Alabama Disowns Drummer Mark Herndon
What’s that thing our mother’s tried to teach us all? Oh yes, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
Randy Owen, lead singer of Alabama, might have taken that into consideration before commenting for a recent article in the Tennessean. Instead, he unloaded on the band’s former drummer going as far as to say that Mark Herndon was never a part of the band…um…what?!
Owen claims that Herndon was hired as a stage drummer for the band in 1980 and that it was just a gig… nothing more. He said that Herndon never joined them in the recording studio and that he was simply one of the hired guns on tour. OUCH! Seriously Randy? I’m pretty sure your legions of ’80’s & ’90’s Alabama fans might have a different memory. Sure, we didn’t all have a peep-hole into the studio but, for all other intents and purposes, Mark Herndon was very much a part of what we all knew to be the country super group Alabama.
Exhibit A: In this still shot from Alabama’s hit Song of the South Herndon is front and centre… not as a stage musician playing in the background… in fact, if anyone looks disconnected in that shot it’s Jeff Cook. From that era, there are enough “exhibits” to fill out the alphabet so I’ll leave it there.
It would be no stretch for fans to conclude that the 2008 lawsuit between Herndon and Alabama Group Inc. (a dispute over money) was the root of his invitation to the reunion tour never surfacing so why go so far as to disown him retroactively?! I suppose it’s glaringly obvious now that the trio of friends and relations, Owen, Cook and Teddy Gentry is a solid clique and Herndon ran afoul of the three somewhere along the line but this dissing business is most unsavoury and definitely unbecoming of Randy Owen.
He is quoted in Cindy Watts’ Tennessean blog as saying, “At the point of the tour, I know we made our minds up that we were never going to play with him again because of his attitude,” Cool. He sued you. Get it. But to reach back and attempt to erase his validity as a part of your collective success?! Not cool at all. “They (Alabama’s record label, RCA Nashville) wanted the four (members) so they could compare it to The Beatles…” said Owen, “I never thought anything about it because everybody knew Mark had nothing to do with the structure with Alabama. He didn’t play on the albums. He was just on the stage with us, as were several other people. Had we been smart enough, there never would have been four people in the pictures.”
“…just on the stage with us, as were several other people…” Really Randy?…Really?! So dismissive and disrespectful. If you’d really been smart enough… you’d have kept your bitter retrospective thoughts to yourself. If it was an attempt to paint Mark in a bad light and justify leaving him out of the reunion I think it’s safe to say it backfired.
There is likely far more that’s gone on behind the scenes to cause this rift but this whole ‘we went along with a record label ploy to make fans think of us like The Beatles‘ tactic to downplay a wayward band member’s role in Alabama’s enormous past success is not only ridiculous it’s insulting.
After all of his verbal shanking, Owen follows up with an attempt to ramp back onto the highroad saying of Herndon, “I don’t have one thing against him in any way in the world, I hope he has a good life.” Uh huh. Clearly (can you hear my eyes rolling?)
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