LimeWire Music Blog

Television stars have sometimes had an easier path to success on the charts than other performers. Several have parlayed their success on the tube to a hit on the record. However, few have done it as successful, or been as serious about their craft as John Schneider. The star of the CBS classic The Dukes Of Hazzard also placed 11 top ten songs on the country charts from 1981-1987.

In 1987, the sky was seemingly the limit for the New York-born singer. He had just won the “Star Of Tomorrow” award from Music City News magazine, and his You Ain’t Seen The Last Of Me album contained some of the best music of his career. However, disagreements with his record company led to his leaving MCA Records, and a renewed focus on his acting career. In spite of the success that he continued to enjoy on television, with roles on Smallville and a deliciously wicked turn on Nip/Tuck, there was something missing. “I’ve been working like crazy, but there’s a huge hole in my soul where my guitar used to be.” Schneider admits to LimeWire Music Blog. “A couple of weeks ago, I did a couple of shows in Nashville, then I would up on stage out here in California. It’s funny, it’s all at once. I wound up on stage with a group I used to travel with, America. I would gladly forego a lot of this tail chasing out here to get back on stage and sing songs.”

It appears that he is going to get that chance. The singer is in the process of releasing some new music, and he’s excited about it. What led John Schneider back to country music? Believe it or not, it was words of wisdom uttered years ago from his friend, Johnny Cash. “I did a movie with Johnny, Kris, Waylon, and Willie called Stagecoach. When we did the movie, I was recording and doing well. Then I stopped. I got my nose bent out of shape with some people at the record label, and I stopped. Johnny said, ‘That’s a shame that you stopped, but you’ll get back in, because one day you’ll hear a song that you will not be able to ignore, you will have to go into the studio and record it, because it will speak to you in a way that you cannot turn your back on it…and that song, John Schneider, is going to bring you back in to country music, and you won’t have to look for it. It will find you.”

“I’ve been working like crazy, but there’s a huge hole in my soul where my guitar used to be.”

As it turned out, truer words were never spoken. John just had to wait a few years. “So…many years later, Phil Redrow, who played Tex in Collier And Company, played me this song. It’s called ‘The Promise.’ As soon as it started, I asked everybody in the room to be quiet, as I wanted to hear these words because they so spoke to me. Then I knew that was the song that Johnny Cash had spoken to me about. So, I wound up in the studio, and we cut the song. It’s a tough song, because it asks tough questions. It’s a song about the state of the union, it’s a song about jobs going to other countries, and causing great unemployment here in this country. It’s called ‘The Promise,’ and the underlying message is asking the question of ‘Who took the promise from the promise land.”

The upcoming release of “The Promise” could prove to be as successful as his 1980s run on the country charts. He’s certainly equipped with great material. Another song that he is excited about is the tender story song “I’m Your Father Who Left.” Of the song, Schneider says, “This is another song by Phil. He had a hit on an old Waylon song. This is a song that has a terrific story that makes you want to pull over and listen to it. As soon as I heard, ‘Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself, It’s Crazy How The Years Have Gone By,’ I thought to myself, that is so conversational, that I had to hear the rest of it.” From there, the decision to record the song was a no-brainer. “As soon as he finished playing it, I thought ‘I’ve got to record this song, because there are so many people out there who are in what we think is an unusual circumstance, but having given up your child to your spouse after a divorce is not that unusual.’ I adopted my son from his biological father when his relationship fell apart from the woman who is my wife. It’s complicated. Phil managed to put this complicated group of circumstances into very beautiful but easy words to understand. I don’t think it’s a single, I don’t think it’s something that radio stations are going to play all the time, but it’s one of those songs that people are going to download on iTunes because it’s so true and so poignant.”

The quality of the new songs is on par with his classic output for MCA in the 1980s. His first single for the label, 1984’s “I’ve Been Around Enough To Know,” stands as one of the decade’s best moments. It was a song that, according to the singer, he almost didn’t get to record.

“It was so country. Bob McDill and Dickey Lee wrote an incredible song….great lyrics, simple ones that told a great story. That song came to me as I had just signed with MCA, and we were going around Music Row trying to get people to play me music that I would want to record. Nobody really understood how country I wanted the music to be. They were playing me kind of pop-country stuff. Gary Morris was big at the time, and he was doing great music — but it was more pop that I wanted to go. So finally, I said to the guys at Tree Publishing. I said, ‘Look, play me the last song in the world that you think John Schneider would want to record–something that is so classically country that I wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole.’ They said ‘Okay, we’ve got this song. We don’t think you’re going to like it. We don’t think it’s for you.” Once he heard the song, it was all he needed to hear. “Like a lot of people, I heard the opening lyric, ‘Hush, don’t talk now,’ and I was sold. That’s a great song. I want to record it.” It had been a few years since Schneider had hit the top ten during the height of “Dukes,” with “It’s Now Or Never” and “Them Good Old Boys Are Bad,” so there were some questions from the label about whether radio would be receptive. “That was the one that Jimmy Bowen at MCA put out a blank label on, because they didn’t want anyone to know that it was me singing it.”

Schneider’s producer, Jimmy Bowen, gets a lot of credit for producing records such as his, but Bowen preferred his artists take a proactive role in their recording careers, as Schneider noted. “There were two gentlemen who produced those records, and one of them was very seldom in the room,” he says. “Jimmy Bowen has a great reputation for producing records, but the magic of Jimmy Bowen, and I asked him when we were doing the second record for MCA, ‘How do you do this…You’re producing me, John, Reba, George Strait…How do you do all these people at the same time, and yet they don’t sound alike? It’s not cookie cutter…Everybody is distinctly different.’ He said, ‘My job isn’t to produce Jimmy Bowen records. God and everybody know there’s been enough of those. My job is to help John Schneider, Reba McEntire, George Strait, and all these people produce their own records.” So, Schneider got to take a very hands-on role in his albums. “I would go and find the music, and he helped cull out the good ones, then he went away. I produced the basic tracks, he got the sound right with the band and the engineer….then he would go away. At the end, we went over what I needed on each song for overdubs, and he would go away again. It’s interesting because Jimmy Bowen would never tell an artist no, because he wanted you to make the best you music that you could.” The process, different than any other in Nashville at the time worked. “The magic in Jimmy Bowen was leaving a real artist alone,” said Schneider. The numbers prove him right. Under his leadership, MCA became the top label in Nashville, and all of Bowen’s artists learned what worked for them, as each artist’s sales grew by leaps and bounds.

“Jimmy had a guy named Don Lanier, that everybody called Dirt. I’m not sure why, but that was his name,” recalls the singer. That was Conway Twitty’s favorite song finder, and Conway will always be known that if there was a good song in a shoe box somewhere, he knew about. Jimmy’s relationship was with Dirt. He was his number one man, and that was who Reba, George, and I all hit the streets with, and he was the one that got the song pluggers to really take out their A-list material. When you worked with those people in those days, the only songs that wound up on your record were ones that gave you goosebumps as soon as you heard them. You were never cutting one because Jimmy thought it was a good song. He didn’t care if he thought it was a good song, he only cared about you thinking it was. I’d listen to 1,200 songs to find ten. Everybody would. So, by the time you got it culled down to the ten that made the record, these songs were truly ten of your favorite songs of all time. They not only spoke to you, but they expressed who you were to the listening audience. That’s why Reba exploded. That’s why George exploded. That’s what I did. But they stuck with it, they didn’t get their nose bent out of shape…I did.”

Unlike some TV stars, John Schneider feels no reason to run from his on-air persona. In fact, he embraces it.

Of course, Schneider knows that his visibility among country music fans remains high, as a result of the never-ending success of The Dukes Of Hazzard. When LWMB asked him about the long-lasting appeal of the series, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, he says “it’s still a show that the whole family wants to watch together. There’s a difference between a show like parents would like their kids to watch, like, and I’m really dating myself here, like Little House On The Prairie or 7th Heaven. There’s a difference between that kind of television and the kind of television that Mom and Dad, and the kids Grandpa and Grandma really can’t wait to sit down and watch it. Dukes not only was fun and exciting with cars, and that sort of stuff, but it had something for everybody, and had it in abundance, so when it’s on TV, or people buy the DVDs they don’t sit in their room and watch it like TV today, where my son watches what he watches, my daughter watches what she watches, and we watch what we watch, and nobody really sits down and watches the same thing anymore — except shows like The Dukes Of Hazzard.”

Unlike some TV stars, John Schneider feels no reason to run from his on-air persona. In fact, he embraces it. One look at his web site, and you will see a new DVD called Collecting Hazzard, about some of the memorabilia created around the show. While he respects his past, he does feel there is more to John Schneider than Bo Duke. “There’s no sense in running from it,” he says of his television success. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I believe I can hit the ball further than that. Nobody ever thought Michael Landon would outrun Little Joe, and he did. Then they thought he would be Charles Ingalls, and I think there are just as many people out there who remember Michael Landon from Highway To Heaven, and now that I’ve been in the business for so long, I’m realizing that’s more of a generational thing. There are a lot of my daughter’s friends, and she’s 15…and they only know me as the guy from Smallville. They don’t even know what Dukes is. So, that I suppose, is going to take care of itself down the road, but Dukes will always be in my heart. It’s kind of like if you had a good time at your senior prom, and you really enjoyed it….and you married the girl you took. That’s how I look back at it—with a smile, with no regrets whatsoever. It’s a fantastic, wonderful show….but professionally, I’m an actor. It would be like when George Harrison said he was tired of playing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand.’ That’s why the Beatles music changed as they were going through their career, and I don’t think they disliked ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ but they were glad they got past it.”