Barney

The show has been over for hours. The big bus rolls down the interstate to
the next town on the schedule. We are all fast asleep in our bunks. A
misconception of the general public is that touring like this is very difficult. Hey, It
is not home but we actually spend a good percentage of our nights every year
rolling along in our own little bunks with our curtain closed. We all have our
own televisions with two different satellite feeds as well as CD players and
books to read. We can even check the news and send and receive email on our
Blackberries...... from our bunks! Imagine that! It is much better than flying.
To fly, one has to get up early, change planes somewhere as there are very few
direct flights to anywhere, carry stuff, check all the gear and instruments
(a nightmare as well as very costly) Then, when we land, we have to pile into
vans and limos and such. By the time we hit the stage that night we are already
exhausted. Sometimes, the schedule calls for a fly date and they are always
very well planned out and expedited........ but for us? We prefer the bus!
After a show we climb on board, change clothes, relax, unwind and eventually crawl
into our bunks. When we awake, we are right there at the next hotel in the
next town and we have all had a good night sleep!

So, here I am, in a deep, humming bus sleep. Oh, Oh! I have to go to the
bathroom. There is an art form involved in climbing out of bed, walking down the
aisle and going to the bathroom without totally waking up.
Our driver is pretty smooth. Billy makes sure that a middle of the night walk
to the bathroom doesn?t feel like a train ride through the Alps.

I heed the call of Nature and continue to maintain a certain, mindless,
stupor. I amble back down the aisle where my bunk awaits me. My special pillow, my
eggshell mattress, my Philadelphia Eagles blanket. I go to jump in and in mid
air (I am on a top bunk, always have been) my blood runs cold and a loud mind
bending scream escapes from the core of my being. While I was in the bathroom,
Duane Allen has silently crawled out of his bed and into mine. He has made
himself as small as possible and at the right moment, in the semi darkness he
has jumped out at me while squealing like Howard Dean. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyaaa!

My heart actually stopped beating! The Ace has done this to me for thirty one
years. Sometimes just once a year, or maybe twice. He always lets enough time
go by for my guard to be let down on the matter. I will check my bunk before
I ever crawl back in there again for at least a month. A long term
ramification prank if there ever was one.

Yes............. BOYS WILL BE BOYS!

Pranks and practical jokes have been a big part of the lives and part of the
history of the The Oak Ridge Boys since the beginning.

We laugh a lot on the Never Ending Tour, and always have.

The old Oaks had some good ones. Back in the days when the guys drove their
own bus they would drive in two to three hour shifts. It was not uncommon for
someone like Herman Harper to end his shift by driving the bus down a back
road, into a farm, and right into a barn. He would turn the lights off, go back
and wake Willie Wynn and crawl in his bunk. Barley awake, Willie would settle
into the seat, turn on the ignition and lights and boom......MOO...... Huh?

Back in the Gospel days things could get really brutal. Did you know a well
placed piece of linberger cheese in a manifold will stink up a whole bus?
Tear gas pellets work pretty good as well. Have you ever seen a tour bus
going down the road where someone had opened up all the luggage bins beforehand? A
guitar makes a strange sound when it bounces off asphalt but it is really not
very good for the instrument. A band has a funny look about them when they
hit the stage and someone has retuned all of their instruments. And are you
aware of how long it takes to remove a couple of hundred crickets from a bus?
Ask the Singing Speer Family!

Speaking of Gospel groups reminds me of the time our crew bus mooned The
Happy Goodman Family. It was during the real Glory Days and we were running
several buses. The Boys had nothing to do with this episode but we sure took a lot
of heat for it. The crew bus, or zoo bus as we called it still had Oak Ridge
Boys up in lights in the destination sign as they approached the Goodman bus.
Most of these guys were hard working old rock and rollers and they had no idea
what a Happy Goodman was. So, they pull along side and line up in the front and
proceed to press there naked rear ends against the front windows. The CB
radio comes alive. Sam Goodman is livid....... NOT HAPPY!
?Give me Duane Allen right now, I want to talk to Duane Allen...... What had
our Sister Vestal been up front?? Our guys were rolling on the floor.
The next morning Duane talked to Sam on the phone and tried to explain and
apologize while trying not to laugh!
All the Goodman Family are gone now. Rusty, Sam, Vestal and Howard. They were
one of the greatest Southern Gospel acts ever to hit the stage and we loved
them dearly. They laughed about the mooning incident years later, but, it took
awhile for them to grasp the real humor!

Now, as a rule, we really don?t pull many shenanigans off against one
another. Oh, on occasion William Lee will be in a deep sleep on a plane with his hat
pulled over his eyes and snoring louder than the engines and we will wrap him
up in toilet paper. It happens.

Ace can never be totally trusted and on a rare moment in time and space, the
quiet bass singer might get you as well.
Case in point

I ran into Richard in our hometown Rivergate Mall one time around Easter
several years back. We were standing by a pet store and Richard noticed that they
were looking for homes for about 60 baby ducks. Richard smiles and says,
?Let?s buy em up and send em to Duane!? The very thought alone was hilarious. We
did it! Duane and Norah Lee became the proud parents of 60 baby ducks when the
PASS PETS truck pulled up and dropped them off with a note that read, Happy
Easter from Joe and Richard. They actually had to raise them and feed them for
several weeks before they could let them go out on their own. Their whole house
smelled like duck poop for a couple of months. I woke up one morning at my
Hendersonville home and found an old Goat tied to a tree. That is when I
received my lecture from Mary.
?You guys think all of this joking stuff is funny but it is Norah Lee who
paid the price. Now...... what are we going to do with this goat?? It was a
husband and wife moment that was made much worse by my rolling around in the
driveway laughing! Richard never received a goat? hmmmmmm

For the most part though, we have taken out the vast majority of our humor on
our supporting acts. We have dropped dollar bills on Exile ($5000.00 worth)
and ping pong balls on Highway 101. (1000 of them at Ballys in Las Vegas) and
we even put an apple in Lee Greenwood's saxophone! (every show!)
One night while The Judds were singing their hit song, Girls Night Out, we
danced across the stage in drag. We had bought the woman's clothes that
afternoon at a consignment store. We were the ugliest looking woman you have ever
seen. Wy and Naomi came totally apart. It was a fun night.

We loved the Forrester sisters. The four girls from Georgia had a wonderful
run of hit songs and opened our show off and on for several years. Their first
night with us was in Miami. At a meeting in their dressing rooms after saying
hello for the first time we told them that they needed to do one song in
Spanish. We told them that we would be doing three bilingual numbers because after
all, this WAS Miami. We were stone faced and they believed every word. We
stood outside of their dressing room and listened as they tried to figure out how
to sing in Espanol. So funny!
A few weeks later we were in Bangor Maine. In the middle of our show all four
Forrester girls rushed the stage. They were all wearing poodle skirts and
funny wigs and they were screaming and throwing piece of gigantic woman's
underwear at us. That was hard to explain to the multitude.

At another show in Florida a 97 year old man was rushed out of the auditorium
while we were singing Elvira. They layed him out on The Forresters swag table
and he died there right in front of them. It was horrible. They blamed us!

We recorded a gospel song with them once and it came out really good.
We overdubbed our parts without them and after we did it right, we recorded
another version. We changed all the lyrics around on our verse so as to
sound....... well...... not as Gospel. We burned them a copy of the doctored lyric
version first and gave it to them as a joke. Well they never listened to it
until they got back home to Georgia and played it for their entire family. Whoops!

In our very poor days around 1974 we were singing to a small crowd in a High
School auditorium when a couple of rowdy drunks began to heckle us. It was a
Gospel show too and we were mystified as to how these two grubby people got
into the building in the first place. They would be quiet for awhile and then,
they would suddenly erupt. They called Duane Allen's name a few times so we knew
they knew us. They eventually rushed the stage. There was no security of any
kind, Not even a cop. It was kind of scary until the drunks took off their
wigs and revealed John and June Cash. The place went nuts. They got us good!

a sidenote: A few weeks later we would miss the only scheduled date of our
entire career because of Johnny Cash. We were scheduled to be in Horse Cave
Kentucky for a Gospel Singing on a Saturday and early that week John called us. ?I
need to draw some strength from you Boys, so bus on out here to San Francisco
and join me on the road for a week or so.? I think he knew that we were
really broke and needed the money. That Horse Cave date was all we had in the book
for awhile and the promoter threatened to sue if we didn?t show. Well, we
didn?t show. In those days there was no flying to the coast and meeting the bus
there. We all traveled on one bus, band and Boys and we got on board and
deadheaded to the West Coast to join up with the Man In Black. We got sued. The
gospel promoter in fact garnished our gate in Paducah about a month later so we
didn?t make any money there either.
But we had once again been with John and June and it kept us going,
financially and more importantly psychologically.

But back to the pranks..........

We really met our match with Mel Tillis and The Statesiders around 1977 at
the NEE WOL LAH (Halloween spelled backwards) festival in Independence Kansas.
The Godfather Jim Halsey has promoted this event for decades.
Back then we had these fancy smoke machines. At the end of our show during
the last song, Heaven Bound, we unleashed the smoke! It looked like we were
walking on clouds. It was cool!

Well during The Mel Tillis show we started up the smoke machines. In the
meantime the four of us undressed and wrapped ourselves in brown blankets that we
retrieved from our bunks on the bus. As the smoke rose up to about waist level
on a bewildered Mel Tillis, we crawled on our bellies through the smoke. We
then rose up as four GHOULS and Mel jumped about three feet.
With our back to the audience we flashed the whole band. Mel had a stuttering
problem to begin with and this just didn?t help at all.

Well, then we did our show and came through it miraculously unscathed.
In fact we had heard that Mel had left town. We were shocked because the
Statesiders were a rugged and funny bunch and we figured that Bob Younce and Larry
Lee and those guys would pay us back in spades.
Well, they did. When we got back on our bus Duane found that the curtains on
his bus were closed. OH OH! When he opened them he not only found his bunk
full of trash from a nearby dumpster but Mel?s boys had also placed a dirty mangy
dog in there as well! It was a mess!

Most pranks have been rather dim next to that one. I think it goes down in
history as the best and ummmmm worst of the lot! We never messed with the
Statesiders again!

But I will tell you this.........

If you ever decide to open a show for The Oaks, keep in mind that STUFF
happens. It could be as simple as a piece of fruit rolled across the stage as you
sing or your keyboard played could be bombed with jelly rolls, or someone might
ride a scooter behind you as you perform. You may even find strange things
appearing inside of your tour bus late at night. Perhaps a half eaten pizza has
been placed under your pillow or maybe a few spicy tuna rolls could magically
appear in your carry bag.

One never knows.

You had better stay alert and keep your wits about you because on the Never
Ending Tour one thing is certain...... BOYS will be BOYS!


	In the final days of editing and reworking parts of An American Journey, our publisher, New Leaf press requested that I write a sidebar or chapter on humorous pranks and such that have occurred over the years. As you can see in the final version of the book, they only used a small portion of what I had actually written. I think they deemed most of the pranks a bit over the edge and edited the following way on down. So, here, for the enlightenment of our friends and fans is the original...... unedited version........ of Boys Will Be Boys for An American Journey by Joseph S. Bonsall The show has been over for hours. The big bus rolls down the interstate to the next town on the schedule. We are all fast asleep in our bunks. A misconception of the general public is that touring like this is very difficult. Hey, It is not home but we actually spend a good percentage of our nights every year rolling along in our own little bunks with our curtain closed. We all have our own televisions with two different satellite feeds as well as CD players and books to read. We can even check the news and send and receive email on our Blackberries...... from our bunks! Imagine that! It is much better than flying. To fly, one has to get up early, change planes somewhere as there are very few direct flights to anywhere, carry stuff, check all the gear and instruments (a nightmare as well as very costly) Then, when we land, we have to pile into vans and limos and such. By the time we hit the stage that night we are already exhausted. Sometimes, the schedule calls for a fly date and they are always very well planned out and expedited........ but for us? We prefer the bus! After a show we climb on board, change clothes, relax, unwind and eventually crawl into our bunks. When we awake, we are right there at the next hotel in the next town and we have all had a good night sleep! So, here I am, in a deep, humming bus sleep. Oh, Oh! I have to go to the bathroom. There is an art form involved in climbing out of bed, walking down the aisle and going to the bathroom without totally waking up. Our driver is pretty smooth. Billy makes sure that a middle of the night walk to the bathroom doesn?t feel like a train ride through the Alps. I heed the call of Nature and continue to maintain a certain, mindless, stupor. I amble back down the aisle where my bunk awaits me. My special pillow, my eggshell mattress, my Philadelphia Eagles blanket. I go to jump in and in mid air (I am on a top bunk, always have been) my blood runs cold and a loud mind bending scream escapes from the core of my being. While I was in the bathroom, Duane Allen has silently crawled out of his bed and into mine. He has made himself as small as possible and at the right moment, in the semi darkness he has jumped out at me while squealing like Howard Dean. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyaaa! My heart actually stopped beating! The Ace has done this to me for thirty one years. Sometimes just once a year, or maybe twice. He always lets enough time go by for my guard to be let down on the matter. I will check my bunk before I ever crawl back in there again for at least a month. A long term ramification prank if there ever was one. Yes............. BOYS WILL BE BOYS! Pranks and practical jokes have been a big part of the lives and part of the history of the The Oak Ridge Boys since the beginning. We laugh a lot on the Never Ending Tour, and always have. The old Oaks had some good ones. Back in the days when the guys drove their own bus they would drive in two to three hour shifts. It was not uncommon for someone like Herman Harper to end his shift by driving the bus down a back road, into a farm, and right into a barn. He would turn the lights off, go back and wake Willie Wynn and crawl in his bunk. Barley awake, Willie would settle into the seat, turn on the ignition and lights and boom......MOO...... Huh? Back in the Gospel days things could get really brutal. Did you know a well placed piece of linberger cheese in a manifold will stink up a whole bus? Tear gas pellets work pretty good as well. Have you ever seen a tour bus going down the road where someone had opened up all the luggage bins beforehand? A guitar makes a strange sound when it bounces off asphalt but it is really not very good for the instrument. A band has a funny look about them when they hit the stage and someone has retuned all of their instruments. And are you aware of how long it takes to remove a couple of hundred crickets from a bus? Ask the Singing Speer Family! Speaking of Gospel groups reminds me of the time our crew bus mooned The Happy Goodman Family. It was during the real Glory Days and we were running several buses. The Boys had nothing to do with this episode but we sure took a lot of heat for it. The crew bus, or zoo bus as we called it still had Oak Ridge Boys up in lights in the destination sign as they approached the Goodman bus. Most of these guys were hard working old rock and rollers and they had no idea what a Happy Goodman was. So, they pull along side and line up in the front and proceed to press there naked rear ends against the front windows. The CB radio comes alive. Sam Goodman is livid....... NOT HAPPY! ?Give me Duane Allen right now, I want to talk to Duane Allen...... What had our Sister Vestal been up front?? Our guys were rolling on the floor. The next morning Duane talked to Sam on the phone and tried to explain and apologize while trying not to laugh! All the Goodman Family are gone now. Rusty, Sam, Vestal and Howard. They were one of the greatest Southern Gospel acts ever to hit the stage and we loved them dearly. They laughed about the mooning incident years later, but, it took awhile for them to grasp the real humor! Now, as a rule, we really don?t pull many shenanigans off against one another. Oh, on occasion William Lee will be in a deep sleep on a plane with his hat pulled over his eyes and snoring louder than the engines and we will wrap him up in toilet paper. It happens. Ace can never be totally trusted and on a rare moment in time and space, the quiet bass singer might get you as well. Case in point I ran into Richard in our hometown Rivergate Mall one time around Easter several years back. We were standing by a pet store and Richard noticed that they were looking for homes for about 60 baby ducks. Richard smiles and says, ?Let?s buy em up and send em to Duane!? The very thought alone was hilarious. We did it! Duane and Norah Lee became the proud parents of 60 baby ducks when the PASS PETS truck pulled up and dropped them off with a note that read, Happy Easter from Joe and Richard. They actually had to raise them and feed them for several weeks before they could let them go out on their own. Their whole house smelled like duck poop for a couple of months. I woke up one morning at my Hendersonville home and found an old Goat tied to a tree. That is when I received my lecture from Mary. ?You guys think all of this joking stuff is funny but it is Norah Lee who paid the price. Now...... what are we going to do with this goat?? It was a husband and wife moment that was made much worse by my rolling around in the driveway laughing! Richard never received a goat? hmmmmmm For the most part though, we have taken out the vast majority of our humor on our supporting acts. We have dropped dollar bills on Exile ($5000.00 worth) and ping pong balls on Highway 101. (1000 of them at Ballys in Las Vegas) and we even put an apple in Lee Greenwood's saxophone! (every show!) One night while The Judds were singing their hit song, Girls Night Out, we danced across the stage in drag. We had bought the woman's clothes that afternoon at a consignment store. We were the ugliest looking woman you have ever seen. Wy and Naomi came totally apart. It was a fun night. We loved the Forrester sisters. The four girls from Georgia had a wonderful run of hit songs and opened our show off and on for several years. Their first night with us was in Miami. At a meeting in their dressing rooms after saying hello for the first time we told them that they needed to do one song in Spanish. We told them that we would be doing three bilingual numbers because after all, this WAS Miami. We were stone faced and they believed every word. We stood outside of their dressing room and listened as they tried to figure out how to sing in Espanol. So funny! A few weeks later we were in Bangor Maine. In the middle of our show all four Forrester girls rushed the stage. They were all wearing poodle skirts and funny wigs and they were screaming and throwing piece of gigantic woman's underwear at us. That was hard to explain to the multitude. At another show in Florida a 97 year old man was rushed out of the auditorium while we were singing Elvira. They layed him out on The Forresters swag table and he died there right in front of them. It was horrible. They blamed us! We recorded a gospel song with them once and it came out really good. We overdubbed our parts without them and after we did it right, we recorded another version. We changed all the lyrics around on our verse so as to sound....... well...... not as Gospel. We burned them a copy of the doctored lyric version first and gave it to them as a joke. Well they never listened to it until they got back home to Georgia and played it for their entire family. Whoops! In our very poor days around 1974 we were singing to a small crowd in a High School auditorium when a couple of rowdy drunks began to heckle us. It was a Gospel show too and we were mystified as to how these two grubby people got into the building in the first place. They would be quiet for awhile and then, they would suddenly erupt. They called Duane Allen's name a few times so we knew they knew us. They eventually rushed the stage. There was no security of any kind, Not even a cop. It was kind of scary until the drunks took off their wigs and revealed John and June Cash. The place went nuts. They got us good! a sidenote: A few weeks later we would miss the only scheduled date of our entire career because of Johnny Cash. We were scheduled to be in Horse Cave Kentucky for a Gospel Singing on a Saturday and early that week John called us. ?I need to draw some strength from you Boys, so bus on out here to San Francisco and join me on the road for a week or so.? I think he knew that we were really broke and needed the money. That Horse Cave date was all we had in the book for awhile and the promoter threatened to sue if we didn?t show. Well, we didn?t show. In those days there was no flying to the coast and meeting the bus there. We all traveled on one bus, band and Boys and we got on board and deadheaded to the West Coast to join up with the Man In Black. We got sued. The gospel promoter in fact garnished our gate in Paducah about a month later so we didn?t make any money there either. But we had once again been with John and June and it kept us going, financially and more importantly psychologically. But back to the pranks.......... We really met our match with Mel Tillis and The Statesiders around 1977 at the NEE WOL LAH (Halloween spelled backwards) festival in Independence Kansas. The Godfather Jim Halsey has promoted this event for decades. Back then we had these fancy smoke machines. At the end of our show during the last song, Heaven Bound, we unleashed the smoke! It looked like we were walking on clouds. It was cool! Well during The Mel Tillis show we started up the smoke machines. In the meantime the four of us undressed and wrapped ourselves in brown blankets that we retrieved from our bunks on the bus. As the smoke rose up to about waist level on a bewildered Mel Tillis, we crawled on our bellies through the smoke. We then rose up as four GHOULS and Mel jumped about three feet. With our back to the audience we flashed the whole band. Mel had a stuttering problem to begin with and this just didn?t help at all. Well, then we did our show and came through it miraculously unscathed. In fact we had heard that Mel had left town. We were shocked because the Statesiders were a rugged and funny bunch and we figured that Bob Younce and Larry Lee and those guys would pay us back in spades. Well, they did. When we got back on our bus Duane found that the curtains on his bus were closed. OH OH! When he opened them he not only found his bunk full of trash from a nearby dumpster but Mel?s boys had also placed a dirty mangy dog in there as well! It was a mess! Most pranks have been rather dim next to that one. I think it goes down in history as the best and ummmmm worst of the lot! We never messed with the Statesiders again! But I will tell you this......... If you ever decide to open a show for The Oaks, keep in mind that STUFF happens. It could be as simple as a piece of fruit rolled across the stage as you sing or your keyboard played could be bombed with jelly rolls, or someone might ride a scooter behind you as you perform. You may even find strange things appearing inside of your tour bus late at night. Perhaps a half eaten pizza has been placed under your pillow or maybe a few spicy tuna rolls could magically appear in your carry bag. One never knows. You had better stay alert and keep your wits about you because on the Never Ending Tour one thing is certain...... BOYS will be BOYS!