Modern Screen's Country Music Interviews Mark Miller

Sawyer Brown's Mark Miller
Wantin' and Havin' It All

By Alice King

Mark Miller gives a "you've got to be kidding" look when asked about on-the-road indulgences for him and his band, Sawyer Brown - Jim Scholten, Duncan Cameron, Joe Smyth, and Gregg "Hobie" Hubbard. You won't find this band, which prides itself on its blue-collar approach, making unreasonable demands from harried assistants. "We'd kind of feel ridiculous if we had people running around handing us Cokes," he laughs.

"I can get real upset real easy when I hear stuff like that." he says. "These are people, and people's lives, and they certainly deserve more than running around finding you a certain brand name of soda or something like that. They've got better things to do."

So, no sorting of M&Ms for the backstage area? "I grew up on a farm," says Mark, "and if someone would have told my grandfather to sort out green M&Ms for them, my grandfather would have shot 'em!

This staunchly egalitarian point of view is reflected in the songs on the band's new album, This Thing Called Wantin' And Havin' It All, which is dominated by the group's signature uptempo songs celebrating the lives of everyday Americans.

Songs like the cheerily down-to-earth "Nothing Less Then Love" (one of the more unromantically romantic love songs to come around), the title track, which tells the story of a man who leaves his money to a poor but good man rather than to his money-grubbing children, and the evocative "Small Town Hero," and three men who prefer the glory of their ordinary lives to anything more spectacular.

"I got some buddies that I went to high school with that are still my best friends today," Mark says of his inspiration for the song. "One's a farmer and one of 'em works on air conditioners. They go out on the road with me a few times a year--- they take their vacations and come out. My friend looked at me one day and said 'Man, I'm so proud of you, but there's no way in the world I'd put up with all the stuff you've gotta put up with out here, not for all the money.'" From this encounter, Mark got the first verse of the song, about a football hero who's got a chance at the bigtime, but prefers to stay at home rather than face the rigors of fame.

The next verse, about a Vietnam vet who's got a lot of medals and a letter from the President, shows how heroism is in the eye of the beholder. The guy sees the letter for what it is---a peice of paper to hang on the wall. The third verse, about a farmer who burns his farm down before it can be repossessed by the bank, shows a different kind of heroism, as well as reflecting Mark's farming roots and strong feelings about the plight of the American farmer

Mark is careful to point out that the rest of the band shares his opinions, despite their early and rapid rise to fame. The band started out in the early '80s as Savannah, barnstorming the nightclubs of the south. A career-making turn on the TV talent show Star Search got them noticed, and after taking a new name from a Nashville thoroughfare called Sawyer Brown Road, the band was signed in 1984 to Curb Records.

"I can't even tell you how exciting for us it was," Mark says of the whirlwind time after the Star Search audition. "We weren't a put-together, contrived band. We were a bunch of Southern boys--hillbillies---who got a free trip to L.A." While the guys took a lot of gruff from the critics and Nashville establishment for appearing on the glitzy TV show, they didn't let it bother them. "It wasn't like 'Do you want to join the Grand Ole Opry or go on Star Search?' It was, sit here at home or go do this TV show. So we chose not to sit at home."

While the band literally went to Hollywood, they never "went Hollywood." They are some of the hardest-working guys in the country, touring relentlessly, presenting their goodtimey music, as well as their more serious stuff to, as Mark puts it, "the masses." ("I want everybody to like my music." explains Mark.) While in the future the band may slow down some, for now, it participates in the old Nashville routine of leaving wives and kids behind for long stretches on the road.

When he returns home, Mark says he needs a few days to decompress and get back into the rhythm of his family. "The first couple of days I'm kinda looking for a place," he says, "because my wife and kids have a schedule and I'm trying to fit into it and become part of it... You have to realize that your wife has become pretty independent, so you have to jump in with her or you're gonna get left out... So you have to make sure and invite yourself in."

One way Mark definitely does not use to "invite" himself in is spoiling his children with lavish gifts. He and his wife both agree that although they can afford to give their kids anything they could want, they will never spoil them. For Christmas, for example, Mark laughs and confesses, "I want to get them, like, an orange and an apple and say 'You've got to work if you want anything else'!"

No Scrooge, Mark will relent and buy his kids the usual loot. His point is that he wants his kids to know that just because their daddy makes a lot of money, they shouldn't expect to get everything they want. "I hope I don't end up going overboard on it," he explains, "being too hard on them, but I hated rich, bratty kids growing up, and that's the last thing I want for my kids."

Mark remembers a funny story about his daughter coming home from nursery school one day all upset. Turns out that some kids had been making fun of her, calling her daddy "rich." Mark hid a smile and asked her what she had said to them. "I told them you're not," said the daughter stoutly. "Well that's right," answered Mark, who added, "Do you know what 'rich' means?" "No I don't daddy," the little girl answered. With a big laugh Mark finishes the tale, "I said 'Well all it means is they think that we have a lot of money, and we don't I just work real hard.' 'Cause I didn't want her to think otherwise, but I did want her to know what it meant because she thought it was bad."

The values behind this attitude come from growing up poor. "We all grew up and our parents worked hard." Mark explains about the band. "I didn't know how poor I was until I went to college and took an economics class and saw where my family fit on the economic scale, and there were some years when we were poverty scale." Poverty may no longer threaten, but Mark will never forget the lessons it taught him.

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