Jennifer & the McCarter Sisters, having recently enjoyed a Top 10 country single in ”Up And Gone,” are back on big-time country radio again with a hot new one titled ”Quit While I`m Behind.” They`re also getting standing ovations on the road.
Which could prompt questions from anybody with a decent memory: Didn`t the McCarters start out like a house afire a couple of years ago with two Top 5 singles and then fall suddenly silent? Why? And what has brought them back? ”We were down,” confirms Jennifer, the eldest of these young sisters and the group`s lead singer.
”We didn`t have a single out for a while, our band members were quitting to go with somebody else, we were changing our name (from simply the McCarter Sisters) and changing management.
”We also were being told that three girls are perceived as so hard to get along with that there might not be many people who wanted to manage us. Our spirits were really down.”
With the McCarters, such a mood is difficult to picture. This is, after all, the talkatively zany trio with mountainous hairdos that hails from the same eastern Tennessee county that spawned Dolly Parton. They are hardly low- key types. Jennifer is nothing if not determinedly aggressive, while her younger twin siblings, Lisa and Teresa, unabashedly confess to being
”hyper.”
Like Parton herself, such young working-class women couldn`t have exchanged Smoky Mountain obscurity for a major Nashville recording contract in their early 20s had they been shrinking violets. But, notes Jennifer, they also didn`t know a lot of crucial things when they arrived in Nashville.
”We didn`t know what to expect or what to do,” she says in the breathless McCarter style.
”We got a great manager who had great artists, and we thought, `Managers are supposed to take care of everything. They`re not supposed to talk anything out with us. We`re just supposed to trust him and let him do what he wants.`
”The problem is, we always want to know what`s going on.”
And their manager at the time – an executive of excellent reputation who works with several prominent acts – was located in Colorado.
Barely able to afford their Nashville apartment, the McCarters certainly couldn`t afford to call Colorado. And whenever their manager was able to squeeze in time from all his other acts to call Nashville, they were always asking him to explain why he was telling them to do whatever he was telling them to do. Along Nashville`s Music Row there began to be whispers that the McCarters were difficult to work with.
Meanwhile, they were getting reports from country radio stations complaining that the songs on their first album, ”The Gift,” sounded too alike and too slow. After their first two singles, ”Timeless And True Love” and ”The Gift,” hit the No. 4 and No. 5 spots in the country hit charts, their third one, ”I Give You Music,” hit the wall at No. 28.
Warner Bros. Records executives wanted to delay putting out a fourth single until the McCarters could record up-tempo material. Suddenly, making music involved a lot more than just singing.
”I`ve figured out that the key to the music business is 5 percent music and 95 percent business,” Jennifer says. ”There`s no singing except onstage and in the recording studio, but every day is business.”
Dissolving the relationship with their Colorado management, they went hunting for a manager they could reach via a local call – and they conducted this hunt in a way that was impressively businesslike for three new performers.
They met with prospective managers every day for weeks, providing each with a typed statement of their assets and liabilities and asking each to submit a typed plan showing how he would handle them. They say they wanted somebody who would talk to them and give them a role in the decision-making, and their eventual choice was Woody Bowles, whose sole client at the time was honkytonk singer Moe Bandy.
Since the inception of their relationship with Bowles, they have come a long way. In fact, he said recently that they had begun earning enough that they were able to invest money in their career and reduce their debt by half- in just one six-week period. He added that talent buyers now write unsolicited letters to Bowles` agency and to Warner Bros. raving about the McCarters` new stage show.
What new stage show?
”When we first moved down here,” Teresa explains, ”when we would sing, me and Lisa would go up there to the mikes and just stand or move back. But now we get out there and dance and do our little thing. It`s so wonderful. Woody`s really helped us a lot.”
”Yeah, he showed us some things we can do to calm ourselves down, exercises and stuff,” Lisa adds.
”The twins are the most excited people you ever met in your life,”
Jennifer says. ”They get tears in their eyes. Everything is a big thing to them.”
”We get hyper all the time,” Teresa admits. ”But Woody has showed us ways to relax.”
Bowles says the sisters also went so far as to ”actually script” nearly everything they do onstage – and, after they had it so memorized that it became second nature, they started dreaming up asides with the band to make every show slightly different and thus keep it from becoming stale.
But the McCarters hardly have to worry about every show being different. There always appears to be some crisis that they meet with mountaineer indomitability – and then describe with not-always-grammatical humor.
Sample, for instance, their remembrance of this summer`s Big Valley Jamboree in Canada. There Teresa, the most accident-prone of the sisters, first didn`t hear instructions not to touch the railing going up the stairs to the stage – and promptly got black paint all over one hand just as comedians Williams & Ree were saying, ”And now . . . Jennifer & the McCarter Sisters!” ”So they got paint thinner and poured it all over my hand,” Teresa recalls. ”Then they said, `She can`t go up there smellin` like paint thinner. Get some of that, uh, Lysol or somethin` and spray on there.` So they sprayed that on my hand and washed it off. Then they introduced us again, and we came out.”
But ”somebody in the band forgot to put a shoestring in one of Teresa`s cloggin` shoes,” recalls Jennifer. ”So she took one of mine out.”
”See, we had to go out and dance first,” Teresa rushes to explain. ”Me and Lisa is the first ones that dances. Then Jenny comes out after us.”
”And as they`re passing me to go out onstage to dance and I`m going back to put my shoes on,” Jennifer continues, ”she says: `You don`t have a shoestring.` I think, `What`m I gonna do?` They was videotapin` the whole thing.”
”Yeah, there was like 50,000 people there,” interjects Lisa. ”They had these big TV screens on each side of the stage.”
”So,” recalls Jennifer, ”I`m saying, `What`m I gonna do?` And the guitar player says, `Take off your shoes.` I think, `Great idea!` But it was a wood stage, and we were in the sun, and it was like 94 degrees. You talk about cloggin`: I got it in high gear that day.”
”I wondered why she was cloggin` faster than me and Lisa,” reflects Teresa, wonderingly.
”When we got off,” Jennifer says, ”I forgot the cameras were still on us at the side of the stage, and I started going, `Oooooh, my feet! Ooooh, my feet!”`
”And then,” recalls Lisa, ”we got a standing ovation and had to go back out there.”
”Yeah,” says Jennifer. ”I still didn`t have my shoes on, and I was trying to sing, and my feet were burning up. Finally our fiddle player throwed us his towel, and I stood on that.”
”But she got whiter than a sheet,” Lisa says. ”They had to take her to the bus. She almost fainted.”
”Yeah, and they went and got some cold beer and brought it on the bus, where they had me laying down and were putting a towel full of ice around my face and neck,” Jennifer says. ”They put a beer on the bottom of each foot and cooled my feet off.”
”I wanted to say, `Who`s gonna drink these beers after they been on my feet!` ”
The McCarters` appeal, like Parton`s, has a potential of reaching far beyond country music.
Which is exactly what they have in mind.
”We`re perceived as country, and that`s fine,” say Jennifer. ”I want us to be perceived as country girls.
”But we`re not down-home now; we`re out in the big wide world, so we can sing about things besides mama and daddy. Being from the country doesn`t have to mean you aren`t intelligent. It also doesn`t have to mean you have to wear little gingham dresses or cute little cowboy boots.
”I don`t want us to be perceived as hokey little country bubblegum girls.
”I want us to sing great country music with meaning.”
Well, at least the unpleasantnesses of the past couple of years have brought them closer, right?
”We fight like cats and dogs,” says Jennifer, ”but we`ve always been as tight as a banjer string.”
”Yeah, I think we`ve always been as close as we can get,” says Lisa.
”If we got any closer,” says Teresa, in her wide-eyed way, ”I think our hair would stick together.
”Like Velcro.”
