Muscle Shoals Sound Publishing and to sup- port myself while I stayed in Shoals to write, I started playing the local bars, especially one called Johnny’s Club, across the Tennessee line. Shoals was dry at that time. All the studio guys had “house gigs” at the
time, so a group of us songwriters that had just joined MSS, worked at Johnny’s while we wrote and began to cut demos of the songs for the publish- ing company. My group
evolved into one that Jimmy was interested in recording and pitching to labels, es- pecially after my brother Dennis quit his band and joined mine. Johnson saw me as the group’s songwriter and Dennis as “the voice”. By then we’d recruited an exceptional gui- tarist, Britt Meacham and Johnson felt a “sound” was emerging and we needed a name. Johnson named us “Jackson High- way.”
Give us the recording history of the band, I know you had two really great albums because I have them! We started recording demos and Johnson couldn’t seem to get us a deal. We had to start back playing on the road to survive. Johnny’s Club just wasn’t happening, so we started working all over the Southeast, still writing and doing demos between road trips. That started in 1973 and by 1977, when Johnny’s went down, we needed a record to survive on
the road, so we took the demos that we’d done and put together out first LP. It was re- leased as an DIY record using the Muscle Shoals Sound logo as a label and Jimmy Johnson served as our manager if anyone asked, and I did the road management with one direct responsibility, “ Keep the band in- tact and alive till Johnson could get a record deal”.
1977 till 1979,
we toured off the regional success of that first LP. We had radio airplay in places like Chattanooga Ten- nessee, where it went Top 10, and lots of small towns like Gadsden Al., Rome, Ga. etc. By ’79, Johnson and the MSS staff signed a record deal with Capitol Records to record
a series of LP’s as a label, MSS/Capitol Records. Jackson Highway was the first to record on the label, followed by Delbert Mc- Clinton (“Giving It Up For Your Love”), Lenny LeBlanc, Levon Helm, Frankie Miller- “Giving It Up” was the only hit, so before Jackson Highway could get a second LP recorded and released, the label lost it’s deal. We had about two LP’s of material in the can. Meanwhile Jackson Highway had morphed
from a country/rock bar band into an harder rock band as an opening act for bands such as Canada’s Triumph, England’s UFO, and Su- perstars Ted Nugent and Blackfoot.
Who all was in the band, and how long were you together? What years? The band consisted of, Dennis Gulley, lead
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