Last spring in Hollywood, the Kentucky HeadHunters arrived at their first awards show in ultimate populist style.
Disdaining stretch limousines and vintage Rollses, from which notables customarily alight at such functions, the HeadHunters showed up at the Academy of Country Music Awards by Los Angeles city bus, regular fare-paying riders.
They had no thought of winning the Best New Group of the Year award they took home that evening. Rather, they wondered if they belonged in the tuxedo- clad crowd at all.
”I felt like a fish out of water,” HeadHunter Doug Phelps recalls.
”It was a shock for us to even be there.”
Monday evening, the HeadHunters-Phelps and his brother Ricky Lee Phelps, Greg Martin and Fred and Richard Young-showed up at another country awards show, the Country Music Association awards in Nashville, the industry`s top prizes.
In keeping with a bone-wearying year of uninterrupted triumph, this oddball quintet from Kentucky and its flamboyant, ear-shattering music scored dramatically again, impressing the CMA`s 6,500 music-biz voters enough to take home titles for the year`s best group and the year`s best album.
Asked to assess their chances a few days beforehand, the group`s laconic drummer, Fred Young, who often appears onstage shirtless with a coonskin cap on his bald head, answered memorably:
”I feel about the same way as I did going into the ACM (Academy of Country Music Awards). Like we ain`t got a chance in hell,” his bluegrass drawl making two syllables of ”hell.”
”I look at it this way,” said brother Richard, who is as large as Fred is slight. ”There`s five in each category, so we got a 20 percent chance.”
They came from deepest left field, it is true, but these rural hard-rockers have hit country music`s most dramatic homer of the year, an inside-the-park job that started off looking as if it might not even be a healthy single.
Previously, country fans have been willing to put cotton in their ears only for such charismatic giants as Hank Williams Jr. and Alabama, but this last year they also were persuaded, seemingly overnight, to do so for the HeadHunters. Just one year ago the group released both its album, ”Pickin` On Nashville,” and its first single, a blaring redo of the old bluegrass song
”Walk Softly On This Heart Of Mine.”
Country radio barely tolerated ”Walk Softly”-it reached only the mid-20s on the charts-but it boasted a deceptive muscle that quickly sold 300,000 copies of the album. Country programmers could fend off the HeadHunters no longer.
The group`s second single, ”Dumas Walker,” hit the Top 10, and the album has gone on to occupy the Top 5 for more than 40 weeks. The album has also sold in such quantities that it`s currently in the process of passing the million mark.
There appear to be several reasons for this stunning phenomenon. First, the HeadHunters appeal most strongly to younger fans who are alienated by rap and the abandonment of roots sounds.
Also, the HeadHunters` high-volume sound isn`t proving as abrasive to older, harder-core country fans as radio executives assumed it would.
Why is that? The suspicion is that the HeadHunters` jovial, comical, easygoing personalities, plus their convincing contempt for the mannerisms of stardom, are winning friends among traditional country fans. With the exception of volume control, the HeadHunters and traditional country fans appear to think similarly.
”We`re as country as stumps,” lead vocalist Ricky Phelps puts it succinctly.
That has become increasingly evident during the last, high-profile six months. Highlights include:
– Richard Young`s joyously rattled acceptance speech at the Academy of Country Music Awards. With the others pressing around him (”We were all vibratin`, knees a-knockin`, and I thought, `Somebody get hold of my belt buckle, boys, or I`m a-goin` down,` ” Young recalls), he made the perfect response for a new arrival.
His long, unkempt curls framing his bespectacled face, he drawled, ”We just want to do right by country music.”
– The 1990 installment of FarmAid. During the HeadHunters` psychedelic version of ”My Old Kentucky Home,” Doug Phelps recited the creed of the Future Farmers of America. (At FarmAid, the HeadHunters were so awed by their fellow headliners that Martin recalls fearing he ”was going to throw up”
with nervousness eating lunch beside Bonnie Raitt.)
– Their interminable ”Pickin` On Nashville” tour. The year`s itinerary has numbered 270 performance dates, of which they have cancelled only six. Except for a 10-day stretch that included the six, the HeadHunters never had more than four days offstage in the 12 months. And they say they would not have cancelled the six had Doug Phelps not become so ill from side effects of a prescribed back-pain medicine that he couldn`t continue.
– A long run of opening shows for Hank Williams Jr. During the tour, the oft-aloof Williams appeared on a personal mission to showcase the HeadHunters for the world. As a result, the group has performed before 1.3 million people since September 1989.
The Williams dates became much more than just one hot band opening for another. Easter night in Kansas City, Williams asked them to come out onstage with him to do ”I Saw the Light.” The occasion notwithstanding, the crowd did not seem to be a particularly reverent one.
”They were fighting all over the hall,” Ricky Phelps recalls. ”I went around the auditorium after the show was over, and everybody had cleared out, and there was blood all over the floor everywhere you looked. They were killing each other.”
”Yeah,” says Doug Phelps, beaming. ”Having a big old time.”
From then on, the Williams-HeadHunters tour quickly became a combination of, as they like to put it, ”a goat-roping and championship wrestling.”
Williams would call them out to sing with him, then he, by now shirtless, would pick up first Fred, then Greg and eventually Ricky and twirl each around his head in a convincing demonstration of strength.
It`s a tribute to the HeadHunters` performance skills that they were able to stay on stage with Williams, whose crowds are legendary for wanting to see only Hank.
”We had even heard Greg Allman had had trouble with Hank`s crowds,”
Martin says. ”I thought, `Lord.` ”
”But we thought we could hold our own,” Doug Phelps says.
They held their own. In fact, they wowed the Williams crowds to such an extent that they soon were being mobbed when offstage.
In a business in which big egos are prevalent, the HeadHunters are tough and highly refreshing. Their gritty background may have something to do with their demeanor.
A friend says he first saw Martin and the Youngs several years ago at a Kentucky county fair, where they were performing in a tent next to a stock-car race-and drowning out the stock cars.
Recently, joined by the Arkansas-reared Phelpses, they apprenticed in a live production they called ”The Chitlin` Show” via a 3,000-watt radio station in Munfordville, Ky.
The five were doing it for the music rather than for bucks, but most of them had families. When this year finally gave them a chance to make some money, they went after it with a single-minded joy that has become all too old-fashioned.
”This year we overextended ourselves,” Richard Young says. ”I`ll be the first to admit it. We had our year pretty well booked when the Hank tour fell in on top of it, and when that happened, we couldn`t drop out of the others, so . . . .
”I`m tired. I`ve got mononucleosis right this minute. But we`re gonna see this year out.”
They will get a month off at the end of October, and in December they tentatively are scheduled to head into a Nashville recording studio to work on their next album.
What it will be like they don`t exactly know yet, except that it will be more of the ear-busting stuff that has made them famous.
”We won`t lose the comical side of it,” Richard Young says, ”but there might be a couple or three songs on there that show a little more serious side to the HeadHunters. We would like this time to do two or three to show that we`re not just goofballs.”
Finally, Fred Young, who mostly has sat watching throughout the interview, is asked what he would like to see happen in 1991.
After a long pause, he answers in a drawl as long as from here to Hattiesburg:
”I`d like to see `em come up with a cure for baldness.”
