Jeff Cook – ALABAMA

Jeff Cook of Alabama Interview Quotes

Up to that point it had always been one or two, or in some cases maybe even four people with a backup band and that’s what was called a country act. We were the first ones who actually sang our own music and played our own stuff as a group, without a front person per se. We heard,’ Well, we just don’t sign bands.’, I don’t know how many times back then. That’s why we had such a hard time getting signed to a record deal.

An Alabama hit song sounds like a hit (he laughs). Throughout the years, we had a little piece of good luck in that we weren’t typecast and we were able to do a lot of crossover material that appeals to a lot of people. We’ve been recording together with our record company for 18 years. We’ve had a great relationship with them and we continue to have that still going for us. Whenever country music goes through changes, we didn’t sit down at a meeting in some conference room and say to each other,’ Well, the music is changed, so we’ve got to change.’ We just did and fortunately it’s worked out for the fans and country radio.

All the times we supposedly have broken up or were about to break up as a group, we never knew anything about it (he laughs). Only the press people knew anything about that. We’re definitely four individuals with four individual musical tastes.

As far as the business decisions, myself and Teddy and Randy are the owners of Alabama and we make decisions democratically.

I don’t always agree with all of them and sometimes we make decisions that none of us like, in part because it’s the logical thing to do and we’ve made our share of illogical decisions.

When we pick our material for our singles, we get together with the record producer who we’re working with at the time and with Joe Galante at RCA and maybe a couple of other people at RCA. They kind of tell us what they think will be a Number one song and we turn around and tell them what we feel we can perform and what we feel is suited for Alabama.

There’s no really set pattern, we get together and play a few tapes and thrown around a few ideas.

I can’t recall a big difference in our audiences between today and when we first started. We always wanted to have a wide demographic in our fan base and that’s a big part of the reason why we played the both in the Northern parts of the country where country music wasn’t always as popular as in some parts of the South.

I don’t ride the bus anymore unless I absolutely have to, when we’re on tour and I am traveling, I see the countryside from 30,000 feet. We sold our private jet in 1994. Randy and Teddy don’t care for flying much anymore so they went back to traveling by bus. So now, I fly commercial flights and occasionally I’ll travel by private plane.

I guess you’ll get a different opinion depending on who you ask. I don’t think as long as we are still having hit records, I don’t think I’ll even be thinking about retirement.

As long as we’ve got our fans and the support of country radio, there’s not really much point in thinking about it.

We’re booked every weekend at least two or three days and in December we go out for a sixteen day tour doing a mixture of half and half between our standard stuff and Christmas music. I ain’t got time to follow country music today (he laughs).

There’s so many new acts and new bands, I don’t have time to keep up with all of them. We changed the collective minds of label heads in Nashville about the longevity of how a band can stay together in country music. They thought back when we were trying to get signed in the late ’70’s, that after a while the guys in a band would get tiered of being together and playing together and traveling together and then they’d just break up. But, we like I said, we changed the minds of a lot of the label heads in Nashville after a few years.