You can make your living doing this.'”īut Baird has done more than coast on a one-hit-wonder. As I’m walking the last half mile to my house, I’m going, ‘I got the thing done.’ I come in and my wife says, ‘Hello,’ and I just hold out a hand and started writing. ![]() You’re on to something.’ It basically wrote itself on the bus ride home. “I thought of the yodel part as I was passing out, and I thought, ‘You better wake up. With a head full of Carl Perkins licks and four dollars in change in his pocket - “Yes, that dumb,” he says of writing the opening lyric, “ I got a little change in my pocket/going jing-a-ling-a-ling” - Baird began to fall asleep. He penned the chugging ode to a greasy spoon “Dunk ‘n’ Dine,” off the Satellites’ 1988 Open All Night, the same day as “Hands” (“That was a good day,” he says), and has had fun recounting tales of hard-luck lovers and unplanned pregnancies in songs like “Julie and Lucky” and “Knocked Up,” both on his 1992 solo debut Love Songs for the Hearing Impaired.Īs Baird vividly remembers it, the song was born on the bus, riding back from his construction job. “It’s like, ‘Here it is, we’re going to hang it out there and be kicking your ass for the next three minutes.'”īaird has always excelled at deceptively simple songwriting, both with the Georgia Satellites, whom he departed in 1991, and as a solo artist. “It’s got a lot of soul to it, but it’s straight-ahead. Stapleton says the appeal of “Hands” lies in its simplicity. It’s a perfect American rock & roll song.” ![]() ![]() “I played that song a million times in a bar,” says Moore of “Hands.” “It’s one of those songs that instantly, from the time you kick it off, people go nuts. In fact, elements of that riff and “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” are discernible in country songs from the Nineties to the 2000s: Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl,” Travis Tritt’s “Put Some Drive in Your Country,” Jason Aldean’s “Hicktown” and Justin Moore’s “Point at You,” among them. “That revved-up Chuck Berry riff - that runka, runka - has been utilized even in country music. I instantly connected with it and I always have,” says Charlie Starr, singer for Southern-rock torchbearers Blackberry Smoke, who recently shared a stage on the Outlaw Cruise with Baird. “I remember seeing the video on MTV and it instantly hit home. in ’87, John Anderson in ’94 and Sawyer Brown in ’05. ![]() Eventually, country artists from every decade would record versions: Hank Williams Jr. A Nashville resident since 1989, he recalls incredulously how some country radio stations began spinning “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” during the song’s surge. The death of Ronnie Van Zant left such a gaping hole that could fit in Jason and the Scorchers, the Kentucky Headhunters, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and us,” says Baird, rattling off Satellites’ peers who also found a country audience.īaird is seated in a booth at an East Nashville club, sipping soda water prior to a hometown tour stop with his band Homemade Sin, who released the ferocious new album Get Loud in November. “We were a rock & roll band that the NASCAR people picked up on. While “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” isn’t directly responsible for any country-to-rock sea change, the song’s popularity did fill a void in the genre and helped reconnect it with its Southern-rock lineage. Indeed, those loud guitars are now all over modern country, with pedal steel and fiddle replaced by Fenders and Marshall amps.
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