DWIGHT GLENN: The band just feels so appreciated and loved.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

DWIGHT GLENN: And they're just happy.

The most important thing to them is the songs still work, that the people still love the music.

And from 1972 until now, they never intended to do anything but create music.

And they're still getting to do that.

[folk music] The Ozark Mountain Daredevils have been making fans, both old and new, smile and tap their toes for many years.

2022 was the 50th anniversary year and featured the production of a 90-minute documentary, a grand opening of an iconic old mill, multiple appearances including Silver Dollar City, and a once in a lifetime chance to sing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Oh, and they were the opening show for the 30th anniversary of the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts.

Dwight Glenn joins me now to take a look back at one heck of a year for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

And welcome to this edition of OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

I'm Dale Moore.

And I'm so glad you are here.

I am joined today on this edition of OzarksWatch Video Magazine by a true member of the Ozark Hills Royalty Association.

DWIGHT GLENN: [laughs] Wow.

Dwight Glenn is my guest on today's program.

This is the first time, I think, that your dad hasn't been on a program with me, the old record collector.

So you are allowed to have a show without a Glenn named Wayne?

We can go a different direction.

I'm very glad to be here.

I've never been called royalty.

I've been called many other things.

But I'm really happy to be here and happy to be here with you, Dale.

With the year that you had in 2022, and boy, we're going to talk a lot about that, I would say we've got a lot to talk about from what's happening in the recent past.

We do.

From the Ozark Mountain Daredevils standpoint, the 50th anniversary was a big deal.

I mean, not many bands make it to 50 and to do the things that we did this year, that we're going to talk about.

There was a lot of firsts, a lot of really great things that happened, including the documentary done by Ozarks Public Television.

But the band just feels so appreciated and loved.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And they're just happy.

The most important thing to them is the songs still work, that people still love the music.

And from 1972 until now, they never intended to do anything but create music.

And they're still getting to do that.

Yeah, and let's kind of go back and do a reset because 2022 was the big-- was the big year.

I mean, that was, like, the seminal moment.

But there was a lot that went on ahead of that.

And it started with-- I'm getting this strange phone call at the height of a pandemic.

And I'm walking around on my back yard, and it's you.

It was me.

You know, 2000-- I guess it had been 2020, right at the beginning.

At the end of 2019, we had started working on some of the projects that we did this year.

And it just dawned on me.

I think it was after watching the Eagles documentary again and thinking the band, our band, has such a unique story how they even came together in the first place and how they were given a recording-- or at least given $500 to record a demo because Steve Canaday walked up to the top floor of CBS Records blind, cold called John Hammond Sr., who discovered everybody.

So the unique story of the band, the good times, the bad times-- and there were bad times.

And when I say bad, they were never bad.

They were just hard-- you know?

--when they lost their record contract, going across Canada, playing gigs in the middle of nowhere, seeing the northern lights, all of these things.

And then starting about, I would like to think about, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, the band found new life.

The band in its current form, the nine members that make up the people that take the stage, are some of the most talented, best players in the Ozarks.

I totally agree.

So I reached out to you.

And I said, I think there's a story here.

I know there's a story here.

Originally we thought-- I thought why he was calling me, I thought he wanted to do an OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

And I thought, piece of cake.

And then he said, oh, wait a minute.

Wait, hang on a second.

I got an idea.

Here's the idea, man.

And-- And I said, I think this is a documentary.

I started telling you some of the stories that the documentary told so well and saying, I think-- plus we have access to two of the original members, access to two, three more as well.

And we knew we could come up with a lot of memorabilia, a lot of clips.

I just-- I could see the jigsaw puzzle there.

There was a lot of pieces in it.

But I knew if we put it together, it would create something special.

And we pitched it as an hour long piece, and that was welcomed.

And it must be an hour.

And we kept saying, we can't do this in an hour.

Well, you know how I felt about that.

As usual, I've made my voice heard.

But I will give credit to Brent Slane and Jason Ferber.

They saw, once they started putting all the interviews and footage together, you could not have squeezed that into 60 minutes.

No.

Truth be told, we could probably have done two hours.

Oh, I think there's another documentary on the cutting room floor.

DALE MOORE: On the floor.

Yeah.

But that's a great problem to have.

And the accessibility of this band from day one, they never were aloof.

They were always from the Ozarks.

They never moved to LA or tried to become rich after "Jackie Blue."

They just wanted to be home.

And they wanted to be around people that they were comfortable with.

And if you ran into John Dillon at the grocery store, he'll say hello to you.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's a special quality that not a lot of bands have no matter what size of popularity they might have.

You know, when you consider all the-- it's almost poetic that this happened, that this started during a worldwide pandemic because this band has gone through so much over the years.

And you speak of the band and eras.

And let's talk about, just generally, each of those eras, the good years, and then the wilderness years, and then-- I thought Supe said it very well in the documentary.

The first five years were the salad years.

You have two huge hits with "If You Want To Get--" "If You Want to Get to Heaven--" DALE MOORE: Right. "

--Jackie Blue."

A&M picks up every option on their contract.

They do seven records with A&M.

And then all of a sudden, '78 comes around.

The records aren't selling quite as well.

Disco comes.

And they get signed by Columbia to do a record.

Well, the person, the A&R person, that signed them to Columbia Records then gets fired in this mass firing that Columbia did in 1980.

And that record really never was publicized correctly.

Thus, it didn't sell well.

And now all of a sudden, they didn't have a record label.

So you have those first five years.

And then the next 10 years, you ride the wave of "Jackie Blue," "If You Want to Get to Heaven."

You can still tour with big groups, open for the Eagles, with the Beach Boys, do a lot of big festivals and concerts.

And then by the mid '80s, so after the second 10 years, then it was slogging around for about 30 years, you know, and wondering, do we keep doing this?

And Supe was there from day one, never has not been the bass player for the Daredevils.

John and Steve were there, other than the very short time period where they took off, literally just a few months.

But the core members always knew that the entity had to keep going.

Yeah.

There was another show to play, another song to be written.

And then the last seven years, or eight years, or maybe even 10, it's just the resurgence.

Now, part of that, Dale, is due to social media.

You're able-- with Facebook, with Instagram, you're able to expose yourself to people because everything's changed with how you publicize everything.

So you have to have an avenue where people can be accessible to you in a different way than they were in 1972.

The other thing is the addition of members like Dave Painter, Kelly Brown, Molly Healey, Bill Jones coming back to the band, Nick, and Ruell, and Ron Gremp that's been there since 1989.

This band is really good.

And they really enjoy playing with each other.

So you had the first five years, the next five years, 30 years of slogging around, and then you get to the last 10 years.

And to your credit, I mean, you came on board in the last 10, 12 years, 13 years.

DWIGHT GLENN: I promoted my first two shows with the Daredevils in 2010 at the Gillioz.

So between those glory years at the beginning and when you came on board, there was a lot of slogging around.

What kept them going?

I mean, because most bands just, they evaporate.

Well, one, you still want a paycheck.

Two, Randy Erwin, who's been their long time agent, was able to keep them working in an era where a lot of those bands were having trouble even finding jobs.

In the Daredevils's case, they went to Canada.

They always had a huge following in Canada.

So they would go, literally, from one end of Canada to the other playing clubs, maybe little theaters.

And they would just get in a van.

The days of tour buses were long past after they lost the record contracts.

And they just kept going.

And to quote a Dylan song, they kept on churning.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

They weren't ready to stop.

Right.

Well, and I think that's the endearing thing with the Daredevils.

It's always been about the music.

Always about the music.

DALE MOORE: Always about the music.

The one thing I can say, there's been 33 people that have been on stage as an Ozark Mountain Daredevil, in one way, shape, or form, that contributed to live performances.

But to a man, to a woman, it was never about the person.

It was about the song.

When you do "Country Girl," whether it be Randy singing it or Ruell singing it, stay true to the song.

Don't try to turn it into a personal show.

And 33 people is who have kept the band alive for 50 years.

What's been the biggest-- and it's a hard question.

But what's been the biggest reaction that you have gotten about the documentary?

It seems like it exploded, in terms of popularity, just instantly.

I think the biggest reaction was people that thought they knew everything there was to know about the Daredevils, you know, that thought they knew how they started and how it came together that were surprised to learn a lot of interesting facts.

Not everybody knew about Canaday going to CBS Records.

Not everybody knew that they met in the New Bijou, at first just Randy, Larry, and John.

They were just sharing songs.

There was never an intention of this becoming a band, much less a band that would be together a year because back then, as you know with Granny's Bathwater, with all the bands, people switched between bands all the time.

So the uniqueness of the story, the willingness of the band to be honest, you know, that it hasn't been all salad years, that there were some down years-- but also I think they love seeing the footage, the old footage that we were able to capture, plus the new footage with the Landers shows.

And the documentary ended in a really cool way because it timed out that we made our Grand Ole Opry debut in time to get it into the document.

And I'm going to talk more about that.

So as I think of the documentary, I know when we started this one of the things that-- I mean, typically you always have an idea.

And I kept telling our guys here, we can't script this out.

We can't-- it is going to be organically planned, which is counterintuitive to say that.

But that's exactly, I think, the success of how it wound up the way it did.

The story told itself.

The story told itself.

It led us in the direction-- led Ozarks Public Television in the direction.

Oh, we heard Supe say this.

Let's go look into this.

Some of the things that Jason and Brent came up with-- when we viewed the documentary for the first time, we had never seen some of the things that you guys captured.

There was an ad for the New Bijou Theater with John Dillon and friends.

And John says, I've never seen that before.

That type of thing, that's what surprises people.

And to go back to your original question, you know what people were really blown away with?

Glyn Johns was in our documentary, Dale.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

There's not a better producer on the planet than Glyn Johns.

Yeah.

And he was enthusiastic, my gosh, the memories, his recall.

DWIGHT GLENN: He loved this band.

He loved the organic nature of the band.

He loved their sense of humor.

And he also loved that they didn't have to have everything perfect because he had just recently, before he worked with the Daredevils, worked with the Eagles where everything had to be perfect.

Trust me, we do imperfect really well.

And that's always been one of the endearing things about the Daredevils is they could literally go out in the field and turn on an old Wollensak tape recorder and they can make magic-- Right.

--with something that simple, which is pretty hard to do.

It's really hard to do.

But that's the nature of it being about the song even more than the performance.

You want to do the song well.

But when you listen to the words of "Lowlands" or "Colorado Song," it paints a picture of this area that not only they grew up in, but some of the areas they traveled as they started their career.

You know, something else that was going on during the anniversary year, there was a book being written by Mike Kuelker.

DWIGHT GLENN: Right.

Dr. Kuelker-- and you know, I had no idea it would be a companion piece to the documentary because those two flowed independently of each other.

But boy, what a great companion.

It's a 538-page book that he has composed that took him-- or put together and wrote.

It took him, I think, eight years worth of interviews.

There's interviews with Steve Cash and Elizabeth Anderson who are no longer with us but a very important part of the Daredevils.

And really, he calls it a discography.

And it is because he has tracked down every recording.

If it was made in Japan and released in 1980, he found it, all the K-Tel records.

But what he did, that I really appreciate, is he let the artist, whoever wrote the songs or participated, tell the stories about the songs, about the albums, about the process.

So to say it's a strict discography is not giving it enough credit.

Right, exactly.

DWIGHT GLENN: It's a biography/discography.

Yeah, it's incredible.

I mean, it is a must have book for anybody who's a Daredevil fan.

Well, and what you said is very true.

It happened to fall as a companion piece to the documentary.

But, Dale, everything we did this year was three years in planning.

And COVID, the pandemic, allowed everything to fall on the 50th year.

Do you not think that's kismet?

[laughs] Yeah, it really was.

You know, one of my-- and I have so many great memories of 2022 and the Daredevils and what all.

But the opening night at The Mill was pretty magical.

Talk about that.

You know, the band is based in Springfield.

Some members have lived in Ozark.

They've all been around here for years and years.

And part of preserving The Mill that was special to us is Clarence and Roscoe, who were on the cover of "Men from Earth," the famous cover of the two guys that people thought we hired as actors to do that.

No, they were the men from Earth.

They bought feed over there.

You know, John lives in Ozark.

He's trying to preserve downtown.

He's very much into history.

All of the band loves to preserve history.

And we, through the years, have developed a relationship with the Morris family.

And they respect what we do.

Obviously we respect what they do.

But to be asked to reopen what Johnny's done down there with the mill, it was a thrill.

We got so fortunate with the weather.

Anytime you do outdoors, you're rolling the dice.

And we had a beautiful night, 70 degrees.

And they limited the crowd to 800, which I understand.

And that's probably a good thing because I think we would have had about 8,000.

Yeah, yeah, I think you could have easily had that.

And it was a magical evening.

It was a magical everything.

Everything was perfect about-- The stars aligned, Dale.

The stars aligned.

Oh, and what about that little event down to Silver Dollar City?

Well, that's another-- DALE MOORE: And I appreciate being acknowledged for my birthday from the stage, by the way.

It's important for us to acknowledge people at your age, Dale.

One of the things that was fun about Silver Dollar City is the band had done two shows, or were supposed to do two shows, during their 40th anniversary.

And one of them actually got rained out.

But fast forward, I have a tendency to make a lot of phone calls, as you have figured out, because I'm not really scared of anything.

So we reached out to Silver Dollar City and say, hey, it's our 50th anniversary.

You guys are starting to do more concerts at Echo Hollow.

Would there be any interest in our performing down there because we would love to do it?

They agreed.

I think they said we had the biggest crowd at that time, since COVID had happened and they'd started doing the concerts again.

And 3,500 people decided to hang around after they'd spent all day in Silver Dollar City and come see our band.

It was really nice.

Yeah.

How hard is it to, I mean-- you do make a lot of phone calls.

I mean, and, again, like, they're still around, these guys?

They're still available?

Dale, that's the hardest part because for a long period of time in the early 2000s, Steve didn't want to travel nearly as much.

So they turned down a lot of gigs.

And the problem is if you haven't been to Billings, Montana in 15 years, they don't know that you're around.

And it does not matter the quality of your band if they're not aware of your music.

It's one of the things that made us happy at the end of 2022 that we were able to sign an agreement with Time Life Records.

So anything new that we produce moving forward will be released on a platform that gives us some marketing capabilities and things that I just basically don't have the time.

And people will take a call from Time Life.

People may not take the call from Dwight Glenn.

So that gives us an opportunity because we have new things to do.

You know, you saw, I know-- well, I guess I'll let you get to it.

But you saw that we have a new singer on "Jackie Blue."

Oh, yeah, don't steal my thunder here on this one.

I apologize.

DALE MOORE: [laughs] I Apologize.

But basically what you said is true.

The hardest thing about it is making people aware that we're still alive.

We're still performing.

And we're really good.

So how much new music is getting produced?

Is there-- I mean, I know Supe's done a couple of songs lately.

Supe's done 12 songs.

Well, more than a couple.

And to say that Nick wrote a song a day during COVID for about 90 days-- there is lots of new music.

Now, not everything that Supe or Nick writes is necessarily a Daredevils song.

But what has happened in the music world is it's not necessary to put CDs out anymore.

And I say that there's still some that sell.

But most cars now, obviously, don't have a CD player.

And because of streaming, which is an evil mistress, you have to have it.

But the songwriters are being taken advantage of.

But you have avenues just to release singles.

Yeah.

We have the avenue to take a song, a new song or maybe a redo of one of our old songs-- part of the reason you do that, much like Taylor Swift, is she remastered all of her own records once they were sold out from underneath her.

And once you record those masters again, the publishing still goes to whoever holds the publishing rights.

But you own the new recording.

A couple of things-- a couple of things I want to get to before we get away, one that pops up, I was into country radio for a lot of years.

And every time I would talk to an artist I would say, what's your dream?

And they would say, I want to be in the Grand Ole Opry.

And lo and behold, you get these guys on the Grand Ole Opry.

Tell us how that happened and what was the experience like.

Once again, in this case, an email was sent.

And honestly it was a dream to play the Ryman.

It still is a dream.

Don't give up on me yet.

But we reached out.

And it turns out that the woman, lovely woman, that books the Grand Ole Opry grew up in the Ozarks.

And her name is Gina Keltner, sweet, sweet girl.

So there was a connection there.

And then she had received my inquiry and was going on a country music cruise with Mike Robertson, who used to be a friend of the band, helped them put together the "Heart of the Country" album that never got released.

It was released in France.

And they were talking on the ship.

And it came up to Gina, where are you from?

Well, I'm from Ozark.

And Mike said, well, that's weird because I used to work with a group called the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

And Gina said to Mike, they just reached out to me about wanting to appear on the Opry.

What do you think?

He goes, you have to do it.

He texted John Dillon on that boat that night and said, you're not going to believe this.

And everything that happens with this band, from the beginning, is you're not going to believe this.

Wow.

2022, 22 is your new lucky number, my friend.

I guess it is.

I'll buy a jersey.

I remember watching that.

And it was just-- I mean, it was goosebumps.

And I've seen a lot of performances and been around a lot of great artists and what have you.

And I got to tell you, it's those kinds of moments when you get the goosebumps.

It's like, that's real.

Well, and I've got them right now.

I'm not even kidding.

One of the things we wondered is, how is this crowd going to react?

First of all, it's a Tuesday night.

Well, there was 4,300 people there.

We're not claiming that they came to see us but that just shows you the attraction that is the Grand Ole Opry.

It is an institution.

And we were wondering during "If You Want to Get to Heaven," Supe and Ruell get the crowd going, count one, two, three, four, get up on your feet, you know, scream.

Well, do we do that at the Opry?

I said, this may be the only time you ever get to play the Opry.

Do it.

And we received a standing ovation from 4,000 people after our set.

How cool is that?

It doesn't get any cooler.

No, it does not.

--to say about that.

Anniversary years, so 2022 also just happened to be the anniversary year of The Hall.

And I remember going to the opening of The Hall back 30 years ago when it opened.

And lo and behold, somehow you reach into the magic hat and pull out, oh, let's do a-- let's do a night-- oh, let's settle that.

Let's do two nights-- [laughs] --at The Hall for the 30th anniversary of The Hall.

It's a story that started in 2020, in February-- well, it started a little bit before that.

Many of us in the band, including Randy Erwin years ago, had mentioned a lot of these songs, especially the deep cuts, the "Lowlands," "Colorado Song," lend themselves to orchestration.

Well, that costs a lot of money.

I mean, if you send it off to New York-- and they wouldn't understand the songs.

And would the symphony in Springfield even want to play with us?

I mean, you can't assume they're going to want to do it just because you have charts for it.

Well, of all people, I reached out to our friend, Ned Reynolds, who's a good friend of mine.

I do radio with him, have for years.

And I knew Ned was a symphony aficionado, loves classical music.

And I said, I know Kyle Pickett.

But I don't know him well enough to make this phone call.

And I want a real answer.

I don't want a placate-- I don't want him to placate me.

I said, would you ask Kyle if he and the Springfield symphony would have any interest in a collaboration with the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

Well, Ned calls him and says-- he calls me right back.

He goes, you're not going to believe this.

He goes, he would love to talk about doing it.

So Bill Jones, our horn player, John Dillon, myself, Jennifer Cotner-Jones, and Kyle took a meeting in February of 2020 to talk about the collaboration and agreed.

Bill is an orchestrator.

Bill is a musical genius.

He had done some orchestrations for Larry Lee in the '70s that were recorded in London, just brilliant, brilliant stuff.

So we knew Bill could do it.

But you're also asking him to do a lot of work to orchestrate 17 songs for what turned out to be a 50-piece Symphony Orchestra.

So we have the meeting in February, decide we're going to try to do it in the fall of 2020.

COVID happens.

It gets delayed.

We have a meeting early, early-- I guess it had been late last year or late two years ago in 2021.

And Jennifer and Kyle, we decide we're going to do it.

And she needed to reach out to The Hall because it was going to be an added performance.

It's not in their subscription.

Well, Keith Boaz, who's been a friend of mine and we'd been looking for years on something to work together back when I was a promoter, said, you're going to add a date.

Great.

Here's the date that's open.

What is it?

And she said, well, we're going to do a collaboration with the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

And he goes, whoa.

He goes, September 10th and 11th is the weekend of the 30th anniversary of The Hall.

He goes, if you don't mind, would you mind reaching out to the Daredevils or Dwight and seeing if they would care if we turned it into a collaboration between the three entities?

It took me two seconds to say yes.

And it took me four seconds to text Keith and go, here we go.

And we announced the Saturday, September 10th.

It's 2,200 plus seats in The Hall.

We had just gotten done selling out four shows at the Landers in March of that year.

And you just wonder how much of an appetite there is for the Daredevils.

Well, we go on sale.

And you could tell by Saturday afternoon that it was going to sell out.

So we added a Sunday, ended up doing 1,500 on Sunday.

It was magical.

But more importantly, I know I'm talking too long, but Bill Jones orchestrations are such genius.

He took a one-chord song, the most simple song we do, which is "Chicken Train," and turned it into the biggest production of the night.

DALE MOORE: Brought the house down.

It brought the house down.

Well, I will tell you this.

We blatantly had to rehearse that three times in rehearsal to get it right because it was so different than the way we normally do it.

Well, we're out of time.

2022 was-- Well, Dale, I got it to go to 90 minutes with the documentary.

We're not getting 90 today?

Apparently.

They keep doing this back behind you.

And I just keep want to talk.

I'm going to have you talk to my agent.

[laughs] It's a privilege to call you a friend.

It was a privilege to work with you.

This was a great, great collaboration.

And here's on to what's next.

It's not over.

DALE MOORE: [laughs] I never quit having ideas.

Dwight Glenn, you're one of a kind.

Thanks for being with us.

Thank you, Dale.

And thank you.

And you stay right there because I'll be right back.

[folk music] ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I'd like to thank my guest, Dwight Glenn and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, for a look back on 50 golden years.

And I'd like to thank you too for joining us here on OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

I'll see you next time.

[folk music]