Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 15, 1991 TAG: 9103150501
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now, a year later, the Headhunters are still touring in the same bus and playing the same brand of Dixie-fried country rock.
But that's about where the similarities end.
The long-haired boys from Munfordville, Ky., no longer tour small venues like the Iroquois Club, where they played in January 1990.
Nor do they open for other acts anymore, like they did for Hank Williams Jr. when he rolled into Roanoke two months later.
No, the Headhunters are headliners now. They're playing the Salem Civic Center Sunday at 8 p.m.
In the past year, the band has sold more than a million copies of its debut album, "Pickin' on Nashville." It has won a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Group and three Country Music Association awards - Group of the Year, Album of the Year and Producers of the Year.
"This has been a damn Cinderella story," said the group's still-amazed rhythm guitarist Richard Young in a recent telephone interview from his home in Kentucky.
Outside, he was having several trees in his yard topped so they wouldn't fall on his house come tornado season.
"Oh man, I hate this," he said above the buzz of chain saws heard in the background. "I hate cutting a tree more than anybody."
Inside, he was deciding where to keep his newly won Grammy. Maybe the antique wine press in his living room?
Young, 35, speaks like the Headhunters play music, bouncing around from subject to subject as if he was bouncing from one musical style to the next.
The Grammy, like all the awards the band has won, came as a surprise. "We're still not used to having a record deal, much less these awards," he said.
"It really hasn't sunk in yet."
But when it does, he said the Grammy will be something to cherish. "If I live to be 75 and I have a grandson on my knee, I'd like to be able to show him it and say that was something I won when I was in the Kentucky Headhunters. It's like a guy who went to war and got a Purple Heart," he said.
For now, though, Young and fellow band members Ricky and Doug Phelps, Greg Martin and Fred Young, have been staying too busy to reflect much on their success.
With the upcoming tour, there are sound systems and equipment trucks and a road crew to worry about. There is the bus, which was once owned by Elvis. It needed a new engine.
And there is the new album.
Titled, "Electric Barnyard," it is scheduled for release April 2, with the first single, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," set for release March 26.
"Do you remember that one?" Young asked. "Nobody does. That's what's great about it."
The Headhunters also tackle the old Waylon Jennings song "The Only Daddy That Will Walk the Line" and the Bill Monroe bluegrass standard "Body and Soul" on the new album.
Other cuts include "Big Mexican Dinner," "It's Chitlin Time," "Always Making Love," which Young described as sounding like a Beatles song that was never released, and "Kicking Them Blues Around," which he called a cross between The Mamas and Papas and Miles Davis.
"It's kind of strange," he said.
But then, the Kentucky Headhunters are no strangers to strangeness. What has set the band apart from the beginning has been its bizarre blend of country, bluegrass, electric blues and rock'n'roll.
Young said the new record will prove no different. It isn't more country. It isn't more rock.
"We just stayed where we were."
About the only big difference was in the cost. "Electric Barnyard" cost twice what the band recorded "Pickin' On Nashville" for. Yet, even at $16,000, Young called the follow-up a bargain by today's standards.
"And most of that was spent on food," he said. "Carry-out ain't cheap."
Meanwhile, Young said the band has taken the new material back into the small clubs a few times to build confidence and prepare for the big halls.
"Even the Stones do it," he said. "Then, you know you can go out and reach that guy sitting way back in the back of a 10,000-seat arena."
And that's one way he said the group hasn't changed. The music comes first.
"It's real easy, man, to get duped into saying, `Who cares about the music? They're going to buy a ticket anyway,' " he said. "The best thing about this band is that no one has lost their sense of values about where we came from."
\ KENTUCKY HEADHUNTERS:
8 p.m. Sunday, Salem Civic Center.
$17.50 reserved. 375-3004.
by CNB