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Please consider writing about Charlie Monk on Sirius XM The Mayor of Music Row The life and times of Charlie Monk, country music industry veteran

JIM BESSMAN FEB 20, 2003 4 AM 3  Tweet  Share You know you’ve made it in the country music business when you’ve been mocked by Charlie Monk, and for the hundreds of country radio executives congregating in town for the 34th annual Country Radio Seminar this week, their time may be now. One of Music Row’s true characters, Charlie Monk is not only one of the founders of the Country Radio Seminar, or CRS. He’s also the fearsome host of the New Faces Show, the seminar’s grand finale, which has helped launch the careers of Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Dixie Chicks, Vince Gill, Reba McEntire, George Strait and Travis Tritt, to name just a few. (Monk wanted to yank New Face Dwight Yoakam off the stage one year, but that’s another story.)

Even more than the artists, seminar attendees anxiously await Monk’s monologue and between-acts patter in hope of being recognized—though they always listen with some trepidation too. Sort of like an anti-venomous Don Rickles at a huge Friars Club roast, Monk’s deep insider humor can still bite: One year he joked that the difference between Elvis and veteran country broadcaster Ralph Emery was that there was a good possibility Elvis was still alive.

Another memorable jibe came at the expense of retired label mogul Jimmy Bowen, the controversial former head of Capitol Nashville. “I said that Bowen was to country music what Saddam Hussein was to world peace,” Monk recalls, confessing that he’s offended at least a couple people with his one-liners—although he can’t remember their names anymore. First-time victims, though, get slapped on the back by their already made peers; being mocked by Monk means they’ve arrived.

Monk himself arrived in Nashville long ago—in 1968. He was already a well established radio guy when he came to Music City, and in short order he would put his remarkable people skills to good use for a then inconsequential country radio industry by helping found CRS. But Monk has long since been a major player in the less flashy but fundamentally more important world of music publishing—a man known for his vision, humor and unflagging good will in a business that’s often lacking in such qualities. On Jan. 1, he celebrated the 20th anniversary of Monk Family Music Group, the family-owned and -operated independent publishing company that’s had a big hand in discovering and developing such country writer-artists as Randy Travis, Keith Stegall, Holly Dunn, Victoria Shaw and Aaron Tippin. (Monk passed on Billy Ray Cyrus and Shania Twain, but again, that’s another story.)

“Look at the people who started with him,” says Shaw, who went on to write “The River” for Garth Brooks and “Nobody Wants to be Lonely” for Ricky Martin and Christine Aguilera, and is now a recording artist in her own right. “Obviously, he’s a talent magnet.”

Or, as Monk merrily puts it, “I’m a showbiz groupie who likes to hang around talented people and feed off their energy.” That he’s been doing it so long—and so well—is manifested by his moniker, “Honorary Mayor of Music Row.” Indeed, the ubiquitous Monk, who was born in Noma, Fla., and raised across the state line in Geneva, Ala., has all the schmooze sense of a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. And like all great music industry schmoozers, he’s got an office Wall of Fame—make that Walls of Fame—to prove it.

At Monk Family Music Group’s headquarters on 17th Avenue South, the walls are plastered with pictures of Monk and country stars and executives from the ’70s and ’80s on into the 21st century. Despite the continually changing hair and fashion styles, the photos invariably show an always affable Monk with a disarmingly bright-eyed smile akin to that of Jim Nabors—minus the Gomer “Gol-lee” naïveté.

Nowadays, you’ll find him a still smiling, still youthful 64, more often than not wearing a blue-and-red Southwestern-style jacket that his daughter Capucine picked out for him in Sedona, Ariz.

Capucine is the Monk Family Music Group’s West Coast rep. While he prefers to avoid formal titles, Monk will claim the company’s presidency while ceding ownership to his wife Royce. Their son Collin, formerly leader of several incarnations of a rock band called Rev. Collin Wade Monk and Bongo Fury, is “vice president in charge of stacking up everything I don’t want to do,” while granddaughter McKenna, now 7, is CEO—that is, “cute entertainment officer.”

Monk himself was once ASCAP’s “Vice President of Hillbillies,” he says, quickly adding that this too is a joke. In truth, he began his career in music publishing at the performing rights society as a writer/publisher rep, “basically a street guy,” he says. It was 1970, and he had gotten the job because he knew everybody—even though he’d only been in town two years.

When Monk moved to Nashville, he was still in radio. He began by sweeping floors at WGEA in Geneva, Ala., before launching his on-air career there. “I started in radio in 1956, when rock ’n’ roll was invented,” he says. “I grew up in rock ’n’ roll and played rock ’n’ roll on the radio for years, but most of those guys in the early rock ’n’ roll days were Tennessee guys: Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley. They were centered in Memphis, but I found out that a lot of the songs they did were country songs that were written by country songwriters or themselves. There wasn’t a job for me in Memphis or I might have gone there.”

By 1968, Monk had crossed over to country and was the program director for the top country station in Mobile. “I knew a lot of the music business people in Nashville, because I’d been coming to the Disc Jockey Convention since 1957 and they would promote their records to me,” he continues. One key music businessperson he knew was Mary Reeves, the widow of superstar Jim Reeves, who had bought a country station in Murfreesboro.

“People forget that WSM wasn’t a [full-time] country station then, that it’s only been one the last 20 years or so,” says Monk. “They played pop during the day, and from midnight to 6 [a.m.], it was Ralph Emery playing country. There was a little country station in Gallatin, WENO, but it was low-watted, so Mary bought WMTS in Murfreesboro.

“Everybody knew I had the top country station in Mobile, but she talked me into coming up here,” Monk continues. “I was offered a job in Shreveport at the same time and went there, but my wife and I really liked this area and thought it was a great place to raise children. So I took a salary cut and did an afternoon radio show [across from ASCAP called], ‘The Charlie Monk Music Row Show.’ ”

The show mixed the current country playlist with interviews with “everybody—Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Minnie Pearl, you name it. People walked in off the street and brought in acetates of their new songs, and that’s how I got to know everybody. And we talked about the music business, so it was kind of a magazine show for artists, managers, producers and record company executives.”

Monk, however, always took a special interest in songs and songwriters. “When I came to Nashville, I had the desire to write and thought I had talent,” he says, “but I soon started telling everybody I had wit, charm, good looks and everything but talent.” Monk enjoyed some success as a songwriter, going on to co-write with the likes of Keith Stegall, Jim McBride and Angelo Badalamenti of Twin Peaks fame (with whom Monk co-wrote “Nashville Beer Garden”). He also had his songs cut by Charley Pride, Eddy Arnold and Pat Boone, but before long recognized that “too many people were more talented, so it became my job to nurture them.”

Knowing everybody, Monk naturally found out right away when the job came open at ASCAP. “I went to work there signing writers and publishers, and then CBS hired me to open their office here after I’d been at ASCAP for seven years,” he says. “It was a natural step for me to go into the publishing business from ASCAP because I knew all the writers and publishers.”

But Monk knew something else that would prove equally important to writers, publishers and the rest of Music Row: He knew how to have a good time. “This was the time in Nashville when people were starting to really make more money than they ever imagined—and didn’t really know why, because they were just good musicians,” says Monk’s son Collin, now 38.

“I remember going to ASCAP as a kid and realizing there was something strange going on, like everyone gathering around one of those mechanical hockey games on the boardroom table and playing and drinking. It was long before Jerry Foster and Bill Rice sat down to write songs together there, and it was the place to hang out because the bars didn’t open until 2 p.m.”

Even though he was only a child at the time, Collin remembers a lost era when Music Row was run by a clique of crazies who’ve long since cleaned up or checked out. “Glenn Sutton was a ringleader,” he says, recalling the story about the grand opening of the guitar-shaped swimming pool on Music Row, a replica of the one Webb Pierce had built at his home on Curtiswood Lane. “Everyone was there, and the news media was interviewing Webb and this limo pulls up, and out jumps a guy in a one-piece bathing suit and Creature From the Black Lagoon mask and jumps around in the pool and then drives off again. Sutton never fessed up to it—but he wasn’t there otherwise.”

Hanging out drinking and partying was a major part of songwriting back then, remembers Collin. “Bobby Braddock and all those guys would sit in a room and try to one-up each other with songs, and Charlie was there to encourage them. One time, when he was at CBS, they rented out the Spence Manor for a party during CMA Week, I think, and James Galway, the flute player, was staying there. It was the rock ’n’ roll hotel, but Galway complained about the parties, so Charlie had him thrown out.”

CBS Records hired Monk in 1977 to open its April-Blackwood Music publishing office in Nashville, where he signed such writers as Stegall, Roger Murrah, Jim McBride, Stewart Harris, Holly Dunn, Chris Waters, Jerry Foster and Bill Rice. “Again, it was all shuck and jive,” says Collin, “because he didn’t really know publishing all that well—but he knew everybody, and that was the biggest thing at the time. They told him to get into the business, so in one day he spent $950,000 signing up Foster and Rice, Larry Butler and Dottie West. He says he couldn’t find anyone else to give $50,000 to, to make it an even million. But he made it all back with a couple $200-a-week songwriters, Keith Stegall and Chris Waters.”

April-Blackwood soon changed its name to CBS Songs, with Monk and Stegall immediately cashing in with both Al Jarreau’s pop smash “We’re in This Love Together,” which Stegall wrote with Murrah, and Moe Bandy’s country hit “Let’s Get Over Them Together,” which Stegall wrote with Charlie Craig.

Having hits in such diverse formats demonstrates Monk’s fondness for all kinds of music—but he never was much for the corporate life. Leaving CBS Songs on solid footing, he split to start his own company, Monk Family Music Group, in 1983. Among his signees were Stegall, Brent Mason and “a little guy by the name of Randy Travis.” Having been raised on Southern gospel music—and having worked with the genre’s legendary Bill Gaither during his ASCAP stint—Monk also formed a Christian music partnership, Lorenz Creative Services, where he worked with such contemporary Christian mainstays as Steven Curtis Chapman and Sandi Patti.

The lone drawback, of course, was that the corporate expense account was gone, thus severely reducing the alcohol intake. But when Opryland Music Group acquired Acuff-Rose Music Publishing, Monk was sought to help head its creative department. He didn’t close Monk Family Music Group, but he did let its writers go during his six years at Opryland. Among his top signings there was “a little kid who came in and sang ‘The Tin Man’ named Kenny Chesney.” In 1990, Opryland Music Group became the first publisher to have the most performed songs of the year at both ASCAP (Reba McEntire’s version of the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown”) and BMI (George Strait’s “What’s Going on in Your World”).

It should probably be noted that the expense account returned, but as Collin Monk puts it, “The partying was left to a younger generation.”

Still, “I had a wonderful experience there,” relates Monk, senior. “Because as a disc jockey—as I had been earlier in my life—I had played all those great standards at Acuff-Rose like ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and ‘Please Help Me, I’m Falling,’ and the Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, Everly Brothers and Dallas Frazier catalogs that I knew extensively from being on radio.” But again, he found his ability to deal with corporate life lacking; in 1993, he departed to restart his own company.

Monk Family Music Group has stayed busy ever since. Named Publisher of the Year by SESAC in 1998, the company is the current home for such estimable writers as Philip Douglas, who wrote Aaron Tippin’s hit “Kiss This” with Tippin; Tony Marty, who co-wrote LeAnn Rimes’ “Commitment”; and Jennifer Sherrill, who teamed with Douglas and Marty to pen Lila McCann’s “Come a Little Closer.”

One early signee to Monk Family Music Group was Aaron Tippin, and Monk took Tippin with him when he went to Acuff-Rose. “He was the first guy to offer me a songwriter deal—and I have trouble forgetting things people have done for me,” says Tippin. “It might have only been, ‘I’ll give you a warm place in the winter to write and a cool place in the summer—and I get the first chance to turn anything down,’ but he got me signed to my first big publishing deal with Acuff-Rose—and he didn’t have to do it. He could have said, ‘Here’s where it ends, I’m selling my publishing company or it’s now defunct. See you.’ But he worked me in there and gave me the chance to write with even better writers, and finally I learned how to write a hit song.”

Tippin also credits Monk with being “very tolerant of my hillbilly-isms. I was such a redneck, and he put me with songwriters who weren’t just to torture them. He never lets me forget his favorite story about me from my days of ‘songwriting training,’ when I invented a word—‘climbward.’ I don’t know how in the world I came up with it, but the song had something to do with some guy who was climbing the ladder of success, ‘He can’t stop his climbward up to just wait on you...,’ and Charlie said, ‘Hold it! What is this?’ And I said, ‘Oh! English is obviously my forte!’ But he was always square with me and a major contributor in me being a hit songwriter.”

Victoria Shaw echoes Tippin’s remarks. “I was living in New York City and driving down to Nashville every two months or so, and the woman who managed me at the time was taking me to the different publishing companies,” she recalls. “Charlie was one of the first publishers I played my own stuff for, and he said, ‘If you ever want to try to write with the big boys, I’ll set you up with some people,’ and that’s definitely one of the reasons I took a chance on coming down [here].”

Although Shaw never actually signed with Monk Family Music Group, Monk gave her full office privileges. “He let me write there, make tape copies, phone calls. And using his name definitely got people to talk to me, and that’s how I got to meet Marcus Hummon back in the day, because he hung out in the same office. But there are so many people I met there when I was starting out who are now my oldest friends: Gary Overton, Steven Curtis Chapman, Jerry Salley, Keith Stegall. And there were many who were very big then whom he introduced me to, like Lisa Silver, and because of that they took a chance to write with me, which was a huge honor.”

This illustrates one of Monk’s specialties, Shaw explains: “He’s great at putting people together—and loves to do that.” Oddly enough, though, she never signed with Monk. “Maybe he was just watching me develop,” she wonders. “He had a few songs of mine and gave them back to me for a dollar—just to prove I legitimately bought them back. So he always dealt squarely with me and looked at me more like another daughter. He came to my wedding and to this day always checks in in a very fatherly way.”

Shaw’s story is hardly singular. Radio industry veteran Ed Salamon, who recently became the executive director of the Country Radio Broadcasters organization that presents the Country Radio Seminar, recounts his first CRS, and his not-so-chance encounter with Nashville’s chief goodwill ambassador.

“The first time I came to Nashville for CRS was in ’74, and when I went to check in at the airport Hilton, there was Charlie Monk standing at the front desk,” Salamon remembers. “He’d have his ear tilted to see who was registering, then take it upon himself to greet everyone by saying, ‘Welcome home.’ I guess I sort of took that to heart, and when I finally moved here earlier this year to become executive director of the Country Radio Broadcasters, I actually thought in my mind that I was completing that wish that Charlie Monk articulated for me so many years ago.”

The Country Radio Seminar evolved out of “DJ Week”—the week of radio activities during the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards show in October when country disc jockeys migrated to Nashville. But it was also a party-heavy period, and Monk and his fellow CRS founders conceived the seminar to take it away from the distractions of the CMAs and to focus, at least during the daytime panels and exhibits, on the business of country radio.

“Obviously, I think the seminar is significant to country radio and to the Nashville music business, and Charlie’s pretty significant to the seminar,” says Salamon. “He’s the only one who was around at the beginning who remains active with the board of directors. He functions as our conscience.... [He] makes sure we never stray too far away from the original ideals of the people who created the event.”

It could be argued that country radio, like the radio industry as a whole, has strayed well off course, and last year’s CRS was a pretty clear indicator. Panelists and attendees alike lobbed bombs at Clear Channel, the radio giant that was under fire for its immense programming power and its policy of charging the record companies a $35,000 fee to showcase acts at company summits prior to CRS. “What’s the difference between Enron and Clear Channel?” Monk asked at the New Faces show. “About six months.”

Responding the Clear Channel challenge, keynote speaker Larry Wilson, the president/CEO of Citadel Communications, earlier suggested that the radio industry should return to the time-honored, if “old-fashioned” practice of actually serving its listenership. But the programmers might just as well have harked back to the values espoused by the seminar’s founders.

“The original motto they came up with was ‘Growth Through Sharing,’ ” Salamon explains. “The idea [being] that in coming together and sharing the knowledge of what made each of us so successful—and in creating a face-to-face dialogue between the radio and music communities—everyone would learn and grow as a result. And that’s obviously what happened, because the format has gone from 600 country radio stations in 1969, when the first seminar was held, to well over 2,000 today. I doubt it would have happened, or at least would have happened to the degree it has, without CRS”—and, by extension, without Charlie Monk.

Music Row was “pretty wild and woolly back then,” says Connie Bradley, senior vice president at ASCAP’s Nashville office. “I was ASCAP’s first female membership rep when I got hired in 1976, and when Charlie found out, he said, ‘There’s no way that Connie Bradley can do that job,’ ” she recalls, laughing. “He said, ‘A woman can’t hang out at the bars with writers and drink and chase women and do all the things men do. It will not work. No way.’ When I heard that, I just laughed and said he was probably right, but I’ve been here 25 years now, so he was wrong. But he’s a very smart man with a great personality who makes you smile any time you see him. And he cares a lot about country music.”

But Monk is also a throwback of sorts, to a virtually forgotten time when Music Row was run by creative visionaries, and artists’ careers lasted generations. So how does the Mayor of Music Row assess Nashville now? “It’s still a very special place,” he says. “It has four distinct seasons, many, many cultures; it’s a financial center, an education center, a historical center, and did I say music center? And I’m a Methodist and it’s the home of the Methodist church.”

Of course, the town has grown a lot since 1968. “It was really small when I came here, with only a few companies that were pretty much locally owned and operated by a few local people. The record companies were all kind of one-man or two-man offices, and you could dine or play golf with Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley. Now it’s grown so dramatically that it’s like the Left Bank of Paris, with all the artists here.”

Regarding his lasting love of songs and song publishing, Monk likens Nashville to the legendary Brill Building era of pop music songwriting in New York in the 1950s and ’60s: “It’s the most concentrated area of talent of anywhere in the world,” says His Honor, The Mayor, and he, as well as anyone, knows what he’s talking about.

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