HATS OFF TO DONNIE 38 SPECIAL

HATS OFF TO DONNIE 38 SPECIAL

by Billy Altman

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“All right, guys, let’s have the truth,” your intrepid reporter says to Don Barnes and Jeff Carlisi, co-lead guitarists and chief songwriters of 38 Special, as the dishes are cleared from our table at the fashionable midtown Manhattan restaurant where ace A&M publicist Audrey Strahl has brought us for an evening of good Indian food and equally good rock ’n’ roll conversation. The topic under discussion at the moment is the video for “Like No Other Night,” the first single off the band’s fine new album, Strength In Numbers—specifically, the fact that the performance clip features the first recorded onstage baring of the top of co-lead singer Donnie Van Zant’s head. “You had to have the hat surgically removed, didn’t you?” I ask, jokingly.

At first Barnes laughs, noting that “we never realized how many people thought Donnie was bald,” but, as he goes on to explain, the subject is a fairly serious one. The hat, it turns out, was given to Donnie by brother Ronnie Van Zant many years ago, and ever since the untimely death of the man who was not only Lynyrd Skynyrd’s guiding force but also the early day mentor of his younger brother’s band, “it became something of a tradition for Donnie to wear it onstage.” And its departure from the top of Van Zant’s head is a rather significant symbol of the evolution that’s taken place in 38 Special’s music over the past few years. “After our last album,” says Barnes, “we took some time off because we wanted to think about what we’d been doing and where we were headed as a band. We’d pushed so hard and toured so incessantly during our first 10 years together that we were drained, and we needed to fill the well again, so to speak. And we came out of that period of reassessment feeling more and more secure about our recent achievements, and motivated to keep moving forward. It’s all gone together,” Barnes notes. “We look a bit different, and we feel a bit different. We don’t consider. ourselves a ‘Southern’ band anymore. What we are now is a ro.ck ’n’ roll band that just happens to come from the South.”

And a rather successful one, too, I might add. By late summer, Strength In Numbers had already gone gold and seemed well on its way to becoming the group’s fourth straight platinum album, joining Wild-Eyed Southern Boys, Special Forces, and TourDe Force in the millionor-better-sold category. As with their last few records, 38 Special’s latest includes more than its fair share of single possibilities that could easily find their way into the Top 10, from the pop-perfect hard rocking “Somebody Like You” to the tough but wistful “Has There Ever Been a Good Goodbye to the eminently hummable ‘‘Against The Night.” A far cry from the guitar army boogie burgers thesix-man band served up in their earliest days.

‘‘I suppose it was after our third album that we first started to change noticeably as a group,” recalls Barnes. “We’d been going along with the trend of the other Southern bands, but we realized that we just couldn’t keep singing about alligators and swamps and whiskey and those kinds of things forever if we wanted to keep going. People were lumping all the Southern groups together, and we knew we needed to show everyone that we had more in us than just three-chord, twinguitar-lead boogies. We started to understand that we’d been cutting ourselves a bit short, because even though we obviously were influenced a great deal by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and by the Allman Brothers, we always had been big Beatles fans, and Who fans, and Stones fans. We were into a lot of different kinds of music, and we figured it was time to start exploring those other sides, to stretch out.”

1981’s Wild-Eyed Southern Boys, the band’s fourth album, contained the first rumblings of the kind of rough-edged melodic rock that Barnes has, at this point, turned into an almost trademarked 38 Special sound. “After the airplane accident which killed Ronnie, I began to think hard about the things he stood for. He was a guy from the wrong side of the tracks, and though no one else ever believed in what he was doing, he made the world pay attention to him, and that kind of underdog spirit really wore off on me. I mean, when I was young and had no money, Ronnie signed for my amplifier; he always encouraged me in my music. He saw something in me. Donnie told me years later that he’d told him, ‘Stick with this guy, Donnie, he got vision.’ Well, I wanted to show that his faith in me wasn’t unwarranted, and I realized that maybe I was being a little too comfortable in my approach to writing songs, that maybe it was time I tried to be strong and take some risks.”

The “risks” involved working up, along with guitar sidekick Carlisi, songs whose style was in sharp contrast to the group’s early sound. But, as compositions like “Fantasy Girl” and “Caught Up In You” began to draw attention as single releases, Barnes’s confidence began to grow and 38 Special’s new music—“aggressive down in the tracks, but with a good melody on top” is how Carlisi describes it—became stronger and more assured. “It was a real learning experience for us to realize that this kind of music could work for us,” Barnes explains. “You’re always a little insecure when you write songs, because you never know how people will accept them. But the more success you achieve, the more you learn to trust your instincts, because now you know you’ve been right before. So when you come up with a little chorus or a piece of a song that you think is right, you don’t tamper with it or change it— you build on it. That’s the difference, I guess.”

Work for them it certainly has, as evidenced by the fact that the increased popularity which the band has been enjoying over the past few years has pretty much paralleled Barnes’s emergence as a songwriter and singer. But, he’s quick to point out, ‘‘we still carry with us that competitive fire that we’ve always had, that hard edge that goes back to our roots.” It’s suggested that Strength In Numbers, as an album, sounds more unified than either of the group’s last two LPs, and both Barnes and Carlisi give credit to producer Keith Olsen (known for past work with bands like Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner and Heart) for his assistance on that front. ‘‘We’d always put all kinds of little guitar riffs and flourishes on the tracks and then try and figure out what to do with them when it was time to mix,” says Carlisi, ‘‘but we’d usually end up cramming everything in, and that often would result in all these different sounds fighting each other to be heard.” ‘‘Keith’s philosophy is ‘less is more,’” adds Barnes, ‘‘and he was able to show us how to condense things without losing any of the underlying power. He really helped us put the dynamics back in our music.”

Not that the album doesn’t touch quite a few bases; it’s easily the most varied album the band has ever done. ‘‘On the whole, I think it’s a happier record, not as dark as Tour De Force,” says Barnes. ‘‘We try and take the listener down different avenues on this album—the melodic songs, and a song like ‘One In A Million,’ which is a nod to R&B, and ‘Hearts On Fire,’ which shows that the guitar stuff is still there if we want to do it—and then wind up with ‘Never Give An Inch,’ which is a statement, I guess, that says ‘see what you can do with determination and perseverance if you stand up for yourself.”

‘‘It’s funny,” says Carlisi. ‘‘I think the biggest change we’ve been conscious of hasn’t been in our music—it’s been in our audience. It used to be, because we were primarily a boogie band with hot guitarists, we’d get 80 percent guys at our shows. Nowadays, though, we see almost as many females as males at our shows. People asked us, when we started getting into the pop charts, if we were afraid we might alienate our older fans. Well, that’s ridiculous. I mean, music is music, and a good song is a good song, and we give our audiences credit for simply appreciating good music.” Which is what 38 Special’s been making for some time now, and which is what has made them one of the nicer rock ’n’ roll success stories of the ’80s. 0