Mike Curb joins I Miss…90s Country Radio for an interview with Nick Hoffman to talk about Curb Records, Tim McGraw, LeeAnn Rimes and more. Tune in and listen to the full interview with Mike Curb at 8am PST / 10am CST / 11am EST or anytime on-demand on Apple Music Country at apple.co/_IMissRadio
Mike Curb on the band Sawyer Brown
He [the label president] said, “Mike, turn on your TV.” So I did, and I heard them play. He said, “This is the next Bachman-Turner.” I thought, wow, we’ve got a… This could be our rock and roll band. We had had big hit with Exile, so we were looking for a rock and roll group in California in the ’80s that could be a visual group. And so we went into a co-venture with Capitol, who was our distributor, and we tried to promote them as pop.
Mike Curb on Sawyer Brown and taking Curb Records to Nashville
Something wasn’t working out… Capitol, I think, signed another group, and they started working on other bands, and Mark [Miller] and his manager were unhappy, and they said, “Hey, why doesn’t Curb just move to Nashville and do it?” I said, “You know something? I just might.” I said, “If I can get my daughters in school in August of ’92, we’ll move there,” and we moved, and we moved, and we moved with the intent of taking “Some Girls Do” by Sawyer Brown number one.
Mike Curb on Curb Record’s early success
We just didn’t change. We came in from California and we didn’t think we could compete. I didn’t even really know what the CMA was, that in California the CMA was the California Medical Association, and it was huge. It was the biggest one, but that wasn’t significant to us, we were just doing our thing and Country appeared to be ready for it.
Mike Curb on Tim McGraw
The album didn’t hit, and we put out five or six singles and we couldn’t get a hit. But we knew he was great, because when you hear him live, he had that Southern rock thing going. He could do the ballads with a lot of emotion, but he could also do that Southern rock thing.
Mike Curb on LeeAnn Rimes
My secretary always gave me a box with my mail for the week. And it had in there any music that was submitted, and there was some music submitted by a 13-year-old girl. I didn’t even know her name. It was in the box. And then we were on that drive. My daughters were in the backseat, and my daughters were about 13, 13 and 12 at the time. So I said, “Hey, they submitted a 13-year-old girl. Would you like to hear that?” And they said, “No, we want to hear our music.” I said, “Well, let’s see what she sounded like.” So we put it on. It was a demo of “Blue,” but it sounded so mature. So I said, “You know something? This probably isn’t her because there’s no way that a 13-year-old girl sounds like this. No way that anybody could be 13 and sing like that.”
Mike Curb on LeeAnn Rimes releasing her version of “How Do I Live”
We were really perplexed about what to do, because it was obvious that they had us at country radio. And so, we started saying, “Well, maybe we should release it pop.” So, I flew to Los Angeles and met with our pop people, and we laid out a plan to take the record to pop. And, it exploded.
