Remember that one weekend when you guys were rehearsing in that little building on Forrest Street, Steve had y’all gather around without your in- struments and worked up the four-part harmony for his song “I’ve Got Some- thing On My Mind.” Lord, I remember the band going over that for a solid two hours. And that’s one of the songs I was talking about that was ahead of its time.
It was so different, but so good. Of course, Randall was a writer too and would later write tons of great songs, but even back then, one of my favorite songs was one Calvert wrote, “Trail to Mexico.” Definite Charlie Daniels influence.
And Toy Caldwell. Let’s talk about Randy Merryman for a moment. Randy was a sound engineer at Creative Arts Studio in Moore, the one owned by Doug, Jerry and George from Marshall Tucker, and of course the studio where you recorded the single. He was always trying to get y’all to try different things, like “Estimated Prophet” by the Grate- ful Dead. He was way ahead of us. He took the time to teach us things and always offered good ad- vice. He had total confidence that we could do it if we’d just apply ourselves. It’s funny, right after we met him, he needed some people to help run wires and set up new equipment in the upstairs studio
And to carry the big mixing board up- stairs. (Laughs) Yeah, the manual labor. But once he got it all hooked up he said, we need to test the new equipment, so he let us plug in and play all weekend. We ended up with a kick- ass demo that didn’t cost anything, and we
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were having fun. We owe a lot to Randy.
Looking back on it, the first phase of Silver Travis was a relatively short pe- riod of time, less than three years. True. When we broke up in 1983, the music industry was changing a lot. Southern rock was dying out, electronic music was hot, MTV, everything was going to video, nobody really knew what in the hell to play.
MTV changed everything. To be a star, you needed to look good. The video be- came more important than the music. And so many popular bands tried to cater to all that. Like one of mine and your favorite artists, Alice Cooper. During those years, he changed his look to a new wave look and his music be- came keyboard heavy, like in his song “Clones.” Even the Allman Brothers came out with two pop records that sounded nothing like the band we loved.
In my most recent book. Gregg and a couple of other Brothers said that the two Arista albums were the worst things they ever did. The producers buried the guitars in the mix and went for a Top 40 pop sound. I hear that Gregg Allman didn’t even have Brothers of the Road or Reach for the Sky in his collection.
From the beginning of Silver Travis through to the point where Randall Calvert left to get married, what do you feel were the highlights of that period? Well, recording and releasing the 45 single and getting some regional notoriety from that. And getting to meet a lot of our heroes like Artimus Pyle, and the Tucker Band, and those guys we’d listened to all of our lives. Another big deal was the week we spent play- ing at Myrtle Beach at the Bowery and getting
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