Rickie Lee Reynolds (Black Oak Arkansas) 2021

[classic rock revival]

Classic Rock Revival
Rickie Lee Reynolds Interview


Black Oak Arkansas are one of those legendary rock and roll bands that just refuses to die. Here we are in 2021 and BOA is still delivery the goods in fine style with their live shows that includes new songs along with their classics. You gotta love that.

I've been a longtime fan of this band since I heard "Keep The Faith," back in the early 70's. They had several great albums over the years and hit the big time in a big way. They released their most recent album, "Underdog Heros," last year on Atco Records.


JIM: "Underdog Heros," is a damn good album, one of BOA's best! Can you tell me a little bit about how it came about?

RICKIE: Well, I have a friend in Las Vegas who is a "music broker." He is the go-between for record labels and bands, and he contacted me about the possibility of a new BOA album for Cleopatra Records. As I listened to the offer, I made notes on what was wrong with the idea. They wanted 4 new songs, 4 cover tunes and 4 old BOA tunes re-done again. I turned it down. "Why?" he asked, " and what do y'all want instead?" Well, I explained that I was tired of redoing a Black Oak song where no matter how good the new arrangement was... the fans never liked it as good as the original! Neither did I!

"Here's what we'll do..." I said. "Jim and I have about a hundred great BRAND NEW songs that no one has ever heard! We'll give you 10 new original tunes that are unreleased... and we'll redo 2 songs by someone else with a new arrangement. BUT... we'll only do this if Jim and I get to produce the album ourselves!
After a bit of grumbling, I explained that we'd actually produced a LOT of the older BOA albums, but labels brought in someone else to finalize the project or to have their name added to the credits "because we didn't have a track record of being producers!" I added that without the production done by Jim and myself... I personally wasn't interested anymore. "I'm tired of other people coming into the studio and telling me what my songs are supposed to sound like! After more than 2 dozen albums, I'm pretty sure I KNOW what my songs should sound like!"
They let us do it the way we wanted.

We were in and out of the studio for several months, juggling live shows and available studio time...but the songs were sounding good! When we'd collected enough ammunition to make a BOA album we thought everyone would like... we went to Royal Studios there in Memphis and worked with our friend Boo Mitchell to help run these tracks while we mixed 'em. Boo is a Grammy award winner and his Dad was Willie Mitchell, who had some great albums of his own.. but who also did the Al Green records that were so damn fine! The combination of Boo, Jim and I... along with a double-handfull of great musicians, made an album that we're extremely proud of! The late great Shawn Lane is actually playing on one track that I wrote titled Do Unto Others! The whole project, though, is chockful of good tunes never heard by our fans before, and I loved leaving small pieces of "racket" in the final mixes that other producers would have eliminated! Finally and at last... it's a record that, if you don't like it...Jim and I can accept that criticism, BUT... if you DO like it... we get the credit and the title of PRODUCER honestly. We now have that "track record" which we didn't have before.

JIM: This new album really kicks ass! Along with Samantha Seauphine on vocals with Jim Dandy, Randall X Rawlings on guitar, Billy Little on bass, and Lonnie Hammer on drums, BLACK OAK ARKANSAS, today, sounds as great as they ever did. Can you give us a little background info on these fine musicians that have joined forces with you and Jim?

RICKIE: Well, the named musicians which you mentioned are only a fraction of the talent on this product! Sammy has been with us on the road for several years now, but this was her first time recording with Jim and I. She loved being in the studio... and did great!
Johnnie Bolin, who is the brother of the late great Tommy Bolin (R.I.P), has been playing drums off and on with Jim and I for more than three decades and has played on the Wild Bunch album and several tracks on Back Thar and Over Yonder, too... and is the drummer on a large number of these songs. The problem was that Johnnie had some heart problems which pulled him off of the road with BOA for a year or more. When live concerts came around, we recruited either Lonnie Hammer (who has his own metal band) or our long time friend Vic Luhenbaugh... (who sadly just passed away earlier this year... R.I.P.) to slam some drums on stage with us. Both of these two incredible drummers are on some of Underdog Heroes... including Lonnie's guitarist Randall Rawlings. Both Billy Little and George Hughen have bass parts on this album, and I even played bass on one song included on Underdog Heroes entitled Do Unto Others, which also had myself and the amazing Shawn Lane (AGAIN, R.I.P.) supplying guitar in abundance! Several of the tracks also feature Hal McCormack on lead guitar, a BOA onstage regular for many years! We even had a young friend of ours from Memphis, Caleb Boyles, who we invited to come Jam on a couple of songs with us! SLAMMIN' guitar player!
All in all, we made sure that every musician who shared this studio with us were placed on songs that embellished their flavor and style! A match made in heaven.

JIM: Sammy Seauphine sharing vocals with Jim Dandy adds a totally new element to the bands sound with her sassy, sultry delivery. Her and Jim Dandy work well with each other. I know she's been with the band for quite a while now, but just how was it she came to join the band?


RICKIE: Hahahahaha! Wellllll, Jim and I were both living here in Memphis. I stay at home a lot and write books, do art, I have a column in an Arkansas entertainment magazine, I run our website, I handle Black Oak Arkansas merchandise, I'm online answering fan questions and mail, I have my own publishing company... Fine and Dandy, I do charity events a couple of times a year for St. Jude's Children's Hospital for cancer research, I book concerts, tend a garden, renovation of a house that was given to me, and babysit my 40 year old son!

Jim likes to go out and party! Now, I'm not complaining, because he being the Party Master of Disaster helps keep us going with the public every bit or even more than all of the crap I do! We both are doing things that need to be done, but on different sides of the same coin! We always say that between the both of us... we make ONE really good person!
Jim was out hitting the club scene here in ol' Memphis town one night, and saw a metal-type band playing somewhere or another. The girl singin' for 'em was cute as a speckled puppy underneath a little red wagon! Jim, being Jim Dandy... sashayed over to say hi! Now, Jim Dandy is what I liked to call... uhhh, THE HAMMER OF LOVE! (I just made that up!) He tries to nail any beautiful lady with a head on her! Sammy was no exception, I reckon.

They flirted back and forth for awhile, and discovered the rights and the wrongs with each other, but when Jim brought her in as an additional voice in the band... and her youth and exuberance onstage started attracting much needed attention for BOA... her talents started increasing gig by gig and her following has almost became a thing of its own. We hope to one day get her a shot at doing a solo album of her own, as we did with Ruby Starr... but not trying to recreate Ruby. Everyone should try to be themselves, because everybody else is taken!
Awhile back, she stuck some words to a piece of music that I love and wrote decades ago, and it'll be great to one day soon sneak into a studio and see what we can come up with.
Time will tell...

JIM: The title track, "Underdog Hero's", is a really powerhouse song, one of my favorites! "Arkansas Medicine Man", "The Devil's Daughter", and "Don't Let It Show", are a few more tunes that really drive this new album. You and Jim Dandy really outdid yourselves in coming up with new material for this album. How is it you and Jim work together writing songs?

RICKIE: Every song is different inasmuch as on some songs, Jim will write lyrics and I'll write music. The next one may be just the opposite or it may be that I might write the entire song myself, just as Jim often writes songs solo. We don't try to maintain a constant formula for creating a tune because we seem to work better when we have no preconceptions of who does what! Even after a song is written, it might go through a process of change a dozen times before we finally settle on one version that we both like.
Every song is a new adventure!

JIM: BOA's self titled debut album featured four classic tunes, "Hot and Nasty", "Lord Have Mercy On My Soul", "Uncle Lijiah", and "When Electricity Came To Arkansas". That album did pretty well sales wise for a new band and has since gone gold. Can you tell me a bit about that period of the band, having a record deal with Atco Records, your first national tour, some of the bands you opened for? Did you guys feel like you had finally made it at this point?

RICKIE: Well, the thing about the 1st album was the fact that we had so much dadgum time before we recorded it to write songs, arrange the songs, rehearse the songs, change the arrangements several times until we got what felt best to us and then to take these new songs and play them in front of people in a club or small outdoor festival format to see what worked and what didn't work with a live audience. This was the only BOA album that we ever had that luxury on. After that, we basically lived on the road, doing opening slots for a major touring act or headlining our own shows in colleges and small auditoriums or theatres. We'd have to write songs on the road and just grab studio time when possible without a lot of rehearsal time.

Our first national tour opening for a major headliner was playing the middle slot of a 3 band bill that was headlined by Iron Butterfly. This turned out to be not only a great experience for us as a new national act, but we also became lifelong friends with all of the musicians in Iron Butterfly! Unlike bands today, Iron Butterfly, ourselves and an opening act named John Manning ALL rode in the same bus, stayed at the same motel, and many times we ate and drank in the same restaurant or Bar. We would occasionally have two or three guitars out in the bus and Jam together on new songs or just make up something as we'd roll down that long highway. A month and a half to two months of living together like that daily and you either become friends or kill each other off! Hahahahaha!

Their bass player Lee Dorman was a truly close friend of mine for decades until he passed away a couple years ago, right after Black Oak Arkansas played Sao Paulo, Brazil for a cultural festival with two million people in the streets! Lee was there with some of the remaining members of Iron Butterfy, also playing the Festival. He was in poor health then, and a few months later... he was gone. Ron Bushy, drummer for the Butterfly, is my friend still, on my Facebook and we talk two or three times a month, reminiscing about days gone by and the adventures we shared. Good times.

Our next national tour was when we were approached by our agent to do a tour as opening act in giant arenas and stadiums! The money was really pretty bad, and the manager of the headlining band had a stipulation that we would get zero advertising or billing on the shows! The crowd was never to know who the other act was until they arrived at the venue! So, the money sucked and the terms were totally unfair, but we accepted the challenge! Why? Because we got to play in front of fifteen to twenty THOUSAND PEOPLE every night of the tour! The headliner was Grand Funk Railroad at their peak! Most of the people in the crowd had never even heard of Black Oak Arkansas, but we hit that stage so hard every night that every person in the crowd and every interviewer at the show went home going, "Damn! What the hell was that??" They loved it. We almost killed ourselves every night, hearts pounding heavy in our chests with sweat pouring off by the gallons to the point of almost passing out, but everybody that went home that night knew EXACTLY who Black Oak Arkansas was.

We actually became really good friends with Grand Funk, too, and then their manager wanted to pull us off of the tour because we were getting too much publicity. But, Mark Farner, drummer, Donnie Brewer and their bass player, Mel, all stopped him. "We're An American Band" was the album Grand Funk were out promoting, and was a hit at that time, but the BOA live show was like getting hit by a truck! We weren't trying to blow anybody off stage. We were just having fun playing to that many folks who loved our show, and there wasn't another rock frontman like Jim Dandy anywhere on the planet! When we got on stage, that crowd was ours, and we slammed! Hard! Soon, even with no billing at all, the word spread, and crowds starting coming to the Grand Funk Railroad concert to see Black Oak Arkansas!
Then, we still didn't think we'd "made it" yet, but we could see the sign posts up ahead! "WELCOME TO MADE IT!" One day soon.

JIM: BOA is the first rock band I can think of in the early 70's that had three guitar players, you, Harvey Jett, and Stanley Knight. Lynyrd Skynyrd later did it, but they came on the scene a couple of years after you. Was BOA actually the first band to have three guitar players? How was it BOA became a three guitar band?

RICKIE: Actually, I would have to describe the situation as an accidental opportunity! When our guitarist from the Knowbody Else days decided to leave, we replaced him with a friend of ours, Harvey Jett. Harvey played with us for a few months, but then, for some reason I don't recall, decided to leave. We needed a guitarist for gigs we already had booked, so Pat Daugherty, our bass player, had a friend in Jonesboro, Arkansas that he'd grown up with, and this guitarist was Stanley Knight! Stan played a different style than Harvey did, but was a good solid player and easy to get along with. He was in.
I've always done a large part of the song arrangements for the band, so I modified some of the songs to fit Stanley's playing. It worked great, but lo and behold, a month or two later, Harv showed back up! He missed playing with us and wanted back in!! Stan was fitting in great, and after all of that work, there was no way we were cutting him loose. Sooo, the answer seemed to be three guitarists! Some of Stan's modified parts fit GREAT with what Harvey had played before! We started arranging the songs to work for multiple guitars, kinda like classical music is set up for many instruments, we started playing either interlocking clockwork parts to each other, or three totally seperate parts on top of one another, or multiple guitars playing harmony to each other! In the mid 60s... this was unheard of! Steve Cropper of Booker T. and the MGs and The Blues Brothers once told us that a band only needed one guitar! Somehow or another, we managed to pull it off with three.

JIM: You guys scored your first top 40 hit with the LaVern Baker tune from 1956, "Jim Dandy."  Your version, "Jim Dandy (To The Rescue)," landed at #25 on the Billboard charts. I know the story behind this song, Elvis telling Jim, you guys need to record this song, you did, and the rest is history. Was this song the band's first attempt at getting a hit single? Did it change your attitudes at having hit singles after the success it had? 

RICKIE: One of the weird things about Black Oak Arkansas is the fact that we write and do so many different styles of music. Rock, Southern Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Country, Folk, Metal, and the list goes on. We had singles that came out dating all of the way back to the late 60s on Stax Records as Knowbody Else, then later on Atlantic/Atco, MCA , Capricorn and others. One problem was that BOA was never a big radio band. Most of our fanbase was because of our live shows. Some of our songs like Strong Enough To Be Gentle, Hot and Nasty and Lord Have Mercy got quite a bit of airplay and did chart a bit, but usually if you had a hit song on the radio in those days... the record label wanted to follow that song up with another the same style. Our albums were a strange hodge podge of different textures and flavors, which made it hard to put a label on our genre of music. Even though Elvis told us to do Jim Dandy To the Rescue, and the three guitar arrangement with the shuffle beat was catchy. I believe that the song got so much response because we had the song's character IN the band! Jim Dandy was a stand-out personality on the rock scene, and lots of folks who had never heard the original version of the song thought we wrote it ABOUT JIM! The timing was perfect, and it increased our concert schedule and the amount we made per show, but we didn't start modifying our song writing just to get another radio hit. We were what we were, and radio play or not, we kept on being us. We still do.

JIM: After the "Street Party," album, Harvey left the band and a young guitarist named, Jimmy Henderson came on board for the next album, "Ain't Life Grand." A damn good album. You guys did a killer version of George Harrison's, Beatles, hit "Taxman." Can you tell us a bit about that period?

RICKIE: When Harvey left the band, it was big loss in the music and the songwriting, but he left for religious reasons, and you've gotta respect a decision made on those grounds.

We immediately started the search for a 3rd guitar to fill the empty slot left by Harv, and it just so happened that Jimmy Henderson was playing with Ruby Starr at that time. BOA and Ruby's band hung out together a lot, and Jimmy had enough talent that he already knew many of our songs just by listening to them. Jimmy loved playing in Ruby's band, but BOA had a much larger tour schedule than Ruby did, and she also felt that it was a good career move for Jimmy.

"Ain't Life Grand," was and still is a really great Black Oak Arkansas album, and the combination of Stanley and Jimmy playing leads together added a new flavor to our music. The double and sometimes triple guitar harmonies the 3 guitars Stan, Jimmy and I played were pretty amazing, and a lot of time was spent on arrangements before we ever got into the studio.

On "Taxman", George Harrison had written that music as a very staccato piece, with hard chops on the downbeat of the verses and choruses. In order to get a different feel than what the Beatles had, I arranged the songs so the notes sustained throughout the tune, which kinda smoothed it out instead of the original staccato flavor. We were told a couple of months after the album came out that Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, gave George Harrison a copy of the album, and supposedly, George liked it more than the Beatles version! Quite a compliment!

JIM: "Ain't Life Grand," was your last album for Atco Records. You signed a deal with MCA Records and released what I thought was one the best BOA albums in my opinion, "X Rated." It's not very often I like every song on an album by any artist, but there are a few I do, and "X Rated," is one of them. "Strong Enough To Be Gentle," was a great single that landed in the Top 100 on the charts and that album in general was just a great rock and roll album that kicked-ass from the first song thru the last. You also worked with Richard Podolar (producer), and Bill Cooper (engineer), on that album. Their resume included working with Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night on the majority of all of their albums and singles. They also did some fine work with Iron Butterfly and Blues Image. Can you take us back to BOA's period during that time, working with Richard and Bill, your overall opinion of that album and recording it?


RICKIE: Well, the move from Atlantic Records was kinda like leaving a home and family that you'd known and lived with for years, and moving not only to a new house, but new state and way of life! MCA had a different concept of how to cut music and promote albums than Atlantic did, and in some ways that was good, and some ways not so hot.

Atlantic Records quickly realized that we didn't get tons of radio play, but we still sold a lot of product and had a giant fan base that continued to grow! This was a direct result of our live shows, and once they understood that, they came up with an epiphany! They would get our tour schedule ahead of time and then send a PR agent to advance our shows 2 weeks ahead of the concert. All of the local papers would get a chance to do interviews, the radio stations would get records to use for the ads the promoter would run, and the record stores would be COVERED in BOA posters, flyers about autograph sessions with the band, life-sized cutouts and free give-aways!
The result of this was that our current recordings will sell like crazy two weeks before and two weeks after our concert. As soon as the PR guy had done his job there, he moved on to the next concert on the list!
It worked. In the matter of a few years, we gained 3 gold albums and sold a lot of copies of all of our albums and 45s.
MCA didn't work that way. They had monster bands like The Who and Elton John and many others, who sold albums so quickly that they would go gold on pre-release sales BEFORE THE ALBUM WAS EVEN FINISHED!

Luckily, we were blessed with Richie Podolar. He producing and Bill engineering was an incredible team who had worked together on some of the best work of many 70s Rock bands. Richie had a talent for playing almost any instrument you could think of, and he played them all great! That helped him recognize a hook lick in a tune or a hit song in the making. He took classical violin lessons regularly, and recognized some of the songs I wrote music to as having some classical counter-point arrangements in part. One of those was my music to Strong Enough To Be Gentle.
Jim loved the music when he first heard it, and was writing lyrics almost instantly! The final arrangement was blend of 12 string picking in parts, single guitar melody in parts, two and three guitar harmonies in sections, and a double time change finale with massive heavy solos and classical guitar harmonies to climax the song's fade out! Richie loved it, and his production on it was impeccable! X-Rated was a masterpiece of Rock in my opinion, and we owe a lot of that to the influence and skills of Richie and Bill.

The cover was shot on the Universal Studio's backlot with a Playmate centerfold from that year named Dana House! That album was "loaded for bear," and to this day, it'll hold its ground next to any of the many BOA albums we recorded in the last half century or so.

JIM: "Balls Of Fire," the follow up album, was a different vibe for the band. A somewhat softer sounding album with more ballads than any of BOA's previous releases. The highlights for me on this album were the remakes of Bob Seger's, "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," and Jerry Lee Lewis', "Great Balls Of Fire." You also left the band after this album. What prompted you to leave at that time?

RICKIE: Our style of songwriting fluctuates constantly, being influenced by events in our lives, in our world and in our hearts. This particular time frame just happened to be one of a bit mellower mode of writing, although this album does have a couple of great rockin' grooves to my mind. This was time of flux for me, and there were several reasons for my exit from Black Oak Arkansas that I won't get into here because I still have friends whom I dislike to speak ill of, but one reason that I WILL mention was the fact that we were on the road almost constantly in those days and my family life was suffering from the neglect. I had a beautiful lady who was my wife, and she and I had a son who was born up in that part of Arkansas. I one day realized that I seldom got to spend the time with her that I should have, and my son was 2 years old and I had only got to see him two weeks out of his whole life. I needed some time off to get to know my own family again, and I was told that was not possible.
This was not the main reason of my leaving the band, but it's the only reason that I'll talk about at this point, and right or wrong, it meant a lot to me.