COUNTRY MUSIC : Taking Billy Ray to Market : In Cyrus, Mercury Records knew it had a country singer who could go big. But how to sell him? Make a video, create an ‘Achy Breaky’ dance and stage a contest.

Seven months ago, the Nashville staff of Mercury Records huddled in a nondescript conference room in the plush Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel to discuss specific plans for new albums scheduled to be released in the first half of 1992. Among the topics of discussion: what to do with Billy Ray Cyrus, an unknown singer from Kentucky who had signed a recording contract with Mercury.

Label executives reiterated what they considered Cyrus’ strong point: He is a charismatic stage performer whose darkly handsome features, muscular build and gyrating hips tended to whip young female fans into a frenzy back around his hometown of Ashland, Ky. (the family home of Naomi Judd).

The company knew a live performance video would be the logical way to introduce Cyrus to country music fans, and one was already set to be released several weeks before his first single would be sent to country radio.

But everyone in country music follows that step these days, especially if the performer is a male with sex appeal. Paul Lucks, a Mercury vice president who heads the label’s Nashville division, and national marketing director Steve Miller hoped to come up with a more distinctive promotional ploy to draw attention to Cyrus.

Several ideas arose, only to be shot down. Then Claudia Mize, a mid-level employee in the label’s administration department, meekly offered a suggestion.

“How about a dance contest?”

Miller gazed over at Lucks and raised his eyebrows. “That’s not a bad idea,” the marketing director said.

A country dance craze had been blooming across Middle America, and expansive nightclub floors were becoming increasingly crowded with young people learning to two-step and line-dance to hits by Garth Brooks, Clint Black and George Strait. Cyrus is a dynamic dancer himself, and the company had been leaning toward releasing an upbeat, highly danceable little ditty, “Achy Breaky Heart,” as the Kentuckian’s initial radio single.

“We knew that side of the business had become huge, yet no one had really done anything to capitalize on the trend yet,” Miller recalls. “We thought we could create a dance around this song and take it out to these country dance clubs prior to sending the song to radio. That part of the country market is real active. They’re hungry to get out of their houses and go out. They’re trendsetters. If you want to start a trend, you go to the trendsetters.”

Cyrus had completed an album and turned it over to Mercury Records five months before the Vanderbilt Plaza meeting that spawned the idea of creating a dance to help promote a new song. The company had decided to shelve the album until executives had time to devise a special marketing strategy for the singer, who was considered to have star potential but whose music might not be an easy sell to the conservative programmers who run country radio stations.

The decision to hold an album and create a comprehensive plan, including a video, to introduce Cyrus to what Miller terms “the entertainment marketplace” will probably be studied and duplicated in coming months by entertainment industry executives, for Cyrus’ album has become the fastest-selling debut in pop music history. Mercury took more than 700,000 initial orders for “Some Gave All”; the total soared past the 1-million mark three days after the album’s release.

Cyrus entered the Billboard pop album chart at the No. 4 position and the following week jumped to No. 1, bypassing Kris Kross, the Black Crowes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That feat topped the previous speed record for a debut album to reach the pole position. Paul McCartney’s first solo collection took three weeks to reach No. 1 in 1970, and the ex-Beatle had a little more advance notoriety than Cyrus.

Of course, many acts who shot to the top of the pop charts at the outset of a career have failed to sustain their careers anywhere near the level of McCartney or other long-running musical performers. Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli and Tiffany are among acts that rode sharp marketing strategies to the top of the pops, only to crash nearly as swiftly. These artists received mostly negative reviews from the music press; at this juncture, so has Cyrus’ “Some Gave All.”

But the meteoric launch of Cyrus’ career underscores the country music industry’s increasing focus on marketing and multimedia promotion plans. Less than a decade ago, a new country artist received little more than a minuscule budget to record a few songs. Record companies introduced most newcomers by sending a single to radio stations and waiting for a response. If radio displayed an interest, the singer was allowed to complete an album for release. Beyond that, record labels might buy an ad in a trade magazine or send an artist on a short regional trip to meet and greet radio programmers at country stations.

A couple of Nashville record divisions still rely on this method. “We’re not in the business of marketing records,” one top executive recently said in a private meeting. His company’s role is to provide a performer with a budget to create an album and then take that work and distribute it to retail stores, he explained.

However, most Nashville record divisions now take a more aggressive role in selling albums by coming up with marketing gambits designed to convey a performer’s image as well as the music.

Even Mercury’s competitors say the label’s executives pulled off a major coup with Cyrus.

“It’s a hell of a plan,” says Rick Blackburn, general manager of Atlantic/Nashville. “In my view, they took the biggest component of their marketing plan, the guy’s looks, and captured it on video. They let him be what he is. . . . It was a direct hit on the fans, especially the younger demographic.”

Jimmy Bowen, president of Liberty Records, sees the recent chart-topping triumphs of Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd and Cyrus as proof that the Nashville-based country music divisions of the leading record labels have finally come into their own in the creating, marketing and selling of albums.

“We’ve seen that there is a pot of gold out there, and it can be attained,” he says. “We shouldn’t put any limits on what we can achieve with this music and in this town.”

Says Miller: “Our industry has to realize that we face much more competition for entertainment dollars than at any time in the past. We have to be more aggressive and innovative if this industry is going to keep growing and holding its market share. We’ve got to really go out and tell the consumer, ‘You need this, and you need it now.’ Here at Mercury, we’re trying to find more ways of putting our artists in front of people under unique circumstances. The more I can stimulate consumer interest in my artist, the better off I’m going to be.”

Cyrus grew restless during the extensive lag time between the recording of “Some Gave All” and its release, says the singer’s manager, Jack McFadden, an entertainment industry veteran who has guided the career of Buck Owens since the 1960s.

“Ten months passed between the time Billy Ray finished the album and the day in May when it finally came out,” McFadden says. “Billy Ray kept saying, ‘Let me out of the chute, let me get out there and sing.’ He believed in his music. Here I had an artist who knew he could sell product, but he didn’t have any product out. He had finished it, he was proud of it, but nobody was allowed to hear it. He had to muster up a lot of patience to wait for the right time, but he also knew Mercury believed in him.”

“That’s the time period when, if I didn’t actually lose my mind, I did the next closest thing,” says Cyrus, who is now recording his second album here. “My wife decided she wanted a divorce. I had an album in the can. It was just sitting on a shelf, and I didn’t know when or if it would come out. It was the most difficult period in my life. All I could do was keep playing the clubs (around Ashland).”

Cyrus traveled to Nashville a few times to beg Mercury to release the record.

“I’d drive down there to plead with them, to tell them it was driving me crazy,” he says. “But I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Manager McFadden now says he is glad he didn’t push Mercury to speed up its planning process. “They kept telling us that they wanted to make sure they had everything set up right,” he remembers. “They’ve proven that they knew what they were doing. When the album finally hit the streets, it exploded. It was the planning of the label that made it happen--that and the talent of Billy Ray Cyrus.”

For Cyrus, the success of “Some Gave All” fulfills a dream he began chasing a decade ago. His search included a move in 1984 to Los Angeles, where the aspiring singer took a job selling Oldsmobiles at a Woodland Hills dealership. (Several tabloid newspapers and the syndicated tabloid TV program “Hard Copy” have reported that Cyrus worked as a Chippendales dancer in Los Angeles, but the claims have not been substantiated.)

Cyrus returned to Ashland in 1986 and formed a band. Before long, he was performing five nights a week in a club in Huntington, W.Va., blending originals with versions of hits by Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin. Nearly every week, Cyrus says, he drove the 300 miles to Nashville seeking an opportunity in the country music capital. Each stay lasted less than 24 hours, as he had to hustle back to Huntington for his next club performance.

During one of these trips, he met the daughter of singer Del Reeves, a Grand Ole Opry performer and country hitmaker in the 1960s and ‘70s. The elder Reeves introduced Cyrus to McFadden. The manager signed Cyrus to a management contract, but only after the veteran music executive gained the approval of Cyrus’ father, a Kentucky state legislator.

In late 1989, McFadden began passing out Cyrus tapes to Nashville record executives. “We didn’t have any positive results at all,” McFadden says. “He was turned down by everyone, including three times by the same label.”

Eventually, Mercury talent executive Buddy Cannon was sent to Louisville, Ky., to see Cyrus open a concert for Reba McEntire and Highway 101. Cannon’s enthusiasm persuaded Harold Shedd, head of Mercury’s talent department, to attend a Cyrus performance. Shedd signed Cyrus to Mercury in early 1991 and set him up with record producers Joe Scaife and Jim Cotton.

The producers took the song “Achy Breaky Heart” to Cyrus near the end of their recording schedule and persuaded him to include it on the nearly completed debut album. The song was written by Don Von Trees, who had been sending songs to Nashville for more than a decade with little success.

“We got excited about the song ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’ but we also thought it wasn’t necessarily going to be a smash hit at country radio--at least not if we just sent it out cold without creating some advance excitement,” marketing director Miller explains, comparing the sprightly sing-along tune to the initial singles by the Kentucky HeadHunters, another Mercury Records act that used a successful performance video to help break resistance at country radio.

“We knew Billy Ray was good live and that he had a huge following in the tri-state area (Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia), where he’s from. So we thought we’d do his first video at a hometown theater and show all these people going crazy over him.”

Then came the idea for a dance. Mercury hired choreographer Melanie Greenwood to develop a line-dance routine that followed the beat of “Achy Breaky Heart.” “She came up with something we thought seemed good,” Miller says with a chuckle. “Lord knows there’s not a lot of dance experts in our company, but we went ahead with it.”

Cyrus also had his doubts. “I was concerned about the fact that the first step of my career was going to be based around a dance,” he says. “ . . . I’ve never been one to go to clubs to dance.” On Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, 26 leading country dance spots across the United States began playing a tape of Cyrus’ performance along with an instructional tape showing how to do the so-called Achy Breaky Line Dance.

“Everybody went crazy over it,” Miller contends. “No record company had gone to the country nightclubs at that point with anything on this kind of scale. It was the first time they’d been invited to take part in a big, new venture. The clubs and their clients responded by embracing the dance and, along with it, the song and the artist.”

To encourage dance club patrons to learn the dance, Mercury sponsored a contest at each of the clubs. The 26 regional contest winners were entered in a national drawing. The top couple won a trip to Nashville to perform the Achy Breaky Line Dance alongside Cyrus as he made his national television debut on “Nashville Now,” a one-hour interview program on cable TV’s Nashville Network. The couple also took part in a taping of the network’s “Club Dance” program the next day.

Three weeks after sending the video into dance clubs, Mercury arranged to premiere the video nationally on the Nashville Network and the other leading country cable TV network, Country Music Television. The latter also ran a short trailer after the Cyrus video that demonstrated how to do the dance.

The second week of April, Mercury finally sent “Achy Breaky Heart” to country radio stations--weeks after initially giving the song to country dance clubs.

“Because of the success of the club promotion and the popularity of the video on TNN and CMT, radio was pretty much chomping at the bit,” Miller says. “Radio programmers were pleading for the song, saying they were being flooded with requests. Radio was ready to go with the song in a big, big way. Obviously, we had accomplished our objective of creating excitement for the song.”

Mercury also issued a cassette single of “Achy Breaky Heart” along with the song’s radio premiere. The flip side of the cassette featured one-minute samples of three songs from Cyrus’ as-yet-unreleased album.

Despite the fast success of the video and the single, Mercury made the controversial decision to stick to its original plan and hold “Some Gave All” until its previously scheduled release date of May 30. The cassette single, meanwhile, broke all previous sales figures for a country single. The total is now more than 1 million copies.

“The groundswell was so big that people kept asking us, ‘Why hold on to this record?’ ” Miller acknowledges. “Also, there’s a widely held belief in Nashville that if you put a cassette single out, it will cannibalize sales of full-length albums. It’s always been my opinion that the cassette single became a scapegoat for a lot of other problems within our industry. I never believed it was true.

“McDonald’s advertises special products for ages 4 and 5. In the record business, we go from one configuration that is $8 to another that is $15. In some respects, we’ve left nothing out there for people to get a taste of something at a less expensive price. Right now, with cassette sales nearing 1 million and album sales at 3 million, I think we’ve broken down some of the old thinking.”

To keep the excitement building through the release of the album, Mercury devised yet another promotion plan. This time, the company would encourage radio stations to come up with their own contest based on Cyrus’ hit song, which was a No. 1 country song and a Top 20 pop song the week “Some Gave All” reached retail stores.

One station set up an “Achy Breaky Brunch” in collaboration with a major hotel chain. Another asked listeners to send a fax detailing a favorite story concerning someone with an achy, breaky heart. Most stations simply enlisted a local dance club and sponsored a dance contest. “We ended up getting 33 stations involved and garnering another $400,000 worth of advertising that didn’t cost us anything,” Miller says.

The special promotions didn’t end there. Mercury announced plans to sponsor yet another national dance contest based on Cyrus’ song. This time, viewers of Country Music Television were encouraged to enter the competition by making home videos of themselves doing the “Achy Breaky Line Dance.” The winner will attend a segment of “Club Dance” that will feature the program’s first live performance by none other than Billy Ray Cyrus.

With success coming so quickly and so enormously, a backlash was predictable. New country star Travis Tritt was the first to publicly lash out at Cyrus, lambasting “Achy Breaky Heart” as a shallow, meaningless song and the video for its focus on “butt wiggling,” as the young singer put it.

Cyrus too was concerned initially about Mercury’s focus on his image and sex appeal rather than his music. That’s changed, he says, with the phenomenal success of the record.

“Now that 3 million people have got the album, I’m not concerned anymore,” he said. “People are hearing all 10 songs now, so they’re getting the complete picture. The music is getting its chance.”

Walt Wilson, a senior vice president and head of marketing at MCA/Nashville, praises Mercury’s job with Cyrus but says the singer has really yet to prove himself as an artist or entertainer. “Achy Breaky Heart” is a big hit, but Wilson wonders whether Cyrus has others in him.

“The test for Billy Ray will come when this song has passed,” Wilson says. “With Billy Ray, (Mercury) swang at the first pitch and hit a home run. But you can’t just hit home runs. You have to hit singles and doubles too.”

Mercury hopes to ward off further skepticism by attempting to establish Cyrus as a performer and songwriter capable of conveying a wider range of emotions than the lighthearted attitude of his initial hit. His second single, “It Could’ve Been Me,” is a more musically complex, mid-tempo ballad that already has been issued to radio stations. An accompanying video shows Cyrus only from the waist up and features him playing acoustic guitar while lip-syncing in a manner that is more intense and subdued than in the previous clip.

Mercury Vice President Lucks indicates that the new single continues to follow the marketing plan:

“We thought it was very important that we follow up ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ with a song revealing Billy Ray’s serious side. We need to prove his career is not tied to only one single. He’s got a message that comes from his heart. He’s not a one-hit wonder.”