The newest member of the Oak Ridge Boys recently returned to the stage of the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, where he first had performed as a part of the prominent country-pop quartet 13 months before.
When the significance of the occasion was pointed out to the audience by fellow Oak Joe Bonsall, Steve Sanders was startled.
”I hadn`t even been thinking about it,” he remembers, ”and it kind of hit me. I started flashing back on the 13 months, and it sure seemed a lot longer than that. We`ve been a lot of places in that time.”
And the trek goes on. It`s now early afternoon on the day after the Los Angeles show. The Oaks` bus has just come to a halt in Paso Robles, Calif., awakening Sanders. Soon, having checked into the hotel, he dashes water onto his face and makes his scheduled interview call. As he talks, his breakfast, a hamburger, arrives.
How, he`s asked, did his feeling at the Amphitheatre the previous evening compare with 13 months before?
”I don`t remember whether I was nervous 13 months ago or not, but I must`ve been,” he says.
”I had some Los Angeles friends there last night who were also there at the first show, and they said the show last night was much better. They said, `You all looked so much more relaxed.`
”On the first show, there was much more anxiety about what was going to happen. Last night, I knew what was going to happen: We were going to go out there, hit `em high, hit `em low and not be afraid to get our suits dirty.”
That`s the zealous sort of approach associated with the Oaks since they left gospel music for the larger stages of country and pop in the late 1970s. After an internal disagreement that resulted in the 1987 dismissal of their senior member, self-styled mountain man William Lee Golden, the remaining Oaks-Duane Allen, Joe Bonsall and Richard Sterban-now are seeking to regain the momentum that made them country music`s top group in the early
`80s. New addition Sanders plays a prominent role.
On the group`s brand-new LP, ”Monongahela,” Sanders sings lead on three songs, including the album`s first and current single, ”Gonna Take A Lot Of River.”
”With the Oaks, the song pretty well decides who sings lead on it,”
Sanders says. ”If it`s a good ballad, it`s a Duane Allen song. If it`s kind of rhythm & blues-ish, that pretty well says Steve Sanders sings it.”
A lifelong entertainer who played rhythm guitar in the Oaks band for five years before moving up front, Sanders responds negatively when asked if his nervousness 13 months ago at the Universal Amphitheatre had to do with the fact he was stepping into somebody else`s shoes.
”I could never fill Golden`s shoes,” he says. ”Or his beard,” he adds with a laugh.
”I never looked at it that I was stepping into someone`s shoes. When I came here, there was nobody`s shoes to step into. When I was asked to be the baritone singer of the Oak Ridge Boys, they didn`t have a baritone singer. Golden was gone. I was filling a big empty space where the baritone singer used to be.”
Sanders says he and Golden, whom he has known for ”24 or 25 years,” had been friends. When he joined the Oaks band, he goes on, the two became so close that he regarded Golden as ”a second dad.”
The rupture between Golden and the rest of the Oaks occurred after Sanders had given notice he was going to quit playing in the band. He says he was planning to devote his time to building a song-publishing company in Nashville.
When the baritone singing job was offered him, his single ”condition”
was that he could first discuss it with Golden. He says he didn`t want Golden thinking he was trying to rob Golden of his place.
”So I went over to his house and told him the deal and said, `What are your plans?` ” Sanders remembers. ”He said, `I don`t know what my plans are, but they don`t include singing with the Oak Ridge Boys ever again.`
”We smiled and shook hands, and that was one of the last times I saw him. I tried to stay in touch with him for a long time after that, but it just became more difficult to get in touch with him, so eventually the phone calls stopped. I haven`t talked to him in over a year.
”I don`t know whether he`s just busy, whether he has changed his mind about the way he feels about all this or what.”
When Sanders stepped into the vacancy left by Golden`s departure, he stepped from a varied and impressive show-business background.
Born in Richland, Ga., he became a big-time child gospel singer at age 5. It began, he says, when his father started learning to play a gospel song on the piano. He always practiced the same song, ”Not My Will But Thine Be Done,” and one day he stopped playing in the middle of it in frustration.
”As he tells it, this little voice, like a little angel`s voice, just kept singing where he left off,” Sanders says, with another laugh.
”He went looking to see where the voice was coming from, and he found me in my room sitting on the floor playing with my toys and singing. I guess I had learned it subconsciously, because he played it so much.
”So he said, `Hey! My retirement! Come here, son.”`
Father and son started performing in churches, then were invited to make a guest appearance on a gospel TV show in Macon. Within a year, they were touring the Southern gospel concert circuit. At age 7, ”Little Stevie Sanders” made his first record.
Five years thereafter, he was on Broadway in a production of ”The Yearling,” having won an audition over 10,000 other young hopefuls. After 18 months in ”The Yearling,” he had a part in ”Hurry Sundown,” a movie starring Jane Fonda and Michael Caine.
”I was on TV things like the `Ed Sullivan Show` and `Gunsmoke,` and dramatic specials with people like Jason Robards, Olivia DeHavilland and Sam Peckinpah,” he recalls.
As he neared adulthood, however, his best years seemed behind him. He left gospel music to flounder in rock and pop. Then, in 1977, he moved to Nashville for three years in vain hopes of a songwriting career.
In 1982, he returned to Nashville from Florida to say goodbye to friends before leaving on a projected three-year world cruise-and ended up instead on the road with the Oaks, who were some of the friends he had meant to bid adieu.
”They did about three days out on the road,” he recalls, ”and I went out just as a guest, and the band ended up asking me to be their lead singer. I wasn`t being paid, I was just traveling with them, and occasionally they`d bring me out to do one song with the band.
”One thing led to another, and before long I was playing rhythm guitar for the Oaks as well as being the lead singer for the band.”
Today, Sanders seems to have found himself professionally for the first time in his adult life, and maybe the Oaks are making a similar rediscovery. Sanders says they again enjoy the common enthusiasm for performing that had been missing the last few Golden years.
Asked how long he expects the other Oaks, who have had a decade of stardom, to keep going, Sanders says that was the first question he asked them when they invited him to join:
”I said, `Look, you guys have carved a niche for yourselves. You can live off your name, rest on your laurels, make a decent living for many years to come and not have to worry-or you can try and do more and better things than you`ve ever done.`
”The latter is what they told me they want to do, and we`re on fire more now than I`ve seen the Oaks on fire in a long time. They assured me they don`t want to live in the shadow of `Elvira` (their 2 million-selling biggest hit); they want to do their best to top it.”
