Q&A With Black Oak Arkansas’ Rickie Lee Reynolds

Black Oak Arkansas rose to hard-rockin’ prominence the old fashioned way in that the band released albums and toured, toured and toured some more, playing to sold-out audiences even though BOA had only one song that received major Top 40 radio airplay. 

That track, of course, was “Jim Dandy,” which also happened to be the name of the band’s frontman. BOA’s recording of the 1950s tune also featured the vocal talents of Ruby Starr.

These are busy times for Black Oak Arkansas.  The band recently returned to its 1970s label home Atlantic Records, which will release a new album featuring 10 lost tracks by the band as well as 5 new songs from a 2013 reunion.  Back Thar N Over Yonder arrives Oct. 15.

Reynolds spoke with Pollstar shortly after the band played a gig at West Hollywood’s Whisky A Go Go, making its first appearance at the legendary nightclub since May 1971.

How was the show at the Whisky?

It was packed.  Really good show.  Last night we played in Corona, Calif.  A really nice hall and it was packed out. We have a day off then play Ramona, Calif., then go home.

Black Oak Arkansas’ history has been a series of highs and lows, more stories than one book could ever cover. What do you think is the biggest misconception folks may have about the band?

A lot of people think we broke up and are just now getting back together again.  That’s not true.  Jim and I have been together – except for a two-year period back in the late ’70s – all the time for the last 50 years.  We’ve played clubs and festivals. We played sometimes in auditoriums.  We went down to South America, we’ve gone on boat cruises. We’ve been here the whole time and just now getting noticed again because of the Atlantic Records deal and the new album coming out.  We’re all polished up and ready to start playing again.

California, we haven’t been here in so long. We played the Whisky A Go Go the other night and the last time we were at the Whisky was 42 years ago.

Did the Whisky feel like the same club you played more than four decades ago?

The first time I ever met Jim Morrison was at the Whisky A Go Go. It’s still the same club.  I saw that the walls with the old autographs had been painted over.  Oliver Stone did that when he was filming “The Doors” there.  Same club. Really nice folks here.

The new album, Back Thar N’  Over Yonder, has several unreleased tracks from the 1970s.  Why has it taken so long for these songs to see the light of day?

It’s kind of funny. … I love Tom [Dowd], he’s a great producer, has worked with everyone from Ray Charles to Eric Clapton.  We were in the middle of doing our second or third Tom Dowd album and Atlantic started realizing that Black Oak wasn’t a big radio airplay band. … We sold all of our albums at our shows. 

Atlantic started realizing that the live shows were selling albums.  We were half-finished with an album and Atlantic [wanted] a live album.  So we took what we were working on, shelved it and went out and did concerts in Seattle, Wash., and Portland, Ore., at the Paramount Theatres up there.  And [those shows] became the Raunch ’N’ Roll Live album. 

We did a couple of songs on the Raunch ’N’ Roll album that hadn’t been released anywhere else yet.  All this time the songs had been sitting on the shelf at Dowd’s house in Florida. When our friends at Atlantic started letting Dowd’s people know that we were getting ready to put an album out, Dowd’s daughter had [the recordings]. They were already mixed and everything. They never touched them. [They were just as] Tom Dowd left them.  They’re exactly as they were in 1973

Myself and Jim Dandy are the only two from the ’70s that are still in the band.  We took all those old songs with all the originals … Tom Aldridge on drums, Pat Daugherty on bass, Harvey Jett, guitar.  We got the old guys who were available to come and play on some new songs of me and Jim. Then we got the new guys who are playing with us now to play on some new songs and everybody to play on some songs.  So there are different generations of Black Oak musicians playing on this.

Going back to Black Oak Arkansas not getting a lot of radio airplay. But at that time it seemed as if every serious rock fan had your albums.

That amazed Atlantic Records, too.  Older brothers who were big Black Oak fans and they’d turn their younger brothers on to the band. … We have generations right now who come and see us, teens and early ’20s who were turned on to Black Oak by their moms and dads.  Some of the songs are cross-generational.  They still work right now.  “Jim Dandy To The Rescue” – I was so tickled we did that.

Elvis Presley told us [about the song].  We were playing in Alabama.  We had a friend there named George Klein who was a disc jockey on an AM radio station back in the ’60s.  He grew up with Elvis. … When Elvis passed away, George Klein was one of the pallbearers. Elvis would give George presents, cars and rings and stuff.

George called us up said, “Elvis is getting ready to call you. … He has a song we wants you all to do.”  Elvis told Jim that back in the 1950s there was a woman named LaVern Baker who put a song out on Atlantic called “Jim Dandy To The Rescue.”  Elvis asked, “How come you never did this song?”  And Jim didn’t know the song existed.  But when Elvis tells you to do a song, you do the song.

So we … did our little arrangement of it and [released it].  That was the closest thing to a big hit on radio that we ever had.

The band used to throw guitars up in the air at the end of the set and let them fall where they may. Didn’t that get expensive repairing or replacing guitars?

It’s weird. We were doing a tour and the idea was that at the end of a song … we’d set the guitars down on stage and just let them fall over … and we’d just walk off while the guitars [were] feeding back.

At the end of song called, “Up,” the big drum solo there … we were mixing three guitars and that last piece of music was only a minute long. So what we did, we got copies of Gibson 335s … and we’d only play them for one minute.  These guitars would have a life span of one minute and then we’d bust them into shreds.  Then we’d give the shreds away to disc jockeys, Children’s hospitals, mementos for fans.  I still go to people’s houses where they have a busted-up guitar hanging on their wall from 1974 or something.

The crowds went out of their minds. They really loved it.  One night we busted guitars and a piece went sailing and hit a policeman in the back of the head. He was kind of upset about that. He took Jim Dandy down to the police station.

When you first heard the tracks sitting on Dowd’s shelf, could you remember being in the studio recording the songs?

I can. There’s one song on there, “Dance With Me Tonight.” We were going to put it on the High On The Hog album. Had it all finished, mixed and everything. It’s one of the only songs Black Oak ever did that has three-part harmony through the whole song.  The whole song is like a dance song.

We were on “Midnight Special” with Wolfman Jack who was a friend of ours.  We did three songs … including “Dance With Me Tonight.”  Then, when we got the album finished we discovered we had too many songs.  Back when we were cutting albums in the old days, the deeper you could cut the grooves in the album, the louder it was.  If there were too many songs, you had to cut the grooves really shallow and you’d get a kind of low-sounding album. … So we took “Dance With Me Tonight” off the album, put it on the shelf and it just sat there.  People would go, “What was that song you did on ‘Midnight Special’ that I never heard on a Black Oak album?”

I remember just about every song on this album.  There’s one song I did, an unplugged song, called “The Snake.” It’s got my 12-string Martin on it, Tommy Aldridge playing screens on it and Jim playing scrub board.  It sounded like an old hillbilly song.

Atlantic called and said, “What’s this song called ‘Snake?’  We really like it.”

And my mind went blank.  I said, “I can’t remember that song for the life of me.  Send me a copy.”

And as soon as I heard the first bar I was, “Oh, God, I remember now.”  It’s like a big joke, a neurotic phallic symbol.  As soon as I heard that I was rolling on the floor laughing.  Dowd probably did the same thing, rolling on the floor laughing at the song.

How did you get the nickname “Risky?”

In high school, instead of “Rickie,” they made “Ricochet” out of it.  Later on a girl I knew called me “Risky.”  Ruby Star did an article once and she was describing everyone.  When she got to me she said I was a big powerful wizard. So they hung the nickname “The Wiz” on me for a while.

We all had nicknames. Jim’s dad gave him [“Dandy” when he was 5. Pat, our bass player, his last name is Daugherty so he became “Dirty Daugherty.”  Stanley [Knight] grew up in a little town in Arkansas right next to another town called Goobertown.  So we [was] “Peanut.”

What’s the biggest audience you’ve ever played in front of?

Rickie: If you had asked me that a couple of years ago I would have said “California Jam” which was about 300,000 plus.

But last year we went down to just south of Rio De Janeiro, down to Sao Paulo.  They have a cultural exchange there where they bring in different groups from all over the world every year.  They block off all the streets there. And there were 2.5 million people there in the streets.  I guess that’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever played for.  That’s a lot of folks.

You’ve traveled all over the world.  What’s the strangest place you’ve ever heard your music played?

We have a song called, “Lord Have Mercy On My Soul” that’s actually based on a psychedelic trip that Jim took a long time ago where he saw both the devil and God.  I’ve heard that played in church.  I walked in and the pastor was a big Black Oak fan.

Back in the ’70s we were in a 50 percent income bracket.  We were on the road 300 days a year for two or three years in a row.  We had so much money coming in, the government was hitting us up for 50 percent of it.  Vietnam was at its peak and we weren’t happy about our money going to buy bombs and stuff so we got to pick charities to give money to. 

In Arkansas we gave away about $2 million dollars in about a five-year period to mentally retarded children [and] YMCAs.  We have a letter from Betty Ford thanking us for a donation to the American Cancer Society.  We replaced the last one-room schoolhouse in Arkansas and built a four-room school house.  We built a radiology wing on a hospital. Battered wives, YMCAs, YWCAs, we gave massive amounts of money to charities in Arkansas.  We gave some to politicians’ plans, some directly to the governor. He’d come out and emcee a big show we did at the capital every year. Whatever his favorite charity was, we gave every cent to that charity.

Some we gave to churches.  Jim Dandy’s mom passed away last year and until the day she passed away she was still teaching Sunday school, Bible education and stuff.

So this pastor was a big Black Oak fan because of all the good we did.  I know some of our songs are sexual, some are drug-related. But on the whole  … we did a lot of good in Arkansas.

We heard tales from back in the Viet Nam days when they went out in jeeps looking for Viet Cong they played “Hot Rod” on their loudspeakers to scare them.

Closing thoughts?

Like I say, we’re not only still here but we’re coming back in force.  Our good friends at Atlantic … they treat us more like family than any label ever has.  They actually call us up and ask how your cold is … something like that. 

Atlantic is putting a whole lot of push behind this album.  Before we would do two or three interviews a week; folks are calling us five or six times a day now.  We’ve done articles in Sweden, Japan, all over Spain, France.  And it looks like we’re going to be out doing major touring really soon.  Back in the ’70s we’d hit every major city and every secondary city in the U.S. at least once a year.  Stick around, we’ll probably come to your neighborhood before too long.

Upcoming dates for Black Oak Arkansas:

Sept. 30 – Forrest City, Ark., Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital Benefit
Oct. 18 – Little Rock, Ark., Revolution Music Room
Oct. 19 – Memphis, Tenn., Rockhouse Live
Oct. 26 – Hillsboro, Tenn., Outlaws For Troy Biker Benefit
Oct. 29 – Trussville, Ala., Trussville Civic Center
Oct. 31 – Eureka Springs, Ark., Blarney Stone Irish Pub
Nov. 3 – Middletown, N.Y., Brian’s Backyard BBQ
Nov. 4 – New York, N.Y., B.B. King Blues Club
Nov. 7 – Knoxville, Tenn., The Well
Nov. 8 – Columbus, Ohio, The Exclusive

For more information about Black Oak Arkansas, please visit the band’s website and Facebook page.