INTERVIEW: Joe Galante Shares His Rise as a Songwriter

I had started at RCA in 1971 and kind of rose through the ranks pretty quickly, and wound up going from finance to marketing. I was a product manager and was really getting into the rock pop side. One day the president of the company called and said, “We’d like you to go to Nashville.” I said, “Okay, I’ll go to Nashville.” They said, “No, we want you to live there.” And I said, “What the f**k are you talking about? I’m the New Yorker. I’m a rock and roller. What do you… I mean, what? Country-western? What? No, no, no, no, no, no.”

You’re wrong more than you are right, and you are wrong by a lot. I mean, I sat there one day and said, I showed the staff, I said, “Okay, so here are my last 10 years of signings,” and you go miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, gold record single, all that kind of stuff. But here are the wins, and the wins, when you are able to get the right wins, offset everything. The Kenny Chesney’s of the world, the Brooks & Dunns.

I went to the studio to hear him [Waylon Jennings] recording and I was just blown away. I didn’t know anything about his music and I’m just sitting there going, “Now this I like.” And then the next one was Milsap and the one after that was Dolly and then there was Charlie Pride and Jerry Reed. And I started going, “Okay, I get the thread here. I can see where this is working. Okay.” And the music, for the most part, spoke to me. There was some of the music that, I just, “Okay, not my thing.” But, you start understanding the art of songwriting in the town. And I got to meet the people and understand how the stories were built and told. I’d said, “I’m not going back. I’m here. Let’s rock on.”

We met with them and did a production deal, signed them immediately for some stupid amount of money, like $40,000 advance. And made a seven album deal and immediately went to work. And we started doing rock club tours with the boys. And by the end of six months, we had multiple records going up on radio. The album had gone gold and finally got to the point where we were platinum. And after that point, then it was mountain music and you didn’t have about a damn thing. They were born entertainers, their harmony, they were a bar band. They played every goddamn song known to man. They could do anything on stage.

Keith was one of those guys, again, up and down, up and down. And we were just starting to get him on the roll when he overdosed. And that was a really hard time because he was one of those guys, he introduced me to Lorrie Morgan. We signed Lorrie. They were the next George and Tammy. That last album where Keith had passed and we had just finished. I remember driving down Broadway and listening to that and just pulling over several times and crying because it was just, he had finally made it. That was one of the best country albums ever.

Dale called, Daniel Joe? Dale. He said, “I have this boy, Kenny Chesney.” Who, “Kenny Chesney.” Dale, is he on the charts? Because, I haven’t seen his name anywhere. He says, “Yeah, he was on there for a moment. Well, he’s on Capricorn. And I think we could buy his record out.” I said, “well, can you send me the music”? So obviously he FedEx the album. I listen because it’s a final record. I listened to the album and I called him back the next day. And I said, “I looked at our roster. We don’t have anybody like him. I mean this kid is country.” And he said, “well, I think we can do what we do at Alabama.” I said, “okay, well I’m willing to give it a try here.” So of course we made the deal. We put the first couple of records out and we had moderate success. The thing about Kenny was we’d have a hit. We’d have a miss, we’d have a hit, we’d have a miss. But each time we did the sales increase, we went from 250 to 500,000 to 600,000 to 750.