How they came to be Big & Rich

The Pub of Love, a funky downtown hole in the wall, sat only six blocks from Music Row before it closed two years ago. But for Kenny Alphin and John Rich of the million-selling country duo Big & Rich, that distance represents the difference between the bottom and the top.

“Dude, you couldn’t get any lower than where we were,” says Alphin, who performs under the stage name Big Kenny. “But that only makes success that much sweeter.”

Indeed, Big & Rich, along with friend and collaborator Gretchen Wilson of “Redneck Woman” fame, are at the center of the biggest current success story in country music. The duo’s debut, “Horse of a Different Color,” has sold 2 million copies since May without the benefit of a Top 10 single, a rarity in country music.

Already this year they’ve starred in a CMT reality series, “MuzikMafia TV,” that helped make January the most successful ratings month in the cable station’s history. The duo also has been given its own label, Raybaw Records, an acronym for red and yellow, black and white, a phrase borrowed from the gospel song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

In the dark days of winter, they toured arenas as co-headliners with Wilson, whom John Rich discovered and whose 3-million-selling debut, “Here for the Party,” he co-produced. Their American Revolution tour played more than 20 concert dates across America and sold out most of them. They even showed up as a halftime act at the NBA All-Star game.

Along the way, they’ve become the most polarizing act in country music since the Dixie Chicks spoke out against President Bush two years ago. The debate is over how they blend rap and hard rock into their songs, such as the popular dance-club tune “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy).”

Ed Benson, executive director of the Country Music Assn., says his organization was flooded with letters of protest after the CBS telecast of the annual CMA Awards in November.

“The typical comment was, ‘What the heck was that? And what in the world is it doing on a country music show?’ ” says Benson. “We expected that. It’s part of why we had them on. We wanted to show people the act that had shaken up our genre the most in the previous year. The response just proved that there’s a lot of passionate opinions about these guys.”

Big & Rich, 41 and 31, respectively, would like to say they planned it that way. But in truth their success came out of a go-for-broke attitude to make music they loved instead of following the usual country music formulas.

“Really, what happened was we decided to ignore the music industry and have some fun, because nothing was happening for us anyway,” says Rich. “Maybe it proves that the best way to succeed is to do what you love and forget everything else everyone tells you.”

Talking points

During a series of interviews that took them from a Warner Bros. conference room to the set of a music video, both performers were animated, obviously energized by their success. Both are cocky and outspoken, neither can sit still, and they love to spout philosophy. Rich talks a mile a minute and is quick with a quip or an angry retort. Alphin talks even faster, often rambling about love, peace and partying all night long.

The excitement surrounding the group has drawn comparisons to the 1970s’ “outlaw movement” led by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, a legacy CMT tried to make explicit by programming a “CMT Outlaws” live concert special that paired Big & Rich with rebel country performers Hank Williams Jr. and Tanya Tucker as well as rockers Kid Rock and Metallica’s James Hetfield, among others.

However, whereas Nelson and Jennings were embraced across the board by critics and fans, Big & Rich have split both fans and critics, who tend to either love or hate the duo. The band was voted the best country duo or group of 2004 in the annual Country Music Critic’s Poll conducted by Nashville Scene magazine. In the poll, published in the Jan. 27 issue, Tracks magazine music editor Will Hermes called Big & Rich “the country music story of 2004.” Others criticized them as a half-baked Nashville remake of Kid Rock or as over-calculated rebel posers.

The road up for the songwriting partners began soon after they bottomed out in 2001. Both had recently lost record deals. Alphin was dropped by Hollywood Records shortly after the 1999 release of his pop-rock debut, “Big Kenny’s Live a Little,” which barely got into stores before the label pulled the plug. He then formed a band, Luvjoi, that received music industry attention but no lasting contract offers.

RCA Records let Rich go in 2000, just before the release of his debut solo album, “I Pray for You.” He’d been fired from the country-pop band Lonestar two years earlier, right before the group enjoyed multiplatinum success with the award-winning love song “Amazed.”

“We were down as far as you could get as far as our careers,” says Rich. “I mean, RCA Records let me know they were dropping me by sending a fax to my manager. They didn’t even bother to call or to tell us in person. It doesn’t get much more degrading than that. Kenny and I both had two strikes against us, and nobody was returning our calls.”

Virginia-born Big and Texas-born Rich, the rocker and the cowboy singer, had become unlikely songwriting buddies, collaborating on each other’s work and contributing cuts to Martina McBride, among others. But their performing careers hit a dead end even as their songwriting gained momentum.

They were relegated to playing music in the living room Alphin shared with another struggling rock songwriter, Jon Nicholson. Along with Cory Gierman, who’d recently lost a job at a major music publishing company, the friends shared songs and passed around bottles while figuring out what to do next.

“We used to sit around and talk about world domination,” says Gierman, now general manager of Raybaw Records. “Of course, none of us had enough money to eat.”

Still, other musical friends would stop by the Alphin-Nicholson home to play instruments and try out songs. They enjoyed themselves enough that the four buddies hit upon an idea: Why not move out of the living room, find a club where they could keep the informal atmosphere of friends making music, and put on a free show every week?

“We’d all been beaten up by the record business,” recalls Gierman. “We’d lost our record deals or our jobs, and nothing was working out. But we weren’t going to sit around complaining. We wanted to make something happen. Only the normal Nashville way wasn’t working out for us. It had to be something different.”

The only club willing to gamble on the idea was the minuscule Pub of Love, a bohemian drinking hole with a small, bare-walled performance space on the second floor. On Oct. 23, 2001, Alphin, Rich, Nicholson and Gierman dragged in couches, lamps, end tables and rugs, turning the blank room into a friendly gathering space. They christened the shows as “MuzikMafia nights.”

The term originated because the men -- who now call themselves the MuzikMafia godfathers -- wanted a catchphrase that emphasized music over business. “We sat around and said, ‘What Nashville needs is a mafia, because this town won’t pay attention to anyone on their own,’ ” Cory says with a laugh. “We decided to form our own mafia. I’ll support you, you support me, and we’ll all support each other.”

They gave the term its own spin, saying mafia stood for ‘Musically Artistic Friends In Alliance.”

A spark catches fire

Admittedly, few people shared their enthusiasm at first. The Pub of Love offered the MuzikMafia a Tuesday night slot, one of the slowest of the week. The shows started at 10 p.m., a late hour on a weeknight for a family-oriented bedroom community like Nashville. By then, most record industry executives and employees were home. That left mostly out-of-work musicians and struggling songwriters and performers.

Nonetheless, word spread quickly. Within weeks, the Pub of Love was overflowing beyond capacity each Tuesday. Wilson began performing regularly at the invitation of Rich, who’d heard her sing during a break between bands at the blues club where she bartended. Cowboy Troy, a 6-foot, 5-inch black cowboy rapper who had met Rich during a Lonestar show in Dallas, periodically drove up from Texas to perform.

Before long, regular participants included jugglers, flamethrowers, a woman who painted abstract art on canvas live to the music, and a 3-foot, 2-inch dancing dwarf nicknamed Two Foot Fred (an Indiana entrepreneur whom Rich met in a bar during the annual Fan Fair celebration in Nashville). It seemed as if every misfit and outcast, every performer who’d been off the radar in Nashville, suddenly felt as if they had a home within the rowdy, anything-goes shows.

The MuzikMafia nights moved to increasingly bigger clubs, always on Tuesday nights, always free, and always overcrowding whatever venue they called home. Detroit’s Kid Rock, a frequent Nashville visitor, showed up one night to play, occasionally returning to sit in; country star McBride and members of the rock band Saliva also participated.

Eventually, the daughter of Warner Bros. Nashville executive Paul Worley told her father that he should check out Big Kenny and John Rich, who often performed together at the MuzikMafia shows. They hadn’t yet considered themselves a duo; both still wanted to pursue solo careers.

Worley, who has produced hit albums by the Dixie Chicks and McBride, invited the two to come to his office to perform some of their co-written songs for him. Alphin and Rich thought they were pitching their tunes for other artists, but at the end of an informal session, Worley asked Alphin and Rich if they wanted a record deal as a duo.

They were an odd couple, for sure: the lanky, long-haired, hard-rocking Alphin who preached of the power of love during his shows and sported colorful stovepipe hats; and the gun-loving, hard-drinking Rich with his cowboy hat, Fu Manchu mustache and honky-tonk style. But the two talked it over and accepted the Warner Bros. offer.

“From the start, we knew we were going to be too radical to be ignored,” Alphin says. “We had hoped people would love what we do as much as we do, but we also realized we could be run out of town for trying something new.”

Indeed, they opened their album with “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich),” which includes rapping by Cowboy Troy and plenty of crunching rock guitars and drums -- as well as Big Kenny’s mock Southern preacher recitation, which has become a trademark of the duo. They mixed funky fare like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” with contemporary country ballads like “Holy Water,” a recent Top 20 hit on the Billboard country chart.

“What we do is polarizing, we know that,” says Alphin. “When people first hear us, they tend to love us or hate us. But we’re finding that people give us a second chance. If they see us live or if they listen to the album a few times, they come around. We’re finding a lot of people who said they didn’t get it the first time they heard it. Now they love us.”

Nevertheless, the stir likely will ratchet up a notch with the debut album of Cowboy Troy, the first release on Raybaw Records, due this spring. “It is un-freakin’-believable,” crows Rich, who is co-producing the album with Big Kenny and Paul Worley.

“And it’s a by-God country record. People will argue that, but man, that’s what it is. Cowboy Troy may rap, but he’ll tell you he’s a country artist, not a hip-hop artist. He grew up listening to country music, and what he’s doing is laying down raps on top of country instrumentation, with a few other things thrown in too. It is going to blow people’s minds.”

Meanwhile, Rich is also co-producing Wilson’s new album, and Big & Rich begin work soon on their next CD. Expect more surprises, they say. “If anything, we governed ourselves a little on the first record,” says Big Kenny. “I think we’ve learned now to just go with what we feel, to not hold anything back. It’s just the purest kind of creativity that’s working for us, to just try every crazy idea you have and see what happens.”