time?
Buddy: Well,of course, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, all the ones you would probably think of, oh, Roy Orbison. Fortunately I had a long....
I worked with him a long time but before I knew him, I was...
Paul: You got out of high school what year?
Buddy: '59.
Paul: As Elvis was really firing up the charts.
Buddy: He'd already in '55, '56, '57.
'57 was a big year.
Paul: So you got to high school about the time Elvis was ...
Buddy: Exactly.
Paul: Knocking 'em dead!
[Laughter]
I could see how he could be an influence!
Buddy: Yeah I wore pink and black. Back then, guys would come to school with pink shirts, black pants and a little white belt- little thin white belt and that was an Elvis fan.
Paul: We all know and I grew up in the same town that he was in and it's hard to get away from Elvis Presley but how important was that sphere to young people?
Buddy: It was The Holy Grail. It was...
I mean Elvis Presley impacted my life and I suppose everybody, most everyone, like my class in school. He was just...
If you were really into music, he was THE MAN!
I saw the Prime Minister of Japan and President Bush at Graceland. I thought that was cool.
Paul: In your career and obviously you started writing during this period. You had hits on the charts as early as the mid to late Sixties. Did you come in contact with Elvis at all?
Buddy: No, I talked to him. I had been fairly hot as a songwriter and a guy by the name of Red West...
Paul: Oh yeah! Sure!
Buddy: that worked for Elvis called me and said, "Buddy, E wants to say hey."
Just blew me away.
[Buddy imitates Elvis]
"Hey man, we'd sure like for you to write us some songs. We're going over to Memphis to record."
So that's when he went over and did the great work with my buddy,Chips Moman, over in Memphis.
Paul: He was on the phone?
Buddy: He was on the phone.
Paul: Red West, I remember him.
Buddy: Did you ever know Lamar Fike?
Paul: No, I didn't know these people. I just remember their names.
[laughter]
Buddy: I knew a lot of his people.
Paul: I knew one. My next door neighbor as an infant was a guy named Marty Lacker.
Buddy: Oh yeah! Marty Lacker, huh...
Paul: He was part of the Memphis Mafia. So I was two years old I didn't jam with him too often.
Buddy: I saw him in Vegas. His producer at that time when he was in Vegas at the Hilton was Felton Jarvis. This was after Chet had produced him.
By the way, did you know that Chet Atkins produced all the Elvis things.
Would you believe if I told you that Chet Atkins quit recording Elvis Presley?
You know what the reason was?
Because they recorded at night!
[laughing]
Chet says,"Elvis, I love you and we're making some great stuff but I can't handle this late night."
[laughter]
That's what you call CONFIDENCE!!!!
Paul: I guess at this point in your career....
This was not the peak of Elvis' recording career.
Buddy: You know, in retrospect, that trip to Memphis and those recording sessions at Memphis had SUSPICIOUS MINDS and IN THE GHETTO.
Paul: Late Elvis.
Buddy: Yes. Late Elvis. The best late Elvis. Elvis was really trying...
He'd done all those lame movie songs for so many years, you know, early Elvis is Elvis to me except for that brief period where he went to Memphis and Chips Moman recorded him on those great songs. Those songs now are....
I know the Prime Minister of Japan the other day, the songs he was singing...
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Paul: Did people compose and write songs for Elvis? Obviously, he didn't....
Buddy: I didn't get a song on the session unfortunately. I'd loved to. I sent songs but they didn't do 'em.
I good at taking a "NO!"
You have to be thick skinned in my business.
Paul: You had to feel pretty good though. You had a few on the charts when he wasn't on the charts.
Buddy: Yeah and like I said, his producer in Memphis was good friend of mine so when he asked Chips about songwriters, Chips named four or five songwriters that he should call and he called some of the best around Memphis and I'd already had a hit with Chips for a girl named Sandy Posey. A song called I TAKE IT BACK. My first BMI award. It went to about #19 in the country. Yeah, you know that whole era of music and when Elvis came back strong, it really meant a lot to a lot of people and those songs today are big for him. I loved DON'T BE CRUEL. All those things that were playing while I was in high school '57, '58,'59.
Those are my favorites but he really did some good work late that a lot of people don't recognize.
Paul: It's interesting to wonder... What (laughs)
We're talking about Elvis Presley but if he had not done so much time doing movies, what kind of...
I mean to say he didn't leave a legacy would be the most ridiculous statement I ever made but there was a big gap.
Buddy: There was a gap between the early and he did all those movie songs. Those were such lame songs.
Paul: VIVA LAS VEGAS! (laughs0
Buddy: VIVA LAS VEGAS was one of the better ones.
Paul: BLUE HAWAII. What were some of the others?
Buddy: Yeah, BLUE HAWAII, but there were a lot of things he did that he hated and he would just go in and do 'em by rote. I know this from talking to people who were around him. Gosh, I don't remember the year. What year did he go back to Memphis? It was in the 70s and cut those things. You know those movie songs he made, everybody kind of laughs at 'em but do you know how big those things were? I mean...
Paul: I remember seeing some of them...
Buddy: I did too. I never missed one!
But we used to laugh a lot.
Paul: Well we shouldn't feel sorry for Elvis. He had a pretty good career.
Buddy: I'll tell you, you know, when he died...
It hit everybody.
I can remember the exact moment, the exact place I was. I was writing at Lake Eufaula, matter of fact, for the Atlanta Rhythm Section at Lake Eufaula. My buddy, Dean Daughtry went up....
We didn't have a telephone there. On purpose.
Back in the cabin, a little trailer where we wrote and we were working on Champagne Jam album and Dean went down to the store to get us some hot dogs and came back and said,"Man, you won't believe this. Elvis is dead!"
Paul: Umm.
Buddy: I never will forget it
Paul: Back with much more...
posted by robertoreg at 7:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home