RASCAL FLATTS: LIFE-CHANGING COUNTRY MUSIC
Very much so. My mother was the eighth-born of eight kids in her family. And every child played some kind of instrument and/or sang. So every year, still, in the summer, we have a family reunion, on my mother’s side, and they still set up a stage. There’ll be at least 100 people that show up to the reunion every year. And they still play and sing. Every single night, they’ll do it for three or four nights, in Oklahoma, where I grew up, or Texas or New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California. Every year like clockwork, bro. Pretty special. And my Dad, the same way. He grew up in a family of five and they all played and sang. So music has just been an important part of my life. Sometimes you'll hear race car drivers or professional golfers or other athletes, saying, “I grew up doing this, so I know.” I feel the same way about music, like it chose me, growing up. I had no choice in the matter [laughs]. It was part of my life, from the time I can remember my first memories. PCC: Growing up, outside of your family, what was the range of your musical inspirations and influences? ROONEY: It was pretty awesome. I’m the youngest of four. My oldest sister Robin is 54 this year. My brother Mike is going to be 52. My other sister, Kelly, is going to be 45 this year. Wow, I can’t believe that. I’m 38. So you can imagine the music around my house, as I was growing up. I was listening to rock ‘n’ roll and country music, hell, even jazz. Jeff Beck, Clapton, all the guitarists. My Dad was listening to Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard. So my earliest memories are of sharing music and understanding styles. My siblings were old enough, when they were in high school, in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, I was hearing Metallica, Nirvana. I love all that stuff. At the same time, I ws enjoying Vince Gill and my Dad’s vinyl records of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. I learned a lot of different guitar parts, a lot of different stylings, the different textures and tones, pretty early on. My teenage years, I was playing, whether it was a rock bar on the weekend with my rock buddies who were my age, or on some weekends, I’d play with my Dad in the honky tonks with his country bands. So I and a pretty good repertoire of songs and styles I could play. But I was still living in Oklahoma The key was getting to move on to Nashville. I grew up in a very small town like I did - Picher, Oklahoma - a town of about 800 people. My parents just had their anniversary, 55 years, which is pretty special. They were always right there for me, man. They were lugging my amps to gigs. They helped me string the guitar. Anytime I asked, they were always there for me. So having them to help me gain confidence and learn along the way, to prepare me for Nashville, was essential. It was the key to my life away form Oklahoma. Once I finally made the move to Nashville, I was scared to death, just like any kid would be, coming from a small town like that. But I was prepared and I really got fortunate to meet Jay pretty early on, when I moved to Nashville, in 1998. Jay, at the time, was playing for a girl named Chely Wright, another country artist. And he and one of our mutual buddies, hired me in Chely’s band, to play guitar. That as my first gig in Nashville. PCC: Backing Chely Wright, was that a valuable learning experience? ROONEY: Absolutely, it was valuable. It was invaluable., because all the players in the late 90s, in Nashville, were such hot players, man. They could play rock. They could play pop. They could play the country chicken-pickin’ stuff, which was still pretty hot back then. Vince Gill was still rockin’. So I was learning all that stuff, too. So there would be two handfuls of guys that would be in any bar, on any given weeknight in Nashville, Tennessee, and they would get up and jam for like six or eight hours, just jam from like eight o’clock at night till two in the morning. Jay introduced me to Gary [LeVox], finally, at a club one night. We started singing together and playing together and every since the first night I met Gary, we never stopped singing and playing together, man. They had been performing as a duo. After a few weeks, they asked me to make it a trio and join the group. And every Monday through Wednesday, or even Thursday, we would be down at this club, all through the end of ‘98 and most of ‘99, this little club called the Fiddle and Steel Guitar Bar, down in Printer’s Alley, off of Second Avenue, in Nashville, Tennessee. And man, we lit that place up. Not many people could get in there. The Fire Marshal was always walking around there, pissed off about something. You could get maybe 80 people in there, if you were lucky. But it was amazing. By September of 1999, we had a deal offered to us by Lyric Street Records. And we jumped all over it. And wow, from there, we fast-tracked our first album. We got it done in about four, five months. Started a radio tour in January of 2000. “Prayin’ For Daylight” was the first single. And the album dropped on D-Day, June 6th, self-titled, “Rascal Flatts.” PCC: So once you teamed with Jay and Gary, you knew immediately there was something special there, amongst the three of you? ROONEY: Truly. Truly special. And the most special thing was Gary’s voice. He had this really unique voice that was not forced at all. He was able to have these pop sensibility chops with a little bit of nasal country hick. Almost a Ronnie Dunn-esque kind of hick sound to his voice, which I love. And we all love Ronnie. Big Ronnie Dunn fan. He can do that Ronnie Dunn kind of thing so well. But he blended it with the pop chops, man. It was crazy. It’s like the most crazy hybrid of a singer I’ve ever heard in my life. He was just perfect for the time, man. And the music, the songs we cut on our first album were just perfect. But I remember the first few nights we were singing together, it was just effortless. Jay and I would sing harmony around him all night long and we just locked in, for some reason. Jay and Gary are cousins, from Columbus, Ohio. For some reason, I took that high part above Gary and Jay was below Gary. So that three-part triad, it was born really quickly. It didn’t take a lot of work. PCC: Just magical. ROONEY: It really was magical, man. PCC: Where did the band name come from? I’ve heard several different stories. ROONEY: Well, I’ll give you the real story And I’ve got proof [laughs]. We were playing Fiddle and Steel Guitar Bar. It was in the summertime, probably July, almost August of 1999. And Jay and Gary had started that club gig as a duo. And they were calling themselves Deuces Wild before I joined them. And we kept the Deuces Wild. I said, “People are flocking to this club every week. Why are we going to change the name now? Deuces Wild works. It’s kind of funny now that there’s three of us. Ironic.” But finally, we had announced one night from stage several times - “Hey, we’re looking for band names. If you guys got any good names out there, throw us a bone, man. We’re looking for anything, cool, hip-sounding.” And we’d play a few things we’d written, some songs we’d cut as demos, trying to get this record deal with Lyric Street Records, because we were really close to inking a deal. They loved our sound. They just didn’t know what to call us. And neither did we. So, on break one night, like early August, this guy walked up to us. We all knew him very well. He was an older gentleman, even back then, in 1999, so you can imagine another 15 years down the road. They called him “Jellyroll” That was his nickname. Scott Blackwell is his name. And he walked up to us during the break, he’d had a little bit to drink - we did, too, but we were still cognizant enough to understand what he was saying, whether he remembers it or not, we do - and he said, [in a gruff, Southern, character voice] “Boys, let me tell you what, back there in the 60s, in the Bootheel of Missouri, I had a garage band and, by God, we were called Rascal Flatts.” He said, “Shit, I’m telling you right now, man, that’s your name... That’s your name, boys. I’m telling you right now, my hand to God. That’s your name.” So we all kind of looked at each other like, “Hmm, Rascal Flatts.” We said, “Thanks, Jellyroll, that’s cool. We’ll keep that under our hats.” And after two or three days, we kept going back to that name. We’d call each other, talk to each other - “Rascal Flatts. That does kind of have an edge to it.... Rascal Flatts.” So we ended up using that. We talked to our label and they loved it. “Yeah, that’s different. It’s got an edge to it.” So, cool. We acted like we owned the name. They didn’t know, but we didn’t. So we had to call Jellyroll. We had our attorney put together this little one-page document, fill out this little contract. Real simple. All in black-and-white. So it basically stated, “Thank you for this name. Please sign this on the dotted line. Well pay you $5,000. And we’re going to take the rights to this name. So there will never be a problem in the future” He signed it. We gave him 5,000 bucks. He was totally cool with it. And so we went to the Library of Congress and got it all copyrighted and trademarked. So to this day, we own the name Rascal Flatts. And it was pretty interesting, through the Library of Congress, seeing there was a group called The Rascals back in the day. And the Little Rascals popped up. All these different names. But it was never close enough that they didn’t think we could get a trademark. So it went through and it worked. The label loved it. Our management at the time loved it. So, man, it just worked out. That’s just God working right there. And Scott Blackwell, to this day, he just beams. He’s been really cool about it and loves the fact that he gave us the name, man. PCC: Becoming part of the Grand Ole Opry - is that one of the things you had dreamed about and now have achieved? ROONEY: Yeah, man, absolutely. I remember we got to play the Grand Ole Opry in early 2000 before our album came out. And back then, it went through a dry spell, where it would be on TV occasionally, but a lot of the nights, it was just on the radio. And so I’ll never forget, we were singing, “Prayin’ For Daylight,” live on the national Grand Ole Opry radio. And my Mom and Dad, in Oklahoma, they pulled in their driveway, at their house, and it was on the radio. They turned it up, in their driveway, and listened to it. I remember at the end of it, saying hi to my Mom and Dad, saying thank you to the Grand Ole Opry. We all said something. And I talked to my Mom and Dad the next day they were so appreciative of me mentioning them. It was so neat. And hearing it on the radio, made it like an old school, throwback memory for them. They grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry. I grew up watching it on TNN with my Mom and Dad, eating family dinner in the living room, with TV trays, food in our lap. And it was really special. To get to be asked to be the newest members of Grand Ole Opry, back in 2010, by Vince Gill, of all people, one of our heroes, in such a big way, and now we can call him friend, which is really strange, because we get to play golf with him and hang out with him. So that whole experience was really special. I couldn’t have scripted it any better. PCC: The new tour, it’s a great bill with Sheryl Crow. ROONEY: It’s been an awesome summer. And it’s been absolutely flying by. Sheryl is legend, man, already. She’s still young to be a legend, but she’s truly a legend. And every city we go to, when she gets up on stage and she sings and she gets out there with us in the middle of our show and she sings, it just brings the house down. People, young and old alike, they all know her music. They all dig her. She still looks great. She just gets up there and rocks. And for us, we’re in our late 30s, early 40s, we know that there’s still potential with us. There’s still a lot of miles left in our Rascal Flatts engine. So it’s inspiring to be around her so we can see that there’s a lot of great years ahead of us, if we want to work hard to achieve it. PCC: In addition to making great records, you seem to pay attention to showmanship, theatricality. ROONEY: Yeah, you know, we love concerts. Myself, I’ve got a bunch of DVDs of concerts that I love. I still go to concerts, when I can. YouTube’s awesome now, lets you see what everybody else is doing. We’re cognizant of everything going on around us, we try to be. And for us, this is probably our eighth year of being headliners. And, in some ways, we feel like we’ve got it down, for the most part. But there’s still always a learning curve. If you’re not learning, you’re not pushing yourselves to try something different. And geez, you might as well go home, hang it up. Because when it becomes a place where it’s absolutely robotic and you’re phoning it in every night, I think the fans are going to know it. And you’re obviously going to be miserable. We just do not want to get there. That’s why we continue to push ourselves... and we haven’t taken a break. And we don’t plan on taking a break, at least for the next couple of years. PCC: What have been the greatest rewards of your life as a musician? ROONEY: Well, I think the biggest rewards are the success that comes along with working hard. Not just that though, but knowing that we’ve been able to record some songs that really matter to people. That’s the best part of what we get to do. People might have gotten married to “Broken Road.” Back in the day, we put out our fourth single, called “I’m Movin’ On,” off our first album, and we literally had a guy call into the local radio station in Nashville, WSIX, back when Gerry House used to be a deejay there. He was the first guy in the country to spin that song. And a guy called in, he’d had to pull over to the side of the road, said he had been literally contemplating suicide and that song, when he heard it, just resonated with him, and he chose to change his life and move on past whatever hurdle he was trying to get over. Success is wonderful, but knowing that somebody changed their life over a song you recorded, that’s the most amazing part of what we get to do. It’s very special. And we do not take that for granted. And don’t take that lightly. And every person we meet, if they have a story, we try to be patient with them and sit there and let them share it with us. I love hearing those stories. It’s powerful. PCC: And the most challenging aspect? ROONEY: I think the most challenging is trying to compete with what you already laid out, because, A, you can have fun doing it, B, you can affect people’s lives for the better with music. And C, it’s hard to sustain it, because it has been 14, 15 years Gary, Jay and I have been singing together, working together, in pretty tight quarters, for a lot of years, on the same bus for most of those years. We’re now on different buses, so we can have our space, our family time on the road sometimes, with our families that go. But keeping it going, keeping the wheel turning, it can be challenging after all these years. But, at the end of the day, we know that the fans are driving this whole thing. As long as they keep showing up at the shows we book, we’re going to keep doing this, as long as they’ll have us around, because we’re having a blast. And I think we’ll know in our hearts, when it’s time to hang it up. And right now, it’s not in the foreseeable future. PCC: Is it still a unique kind of rush, when everything’s clicking, the band’s tight, the harmonies are spot-on, the crowd’s really into it? ROONEY: Yeah, there’s nothing that compete with that. It’s one thing, being in a studio, creating something from nothing, basically. But that hour-and-a-half that we spend each night with the fans, there’s those nights, when it’s just so powerful that you can hear the crowd roaring, over the powerful p.a. system. And they’re singing every word back to you. And they’re just so passionate, looking at you dead in the eye. They’re in that moment. And you can’t help but go there in that moment with them. So it’s fully reciprocated. It’s kind of a dance we do with the fans, throughout the ebb and flow of the whole show - the uptempos and the ballads - we kind of take them on a roller coaster ride of emotions. And there’s nothing in the world, in the music business, that can replace that, that can equal that live concert setting. You can’t download that, man. For the latest tour dates, visit www.rascalflatts.com. |
