Previously on Murder on Music Row.
He was so just such an open person. Never met a stranger.
I don't know what made him go to Nashville. I think he'd just like the Belmont College.
I don't think they ever really recovered from Kevin Shine. And especially the way that he died.
We knew that Kevin would do the right thing.
I do think most of the radio guys at that point were on the up and up. But I know some of them were not.
I didn't want them to think that they could manipulate me. And I walked.
In front and opened the door and sat down and started to close the door. And I thought I caught something moving out of the corner of my eye, and I looked up and the guy standing over me, and I just saw his arms straight out, and I saw a gun. And I said, oh my God, this guy's got a gun. And I threw my arms up to cover my head. And that's when he shot. And they said, Kevin did like a barrel roll out into the street, running back up 16th Avenue. And all I heard was shots after that.
And old Hank wouldn't have a chance on today's radio since they committed murder down on Music Row.
Nashville cops loved the Longhorn, a local bar where they could unwind after a long shift. All these years later, it's called The Row. I actually had lunch there the other day. It's just off West End in Midtown. Larry Cordle used to hang there, too. He said there was a bartender at the Longhorn named Susie, and she was a real pistol. He said the place was always full
of songwriters and cops. After he finished writing and recording Murder on Music Row, Cordle went to the Longhorn one night and asked if any cop at the bar had some crime scene tape. Ape. Bingo. His writing partner, Larry Shell, wrapped up the demo with yellow police tape and drove a copy of Murder on Music Row to the Wkdf radio station, Music City 103 on your FM dial. Shell wanted to hand the song to the morning drive time personality Carl P Mayfield.
Larry makes up a gaudy package and takes it to the guy. Carl P Mayfield. Carl P Mayfield. Carl P is not there. But we left it in his. Larry did I guess in his inbox.
They waited and nothing. Then one day about a week later really early Caudle's phone rang.
And Kim Fox is friend of mine. She's from New York and she's a great songwriter and calls me at 6:00 in the morning and says, My God, they're playing that song. They played it 2 or 3 times already.
Cordle was in disbelief.
I don't listen to a lot of music, but I went and turned the radio on. Son of a of a gun. So Carl tells me later that he played it every 30 minutes.
Something was starting to happen. This is Murder on Music Row, an investigative podcast. I'm Keith Sharon. I work for The Tennessean in Nashville. On March 9th, 1989, a young man named Kevin Hughes was shot twice in the head in the middle of Music Row. In August of 2022, my editor handed me a flash drive full of police files, interrogation reports, coroner notes, crime scene photos and drawings, phone records and internal memos between Nashville police, the FBI and
law enforcement officials in other states. Somewhere along the way, I began to feel like it was our responsibility to tell the story that two bullets stopped Kevin Hughes from telling this is episode three. Chasing that neon rainbow. In whispered conversations around Music City. Some people believed they knew who fired the gun that killed Kevin Hughes and why they did it. But here's the thing the more people knew,
the more reason they had to be afraid. Independent music promoter Bill Wentz kept some firepower behind the door of his office.
But after the murder, I had a shotgun here, a 12 gauge, and I lived out here where I live now. I think everybody was pretty, pretty afraid of what went on.
That fear drove some people underground. They didn't tell everything they knew to police in the early days of the investigation. Bill Wentz was not one of those people. He knew Kevin Hughes. He played piano at Kevin's memorial service on Music Row on March 14th, 1989, five days after the murder. Detective Bill Pridemore went to Bill Wentz's office. The one with the shotgun.
I told him everything I knew. You know, I was well versed in on Music Row, and I would be down there at lunch every other day or so. And I just, I knew. I mean, at this date, I can't tell you, but I just knew.
The case bothered Wentz. Long after the police left his office in an alcohol inspired haze, Wentz called the guy he thought was the killer. The guy wasn't home.
I mean, it was really stupid back then. I drank a little bit and I mean, it just. I left a message on his voicemail, something I didn't know. Anybody could trace anything back then or. I don't know if they could, but I really, uh, thought it was 100%. He was involved, but I had no proof or anything.
What did you say on that voicemail?
I can't remember. I probably. We know you did it. Or some some stupid thing.
We know you did it. Or some stupid thing. Here's the problem. The story Bill Wentz told wasn't based on hard evidence. It was based on what he believed in his heart from his experience. No matter how accurate it seemed, Pridemore had no way of knowing if Bill Wentz was right or a million miles off. Pridemore couldn't make an arrest just because a promoter had a hunch. Sammie Sadler was born in Memphis August 23rd, 1966. It wasn't long before his family moved to Texas, where his father's from.
Jerry Sadler had a painting business that did very well. He was able to buy a 56 acre ranch and raise quarter horses that raced all over Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Sammy went to Leonard High School, played on the baseball team. He often says in interviews, he was so good. If he hadn't been bitten by the music bug, he could have played professional baseball. I couldn't find any references to Sammy's high school baseball career in the regional
newspapers I scanned. He was also in the marching band, playing symbols for about a week until he quit. His dream was much bigger than symbols in the marching band. Sammy had been singing along with the radio since he was three years old. Elvis songs. Johnny Cash. As a teenager, he had a couple of singing gigs with a band called Perfect Stranger. He sang at the Louisiana Hayride while
he was still in high school. Like so many other country music crazed kids, he had to get to Nashville in November of 1984, just after Sammy had turned 18. Jerry and his wife Juanita brought their son to Music City. The plan was for Juanita to live with Sammy until he got on his feet. Jerry rented a limousine on that first night, and they drove with all the possibilities
of Nashville's stardom floating in the cold night air. The limo driver, Ronnie Cummings, helped Sammy make a demo tape, which Jerry Sadler paid for, and the demo tape became Sammy's calling card. The limo driver also introduced Sammy to a couple of independent record producers. To put all this in context, this was the month Ronald Reagan was re-elected as president of the United States. The movie Nightmare on Elm Street premiered. The number one country song was Willie
Nelson's City of New Orleans. Kevin Hughes, the kid who would later die on Music Row, was a business student at Belmont College. Hanging out at Tower Records and making index cards of his favorite music. In the early 1980s, country music was in a bit of a tizzy since June 6th, 1980, when the when the movie Urban Cowboy hit America like a bucking bull. Country music was becoming more mainstream. Record labels were chasing pop music dollars. Editorial comment.
It wasn't even a good movie. John Travolta and Debra Winger tried, but come on. All that drama over riding a mechanical bull in a bar. At least the soundtrack was good. Looking for Love by Johnny Lee. Love the World Away by Kenny Rogers. Look What You've Done to Me by Boz Scaggs. Those songs, however, were a little too soft, a little too pop for some traditional country music fans, like the Larry's who wrote Murder on Music Row,
Eddie Rabbitt, Juice Newton, Sheena Easton and Marie Osmond. All pop stars had number one country hits in the early and mid 1980s.
I mean, it went from Conway Twitty, which was half pop ish, but it went from things right before Conway to Conway, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, they were on the radio. Those were the drive time artists. And then it went to Barbara mandrell and, uh, Milsap and all things very pop for the time.
That's Trey Bruce, the genius songwriter. This guy wrote look, heart, No Hands and three other number one hits for Randy Travis. He's written songs with Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood, Leann Rimes, Trace Atkins, Reba mcEntire, and Carrie Underwood.
And then, with Barbara mandrell and Kenny Rogers, it became Pop Goes the Country. There was even a TV show and that was looked on as ruining country music. And then when the rock stuff started coming in to country music, that ruined what we called country music before that. We've gone through that, that evolution several times, and it's still happening. I mean, it just should country be by country. It
really depends on what decade you call country. And before now there wasn't bandwidth, but now you have 90s country internet radio and you have Spotify pages for all that. So right now Nashville's got a lot of hamburgers. Nobody's forcing you to eat McDonald's.
Bruce teamed up with Scott Hendricks. If you don't know Scott, he worked on his grandparents farm driving a tractor in Oklahoma. Then he became a Nashville music producer with 75 top ten hits to his credit. He was the founder of the Big Tractor music publishing company. And Scott Hendricks became entangled, I guess you could say, with one of the witnesses of the murder on Music Row.
I signed my deal in November of 89, and Scott Hendricks and I opened Big Tractor in 92. I was only at universal for three years. And when Scott and I opened our company, I remember going in the office one night we were in the curb building there on the corner, and, um, I said, hey, I'm going to hear an artist named Faith Hill tonight. Gary Burr is working with her. And he said, uh, I already passed on her. Wow. I went to the show and I thought she was great. Scott would sit in his office
and listen to songs all night. I mean, a slave to trying to find the best song. And I went back after the show or the next morning and told Scott, man, I don't know. I think there's something there. And, uh, a few days later, Martha Sharp walked her down, you know, 3 or 4 buildings from Warner Brothers and introduced her to Scott personally. And, um, everything changed fast in 1994.
Faith Hill divorced her husband, Daniel, who you heard from in the first episode of this podcast. Faith then got engaged to Scott Hendricks, but then she met Tim McGraw in 1994 and married him in him in 1996 and became one of the biggest power couples in country music.
Faith Hill became a star, but it took a lot of effort after singing to entertain prisoners at a Mississippi jail, singing demos in Nashville, auditioning to be a backup singer for Reba, not being selected, becoming a backup singer for Gary Burr, working a bunch of gigs with Burr in which he got his soul crushed by not attracting a record deal. Finally, Faith was discovered during a backup gig with Burr at the famous Bluebird Cafe. She got a deal.
Burr did not. But don't worry about Gary Burr. He's had a long, great career as a performer and songwriter. Burr has more than 170 songs to his credit, with cuts by Reba mcEntire, Patty Loveless, Garth Brooks, and on and on and on. The Faith Hill story has inspired a million Nashville dreams. I tried several times to set up an interview to talk to her about the murder case and her career. I got a note from Faith's manager,
Sandra Stillwagon. Quote. Faith is aware of the podcast as I let her know when I asked her about doing the interview. I appreciate your interest in speaking with Faith, but she isn't doing any interviews, unquote. Sammy Sadler's attempt to become a country star did not look like the same journey taken by Faith Hill or Garth Brooks. It did not involve open mic nights, playing corporate gigs, singing at birthday parties or bowling alleys. It didn't involve much
singing at all. Instead, Sammy was going to make independent or custom records. Seven inch vinyl 45. Work the phones. Get his songs played on the radio and get his songs recognized in the country charts in hopes of getting noticed by a major label. In the first five years he was in Nashville, from 1984 until the shooting of Kevin Hughes. Sammy didn't play a single gig in town or sell a single record. In 1985, he signed a record deal with Johnny Morris, who was part owner of
Evergreen Records. Morris had once been a radio DJ in Missouri. Evergreen had produced records on some local talent like Narvel Felts, Joe Stampley, and Robin Lee. Lee went on to sign with Atlantic Records, but Sammy said his record deal was different than a lot of other young people who came to Nashville with rich parents and got taken advantage of by independent labels. Sammy said neither he nor his parents
paid Morris any money. While lots of musicians like him were getting shaken down for $5,000 here and $10,000 there, or much more. Sammy said that wasn't happening to him. It raises the question, though, who was paying for those records and studio time? Sammy was adamant the first five years of his career, he said, for all intent and purpose, was an Was an expensive game to which he contributed nothing. He and his parents paid no money for records. And
his records made him and his label no money. Sammy said Morris agreed to produce and promote six singles. When you signed with evergreen, did you actually sign a piece of paper? Yeah. And did you have a signing party? I would think no. That would have to be the highlight. I mean, that's that's the dream, right?
Well, I mean, again, man, I mean, I came to this town. I was just a naive kid, you know? I didn't know any of this business worked. How things happened. And, you know, there was no signing party.
As part of their agreement. Morris also hired Sammy to work in the evergreen office, paying Sammy $200 per week for 40 hours of tedious promotion. Early in 1985, Sammy began working a regular eight hour shift, working the phones, pitching songs, sometimes 30 calls per day, promoting evergreen artists and promoting himself to radio stations and to Cashbox magazine. Sammy's paycheck from evergreen wasn't enough to pay for an apartment, so his father paid for that.
My mom moved up here with me, and we we rented an apartment.
Um, I know that it was about six months before you hooked up with Evergreen Records. Were you a waiter? Where did you. Did you work in a mechanic's? You know.
I think I worked two days at a at a western store here in town. Out somewhere out, uh, by Opryland or. Or somewhere. But then my dad again, you know, my dad had his business, so he he kind of took care of me while I was here, and, uh, he kind of footed the bill for me, uh, to to do what we do.
You had a strategy when you came to Nashville, and I want to know if this is intentional. You weren't the kind of singer to be playing a bunch of gigs.
You know, I didn't, uh, we weren't playing, you know, gigs around here or doing any of that kind of stuff. And whenever I came and we signed with evergreen, you know, Johnny was looking for a I don't know if he's looking for another record promoter or what, but he said, man, you just go to work for the label. And, you know, I started working there promoting records as well. And that's, you know, that's how I learned how the record promotion business worked.
But it was an intentional strategy. I think the reason I'm asking is if I've talked to a bunch of singers, and how do you make it in Nashville? I think they would say, play as many open mic nights as you can. You decided not to do that?
Well, it's I don't know if it's I decided not to. I mean, man, I was just a 18 year old kid out of Texas, you know, I thought, you know, if you if you could sing, you know, you could make it in this business. And, you know, I just I don't I don't think I planned it any way. I think it's just how it happened.
Sammy said he would show up to work at 1020 1/16 Avenue South in the Evergreen Building. It's still there if you want to drive by. He usually would be the only person in the office. He would be given a list of radio stations to call nicely prodding, asking provocatively, strongly suggesting that it would be great if songs by Sammy Sadler and other evergreen recording artists be played on
their stations. He said not only did he lobby hard for airplay, he would also collect statistics from radio stations and report them to Cashbox. In effect, the singer was calling in his own numbers and numbers for his indie label mates to Cashbox magazine. What did you need to call Cashbox for?
You had to call in and report your stations to them or your report every week on your records you were working.
So let me make sure I got this straight. W whatever station calls you and tells you which songs are charting, do they give you numbers like this? Has this many plays and that many?
Yeah. I mean, it's like first, you know, you'll get an ad, so it'd be an add. So we're adding the record. So you get an add. Then like I said, once you get an add then you would have to turn it into or can you, you know, turn it into numbers of what you're playing. So you'd have to give Kevin, you know, say Norvel got this many adds this week, so you'd give him the number and then whatever he had to do with whatever his job was.
The the important point, I think, though, is that it came through you, goes to you then, Kevin.
Yeah. I mean, why didn't they call Kevin directly?
I mean, that's just, you know, that's how that's how the system was working at evergreen of what we had to do and what I had to do every week, I would just take and compile my list of evergreen's artists of whose record we were working, and I would just call it in and give it to him.
Was there about 4 or 5 artists at a time?
It sometimes it just depends on, you know.
Sometimes only 1 or 2 maybe.
Just depends on when they were because.
It was small.
Yeah. And when they were released. Singles.
I've shared Sammi's Sammy's explanation with a couple of industry insiders, who said it was hard to even wrap their heads around a situation in which a guy at a small label was reporting for radio stations.
I don't make any sense. That's total corruption. If the report that's like, you know, going and doing ballot harvesting for a vote, that don't make any sense. So that stinks to high heaven right there.
Mark Carman was a singer who then got into the business side of music. He took over as the cash box director of operations after Kevin Hughes was killed. He knew how the reporting was supposed to work. I haven't said a whole lot about the guy who was in charge of putting all these investigative threads together. Detective Bill Pridemore was raised a military kid bouncing around bases. He was ten years old, living in Dayton, Ohio, when he was the victim of a crime.
I'd just gotten this bike and it was a Schwinn five speed, which is, you know, really hot at the time with the banana seed and the butterfly handlebars and, you know, kids our age. And at that time, we just set the bike down in the middle of the yard or on the side of the house and didn't have to worry about being stolen, I didn't think. Uh, so anyway, I it was sitting on the side of the house or in the yard, and I came out the next day and it was missing and I was
really upset. And so my mother called the police and a police officer came out, and he seemed really concerned. He said, well, come on, let's get in the car and let's ride around the Platt and see if we can find it. And so I did. I got in the car and in the front seat with the radio blaring, and we rode around. I mean, it was like at least 30 or 40 minutes. And sure enough, he rode down this one street and there was my bike without
a front wheel, but, uh. And my speedometer was gone, but, you know, got it put in the trunk of his car and took me back home and took it out and went on his way. And I just, you know, I was amazed I was that somebody, especially a policeman, that he would take the time out of his day to, you know, to ride around with a ten year old kid in the car and look for his bicycle and that just it always from that point forward, I just felt,
you know, I was just I just admired him. I admired the fact that, you know, he's a perfect stranger. And as I got older, it just impressed me more because he was a perfect stranger.
Pridemore's family lived in Offutt, Nebraska and Kingston, Tennessee, before moving to Nashville in 1971. Pridemore attended Stratford High. Shortly after high school, he got a job working at UPS. He started at the police academy in 1976. Over the next nine years, Pridemore worked his way to the spot he had always wanted.
So they created the Murder Squad unit. They took the best. They considered the best from the homicide unit and created the Murder Squad unit.
There were six guys on the Murder Squad. One of the guys was Pat Castiglione, the guy who became Pridemore's partner. What was your first impression of Pat?
Well, other than he was from New York City, I liked him. I mean, he didn't try to be overbearing. When we got to a crime scene, he didn't he didn't try to take over the crime scene. Uh, he and I got along well. We we giggled. We, you know, we ask each other questions, made points and things.
Pridemore used a term that I had never heard. He said he and gee had. I had to look it up. It's a farming term used when train donkeys work in tandem. They gee-haw when they move left or right smoothly. It means they work well together. In this case, Pridemore was the lead donkey. The two The two detectives would spend hours sitting on the short brick wall across the street from Evergreen Records, trying to figure out what the hell
was going on. After Kevin's death, for the first time in their lives, the detectives were introduced to the mechanics of a music chart at Cashbox magazine. They found a doozy. The hitmaker, Bobby Braddock, said number one at Cashbox was basically meaningless. He wrote a hit song called Old Flames Have New Names for Mark Chesnutt.
And it was.
Number one in Cash Box and, uh, I think number four in Billboard at that point. I don't think anybody, you know, had a lot of respect for for Cashbox. And I think just the buzz that was going around after the after the murder of Kevin Hughes, you know, I think that that had a huge impact on the negative impact on Cashbox, for sure.
I know it's a little hard to hear. He's saying number one at Cashbox wasn't a respected position, especially after the murder of Kevin Hughes. Here's Lon Helton, the chart expert on the Cashbox chart.
It was certainly unethical. I remember stories of people sitting in Shoney's at the time, talking loudly about being in the music business, hoping that they would be overheard by, you know, a set of parents or grandparents with an aspiring young star or starlet who would come over them and talk about it, and then they would get them in the system of paying for chart positions.
Mark Carman had similar thoughts.
But I learned at that point the charts were just irrelevant. They didn't mean anything. I knew that there was that. The charts were indicative of nothing. They didn't represent sales. They didn't represent how popular the record was in the industry overall. They just represented somebody took a pencil and wrote it down. For whatever reason.
It got so bad that promoter Jerry Duncan stopped working with Cashbox in 1988. He wasn't the only one who quit promoting to Cashbox altogether.
It had been a year since I got out of Cashbox, and I knew about I knew what was going on. So it had taken that long for us to see just how bad it was. And so two and two makes four. It was clear to everybody.
And there was one guy everybody in town believed was controlling the Cashbox.
Chart Chuck Dixon, Chuck.
Dixon, Chuck Dixon.
Chuck Dixon, won't you lie to me?
Chuck Dixon was probably the ugliest man I ever met in my life.
Chuck Dixon's name wasn't Chuck Dixon. His given name was John Blane, Deadline junior. He grew up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, which is about 40 miles from Philadelphia in the southeastern corner of the state. As a teenager, Chuck fell in love with rock n roll in 1955. He learned how to play guitar and spent the rest of the decade writing and singing songs. He played in Philadelphia and New York City sometime in the 1960s. His focus switched from
performing to the business end of music. There's an old Tennessean clipping from August 20th, 1969. A Nashville company called Clark Records was being sued by a singer named John Poole. Poole said he had paid $1,400, and all the company gave him was one single 45 record. Poole said he also paid a clerk agent, John B Federline, junior, $600 to advertise the record in trade journals. Federline kept the money and didn't promote the record. I couldn't find any
resolution to that lawsuit. One thing is for sure, some people have not trusted Chuck Dixon for a long time. In the late 60s, he left Coatesville with the intention of chasing a music career in Memphis, a story by Joe Henderson in Cashbox magazine said, on the way to Memphis, Chuck made a stop in Nashville, and he never left. He saw the opportunities for business in Music City in his songwriting career. He wrote under the name Chuck D, J.B.
Deadline Jr, and Chuck Dixon. His first break when George Gobel, who would later become a star as a comedian, recorded a JB Federline Junior song called Big Gold Cadillac. I talked to more than a couple of people who said Chuck presented himself as a good guy. A little intense, maybe. He liked the movie The Godfather and liked to act like as if his real life was a storyline in that movie. But they said he seemed like basically a good family man with a good eye for music.
Chuck came.
In. He said, you are the one that's.
Got to write a song about Hank.
Gary Gentry met Chuck sometime. It appears in 1982. Gary and Chuck share writing credit on a smash hit called The Ride, which was released on CBS records in 1983. It's about an imaginary ride with Hank Williams, and it was Chuck who pushed Gary to write the song. The ride was sung by David Allan Coe and later Hank Williams Jr and Tim McGraw. And one more singer of note I'll tell you about that most recent cover of The ride in the last episode of this podcast.
Well, we met that night.
I thought, well, it's a good idea. I've been clean and sober since 1984, but back then I was a party animal boy, and, uh, he wanted to write a song about Hank and Lefty. Well, we did, and at 10:00, he said, Gary, I gotta go home. He said, I like the song. I said, well, I don't it's not what I want for Hank. I want the I want a better song for Hank. So I was drinking and doing cocaine. The song went like, uh, last night, a DJ called me. He said, Gary, I need a drink.
Said someone requested a lefty song, and it sounded like Hank. I said, brother, I believe you get his number next to my phone, because wherever Hank and Lefty are, that's where I want to go. Well, it's not what I wanted. I wanted a tribute to Hank. And so when Hank, when he left, I dove down deeper into the bottle and deeper into cocaine. And I had held a seance.
So I dove deeper in the bottle, and I held a seance and cut all the lights out, lit candles, cussed Hank because I couldn't get him to come into the room. Well, guess what he did. And, uh, I said, Mr. Williams, we're going to take a ride. So next day, I found an unfiltered cigarette in the, uh, ashtray. I don't smoke unfiltered cigarettes. He was sitting there on a couch, smoking with his shirt off, and, uh. Yeah, Hank was a co-rider on that ride.
The next morning, Gary called Chuck and Chuck's wife, Catherine, who they called. Carter was listening on the phone.
And now Chuck was not per se, a songwriter. And I called him at 4:00 in the morning. I could barely read my own writing. I was still drunk. He said, I said, I want you to hear something. So we didn't have cell phones. Then I laid the phone down, picked up the guitar and played it for him. He said, oh my God, Carter, wake up, wake up, you gotta hear this. And so she did. I knew it was a hit. It was like sitting there on the lottery ticket, you know, all you had to do was go cash
it in. It was a monster. I knew it was.
Chuck got royalties and an enhanced reputation off that song. I don't know how many songs Chuck Dixon actually wrote, but I found 27 songs which listed him as co-writer with Johnny Morris, Jerry foster, Bill rice, John T Lewis, Don Goodman and others. I also found nine songs on which he sang, sometimes using the name Chuck D. Chuck's main focus was making money off songs, not sweet music. Many people I've interviewed have described Chuck Dixon as a mafioso type. The Mafia tag is used a lot in
this murder case. From my reporting, Dixon was not a made guy. Even if he might have tried to act like one. I talked to Frederick Dannen, author of the seminal book Hit Men, Power Brokers, and Fast Money Inside the Music Business. He had never heard of Chuck Dixon. He said these low level scams ripping off kids from Iowa with acoustic guitars and manipulating small time music charts, were not a part of the Mafia.
Footprint didn't matter all that much, certainly not compared to Billboard first and then Radio and Records. In that era, it just doesn't add up.
Kyle Hughes was a teenager in 1988 when he came to Nashville for the summer to visit his older brother, Kevin. Kevin was introducing Kyle around to the people he worked with. One of them was Chuck Dixon.
He was overly jovial. When I met, Chuck said a lot of nice things about Kevin. When I was there, but for some reason, I got home. When I came home to to Carmi, I said, Chuck Dixon guy just doesn't go well with me for some reason. He was really fake. That's how I felt when I left the office. He just felt like he was over the top fake. I remember he was behind his desk. I'll never forget him getting up. He's had the beard on and had
his beard. And it's just I just never forget that moment of him doing that on his desk, you know, and come and shake my hand. We sat there for maybe, maybe five minutes, and we left.
Since the charts were supposed to be based on radio station airplay, Chuck worked with several radio stations. In a deposition years later, a music promoter named Gary Bradshaw dropped several bombshells. He said 95% of the songs that appeared on the Cash Box Country Indie chart in 1989 received no radio airplay at all. Zero. There's no way to check on the veracity of that number, but if it's
anything close to 95%, that's shocking. Bradshaw also said Chuck would buy tickets to country music events around Nashville and hotel rooms, and give them free to disc jockeys. Nashville law enforcement agencies never investigated payola, so we'll never know how much or how often Chuck Dixon corrupted radio station employees. Police did believe Chuck convinced some stations to report inaccurate numbers. Police and everyone else called those pocket stations. It's a
common term, totally illegal. As if Chuck Dixon had them in his pocket. For example, Chuck Dixon would convince someone at radio station WRs to report they had played a song 100 times when actually they didn't play it at all. In other words, Chuck could take a crappy song with no airplay and make it look like a hit. In the world of independent promotions, that was like gold. It
sounds preposterous, right? But check this out. On October 22nd, 1988, four and a half months before the murder of Kevin Hughes. A singer named Mickey Jones landed at number 17 on the Cash Box Indie chart with a song called The Gal from San Antone. The song was produced by Robert Metzger and promoted by Chuck Dixon. Here's the problem with that record. Due to a mix up at the pressing facility, the record had literally never been made. It had never
been shipped to radio stations. It had never been played on the radio. But Metzger, I discovered in records I reviewed, had paid Chuck Dixon $15,000 for a position on the chart. So it got on the chart. Was that a one time mistake? Nope. Mark Carman remembers another one.
I'd rather not say the name of the artist, because, you know, that may be humiliating to them, but I'll just say it this way. I was in the office when the call came in. Don't don't send in the chart yet. We got a problem. And the call was the record had been added and was being reported as being played in light, medium and heavy rotation. But there had been a problem on the on the labeling on the little 45 where they had the wrong songwriter on
the label. So they were having to repress the record, and the record was three weeks behind. But the promoter had gotten the fact that it was going to release and had it in his schedule to get it out, and so he had promoted it for the whole week before he got the word that the record had not been mailed three weeks early.
So it was impossible that anybody could have played that record. The record.
Didn't exist.
Who was that promoter?
Chuck Dixon.
Chuck Dixon also influenced what was going on inside the cash box office. Remember, it was a small operation. Chart director. Maybe one assistant. Dixon was good friends with Richard de Antonio, known as Tony de Tony. De was the chart director. Then after he was fired, he kept a key to the office and there were employees who believed Tony De would go in after dark and erase some names from that chart and add names of songs promoted by Chuck Dixon.
Kyle Hughes said Kevin showed him two sets of charts he made every week. One was the chart that some unknown person was manipulating. Kevin had no control over that one. It would get published in the magazine. Complete fiction. The other was the real list of charting songs from real airplay statistics that Kevin had researched. A master copy that Kevin kept all to himself. He let his brother in on the secret.
Kevin. Big old chart thing that he would work on. You know, we had those charts at the house with dates on them, and you could see, well, that's not what's in the Cash Box magazine. You know, so we knew doing that. So I knew that something had gone. Gone on with those those magazines for sure. We have it in black and white, you know. So he had the chart. It was a complete different magazine.
He wanted to be able to prove to anyone who ever checked that he had integrity. Chuck was also friends with Cashbox owner George Albert, who was based in Los Angeles. Chuck's influence on the magazine was so pervasive, people in the industry called Cashbox magazine. Chuck Box magazine. Bradshaw, the promoter who worked with Chuck, said Dixon was completely in charge and made every decision for Cashbox magazine with George
Albert's permission to do so. Listen to this conversation I had with Lon Helton, the famous DJ, music magazine editor and industry insider. While we're talking, he's got an issue of Cashbox magazine in front of him. I'm looking at it, too. It's August 12th, 1989. Beginning on page 20, he mentions Bradshaw. I found out later. Bradshaw is now dead.
Cash box was George Albert's baby. It was part of him. It was part of his fabric. It existed because he willed it to exist. And he was willing to. He did not want it to die, so he was willing to do things maybe he didn't even believe in. By the way, in the August 12th, 1989 edition is an ad for Brian O'Neill. You're the softest rock I've ever leaned on and sing me records. Thanks, radio for your support. Management. O'Neill, Terry. National promotion. Chuck Dixon.
Exactly. And that's six months after Kevin died.
And there's another one for Razzy Bailey on So Records promotion by Chuck Dixon and Gary Bradshaw. Here's another one. Um, produced by Danny Day. The ads. So The promoters were getting money to promote their record, and then they were requiring them to buy ads. Here's another one Steve Douglas to a San Antone Rose national promotion. Chuck Dixon, Tim Fitzpatrick, also Tony de Antonio. So there's a lot going on here, man.
I'd have to double check this, but I would probably say that none of those songs ever charted on the R&;R chart.
He's talking about a system in which promoters like Chuck Dixon charged money around $2,000 per month, promising singers chart positions, and then told them they needed to buy advertising in Cashbox if they wanted to be a star. He required artists to pay him bonuses up to $500 for songs that got on the charts successfully. Oftentimes, Dixon worked more than ten records at a time. That's good money. There were other allegations, too, about even bigger money. You heard
from Amy Lavelle in a previous episode. She worked at Cashbox. Her husband, David Michalski, was a singer. He had a meeting with Chuck Dixon. I was talking to her when she put her husband on the phone.
Chuck was telling him off for this. This many thousand. I can get you number one at Cashbox, you know, for this many thousand top ten and all the way down in the top 50. So that's how I knew for sure that was going on.
Do you remember what those numbers were? What how how much for the top ten? How much for the top 50?
Um, they said 50,000 for number one. Then we asked them, hey, honey, can you go on the phone from Nashville? Yeah. After 50,000 for number one, what were the amounts? 50,000 for number one. Uh huh. 40,000. Wow. And 30. And on. Down all the way. Like 10,000. Clear down into the top 50. So, did you hear that cue?
Yes, I did. And and did. Did you guys ever play ball with Chuck? Did you you know when you heard those numbers, what was your reaction?
It was disgusting.
She said it was disgusting. Dave had worked so hard to make it in the music business, and he didn't want to be part of a corrupt music chart.
David worked so hard, you know, in the music business to get anywhere, and so many of our friends and people we looked up to did as well. We didn't want to participate in that in any way, shape or form.
I asked Dave what he thought of Chuck Dixon.
I thought he was a crook after, you know, after he offered me a $50,000 deal in his office. I just thought it was a cook and I didn't care for him. You know, that's not how the music business should be run.
In the police file, there's an interview with Kim Buckley, who was an intern research assistant when Kevin took over as chart director. She said she remembers Kevin, I'll quote her quota now became very upset because he was ordered to change the charts by the owner of Cash Box, unquote. Kim told Pridemore an artist she didn't say, who had been paying cash for chart positions since the days Tony
Deantonio was chart director. Kevin tried to knock that artist off the charts, but George Albert called Kevin and promised this would be the last time he had to change the charts because someone had paid cash. Kim said, quote, Kevin was very upset, but he did change the chart, unquote. In the first week of March 1989, Kevin Hughes attended the Country Radio Seminar, the annual event at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. With all the big shots of the music industry.
Randy Travis was one of the headliners in 1989. Jerry Duncan saw Kevin there.
I saw Kevin at the country radio seminar one night and one of the one of the through. I don't know.
Where one of the restaurants and I said at the seminar, one of the panels was almost always a chart panel where the various chart editors would be on a panel and explain their chart methodology and take questions. I was I would do things for changing it with with him there now and trying to be honest and clean up the chart. I knew things were changing and I said, are you going to be on the panel tomorrow or whatever day it was? And he said, no, I'm not
going to do it this year. We're making some big changes. That was the last time I talked to Kevin Hughes.
I asked Jerry how the chart could be so dirty, while Kevin, who everybody said was a clean kid, was running it.
Well, when he first got the job, it was all the system. The whole was there. The corrupt system, the stations that were on the panel were a lot of them had relationships, you know, with the promoters, etc. it probably took Kevin a little while to figure out what to do about that. So it's not it's a process. He couldn't go in and overnight say, okay, we're changing everything. So it was not his fault. He was trying to fix it from the start. You had to do research,
had to get the right stations. And it was it's a major surgery that he was performing.
Many promoters I interviewed believe Kevin was about to go public with what he knew about corruption at Cashbox magazine. They thought he was going to talk to The Tennessean. I wish I would have been around for that on the last day of the seminar. Kevin Hughes was supposed to participate in a panel discussion about how music charts work. Kevin was embarrassed because Cashbox was still using fax machines and pencils to make the weekly chart, while other magazines
were using computers. He called George Albert in LA to ask permission to skip the panel discussion. Albert called Chuck Dixon. Chuck met with Kevin at the seminar and told him he didn't have to do the panel. Chuck also slipped him some money. More than a few people saw it happen. Kevin argued that he didn't want the money, but he took a couple of hundred dollars anyway. Kevin told people taking the money made him sick. He would be dead within the week. Next time on Murder on Music Row.
I mean, there's so many people putting out records, you know, just to be on the charts, you know? I mean, it's thrilling to at least be on the charts, you know?
There's no question that I think that he paid money to have his records put on Cash Box. I know, I mean, there's no question in my mind.
I mean, I had no idea that that it was corrupt. I never knew any of that until. I never knew how this business worked until this crime was solved.
I would say that even when Sammy told me he didn't pay for play, I said, that's bullshit, you know? And you know, because I know the chart.
Murder on Music Row was.
Reported.
Written and narrated by me, Keith Sharon. The executive producers were Gannett's vice president of local news. And Tennessean editor Michael Anastasi and Tennessean news director Ben Goad. The project editor was Duane Gang. The sound editor was Amanda Rosman. Our reporting on the legacy of the murder on Music Row doesn't end with this podcast. If you've been duped by an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville, we want to hear your story. Please send an email to Sharon at tennessean.com.
That's the letter k s h a r o n at tennessean.com. Include some details of what happened to you and how you can be reached. Thanks for listening.