Sshhh! Listen. Hear that? It`s the sound of Ray Stevens minting money.
Nashville`s longtime singing comic, a musical genius who for more than three decades has been making people laugh, is enjoying what is probably his life`s largest financial windfall.
In the realm of long-form video sales, in which 50,000 are considered gold and 100,000 are platinum, Stevens is rapidly approaching 1,000,000 on
”Ray Stevens` Comedy Video Classics,” a $19.95 package that has been out only since May and has been available only by mail-order.
”We`ve been in Parade, TV Guide, the National Enquirer and so on, and now we`re going (in)to all the catalogues,” Stevens reports. ”Big buyers are starting to come in for big chunks now. We`ll be (at) a million before very long at all.”
And then . . .
”An aspect some people don`t realize is, in the short history of telemarketing it has been proven that when you go to retail after you do your direct marketing on TV and in print, your retail sales are usually double the sales that you did by direct marketing.
”Which means we could sell five million copies of this thing. Or at least three or four; it looks like three`s a shoo-in.”
So has anybody in Nashville-the fabled Garth Brooks, perhaps, or some other serious superstar-ever sold that many videos?
”Never,” Stevens replies. ”I was told at the beginning of this project that a Victor Borge package two or three years ago was the all-time record-setter with four million copies, but later on I heard that was hype and that that package really sold two million.
”I don`t really know, though. I don`t have access to the figures.”
No matter who the national record-holder is, Stevens appears to be giving him (or her) serious competition-and taking over the lead in Nashville. Over the past summer, Stevens has become one of the bigger-grossing stars on the country scene.
By reprising several of his old hits, the video package revitalized several of his old albums, landing two of them high in the Billboard chart of top 25 country catalogue packages. His ”Greatest Hits” on MCA just went platinum (a million copies sold).
Over the summer months, Stevens was widely considered the hottest ticket in tourist-teeming Branson, Mo., playing to sellout crowds of 4,000-plus people six days a week at his theater there.
”We`ve been selling videos at the theater by the thousands,” he says.
”People come in and buy anywhere from three to six at a time to give away as presents.”
Stevens tends to be close-mouthed about his commercial thought processes
(”I`m not one of those people who can verbalize the intricacies of my reasons for feeling the way I feel about doing business”) as well as his songwriting techniques, but the `92 Branson theater season unquestionably helped prompt the video project.
Whereas most videos are made by record companies to sell their current hits, Stevens-in a first-laid out his own money and filmed four of his more memorable previous smashes: ”The Streak,” ”Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” ”It`s Me Again, Margaret” and the collection`s serious closer,
”Everything Is Beautiful.” These were packaged with four other videos Stevens already had done: ”Help Me Make It Through the Night,” ”Sittin` Up With the Dead,” ”Surfin` USSR” and ”Santa Claus Is Watching You.”
When he began telemarketing it, he says, his first spot-a single airing at a very non-prime time on Chicago`s WGN-Ch. 9-produced 300 calls for orders; ”they said it was the biggest order they had had off of one play.” He went to more and more TV spots, which he knew were advertising his Branson shows along with the video collection.
”The ads didn`t even have to mention Branson or the theater,” he notes. ”When you`ve got that many people coming to a place (the way Branson does), they see the Ray Stevens Theater and immediately remember seeing the ad for the video on TV. And some of `em will buy tickets.”
A native of a north Georgia mill town called Clarkdale, Stevens has been selling his products, in varying numbers, since 1957, when as a 17-year-old high schooler he made a teen-love record titled ”Silver Bracelet.”
Although it did well in Atlanta, subsequent efforts did no better-until he took a cue from the great rhythm & blues group the Coasters, who ”were starting to hit with `Yakety Yak` and `Along Came Jones` and all those crazy songs.”
He wrote a comic lyric called ”Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,”
featuring barks from the sergeant`s dog, King.
He had sold 100,000 copies virtually overnight when disaster struck.
”We hadn`t gotten the permission of the owners of the character, King Features Syndicate,” he recalls, ”and we got a letter from their lawyer telling us to cease and desist.
”The thing was going to be a monster, but we had to pull the record.
”But that gave me a clue. I said, `Heck, I can do this.` ”
With a vengeance.
After putting in three years as a music major at Georgia State in Atlanta, he followed ”Sergeant Preston” with another off-the-wall lyric,
”Jeremiah Peabody`s Polyunsaturated, Quick-Dissolving, Fast-Acting, Pleasant-Tasting Green & Purple Pills,” which he recorded for Mercury Records in Nashville. It got well up in the hit charts.
Soon thereafter, in desperate need of a hit for a Mercury album he was recording, he wrote one of his classics: ”Ahab the Arab,” featuring the sheik of the burning sands, his camel named Clyde and his veiled girlfriend, Fatima.
”I don`t know where the idea came from,” he says. ”I had no connections with any Arabs or camels or anything.
”I wrote it in the one-bedroom apartment where I was living with my wife and new baby in about 45 minutes, and we cut it the next morning in two or three takes.
”It was easy to write and easy to cut, and when we played it back, I knew it was a smash. And it was.”
Since then, Stevens has been on the road-or, this summer, in Branson, where he occupies a condo on a golf course.
He intersperses his craziness with an occasional serious-message song such as the heartwarming ”Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way),” which concerns tolerance of diversity, and ”Mr. Businessman,” a condemnation of commercial enterprise conducted with no conscience.
With ”Ray Stevens Comedy Video Classics” still selling like hotcakes by mail-order, Stevens is expecting to go retail with it by spring-and meanwhile is readying another package for the mail-order market: a videotape of his zany, technologically state-of-the-art Branson stage show.
”We`ll call it `Ray Stevens Live in Branson` or something like that,”
he says. ”It`ll probably be a two-cassette package.
”We`ve got God knows how many hours on tape that we have to edit down to two one-hour tapes or one two-hour tape.
”I`m in the studio now, mixing it and sweetening it and making it sound like two zillion dollars.”
Which is probably in the neighborhood of what it will earn for him, since it stands to be an even more obvious advertisement for his Branson theater than the present package.
But Stevens earns what he makes, especially since he recently began summering in Branson. His annual May-to-October, six-days-a-week, two-shows-a- day schedule there is a man-killer, making the proximity of his condo to a golf course an appearances-only asset.
”If I played golf, I physically wouldn`t be able to do the shows,” he says.
”Selling 2,000 tickets per show is wonderful in a way, but you have to do it twice a day six days a week whether you feel like it or not. You start acting like a hypochondriac. You see somebody sneeze and you run away. You catch a little cold and go live with the doctor.”
Fortunately for him, Stevens appears not to have many unhealthy habits. Jokingly asked if he is writing fewer songs these days because he can`t take the same stimulants he used to, he says he doesn`t have time to write songs anymore-and that he never took stimulants, even when he was writing such abnormal stuff as ”Peabody`s Pills,” ”Ahab,” etc.
”I never took anything, never imbibed or took pills or any of that stuff,” he says.
”I didn`t need it. I`m about as goofy as you can get without it.”
