Dancehall Doctors

I grew up in Kansas, got an old Sears guitar when I was eight, and started playing in bands in my early teens – country, ‘50s rock’n’roll, southern rock, a little of everything. Eventually a drummer friend talked me into coming down to Nashville for awhile to check things out. I came down here in 1982, did a couple of little session things and moved to Nashville permanently in ’83.

It was pretty tight for awhile, working day jobs, doing construction and whatever I had to do to get by. I ended up landing a house gig at this hotel lounge and played there for three and a half years. I met Tim in ’89; he’d just moved to Nashville and didn’t have much going on. I was playing another house gig over at a place called Sissy’s and also was playing down in Printers Alley at this club called Skull’s Rainbow Room. Tim used to hang out down there all the time and he asked me if I wanted to go play for three or four days in a club up in Delaware.

I grew up in Florida in a musical family. I started playing clarinet in fourth grade, and I hated it because the Beatles and Monkees had just come out and I wanted to play guitar. So I got an acoustic guitar, picked up a Mel Bay book, and started banging out chords.

When I was in the sixth or seventh grade, I hooked up with some kids down the street who had a little garage band; they already had a guitar player, a drummer, and a keyboard player, so I picked up a bass for, like, fifty bucks and it was love instantly. I got really serious about bass, listening to guys like Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius and playing rock ‘n’ roll and jazz. My older brothers were into some pretty weird stuff and knew a lot of serious jazz guys, and they were a pretty big influence on me. In the middle ‘70s, I joined a rock band called Fantasy that had been signed and had had a hit record and were trying to regain their former glory, and it just came to the point where I hated rock ‘n’ roll and didn’t want to play it anymore.

I’d always sworn that I would never play country music, but I met these bluegrass guys who played like nothing I had ever heard in my life and I said, “OK, this is cool.” I also played in Tanya Tucker’s band for awhile. Then a friend of mine said he knew this guy named Tim who needed a bass player, so I went and did a couple of things with him. He said, “We’re not gonna rehearse, let’s just go out and wing it.” And I said, “This is for me.”

I grew up in Missouri and started playing banjo when I was five. My first professional gig was playing at the opening of a carpet store when I was ten, and I played bluegrass banjo and electric guitar through high school.

In the late ‘80s I was doing forty weeks a year playing Holiday Inns and country saloons with a band that included a drummer named Randy Davis, whose dad, Gene Davis, is a really big West Coast country music pioneer. Around 1990, Randy left the band to move to Nashville; a few months later my wife and I visited Nashville for a few days and stayed with Randy and his roommate, who was Tim. Tim was just pluggin’ around town; he didn’t even have a demo yet, but he definitely had the charisma. My wife said, “If that guy ever does anything, he’ll be a star.” He definitely had the charisma back then.

We came off the road when my wife had our first son, and Tim was calling me asking me to do these club dates with him and Randy, but I’d already committed to a day job retreading tires, so I stuck with that. That’s when Tim found Darran and hired him. I didn’t enjoy retreading tires much, and one day I flipped on CMT and saw Tim’s first video, “Welcome to the Club.” So I called him and told him that I also played acoustic, and he hired me.

I grew up in Gainesville, Texas, playing piano and stuff in school. It was a small town and I didn’t know guitar players and people like that; the people that I knew were all in a band or choir in school. I went to Baylor University and I wound up playing in my first country band with a couple of college buddies, Brett Beavers and Deryl Dodd, who later moved to Nashville and had their songs cut by Tim.

When that band broke up I moved to Nashville and worked with a guy named Butch Baker, then with a group called Canyon for about a year and then I started doing some showcase work for some writers that worked for Byron Gallimore’s publishing company, which is how I met Tim. Byron was one of the people that recommended me to Tim. I auditioned for Tim and started playing with him in March of ’93. When he hired me I think it was as much for the fact that I’m real physical on stage as it was for my playing.

The day Tim hired me, he was at Deryl Dodd’s birthday party and ran into a guy that I had worked for before, and this guy told Tim, “Man, I don’t know if you want to hire that McMahon guy because he’s really flashy onstage and he’ll just try to steal the spotlight.” And Tim told me he thought that that was a great reason to hire me.

I grew up in Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, about twenty-five minutes north of the Mexican border. I started playing classical violin when I was eight years old, and started playing country in my early teens. I moved to Nashville in 1992 and kicked around for a while, playing talent contests and working in retail to keep myself going.

I actually met Tim through a mutual friend before I moved to Nashville, while I was visiting. He’d been in town for a week or two, playing around town doing open mikes, and we just hit it off. Back then, Tim was new in Nashville and nothing was really happening for him. But he had this confidence that made you feel like he knew it was going to work out, that everything was going to be cool.

We’d sit in his little apartment for hours playing video games or watching movies. He’d call me up and say, “Hey, what are you doin’?” “Nothing.” “Well, come on over, and bring a fire log.” His deal was always to bring a fire log, because sometimes there was no heat. It seemed like he didn’t worry about day-to-day things like paying the electric bill, because he just felt like things were going to work out. But he’d give anybody his last five dollars if he knew they needed it or if anybody came to ask him. He was a very shy, humble kind of a guy, but when he’d get on stage, he just came alive; it was like a different person.

I was born in Cleveland and grew up in Los Angeles. Before Tim, I’d played with a pretty diverse bunch of artists, including Jo-El Sonnier, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Paulette Carlson, which is where I met Denny. Paulette took some time off and I was doing this club date with another artist and Darran was in the band, and he told me he was working with this new guy, Tim McGraw, and that they needed a drummer. We all met at Byron’s studio and Tim heard me play and hired me. I figured I’d do the gig for a few months, and I’ve been here for fourteen years now.

I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, and when I got out of school I moved up to Minneapolis and played in local bands up there for a few years. Then I moved to Honolulu because it’s way too cold in Minneapolis, and I played in clubs for tourists and stuff, playing whatever I had to play to get a gig.

Eventually, I realized that I needed to get to a major music city to progress, so I moved to Nashville and did some clubs and sessions and stuff. The first touring gig I got was with Paulette Carlson, who had been the lead singer for Highway 101; Billy Mason was in that band, too. I did that for awhile, until the opportunity to join Tim’s band arose, and I’ve been here ever since.

I started out doing the bar scene in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, and writing and trying to send stuff to Nashville. I packed up and moved to Nashville in ’87, went back home to lick my wounds in ’88, came back again in ’92, and went back home again a year later.

I was back in Charleston in ’95 and playing drums in a rock band and I got a call from our sound man, John Ward, who’s also West Virginia. He knew I knew how to tune a drum set and make it sound good, so he called to see if I wanted to be a drum tech with Tim for a couple of weeks, and after that I never went back home.

After I’d been on the crew for about a year, I started playing percussion on a few songs during the show, which meant that I’d be tech-ing for Billy through the show, then change my shirt, push the congas out from under the drum riser and play them on the song, then push them back underneath, change my clothes, and take the drums and pack them up. Then Tim started talking about adding a full-time percussionist, and Darran says, “You’ve already got someone capable working for you.” So one day Tim just walked by me in the hallway and said, “I want you to order up everything you need so you can start playing in the band full time.” My first full-time gig with the band was at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, which was a little intimidating.