Back Stage Pass with Steve Ryan
Steve Ryan is a former Radio DJ and Music Director, as well as a Promotion Manager for major record labels and spent 18 years in Media Management. Join Steve as he interviews some of your favorite artists. For questions, comments or to book an interview, email, steveryan.songoftheday@gmail.com
Back Stage Pass with Steve Ryan
Ep. #87 Lacy J Dalton
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Back Stage Pass with Steve Ryan Ep. #87 Lacy J Dalton. Talking about The Outlaws, faith and the songs, Takin it Easy, 16th Avenue, The Heart, Everybody Makes Mistakes, Dream Baby, Crazy Blue Eyes and more. #lacyjdalton
It's Backstage Fats with Steve Ryan. And here's your host.
SPEAKER_02Steve Ryan.
SPEAKER_04I'm so excited to see you.
SPEAKER_02I'm excited to see you too. And Steve, do you want to be Steve or Steven? You can call me whatever you want. Your country music royalty. Oh, thank you. What is your how do you do good? You're a Southern boy, because I northern boys don't go on like that.
SPEAKER_04Over the weekend, I was in Salt Lake City and I went and saw the All 80s music festival all day long on Sunday. And so I saw all the 80s bands. So it was it's just been a weekend. It was my birthday weekend, so I just I filled it up.
SPEAKER_02Happy birthday to you belated. Happy birthday to you belated. Happy birthday, dear Stephen. Make it last a month. Ride this thing, ride this thing all the way home.
SPEAKER_04Lacey J. Dalton just saying happy birthday to me. I I it doesn't get any better than that. Thank you so much for that.
SPEAKER_02Well, happy birthday. I'm probably the last to uh to wish you that since your birthday was when was it? What day?
SPEAKER_04It was Sunday.
SPEAKER_02Sunday. Your Sunday's child is full of grace.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. Hey, um, can you believe 45 years? Take it easy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that that song was uh a really quite a very big hit. It sold and sold and lasted a long, long time, but it was 45 years ago that it came out. Wow, did I can you believe that? I you know I sing Willie and Ray uh Charles's song, Seven Spanish Angels. Do you know how old that song is? No, it blew my mind. It's 40 years old. Wow, and 16th Avenue was 40 years old about three or four years ago.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I love that song.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it looks so uneventful, so quiet and discreet. But a lot of lives were changed down on that. Little one-way street, as they walk away from everything just to see a dream come true. So God bless the boys who make the noise on 16th Avenue.
SPEAKER_02Time flies when you're having a good time.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Are you still having a good time doing it? I'm still having a good time doing it. I've had some very hard changes this year. Uh, and at the end of last year, I lost to the most wonderful manager I have ever had. Um, she uh her name is Leslie Adams, and she was the most service-before-self person I have ever known in my life, and we had the best time together. It's uh it really changes you, and it changes how you feel about how precious the time we have together is.
SPEAKER_04100%. 100%. Speaking of taking it easy, tell me if this is true. I read that you wrote that on a fishing boat.
SPEAKER_02Well, it wasn't my idea. Normally the songs, normally the ones, the hits that I've written are my idea and my title, but this one wasn't. I was out at a fishing boat with my friend Mark Sherrill, who was the nephew of my producer Billy Sherrill. And uh Billy put us together because he thought we would get along, and we really got along. We wrote a bunch of millionaire play songs together. But he was sitting in this, all Mark Sherrill ever wanted to be or do was to have uh a boat rental place on on the probably on the ocean, probably in Florida. But he would have been happy with the Lake Henderson there. He would have been right in Nashville. He would have been just as content as he could be. So we were out, he had a boat, and uh his dream was to have this bait shop and boat rental. And we're out in the middle of the uh Lake Henderson, he's sipping on a beer and he goes, What do you think about this? I want to go where the warm winds blow me. And I said, Oh, that's great. And because I knew it was his dream. Yeah, and I said, Let's write your dream. And so we wrote, we wrote on it a whole bunch, and then we were excited. So we took it into the office to the great Billy Cheryl, who was the producer, as you know, of George Jones and Tammy Wynette and Ray Charles almost to the end of his life, and Charlie Rich and and the outlaws, too. He also did David Allan Coe, and I mean, I got to play David Allen Coe's wife in a movie, and believe me, that was outlaw. I was I was fortunate though to be signed as an outlaw artist. Uh I was raised in a country music family, Stephen. And um, my mom and dad, everybody played an instrument, and I used to sit under the big oak table up against the you know the center pillar and just listen to them. And I never picked up a guitar until I was 17 years old.
SPEAKER_04Wow.
SPEAKER_02And when I did, you know, when I did, it was horrible because I strayed from the flock.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I was listening to all kinds of stuff, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Janice Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane, the Jefferson uh Starship, and it did change me. All I knew growing up was country music and Pericoma because I was in northeastern Pennsylvania. But because I was signed as an outlaw artist, I got to do a lot of things that a lot of us girls didn't get to do. And one of the things that I liked the best, because what brought me back to country music and the music in country that I still love is the music of Wayland and Willie and the boys. Yeah. And the Highwaymen. That's the music that really had my heart. And uh so when I came back, uh, because I had been assigned as an outlaw artist, I got to do that very unusual thing that only a few of us women got to do, which was open for those outlaws for long periods of time. And uh I talk about this in my show because it was uh it was quite a wonderful experience. And my favorite one of those um of those tours, those outlaw tours, was a tour of Europe. And I got to be there with the original outlaw, Bobby Bear.
SPEAKER_04I love Bobby Bear.
SPEAKER_02Everybody loves Bobby Bear. I love Bobby Bear. And he was one of the first acts I ever toured with, and he took such good care of me. He was he's such a wonderful man. My mother loves Bobby Bear. She introduced me to him to his music. Well, he he um he is a great songwriter, and he knows a really good song when he hears it. And he was really, I think, one of the original outlaws. And then we had Hoyt Axton on the tour of Europe, and we would have all starved to death if Hoyt hadn't been there, because Hoyt knew where all the good places to eat, you know, in Europe at that time, in England especially, the food was just dreadful. And but Hoyt, you know, he was a foodie, so he knew where the good places to eat were, and we would we would be following behind him, and it would be it was Bobby Bear, and it was, you know, the incredible legendary uh man in black, uh Johnny Cash. Yeah, and it was Chris Christofferson and me, and there we were like a bunch of little ducklings following to to get a get something that tasted like the food we were used to. And of course, we liked we love to taste the different foods too, all over Europe. But we had we played big stadiums all over the place, and um I always tell in my in my shows of a story about going into this little smoky underground uh place in I think it was in Berlin, and a lot of this uh clubs in Europe are underground and they're small, maybe two, three hundred people at the most, maybe only a hundred. And we would be doing these big stadium shows, and then we would all go to these little clubs, and everybody would just sit around and play. And I heard a song uh in my in that club that literally changed my life. Christofferson's songs have changed my life twice. He is my very favorite singer-songwriter, always will be. He and Guy Clark are just at the very top. And I mean, I've I have friends who are fabulous songwriters. I mean, people who have written big hits for me. And I still I always gravitate to Chris Christofferson and Guy Clark, and writers who write so close to the bone, you can you can scrape about the your bones in your body with them. And I heard a song called The Heart and recorded it, and it became a very lovely, long-lasting hit. And I play it in every I think I would not. The hook line of that song is called The Heart is All That Matters in the end.
SPEAKER_01When they dealt me down in the reading in a way I'd not deserve, I felt better when I took it like a man. Take it off and get your hardest of button matters in the end. The hardest of all button matters in the end.
SPEAKER_02The heart is all that matters in the end. And I digressed, which I do now. You know, I want you to know that I live in a proud, dementia-friendly county. Story county in Virginia City, where I live. We are we proudly announced on the internet that we are dementia-friendly county. So we've been in the right place. But you wanted to hear the rest of the story about taking it easy. And so let me tell you the rest of the story. We were sitting in this rowboat and we got a whole bunch of it uh written, and we were so excited. We rode into shore, jumped in his Jeep, and went over to the studio where Billy Cheryl was, the great producer that he was the producer in Nashville at that time. He was the biggest thing in show business. And he uh I used to joke with him. I used to say, when I come to play a song for you, I start up the first step to the to your office and goes boom boom. I stick the second step, boom, boom, the third step, boom, boom. I said, by the time I get to the top of the stairs to your office door, it's like boom, oh, boom, boom. But he uh he was a very gentleman and he fell in love with taking it easy and he finished it with us. So the three of us wrote it, and then it went on to be a quite it was a number two song, yeah, and just lasted and lasted and lasted and sold and sold and sold. And people still love it, and I still do it.
SPEAKER_01I wanna go along and blow me. I just wanna leave my mind. I wanna run through the stand. It doesn't make it it easy, but take it it easy with you.
SPEAKER_02So that's kind of all the way around the bush scene, and if that'll give you an idea of what it was like for me in country music.
SPEAKER_04Did you know that it was gonna be so big? Did you feel it or were you surprised?
SPEAKER_02No, is I was I I never really uh I didn't have that thing where I wanted to be a star. I knew I had to get a record deal, and in my 30s, If I didn't get a record deal, I wouldn't be able to afford to do music. I do music, I do music because I feel like there's a lot of healing in music. You can heal people's hearts, you can heal people's souls, and you can heal the rift in our country between the right and the left by singing songs about unity. And I do believe songs come through us, not necessarily from us. I believe there's a higher power, and I believe that's where songs come from. And so that's what's important to me, and that's what's important for me to sing about. And I have a couple of, I'm so proud um to tell you that uh I played on the Malpass Brothers uh RFD TV show not long ago, and I played a song called The Devil by a different name. And they picked it up. Uh, they want to have it for five years with a two-year option to go all over the world on their television show. And it is the message of that song. It goes that one of the verses says, Call me left, boys, call me right. We are split right down the middle in this fight. Divided we fall. That rule doesn't change. It's just the devil by a different name, boys. The devil by a different name. A lot of us are Christians. And if we're gonna call ourselves a Christian, we need to remember that what that message is is Christ's message was love God with all your heart, mind, and spirit, your higher power, whatever you call that. Love yourself, which is the hard part. Love your neighbors as yourself. That he said is the whole of the law, and all the other laws of life are based upon it, and that he said is what I came to teach. Anything else is just anything else. All the laws of life are based on that, and we need to remember that, especially now when we're so divided. We need to find ways. I'm writing a song, I have a song called We Got That to Build Bridges, not walls. We need to learn how to listen to one another again. We don't have to hate, we don't have to do that. We may hate something that someone else believes, but that doesn't mean we have to hate the person. The person has a reason for believing that. So we need to respect that because it comes from somewhere. A lot of I think a lot of things are just habit and family taught from the little kids stuff, you know, especially racial prejudice, which I have no patience with. I have no patience with that at all because we are all made in creator's image. And um if you are gonna are you really gonna tell Creator, the group who created the stars and the moon and the galaxies and the sun and everything, you're gonna tell that creator that he made a mistake because you are superior because your skin is a different color. No, that is wrong, and we need especially to get rid of that stuff. That's just wrong. Live and let live. Love your neighbor as yourself.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thank you for that.
SPEAKER_02Well, I you know, I got on my soapbox and I uh I'll stop.
SPEAKER_04No, it's okay. I'm interested in in how you think. I mean, this this podcast is about songs, and so I want to talk to you about songs, but you've got so many, I'm never gonna get through them all. But uh we all have to call again. Yeah, I would love that if you want to. Absolutely. You know, we were talking about Take It Easy on that on that same album, Everybody Makes Mistakes was a huge hit. I love that song.
SPEAKER_02Do you know? I really love that song. I started writing that song. Uh, it's actually gonna be 45 years old, and uh well, it's probably gonna be about 47 years old. Uh, but I went uh I was up in a cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains. My friend owns the property that used to be the uh uh summer home of the mayor of San Francisco in the late 1800s. It's a big, beautiful property with big redwood trees, and I got to live there uh in the pool. There was a cabana house by the this pool that is spring-fed with pure water all the time running through it and beautiful oleander trees all summer long around it. And we closed in the front of this little cabana and put in little diamond pane windows and shake all over the front of it. It had vines all over it. I've been so fortunate to live in such beautiful places. I'm pretty down home. The roof leaked. My father-in-law came to visit me one time and I had pans all over the floor. And I remember climbing up there in the wintertime and putting plastic down with lathing, you know, you know, big sheets of plastic. But it was wonderful to live there. And I, you know, my my new song is called Common Ground. And it talks again about division. And I always say after I sing that song, you know, I think my next song should be called Common Sense. And then I say, and then I apologize because I say, well, actually, you know, some people who know me well know that that is probably not one of my strong suits, at least not in the romantic department. And that is how I introduce everybody makes mistakes. Yeah, that song I started up in this cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it was after one of my should we say, less than stellar love affairs. And um, and I started writing that song. I took it back. I didn't think Billy would let me record it because it wasn't really country. It's country enough, but it was at that time there that kind of a song was very unusual, and it turned out to be, I believe I was told by uh this jockey out in Pennsylvania last year, the year before. He said, Well, you know that's the song, that song has more right radio airplay than any other song you've ever done in the United States. I said, I said, I don't believe it. Really? He said it's right here in BMI, and I said, he's he said, I'm looking right at it. And I said, I had no idea. I should probably put it back in the show. Maybe so. Maybe I should put it back in the show.
SPEAKER_01For the king of arms, the old taste. It always takes we're everybody makes mistakes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you know, um, and another one of my favorite songs that you do, you covered a Roy Orbison song, Dream Baby. It was the title of one of your albums. Man, I love your version of that song.
SPEAKER_02We had so much fun cutting that. I wanted to cut it with Tanya Tucker. Yeah. It would have been so much fun, but she was they had her doing other stuff and she couldn't do it at the time, but we both wanted to do it. And I think if we had both done it, it would have been the the really the cat's meow. I love Tanya, and I I I've always just loved her, loved her music. She's an incredible performer.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh we were on the same uh label for a while. My last label with uh the great Jimmy Bowen.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, it was still a big hit.
SPEAKER_02It was about four labels with him. What's that? I said it was still a big hit. It was a big hit, and and you know, and really I should put it back in the show.
SPEAKER_04Oh man, I love it so much.
SPEAKER_02You know, I just heard it the other day, and I thought, you know, I really do like that song. I remember um in when in my youth hearing a song called Red Ragged Rose, they and they were from the state of Washington, and they did that song. And I always loved to go and see him because I loved that song. So when I started uh looking for people songs to do that were that had already been done, but I liked them, so I did them myself. I really like Dream Baby, just just as you do, just as you do. I don't know how old that one is, I don't know when that one's birthday is.
SPEAKER_04Well, uh, I wrote down in my notes that you recorded it in 1983. Oh, well, however many years that's been, you're I'm sure that's right. A couple. Um can we talk about your self-titled LP a little bit? You did a song on there called Crazy Blue Eyes.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_04I love that song. Go ahead. It was magic, Steven.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I wrote that song with my longest friend, Mary McFadden, and we have been friends since we were seven years old. Seven years old. She was at that same cabin I was talking about a little earlier. She was recovering from a divorce. And I was I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee early in the morning, and I just started playing this song. And why do I fall for those weird blue eyes? Why did I fall for, you know, it's just you know, because because I'd had another one of my fabulous love affairs and that hadn't quite worked out to be stellar. And um and so I and then I realized, you know, I was doing this, I was choosing men who were not capable of sustaining a relationship, probably because I wasn't, you know, probably because you know, I wasn't ready to settle down and do all that stuff. I wanted to understand a lot of uh things about the world. And so I woke up, I took a broom handle or a mop or something. She was up in the loft in the next room, and I pounded on the bottom of the her bed, and I said, Mary, get down here. Mary, get down here. Uh, I want to write this song with you. I said, I'm sure because you're suffering, she was recovering from a divorce, so surely she was in the right place to write this song. And we wrote the song in about 15 minutes. Wow, and it was magic because it was a song that we wrote together, and we'd been kids, we're still best friends after all these years. I don't even want to tell you how many years it's been. And um, we still can write a song over the phone, and we have done that many times. Um, but that one we wrote together, and it turned out that's the song that got me my record deal that started Lacey J. Dalton back in 1979.
SPEAKER_01Mom, I always love losers. Mom, I never will change. Have driven me almost insane.
SPEAKER_04You know, I think I was listening to it last night, and I think that the Juds took a nod from Lacey J. Dalton because I was listening to it and I thought, this could this could have been a Juds song.
SPEAKER_02Joe, I wish it were. I'd love to hear Wynona sing it. She could probably sing it too. She she too has had her adventures. Crazy Blue Eyes. Um, it it actually was the very beginning for me, and a magical song, and a song. I really do like the song. I really like it, and it was so unusual for Nashville. You didn't hear that. You heard Stand by Your Man. Yeah, you didn't hear uh a woman saying, you know, why do I fall for those crazy blue eyes, those mavericks who won't settle down? But I never could stand the touch of a man who'd brand me to keep me around. You have to be careful in love. I've been on both sides of it, and you have to be careful about holding on too tight or it'll slip away.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that's uh, you know, that that is the thing I think the most important thing about love is don't you can't squeeze the puppy too tight. You can't squeeze it too tight. You have to it's like when you're riding a good horse. Most horses uh relax more and are easier to ride if you sit deep in the saddle and have a looser rein. I've ridden some pretty hot horses, and I had one myself, and they when I bought him, they had this horrible Spanish bit with a thing over the top and a bar. Eventually I put him in a side pole, which is a halter with a rope around the nose, and I just used that, and that horse was so much more relaxed with that side pole than he ever was with that awful headpiece on him. And I think that's the same with human beings. Yeah, I think I think that that if there's ever a message I have uh to give people, that's one of the messages that I would like to give, having made the mistake of holding on too tight. You know, I think the whole message that I would give for this particular thing, and I've only got a minute to do it, yeah, is uh just relax, let go, trust God, trust your higher power. If this thing's gonna work, it's gonna work and feel like you already have it. Feel like what you want, you already have. Yeah, because it's Christ taught that. Christ, that is a that is from Christ. If you say there's something that you want, believe that you already have it, yeah, and it will be given to you.
SPEAKER_04Wow, Lacey, thank you so much. I so enjoy talking to you. I only got through about a quarter of my notes. I really hope we can we can do a follow-up sometime so I can go through the rest because you've got so many songs that I'd love and I would love to hear your stories.
SPEAKER_02Well, please uh call anytime. You just call Scott and he'll set it up, and I'm happy. Yes, you can tell. I have no trouble talking.
SPEAKER_04I love that. I love that. You look great, you sound great. You've got some pretty new music out that I want to talk about too. We didn't just didn't get to it, but I know you got to go, so I'm gonna let you go and I'll get with Scott and we'll do this again in a little while.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Stephen. It's been a joy to be on your show and easy to talk to you. And thank you for your interest and God bless you. Of course, and all your people. All your people.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thank you so much, Lacy. Have a great night, okay?
SPEAKER_02Audios for now.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Hae-bye.
SPEAKER_03For questions or comments, email Steve at Steve Ryan.song of the day at gmail dot com.