INTERVIEW: Vince Gill on His Start in Country Music

I always had a guitar that I was banging on when I was a baby and my parents got me a great guitar when I was 10. I played my dad’s guitars up to that point, and I went over at school and they let me play the House of the Rising Sun for the third grade or second grade, something like that. I knew the die was cast. I was already singing songs about cat houses and stuff.

Once somebody said they would pay me a little bit of money to play music. And I think I was 15 years old. I said, “I’m doing this.” My mind was made up. If I can get somebody to give me a little bit of money to play music, I said, “This is a game over.”

The funny thing is I felt very successful even in the mid 70s being in a band with Ricky Skaggs when I’m 18. I said, “That for playing bluegrass, how are you going to get any better than this guy?” You’re not, this the best of the best. And this feels great because I’m mixing it up with the best of the best. And so each move that happened was never too much about a financial thing, but how am I going to get better?

Man, I don’t know what it was about ‘When I Call Your Name’ that struck a nerve like it did. But, man, when it first got going, it was so different of a response than any record I’d ever put out. And people say, “What was it about When I Call Your Name that was so special?” And I say, well, it was three things. It was Barry Beckett’s piano intro. You know? He played that and your record is defined. There’s the definition of what song is about to happen. I was defined before I ever started singing because of how brilliant that intro was. You know? I think it was just how lonesome it was, how melancholy it was. And then, let’s look at that logically in 1989, 1990 and say a four minute and 40 second waltz is going to do good on country radio. You know? You wouldn’t think that was going to happen. You know? So I was really grateful that something that traditional and that mournful and melancholy and just so deeply traditional, I’m glad that was the song that blew everything out of the water rather than something kind of up tempo-ey and fun, and frolicky, and whatever. You know? This has had legs now for 32 years. You know? And grateful for that.

And then the thing that made that song special were the solos that Barry played, and Paul Franklin played. Paul played the solo on the record, and I called him afterwards and I said, “Man, would you mind coming back and replaying the solo?” He got mad at me. He goes, “No, I like what I played.” I said, “Well, I do too, but I really want the instrument to do kind of used to do, where it really cried and it moaned and it was everything they try to get you not to do now, that’s what I really like to hear.” He came back, and then played this just iconic solo, that’s one of those solos like “Together Again” by Tom Bromley, but Paul, afterwards, after it was a hit, he pulled me aside and said, “I really appreciate you asking me to come and replay that solo.” After all that, then you put Patty Loveless’s voice on top and all of a sudden, it turned that song completely on. It was recorded, I’d sung it. Nobody was saying anything about that song, whether they thought much of it or it could be a single or whatever, and then Patty got on there and everybody went, okay, now we got something.

After I’d signed MCA, Tony Brown called me on Friday and we were going to start that record on a Monday. And he called me and he said, “I can’t believe I’m calling you and telling you this,” I said, “but I’m leaving the company. And Dave told me that they’re going to bring Jimmy Bowen back to run the label, and I’m not going to stay here if he comes back. So I’m going to go to New York and I’m going to say, ‘Hey, it’s him or me, which way do you want to roll?” And then I found out later that when Bowen called Tony and said, “I’m coming back to run the label,” he said, “and the first thing I’m doing is dropping Vince Gill.” He said that, “You couldn’t have made a dumber signing.” He didn’t care for me being a high singer and this and that. He said, “You knew better than to sign somebody like that. That was big mistake you made.” So Tony went and had the big power play meeting with Al Teller at the record company, and Al decided to roll with Tony. Had that gone the other way, I would’ve never gone into the studio and make, “When I Call Your Name.” So who knows, would I have had the next 10 or 15 years of a career that I did had those things not been in place?

There had to be an element of my musicianship that was part of my career as well. You know? But I was also wise enough to know that that’s not what I was going to lead with. I knew that the singing was going to be the thing that people would respond to always. You know? There’s tons of tons of hotshot guitar players. And I didn’t shove my guitar playing down people’s throat. You know? I just wanted to discover that I could play too.

I get a call from Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and he said, “Hey, I’m going on a world tour. I want to see if you’d come and join the band.” It would’ve solved all of the financial problems I had, and I thought about it and I adored the way he played, and thought about it and thought about it. And then I told myself, I said, “Man, if, if you do that, it’ll be like throwing in the towel. You’ve worked so hard to try to be a country artist of some validity,” and if you do that, in my mind, it meant admitting failure and that wasn’t much of an option for me. So I called him and I said, “Look, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to say no just because I think I have something to offer country music.” And I hadn’t recorded ‘When I Call Your Name,’ I don’t think. It wasn’t a hit. I didn’t have it in my back pocket, nothing like that. I said, “Look, Mark, if I don’t believe in me, nobody else will. How can I expect somebody else to if I don’t? So I’m sadly going to turn this down.” Then it turned around and ‘When I Call Your Name’ changed everything.

That was my dream as a kid. I didn’t have a hairbrush in the mirror trying to be Elvis and hunching around and doing all that. I had my head down trying to learn how to play the guitar. And I read the back of record jackets. I wanted to be one of those guys to get called to play on somebody’s record.

When you look back at my life and my career being musical, that’ll be the one song that I’m remembered for. And it carries more weight in that people went to that song when they really were hurting, when they’re struggling and going through the hardest part of their life, not the best part of their life. When you lose somebody that you love and you go, you want comfort, you need to feed that melancholy thing that you’re going through. And I had no idea I was even going to do any of that. I wasn’t even going to record it. And Tony [Brown] heard it and he says, “You got to record that song.” I said, “Boy, it’s pretty sad, pretty tough.” And he said, “No, you really need to.” And that was so to me, because it was written about my brother’s passing. All that stuff was part of it. But he didn’t know that 28 years later it was going to wind up having the impact that it’s had on people. Not too long ago, about a year so ago, as I listened to that song, it always felt incomplete and I didn’t feel like the song, as a songwriter, buttoned up and ended and finished the story. It told a nice story, but it never finished it. And so I wrote a third verse and I haven’t recorded it yet, but I’d like to, just to have a version out there with the third verse. The third verse is, “You’re safely home. In the arms of Jesus, eternal life my brother’s found. The day will come I know I’ll see him in that sacred place on that holy ground.” And so I finally felt like, Rodney [Crowell] told me, he said, “Man, that was the right thing to do.” He said, “You were right. And then how you finished it is exactly what it needs to be.” So maybe at some point people will discover that last verse and have it be a part of it too, but that song has been… I think what I’m proudest of, it’s been a gift for everybody else, more so than me. And that’s a great feeling.