Larry Lee, co-founder of the country rock band the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, recalls writing his first song. Rather than running the risk of being drafted into the Army where would surely be sent to the front lines, he joined the Navy for a four-year stint during the Vietnam War; he figured the odds of survival were higher. Stationed in Puerto Rico as a postal clerk, Lee—who has never been religious—walked by a small church located on base one afternoon and decided to go in.
“I walked in and it was very quiet, nobody in there,” says Lee over a call from his home in Springfield, Missouri. “There was a piano down in front of the chapel. And I went down and opened up the lid and I hit a couple notes with my fingers. Never played piano before in my life. And essentially over the last two and a half years I was in the Navy I would go in there a couple times a week and figure out more chords because I didn’t read music. By the time I got home, I’d written maybe 20 songs.”
More from Spin:
Quincy Jones, Legendary Music Producer, Dies At 91
The Weeknd Reveals Film ‘Extension’ Of New LP, ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’
In 1970, after returning to Springfield from the Navy, Lee helped form the Daredevils and spent 10 years with the band.
Though the Daredevils still play, Lee moved on from the band in the early 1980s, moved to Nashville, and became a producer. Then in 1989, he formed the Del Beatles with a few music industry friends—Josh Leo, Jim Photoglo, Michael Rhodes, and Harry Stinson—eventually changing the group’s name to the Vinyl Kings; not wanting to get sued by the Fab Four and all. “All of us were either record producers, songwriters, studio musicians, so we were all working all the time,” Lee says. “We got together thinking…we haven’t been in a cover band since we were kids. We wanted to do a bunch of stuff that we grew up with that influenced us, which was a lot of Beatles and British invasion stuff.”
The Vinyl Kings
(Credit: Peter Rodman)
Their first gig was at Nashville’s famous Bluebird Café. It was so successful that they began playing regular gigs there and at other clubs and music industry events around town. By 2000, the band evolved from playing covers to writing their own songs. In 2002, the Vinyl Kings released A Little Trip, a 13-track collection of Beatles-inspired songs, complete with jangly, George Harrison-style guitar and Lennon-McCartney harmonies. The group released its second album, Time Machine—more Beach Boys than Beatles—in 2005. After Lee moved back to his hometown of Springfield around 2008, the band broke up, though they stayed in touch over the years.
When Leo’s wife, Renee LaRose Leo, died of pancreatic cancer in 2021, bandmate Photoglo wrote a song about her death, which inspired the Vinyl Kings to start playing together again.
“I’d drive down to Nashville…I probably went down there four or five times a week and sat with everybody and wrote songs,” says Lee. “Then we started recording stuff. “Smoke Rings for Renee” was the first single that we put out.”
Lee recalls how exciting it was getting back together with his old bandmates after 16 years. “It was like a reunion in some ways,” says Lee. “I’m living in Missouri and all those guys are still in Tennessee. So it was like being able to socialize and get together and see families and talk about old times.”
The five friends, inspired to make more music together, released a new single every month from January to June of 2023. Eventually, they decided they might as well make another album. But with Lee living seven hours away and other band members touring on a regular basis, it was no easy task.
“It is just really hard for us to get together, to find little windows of four or five days where everybody can get together and not take away time from family and stuff like that,” says Lee. “It was just hard to do. So we got a lot done in very short periods of time. It took us almost two years to finish this because of everybody being gone.
The hard work, however, paid off.
Earlier this year, the band released its third album, Big New Life, an album about love, loss, and nostalgia.
As Lee and I reminisce about his career and how the music of his youth helped define the sound of his passion project, the Vinyl Kings, I ask him about meeting legendary music producer and recording engineer Glyn Johns for the first time. “That was mind-blowing,” he says.
As Lee tells it, the Daredevils were being shopped around to major labels. A&M was the most interested, so staff producer David Anderle and Johns flew into Kansas City to see the group perform at the Cowtown Ballroom on March 10, 1973.
“We were nervous as hell,” Lee says. “I mean, this is Glyn Johns. He’s worked with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and we were still trying to figure out what it is we were. We hadn’t really been together all that long. So we played, and I think we were probably nervous and didn’t play very well.”
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils – R: Buddy Brayfield, John Dillon, Larry Lee, ‘Supe’, Randle Chowning, Steve Cash (Credit: Charlie Gillett/Redferns)
After the show, Johns and Anderle followed the band up to their dressing room and laid it out for them as plainly as he could—he didn’t see anything special about them. But after the band’s manager, Stan Plesser, told him that the fellas were nervous, he offered to take John and Anderle back to his office to let them hear the band the way he had first heard them—sitting around casually on acoustic guitars. “So, we went up to his office, it’s like 11 o’clock, midnight, and we started playing,” says Lee. “And we only played like one or two songs. and he [Johns] had a big grin on his face, and he said, ‘Listen, I want you to play some more of your songs but I’ll tell you right now, I wanna do this.’”
When Lee first played “Jackie Blue” for Johns on the piano, he didn’t intend it to be for the Daredevils. But Johns knew they had a hit song on their hands. The song needed a little polishing. “He made ‘Jackie Blue’ be ‘Jackie Blue.’ He had me change the lyrics for it because it was about something else. And he was right…made it a lot more commercial. And if you listen to that Daredevils record, ‘Jackie Blue’ is so unlike all the other songs on that album…a lot more pop, a lot more slick. But he got us on the radio.”
About a year ago, Lee sent Johns—the man behind much of the music that inspired Lee to play music in the first place—an email after not talking to him in years. “I just said, ‘Look, you’ll never know how you influenced me as far as my music, what I write, how I perform,’” Lee tells me. “‘I can’t thank you enough for that.’”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.