10 Questions with ... Charlie Monk

BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:

It's hard to clearly define Charlie Monk's career, because he's had so many, all of them successful. He's a radio guy at his very core, having started by sweeping floors at WGEA/Geneva, AL in 1956. Soon, he was hosting his own show on the station. Monk came to Nashville in 1968 for a radio gig, and soon took over Music City, branching into publishing, and discovering songwriters and artists (Randy Travis and Kenny Chesney are two of his finds). Monk teamed with industry friends and founded Country Radio Seminar (CRS), which boasted 60 attendees at its 1969 debut event. CRS has grown into one of the elite industry gatherings on all of the music business and will celebrate its 50th anniversary in February of 2019. Monk has kept the daily radio bug alive and well, too, as a longtime host on SiriusXM's "Prime Country" channel. All Access sat down with Monk at his headquarters on Nashville's famous Music Row, to talk about his many experiences in the music business, CRS, Monk Family Music, and his role as "Mayor of Music Row."

1. Charlie, there's so much to cover with you, because you've basically done all of the things in the music biz. That's why you're called "The Mayor Of Music Row." So, as "The Mayor," share with us your many responsibilities, and take us through a typical day in the life of Charlie Monk.

I'm old enough to retire, but I don't want to retire, because I'm doing what I want to do. So, what am I gonna do, retire and do something I don't wanna do? I think being a senior citizen and kind of the grandpa of the town, I'm probably the elder of the group that continues to be active on Music Row. The reason I got that title is because of Jerry Wood, who wrote a story for a Country music magazine - this was 25 years ago - but, it was talking about the fact that I'd been at all the Fan Fairs, and I knew everybody, so I should be the "Mayor Of Music Row." Of course, a lot of people were reading that magazine at the time, so every now and then, I'd bump into "Hey, Mayor, how ya doing?" So, when I got back into radio, I thought it was a nice little cliché. I taught at a couple universities - Trevecca, Middle Tennessee State University - so, I have an academic understanding of the music business, and I've spent so much time involved with radio, with CRS, and the fact that I've now been doing radio for over fifty years; I started in 1956. That's a long time ago. I'm the best Charlie Monk in town.

2. Let's talk radio; on May 5th, you'll be honored with a Tennessee Radio Hall Of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted into the Hall. What does this honor mean to you, and why is it so fulfilling?

Because, I came to Nashville to be in radio. I feel like these are the guys I've also kind of grown up with, because the membership has to vote on that. So, it's about the same thing as the Music Row thing; I've seen all the guys that are voting grow up in Chattanooga, Memphis, Knoxville, and Nashville. Of course, I knew all the radio guys in Nashville. It's a real honor, because they know me on a personal level, too, so it's not just the fact that I've spent a lot of time in radio. I came here in 1968 in radio to program the only full-time Country station. People talk about WSM, but they didn't play Country music in the daytime. They only played it overnights. It was really a variety station for all those years; it was a powerhouse radio station, politically and economically in the community. It was so powerful all over the Country. Then, there was a station out in the countryside - WENO - but, it was low-strength. Jim Reeves' widow, Mary Reeves, hired me. I had always wanted to come to Nashville. I thought I had talent; I had wit, charm, and good looks - everything except talent. If God had given me talent, I would've been a superstar. I wanted to be a songwriter. I wanted to be everything, but I found out I was better at patting other people on the booty than patting myself. But, I'm pretty good at patting myself. With the radio thing, getting that honor from the guys who know me is an extreme honor. If it were some distant thing that I just put a resume down and they just voted on the resume, they know me. They know my face.

3. Your radio roots go way back. Tell us about your first radio job and how it developed into such a long career.

It was in my little hometown of Geneva, Alabama. I actually was running Gospel tapes on Sunday morning, segueing into records, and they'd let me talk a whole lot. It was a hometown, local station. 1956 was the year for Rock 'n' Roll to sneak in, so I got a chance. They thought, "He's young and cool. He'll interest the youth in our community," so they let me play some records from Frank Sinatra to Fats Domino, we played all kinds of music. Of course, I was not an adult; I was a high school student doing a phone-in, 'will you please play' kinda thing. I was the big man on campus, because I was the only man on campus at the radio station. It was a big thrill. The guy who hired me was really my mentor in life, too. His name was Jimmy Helms, and he just helped me in so many ways. He told me later on, when I'd come home to visit years later, "I recognized that you had something." I was very aggressive about it; I wanted to be the big daddy. Being a big daddy in a 4,500 town, you could control the world with it.

4. Now talk about your show on SiriusXM. It feels like you get to be 100% yourself. True?

They really hired me as a consultant, because they were coming to town, and they needed connections to the music business. And, again, I was the best connection they might have. They said later, "Didn't you used to do radio?" and I said, "Yeah a long time ago," and they asked me to do a show. I asked how much it paid. So, technically that's how. They told me to just tell the stories. When you've been around that long, I knew Willie and Waylon - I knew all these people, at least, in some area. So, they stopped me later on and said, "Are all those stories you tell about all these people true?" I said, "They're all dead. Who's gonna refute it?" I get complaints occasionally, but my response to them is that if I don't shut up, I don't get paid. So, I'm not gonna shut up. I had worked in almost every area of the music business, so anybody's career, I was there somewhere in their career as a songwriter or as a musician. Vince Gill came to speak at my son's class one time, he was telling people he had met me 26 years before. Well, I don't remember that, but I must have hired him either as a guitar player or as a backup singer, because that's what I did - I produced demos of songs. Vince saying that just stunned me. A lot of situations that I was involved with, I didn't know they would be superstars, or I would've been kinder to them.

5. How do you prep your show, if at all?

I spend about an hour and a half each day, and that's to research my stories: what year was that, what songs, who wrote that song for the artist, or if I simply have a "Hey, we got drunk one night" story. I think the fans like to know that kind of stuff; that's why they read fan magazines or read the Internet. I'm really a live Internet situation; you don't have to Google, you just have to listen to me. But, the prep work, I got a stack of information and books. I love reading bios; I've read almost everybody's in the Country music business, and anyone [of them] that has written a book, I've read that, too. You tell a story long enough, after a while, it gets a little strange. I've been around people that I was in a situation with, and the only thing I remember about the story is that I was there, because I don't remember a thing, and I can tell you that.

6. Why do you think the SiriusXM model works so well? You've been on the channel for many years now, and it's grown tremendously since you started.

I think the fact that we don't care what channel you listen to. When I first got into radio, then later when I got into competitive radio, we were always concerned about tune out. You didn't do anything to insight them to turn away or go to another station. We encourage it. If I'm on the radio, I encourage you to go to a Prime Country channel or a Talk channel, because that's what you pay for; you pay for that opportunity to listen to whatever you want to. It was stunning to start with, because I'd say, "You can badmouth me if you don't like what I'm doing. All you gotta do is just zip, you're gone. We've got lot of kinds of music you'd want." Any genre and eras, we got everything. When it comes to Talk or Sports, we've got golf. I remember when I was young in radio, we'd have baseball, and, damn, that was the [most boring] thing on radio, then it got better on television. Could you imagine someone listening to the golf match? I think it's the opportunities that are available; I don't think it's too pricey; and you can listen from Florida to Maine without any interruption. If you're listening to a football game, you can listen from Nashville to LA if you can drive that fast and never lose it. I think those are the issues that keeps people. The turn is pretty good, and of course, it's in every rental car. And, people get introduced to it.

7. You've had your own publishing company - Monk Family Music - and, it's safe to say that's gone well; you signed Randy Travis and Kenny Chesney to songwriting deals. Whenever someone signs a deal, they are thought to have potential. What did you see in those two guys? And, what does a publisher need to see from a young talent to make a commitment?

Well, I'll start with Randy, because he's the superstar who, I think, changed the music and radio businesses a great deal. I was working at CBS, but all of a sudden, I had signed two of the biggest writers in town - Jerry Foster and Bill Rice, who were traditional songwriters. They had songs on the charts consistently, but all of a sudden, you've got Kenny Rogers doing smoother, thicker stuff. And, quite frankly, nobody was interested in the traditional songs. While I was there, I was at a golf tournament, and Gary Morris invited me to come over to hear [Randy] sing, and to make a long story short, he sang two songs, and I just thought he was so interpretive in what he sang. And, of course, he wrote them. He wrote "Reasons I Cheat," which is a 40-year-old lyric, but he was 18. But, think about the emotionalism he puts in those things, but I couldn't sign him at CBS songs, because no one's gonna record these three-chord hillbilly songs. So, shortly thereafter, I opened my own company, and I continued to see him, and I was working with a guy who was a very successful songwriter, Keith Stegall. I managed his career. Keith's father was steel guitar player with Johnny Horton, so he was reared in that element, that traditional Country music, but he was very fascinated with Randy, too. There was just something interesting about Randy. I always tell everybody that anybody I've ever been involved with, I've never sought them out, they somehow found me. Gary Morris was the guy who did that. Keith was quite fascinated with Randy. I've never signed artists, only songwriters, because if they were a writer and became a star, that had success. But, if they were just a singer and didn't have success, then I had nothing. It was always about the writing; everybody I've ever been involved with has been about the writing. In Randy's case, it only took me three and a half years to get him a record deal...everybody turned him down, including Warner Brothers, who later signed him. Randy was the type of singer and performer that if he had never become a star, he would've still been doing it in some Honky Tonk. He was not looking for stardom. It was an old joke when he started becoming a Pop icon and hitting the Pop charts, he asked the label to get his name off the Pop charts, because he didn't wanna go Pop. He was selling more records than the Pop stars. Randy was just unique because nobody was doing it. Then, later on, with Chesney - and, I look at [Randy and Kenny] the same way, because they were both hardworking people - I signed Kenny Chesney when I went to Acuff Rose. Troy Tomlinson worked for me, and Troy was very excited about him, but I got excited about one song called "The Tin Man."

8. Speaking of songwriting, you've done that, too, penning cuts by Eddy Arnold, Jerry Reed, Charley Pride, Keith Stegall, Louise Mandrell, Jimmy Dean, and Pat Boone. Did your songwriting help you become a better publisher, or is it the other way around?

I really feel honored. Pretty much, I've only written two things all by myself. I wrote a recitation that Jimmy Dean and Charlie Chase did; I wrote it for my wife for our 25th anniversary. And, I wrote a song about my sister called "A Sermon From Sister Louise," because she was a Pentecostal preacher. By virtue of being in publishing, I never contributed to someone else's idea. Anything that my name's attached to is my idea, and I had something structured or written before I got anyone else involved, and I've written with some of the biggest writers in town. They didn't need me, but they liked my idea. That's how it works, even more so today. Everybody that I wrote with wrote by [himself or herself]; they sure as hell didn't need me. Today, it's all a collaborative effort; it's not uncommon to see three or four writers on one song. But, all the guys I wrote with, they wrote [$1 million] sellers on their own. So, I was even more honored to have had a chance to have written with the masters. I gave away a lot of ideas, not that that's bad, but it was my job. I'd see a sign or a note, and I'd say, "Hey, here's an idea," and they might structure it entirely different, or it might be a word from a TV show I've seen. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. I don't know how to play any instruments. As a radio guy, I was always reading who the writers were. I knew who wrote every song on the radio station. I was a student of the writers, and that included all genres. The significance of real Country music when I came along was the lyrics, not the melody. The melody is important if you can bring that, but you can have a great melody and bad lyrics and it ain't gonna work. A major portion of today's Country music is production and how many people were involved. Now, you gotta have ten guys writing and ten guys playing.

9. Country music is always evolving; the format is a wide-open range of sounds from all influences, and they seem to all be working. As somebody with a long, inside-out history of songwriting and talent discovery, what's your take on Country music right now? Are you happy with its direction? Optimistic? Or, is it way off the reservation, as some seem to think?

Well, we actually thought that when Eddy Arnold did a record with Hugo Winterhalter's Orchestra. The good ole days are tomorrow; I don't wanna live in yesterday. But, again, back to the structure of the song, it might take somebody six months to write a song. Now, people get together for two hours and they think they've written "White Christmas." In many cases, they got the demo done in the amount of time they had written a song. So, I think that there's more to the construction and the technology. I stole an idea from a guy named Bill Hall, who was the first guy to have writers come in and write every day and write songs. Nobody else did that. There was no place for writers to write in the 60s at publishing companies. Most of them came by to play the song, and then they went back home. When I opened CBS Songs, I signed Jerry Foster and Bill Rice, so I had to have them a room to write in. Every writer I signed after that, I requested they come in every day. I never signed collaborators, only songwriters. If they collaborated, that was okay, but they had to prove to me that they could write songs by themselves. So, I don't think that's true today; I think it's a lot about connections and associations. Every club now that people are going to see is a full band, because they have to construct the record as the record is, which is really tough to do. You never see those artists singing acoustic things themselves. They have a band behind them if they're gonna perform somewhere. That wasn't the case early on; Willie could sing by himself, Cash could sing by himself, Kristofferson could sing by himself. They went on the road and took a band, but they didn't need a band everywhere they went. I'm hearing lyric form now. I think that Pop music eased itself into the traditional thing and pretty much wiped it out. There's nobody out there that sounds like Randy Travis or George Jones or Merle. I'm trying to find those songs they did in the new way. I'm hearing a little bit of lyric and storyline coming in - "The House That Built Me," "I Drive Your Truck," "Humble And Kind" - sometimes it's so music-oriented and so loud that sometimes you can't hear the lyric. I think they toned that down a little bit. I go to shows now, and you would think that at my age, I would probably want it louder so I can hear it, but I have to get away. I never buy the front seat. I'm a Sinatra freak; I wonder how those guys went from playing a nightclub to playing amphitheaters with a full 60-piece band. I guess if I were to wish for something, I wish there was more time spent on the songs. I don't think enough time is spent on the creativity. You want to listen to the lyric and be moved. I think the dynamic of the sound has more of an impact than the lyric does today.

10. Let's cover CRS now. You're a CRS "Founding Father" and have been to all 49 of them. What were the early days of CRS like?

It was originally Tom McEntee's idea; we had several conversations. Back then, you didn't have 20 promotion guys at one label. You had one promotion guy at a label, and for him to see people, he had to drive or fly to a lot of towns. I was here, in town, at a radio station, and Tom came and talked to me and other people. We were talking about how CMA was doing nothing for radio and everything for the artist, and that's fine, but they didn't have a structure where they were promoting radio in every city, so we talked about how we could get more stations to play Country music. Tom was doing a tip sheet at the time; his relationship was with radio. I don't know when the light bulb came out to have an event, but we thought that we could get these guys together to exchange some ideas about sales, programming, and those kinds of things. Remember that, also, 50 years ago, most owners at the station controlled the programming. If they were a Country music fan, they played Country music. People talk about lack of control today, but it was very uncontrolled back in those days, or it was major block programming. We got to talking about having an event to get everyone together. I don't even remember where the term Country Radio Seminar came from, but it was always an academic approach to it. It was always an event to learn - that's all we talked about. We put together the "New Faces" show, because we didn't have videos or radio tours those days. There was no way of people seeing [these artists]. The whole event was to introduce them to two kinds of music: the hit or semi-hit they had and their next record. They only played two songs. We had about 60 people at the first one. We'd chew your ass out if you were in the record business and took somebody away from one of the events. We'd go through the hotels and run them out of the bars and tell them to go back. Early on, the people that participated in the presentation of whatever academics we had, we started having a free-for-all where we invited everybody to have a beer and ask questions. That kind of turned into two or three days. It became a hip thing, and people got jobs from it. At first, there were not multiple Country music stations in market places, so we had people coming from a 10-market situation where somebody had an AM station and for some reason, someone would tell them to go to [CRS], and all of a sudden, they'd start playing Country music. And, we had people exchanging sales ideas, because they weren't competing with each other. This guy would pay $50 to come to the seminar and get a $2,000 idea. It paid itself off. Then, of course, the artists started coming. No big artists came, though. The biggest star we had for our "New Faces" show was a guy named Norro Wilson.

And, how has CRS evolved? It feels like the Detroit Auto Show for Country music. As a founding member, are you pleased with how the event is staged and what it has become?

It became something else. It became less of an academic and more of a promotion thing for the music business. The title, Country RADIO Seminar - it was never Country MUSIC Seminar. We made sure we stayed with that name. Of course, with syndication and corporate things, that all changed, but I think we have more intense academic things than before. They were great new ideas, but now it becomes more about a structure that they talk about all year long. It's stuff that some of the radio companies have spent the last two weeks talking about, before they get to CRS. You may get a new handle on it, but the growth was something brand new for them. If they went into a seminar event, they were meeting new people, hearing new ideas, they didn't read about it. The music wasn't part of the seminar. The evolution is just so big that I'm still back 45 years ago, in my mind. You asked the word 'pleased,' and I'm not pleased. I'm not disappointed, but it's just something different.