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We Be Big
The Mostly True Story of How Two Kids from Calhoun County, Alabama, Became Rick and Bubba
By Rick Burgess, Bill "Bubba" Bussey, Don Keith Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2011 Rick Burgess and Bill "Bubba" Bussey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4016-0444-8
CHAPTER 1
The Light Goes On
The alarm clock goes off at 4:30 a.m. at the Burgess house. I—Rick—hit the snooze. The alarm is a Bose clock radio because Paul Harvey, one of the greatest radio personalities of all time, said Bose was the best there was. Like most right-thinking Americans, I believe everything Paul Harvey said. I almost always sleep through one snooze cycle, and then I finally, reluctantly, crawl out of bed at 4:40. That is not because I am lazy or lack a strong work ethic. The reasoning is that my rest is far more important than being early for work. The way I look at it, there is no point in my getting to the studio early if I am too tired to perform at a peak level when I do get there. So long as I'm at work at six o'clock with my finger on the trigger, the opening music for the Rick and Bubba Show ready to fire off, then all is good. At least, that's what I tell folks.
Truth is, even though I've been getting up early to do a radio show for a long, long time now, I am not what someone might call "a morning person." The fact is that I maintain I earn every penny they pay me just for getting both feet on the floor every morning before the sun comes up. Everything else they get out of me after that—the show, books, public speaking—is gravy. Remember, though, gravy is very important to me.
I love what I do for a living. It was my dream from before I can remember. I just wish I could do it at two in the afternoon, when the sun is warm and the roosters have hushed.
There are plenty of mornings when, if I could reach my deer rifle, I would probably bag me a 12-point Bose alarm clock radio!
* * *
When we were growing up, my sister, brother, and I never had a doubt that our parents loved us unconditionally. They didn't have to tell us a bunch of times a day just to make sure we got the message. They showed unconditional love in everything they did, and that couldn't have been easy at times. Not when you consider some of the episodes I required them to look past.
My mom, Geynell, was a typical stay-at-home mother, first to us two boys—my younger brother, Greg, and me—and much later to our sister, Angey, who came along a decade after I did. And when I think of what we put Mom through and how she handled it all, I know she will be at the front of the line for sainthood. My dad, Bill, was a football coach. People have an image of what it must have been like growing up with a hard-driving, character-building, sell-out-for-the-team coach for a parent. But you know, hard-nosed and demanding as he was on the practice field, he was no Great Santini–type when he came home to his family at night. Bless him, he kept his job as a gungho football coach and being a father completely separate.
That even worked out the same way when I later played football for him. I was not Coach Burgess's son when I was out there on the practice field. I was just another player and had it no tougher or easier than anybody else on the team. We were all equally miserable.
And Dad and I rarely talked over the dinner table about that day's practice or the previous night's game. What happened on the field or in the locker room stayed there, not all mixed up with a platter of biscuits and a dish of fried pork chops. That couldn't have been easy for him! I bet there were plenty of times he wanted to fuss about me getting myself blocked out of a key play or missing a tackle or dogging it on the end-of-practice wind sprints, but he simply buttered a biscuit and talked about something else.
When I was born, Dad was working as an assistant football coach at Banks High School in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a key member of the staff. His Jets regularly made it to the top of the city high school standings. Coach White later went on to work for Paul "Bear" Bryant at the University of Alabama, and Dad moved up to take over the Colonels.
Dad made very little money, but he worked hard, doing something he loved to do, and that fact did not escape me, even at a young age. He taught class all day and coached football after school—usually until it got too dark to see the ball—and then coached games at night and watched film on weekends. He certainly taught me the value of doing for a living what you are passionate about, even if there are not necessarily many financial rewards attached to that package.
Dad got his first big break in 1971 when Oxford High School in East Alabama noticed the success he was having over there in the big city and gave him a call. They wanted to see if he was interested in making a move to Oxford, a small town very similar to Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show, about halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta. The area was growing, the school was getting bigger, and the administration and parents decided they wanted to build up their athletic program to be more competitive. They made Dad the handsome offer of fourteen thousand dollars a year (which would be a sizable raise), and that was attractive enough to get his attention. But then they also offered him the position of athletic director. As both head football coach and AD, he would no longer be required to teach classes. He couldn't turn that down, even if it meant uprooting and moving his family halfway across the state, leaving a big town and going to a much smaller one, and, in effect, building an athletic program from scratch.
So when I was six years old, we made the move east, out of the big city to a small house in a nice, calm neighborhood. I doubt the residents there knew exactly what a wild bunch had just moved in down the street.
Our new home had a covered carport, a big backyard, and a thick plot of woods nearby. That carport, the yard, and those woods morphed into our football field, battleground, racetrack, strange planets beyond the known solar system, basketball court, circus tent, church house, movie set, rock-and-roll stage, radio studio, and much, much more—anything our active imaginations could conjure up. My brother, Greg, and all the neighborhood kids became teammates, big-game hunters, fellow space travelers, animal trainers, movie extras, race car drivers, congregation, band members—whatever personnel I needed to fill out the cast of that day's gargantuan production.
You can see I was afflicted from an early age with the insane desire to be in show business in some way. I don't know where that serious genetic malfunction came from. Understand, too, that my definition of "show business" was extremely broad from the very beginning.
It could be sports, music, radio, TV, preaching, singing, playing guitar—anything to get me on a stage in front of people. And Lord help me, I had to be the one who was up front, at the microphone, carrying the ball, making the quarterback sack, always the center of attraction. If I believed in psychiatry, I might speculate that this unnaturally powerful force was just my somehow seeking the approval or attention that I was not getting enough of at home. But that wouldn't be true. I lacked for neither approval nor attention.
That need to perform was just there, and I could not deny it. There is no real explanation for it. Old Rick just liked what he liked. And he liked him a ton of it!
We put on some of the most spectacular shows you would ever hope to see there in that carport in Cheaha Acres. It might be the Burgess High-Flying Circus, with our beagle puppies subbing as lions and tigers and us doing death-defying feats on the jungle gym. There were puppet shows there, too, scripted and complete with props and sound effects. We built vast amusement parks in the pine thicket nearby—"Frontier Land" with swinging-grapevine rides, "real" cowboy-and-Indian fights, and even more elaborate attractions designed to amaze and enlighten visitors.
The funny thing is that we didn't put those shows on just for the praise or the glory. Or even for the fun of it. No, we charged admission.
Parents, neighbors, other kids, aunts, uncles, everybody. No free passes to the Burgess High-Flying Circus or to Cheaha Acres Frontier Land! I was downright entrepreneurial about these things. It may have only been a penny or a nickel for a ticket, but there were no unpaid admissions.
Even at that age, I realized two things: when you do a show, you put on the best show you can; and if you do that, you get paid for it.
That included sports. From the first, I figured "sports" was equal to "entertainment." When we had neighborhood football games, we had to have uniforms and coaches' shirts for everybody who participated. The "field" may have been a patch of Bermuda grass between our house and the neighbor's, but the yard lines were marked off as best we could do it. There may have been some misuse of Mom's White Lily flour on occasion, but if so, I'm sure the statute of limitations has run out on that. At least I hope so, or Mom may still take a belt to my behind. Those of you from the South know exactly how traumatic that can be!
Later on, when I figured out how to do it, I rigged up a cassette tape recorder and found a microphone that worked. One of the kids who was reluctant about getting trampled by us big 'uns would record play-by-play commentary, just to make it feel a little bit more like it was Alabama playing Auburn in front of seventy-five thousand cheering fans instead of just a bunch of kids in our backyard.
We wrote up stories about the games, too, and put them into the neighborhood newspaper we published and sold to everyone in the area. I guess if I did an accounting, I would find that I still owe the subscribers issues of the paper that they paid for but never received. Truth is, I quickly realized that newspaper publishing did not push the same buttons as sports, music, or other facets of show biz. I just did the paper for the money—and to drive attendance to our games, shows, and amusement parks.
The older I got, the more music seemed to dominate my interest. Music and radio. I remember riding in my dad's pickup truck, his radio on one of the local stations or pulling in one of the big signals out of Birmingham or Atlanta. It was mostly country music, but then I would hear rock and pop and R&B and I couldn't get enough of it. At night, on our big radio at home, I began to notice that when the sun went down, there was a whole new array of AM stations that rode in on the skip. There was an even wider variety of music, and it only whetted my appetite for more of it. I learned the lyrics and added the latest Top 40 hits to the shows we were putting on out in the carport.
There was something else that drew me to those stations besides just the music. The personalities fascinated me. Some call them disk jockeys, or deejays, but the good ones were far more than that. Those guys seemed to be having so much fun doing what they were doing, and they were as much a part of the show as the records they played. They didn't get in the way of the music they were spinning—they added to it. Guys like John Landecker and Larry Lujack. Stations with call letters and slogans like "the Big 89, WLS, Chicago" or "the Mighty 690, WVOK" from Birmingham, with the commercials for its Shower of Stars concerts with an all-star lineup of the very people who were recording all that great music. "Quixie in Dixie, WQXI, Atlanta." All AM stations. FM was not really there yet. Besides, I couldn't hear Chicago or Dallas or New York on FM. That dial was for elevator music anyway.
I loved to listen to those personalities every chance I got. There was a warmth to what those guys were doing, an excitement in their voices, a contagious zest that they applied to the music, to whatever they were talking about with their listeners, and even to the commercials they read. I caught myself flipping past the music sometimes, just to hear one of them do his act.
One of the area's best-known personalities, Gary Lee Love, from Q104 over in Gadsden—one of the first FM stations to have an impact—made an appearance one night at the local teen hangout, the Sunshine Skate Center in Oxford. He had long hair, a beard, and some cool half-glasses that just seemed to scream "Star!" He was a personality. People crowded around him. Some asked for an autograph. He played a few records for us to skate to, gave a couple of shout-outs, and was gone, but I was danged impressed with the whole thing.
You know what I believe it was that first attracted me so much to these radio personalities? It was one-on-one show business without having to go to all the trouble to assemble a band, rehearse, build sets, write a script, line off a field, sell tickets, put up curtains, or recruit reluctant kids to play bit parts. It was just the deejay, some records, and a microphone. A transmitter, too, if they wanted to be heard somewhere else besides the skating rink, but that wasn't really an impediment at first. Just doing it for the sake of doing it was enough.
At some point, though, it occurred to me that those guys broadcasting on the radio were getting paid to do what they were doing. I assumed they were being paid a lot to do it, too. Maybe millions of dollars!
The moment that concept hit me when I was about twelve years old, it was like a bright, bright light coming on.
Well, that part about the transmitter was quite the hurdle to overcome, but it didn't stop me. I tied an old tape cassette recorder microphone to a baseball bat, pulled my long-since-retired See-and-Say record player and the family console stereo together in a corner of the living room, stacked up what few records we had in the house, and put WXYZ on the air. I had deduced that the deejays—Malcolm Street and his son Rob Street on WHMA and local legend Rex Gardner, also on WHMA, some of the personalities I had heard on Dad's truck radio—had to be playing records on two turntables in order to mix them together the way they did. I suppose I had seen pictures of deejays somewhere to get some idea of how they had their studios set up, and I mimicked them the best I could with duct tape, the ball bat, and my mother's coffee table.
I alternated "shifts" with Greg, playing over and over the few "hits" we had, doing our own patter between the songs, ad-libbing commercials for the same businesses we heard on the local radio stations or reading ads out of the newspapers. We recorded ourselves and played it all back so we could go to supper without signing the station off the air when the sun went down, like WVOK in Birmingham had to do.
Oh, we still had our neighborhood band going, putting on shows in the carport. Just putting up with our practicing should get our mom into the Mother Hall of Fame. Greg and I were both self-taught musicians. Dad wouldn't spring for a drum set, so I managed to save up fifty bucks for my first set and started banging away until I figured out how to play them.
The beagles were getting a rest by then, no longer called upon to perform in the circus. Sports had come along, too, and I played baseball, basketball, and football, which seriously cut down on the performances of the Burgess Family Flying Circus and the broadcast days of WXYZ.
There was no doubt about it. The hook had been set. I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to spend the rest of my days in some branch of show business, and radio seemed like a good possibility. I just had no idea how to get there—how to get onstage to sing and play, how to get a record cut and on the radio, how to get a job behind a microphone, spinning those records for an eager bunch of adoring listeners. I just knew I desperately wanted to go there, to perform before crowds, hear the roar of approval, to entertain thousands of listeners who would hang on my every clever word—to get paid millions of dollars for doing something I craved so fiercely that it bordered on an obsession.
I got a smidgen—Southern for a "little bit"—of it when I bluffed my way into a job as a deejay at the local teen club. I spun up a bald-faced lie and told the manager that I knew how to cue up and mix records and run the sound equipment. Somehow I figured it all out before he realized I was making up all my deejay expertise. It was there that I got just a touch of what it felt like to be "broadcasting," to be playing to an actual crowd of people who were not my neighbors at Cheaha Acres or family members who had no choice but to sit and watch and listen. But since I had sports and school to occupy most of my time, it was short-lived, and I still had no means of reaching that vague goal I had established for myself of being in the spotlight—onstage or on the radio—and famous.
Then I realized that the most obvious way to my dream was right there in front of me. Sports. Remember, "sports" equals "entertainment." So I threw myself into the one other thing that I seemed born to do, and a means to that end that appeared to be a reasonable possibility.
Okay, so I would be a football star. That would be my path to stardom, roaring crowds, millions of dollars.
Let the acclaim begin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Be Big by Rick Burgess, Bill "Bubba" Bussey, Don Keith. Copyright © 2011 Rick Burgess and Bill "Bubba" Bussey. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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