Billy Ray Cyrus revisited: Part 5

Editor’s note:

This series on Billy Ray Cyrus appeared several years ago in The Greenup Beacon. It was a work provided by Gregg Davidson a frequent contributor to the paper. This series has been revised with some new information ad restructuring by its author. The content presented is of his work and we have protected his poetic license. Any content or opinion in this series is his work and doesn’t express the paper’s stance or opinion.

After finally realizing his dream of being signed to a major recording contract in January 1991, Billy Ray Cyrus was anxious to finish up his debut album and embark on a major US tour, but there were a number of delays that kept him in a state of suspended anxiety. After bassist Harold Cole left the group (replaced by Westwood’s Corky Holbrook) retaining his rights to The Players name, the remaining band at first resuscitated the Billy Ray & The Breeze moniker before the label suggested that they be billed just as CYRUS, but eventually Billy took drummer Greg Fletcher’s suggestion and dusted off the old Sly Dog name.

Meanwhile, the label was scratching its collective head over how to market Billy and his indefinable brand of Country music. It would not have been unusual for them to compel the singer to conform to the established design of Nashville artists, but Billy would have felt uneasy to be forcibly represented as something that was out of character for him, a fact that they were well aware of. Billy Ray was comfortable with the way that things had been going before becoming signed, and was suspicious of people who tried to alter his persona or mess with his band and their formula. He even managed to convince his producers at Music Mill studios to try out Sly Dog in the studio, and the group won them over with their musicianship enough to nix any ideas about bringing in expensive session players.

When Billy and the band weren’t busy at the studio recording demos of their original songs for Mercury/PolyGram’s approval, they were warming up for established acts and still juggling the usual club performances. Still engaging in regular bookings at the Ragtime Lounge in Huntington, West Virginia, they also continued to play other local shows as often as possible, including an opening spot for Lionel Cartwright at Ashland’s landmark Paramount on April 20th (with Zachariah’s Mike Murphy making an appearance as guest vocalist). Other shows included one at Huntington’s Summerfest on July 23rd, a September 14th gig at Ashland’s new shopping mall - Cedar Knoll Galleria (now the Kyova mall), one at Greenup Kentucky’s Old Fashioned Days event on October 21st, and another at South Point, Ohio’s Red Fox Lounge that New Year’s Eve, with all appearances attracting large, adoring crowds.

As unfamiliar as the label was with Billy’s own personal recipe for success, one thing was certain: it was working. Everywhere the charismatic Flatwoods musician appeared, he made waves with the ladies, but for him it was nothing new. His ability to assemble a large gathering of adoring women had always been a big part of the reason that Billy Ray managed to keep steady gigs over the years.

We may never know all of the details of why his fragile marriage finally fell apart at the seams, but the unwavering attention he was receiving from such amorous female audiences must have been a probable factor, and in October of 1991, Billy and Cindy were divorced after a long, estranged relationship.

Still in the incubation period of building a recording career, Billy was largely still struggling financially, but in a heart-warming gesture, he added Cindy’s name to the songwriting credits on several tunes that made it onto his first album, insuring her a modest percentage of any royalties derived from record sales, something that must have still seemed miles away.

To Billy, it felt that the months were flying by with very little change in his status and he was growing ever more impatient to get things rolling. He remained fairly firm on his decision to retain his own sense of style both in the studio and out, and was continually convinced that people would love his music whether they would “get him” image-wise or not.

In the end, a decision was made at the label to take a chance on Billy as he was, and by not tinkering with a winning modus operandi, they allowed his revolutionary image to remain genuine.

When it came to promotion, Mercury knew what it was up against, so when planning the next stage in Billy Ray’s career there had been an unprecedented and concentrated effort to infuse new ideas into their marketing strategies concerning their unconventional new acquisition. At one brainstorming corporate meeting, someone suggested that they might try to create a special dance to be paired with one of the songs designated for inclusion on the album.

Realizing the possible potential for sales that a popular dance craze might ignite, they instantly hired a beautiful choreographer named Melanie Greenwood (the wife of singer Lee Greenwood at the time) to tackle the task. She was given a copy of the most beat-driven and danceable song from BRC’s sessions to build the new dance around, and as inspiration she borrowed one of Billy’s signature stage moves to create a simple, but exaggerated variation of the classic two-step. The result was the “Achy Breaky”, a memorable and lively boot-scootin’ dance that encouraged audience participation, in effect becoming the very first “line dance”.

In January 1992, Mercury filmed an instructional how-to video of Greenwood properly demonstrating the dance (along with three dozen hand-picked dancers) at the Holiday Inn’s Red Fox Lounge in South Point, Ohio, a venue where BRC had been performing that week.

On January 20^th and 21^st of 1992, Mercury sent another cinematography crew to our area to film “Achy Breaky Heart” Billy’s first commercial video. In the beginning, Billy Ray tried to persuade them that his introductory video should be shot at his former home on Long Street in an attempt to convey his simple roots. He wanted to include shots of his mother working in the kitchen, sitting at her piano, and hanging wet clothing on their backyard clothesline. He also wanted to include a shot of the handmade wire cage where he kept Rascal, a pet raccoon.

But in the end, corporate logic prevailed as Mercury wanted to showcase his sex appeal and captivating stage presence. So as a compromise, they agreed to schedule the shoot on location as near to his hometown as possible, settling for the stage of the Paramount, where over a year earlier, he had officially signed his formal recording contract.

On the first day, the band performed to a near-empty house (actually lip-syncing to the recording, a normal part of such a procedure) in order to allow for obstructed preliminary stage shots of Billy Ray and the band as the crew experimented with lighting tests, wardrobe variations, and alternative camera angles including close-ups. The following day’s shoot included many more stage shots, but with a live audience in attendance. If the label had doubted whether they could draw an impressive enough audience for the crowd shots, they must have been elated when over 1,100 enthusiastic fans (composed primarily of beautiful and energetic women) filled the treasured former movie theater with real excitement written all over their beaming faces.

Despite take after take, with long periods of waiting in between, the crowd’s enthusiasm remained unabated and unsolicited. The final result that you see is very genuine, the kind of audience reaction that you can’t buy at any price. Today, the video serves as a perfect time capsule, allowing younger fans a rare glimpse of a small-town Midwest artist on the cusp of international superstardom surrounded and passionately supported by his devoted hometown fans.

Not long afterwards, in an attempt to best accentuate their sound at live shows, the band decided to add an additional musician in the form of Ashland native Michael Joe Sagraves. I’d known Michael Joe for several years and couldn’t have suggested a better man for the job. A multi-instrumentalist proficient on acoustic and electric guitar, lap steel guitar, and harmonica, he had once toured with Loretta Lynn’s niece Hermalee Fields and had racked up hours of studio experience at the famous Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama. A fan of both Southern Rock and Country, he had no trouble taking his proper place alongside the other Sly Dog members.

On a side note, my father Joe had once done some construction work for MJS’s grandparents in Ashland in 1980, one of the last jobs he’d contracted before his premature death from an aneurism in 1981. A few years later, MJ and I were both sweeping the same sidewalk in front of two different businesses that we were employed with when our push brooms met. We’d caught one another pushing our dirt onto each other’s section of the walk, and when we looked up and realized that we knew each other, we both had a good laugh at our own expense. A few years later still, I was buying some art supplies at Ashland’s Frame Up Gallery (one block from The Paramount) and MJ rang up my purchase as we joked about the fact that we kept running into each other and how it must mean something to keep doing so. It wouldn’t be the last time.

In a smart business move, on February 28, 1992, Greenwood’s “Achy Breaky” line dance video was shipped to dozens of high profile dance clubs across the US in hopes of attracting attention to the song itself. With the video came an announcement that a dance contest would be held at all of the locations who chose to play the song. The tactic worked, and the innovative new line dance caught on very quickly. As a result, many of the patrons of country music clubs across the U.S. already knew the song and dance before having ever caught a glimpse of Billy Ray Cyrus.

By March, “Achy Breaky Heart” had landed on the Billboard charts without ever having been officially released in any format other than the Greenwood video, a remarkable feat in and of itself. But that was just the beginning.

Billy moved to Nashville that month, taking a modest, one bedroom apartment that he seldom got to see. On April 3^rd, he appeared on “Nashville Now,” a televised talk show hosted by Ralph Emery, and then returned to the Paramount for a full, sold out performance (sponsored by radio station WTCR) on the following night. Two days later on April 6th, the single was shipped to radio stations and the video of “Achy Breaky Heart” debuted on both The Nashville Network (TNN) and Country Music Television (CMT) on that same day.

Needless to say, the buzz started by the line dance began to spread like wildfire and soon became a raging inferno. Radio stations became inundated with requests for the snappy song and it was eventually released as a single to the public on April 14th. In May, it hit the number one spot on the Billboard Hot Country Singles Chart and sold a million copies (platinum) on its own before the “Some Gave All” album was released on May 19th, a feat not matched since the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ single “Islands In The Stream” in 1983.

The album’s sales figures went on to outperform everyone’s expectations when it went platinum only one week after its release. Even more astonishing is the fact that it remained at #1 for eighteen weeks in a row. It also crossed over onto the pop charts to hover at #1 for seventeen weeks. The news about Billy Ray and the “Cyrus Virus” was soon sweeping into other countries as well. In the UK, “Achy Breaky” hit 3# on the Singles Chart, and went #1 in Australia and Canada. It charted into the top forty in Germany and Switzerland, and hit the top ten in Austria, but fell just shy of that to land at #11 in France.

The “Some Gave All” album eventually went on to sell 20 million units worldwide, an unimagined achievement for a debut release. Needless to say, as the money began to pile up, the gifts and accommodations for Billy Ray and Sly Dog increased exponentially. The old bread truck that once carried the boys around the country was replaced with a brand new tour bus, a Silver Eagle coach with a large, ornate monogram of BRC on the sides, and a hand painted scene of a rural country house complete with a dog in the yard on the back end, encapsulated with the words from one of Billy’s songs: “Wher’m I Gonna Live When I Get Home?”

Suddenly, promoters were coming out of the woodwork to book Billy Ray, now the hottest thing in Country Music, in their own neck of the woods, and personal invitations to everything from complimentary dinners to free musical instruments (commonly called “endorsement deals”) poured in from hotel owners, venue owners, music retail and wholesale stores, and even from local politicians and city officials who offered keys to their cities and proposals to act as the Grand Marshall in street parades.

Some of Billy’s business associates advised him to cancel some of the backlogged shows that he had already signed up for in order to make more money. Many of the bookings were scheduled at County Fairs and small venues for small fees that seemed generous at the time. Realistically, he could have broken these contracts, paid a small legal “fine”, and still made much more cash by re-booking the dates at larger venues. But Billy refused, stating that he would honor all of his previous contracts since they had, in a gesture of good faith, taken a chance with the unknown artist.

Meanwhile back in Flatwoods, there seemed to be two factions; those who said “I told you so!” and those naysayers who were thunderstruck with amazement at just how quickly and how high BRC’s professional profile had ascended. Without a band at the time (summer had just gotten underway), I was working as the maintenance man at Flatwoods’ new Hamor Village Shopping Center and was honestly bored silly and desperately wishing for a change of scenery. On a whim, I called up Michael Joe to congratulate him and asked if they were hiring for any road positions, explaining that I could be a drum tech for Fletcher if he needed one, and even half-jokingly offered to sweep out the trucks if need be. MJ laughed and said he’d check it out for me and get back. I didn’t really expect that he would and reluctantly went back to my daily grind.

One day not long afterwards, I walked into the old Arthur & Riggs building that was then a Flatwoods music store owned by local musician Paul Cook to buy some drum sticks, and was met at the counter by employee (and fellow musician) Chris Kitchen. He greeted me warmly and with an excited tone of voice told me that Billy Ray had called the store looking for me the previous day and wanted to offer me a job on the road. He then handed me a slip of paper with a Tennessee phone number written on it and offered to let me call him back from the store’s phone.

It seemed that Michael Joe had lost my home number amid the craziness that all things BRC was becoming, but hadn’t forgotten about our prior conversation. After I hung up, I had to explain to Chris and the others present that BRC had been in need of a driver and since I didn’t drink alcohol, I was now about to join them as their newest road employee. As excited as I was, I skipped a bunch of the details so that I might rush over to tell my mother about it.

Mom had always personally loved Billy and his family (having known both of BRC’s parents Ron and Ruth Ann), and was a big fan of his music as well. When I told her that I was now going to be a part of the road crew, tears welled up in her eyes as she told me how very proud of me she was for always having been such a nice and respectful guy, reminding me of how good things happen for good people. She held me for several minutes and went on to tell me how much she wished that my father was alive to hear about it. She then asked me when I was supposed to start and I told her that I had to meet up with them in three days. Her jaw dropped as she flung off her kitchen apron and said “Oh my gosh! We gotta start packing!”