Hitch-Hiker’s Hero

The Zoo Crew has got a soft-shouldered Georgia groove spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and it is Hitch-Hiker’s Hero by the Atlanta Rhythm Section, the second cut on their 1976 album A Rock and Roll Alternative. Buddy Buie and drummer Robert Nix wrote it, Buie produced it, and Rodney Mills engineered the sessions at Studio One in Doraville, just outside Atlanta. The track runs about three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, an easy pulse under light guitar, with Ronnie Hammond’s voice carrying a story that feels like a roadside postcard from the long-hair years.

The lyric puts a man by the shoulder of the highway, thumb stuck in the wind, sun-striped and stubborn. He was one with them at Woodstock, and he was there at Watkins Glen, the 1973 Summer Jam that drew a couple hundred thousand people into upstate New York. Kids gather around him and ask where he has been. They look at him with wonder and wish they were him. They would follow him to hell and back again. Then the song turns the picture over. The children never see him when the nights are dark and cold, when the cars are few, if any, and he only wishes he was home. He has got to keep on going, knowing not where he will be next. The last line is pure hitchhiker gospel: stick out your thumb. It is a road parable dressed up as southern rock, king of the highway on the chorus and a lonely man in the verse.

That album was the one that finally cracked the door for the band. Released on Polydor in December 1976, A Rock and Roll Alternative climbed to number 13 on the Billboard album chart and went gold in the spring of 1977, pulled along by So Into You, which peaked at number 7. Robert Nix later said the record was their first real breakthrough with radio and fans, the one that lifted them out of opening-act and regional-cult status. The set is eight songs, seven originals and a cover of Blind Joe Reynolds’ Outside Woman Blues, the blues that Cream had already turned into a rock standard. Buie and Nix wrote most of the album together. Dean Daughtry and J. R. Cobb each had a hand in a few. Beside the hitchhiker song sit Sky High, Don’t Miss the Message, Georgia Rhythm, Everybody Gotta Go, and Neon Nites. The production leans smoother than the tougher southern-rock neighbors, mid-tempo, rounded vocals, bright keys, and Barry Bailey’s clipped, rising guitar figures. Fans still treat the album as the place where the Doraville sound fully arrived.

Nix remembered the pace around those sessions as pretty much crazy. The band was writing, recording, and touring in the same stretch with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, ZZ Top, Wet Willie, and .38 Special. He said they really thought they were all supermen. A British writer who caught them on the road while they were pushing A Rock and Roll Alternative found two camps in the bus: the old Candymen road dogs, Nix and Daughtry, big and battle-scarred, and the quieter players who had come up through the studio. Paul Goddard, the bassist, was not shy about saying Nix could make a night difficult. That friction never showed up in the records. On tape the six of them locked in like the session men they had been before anybody called them a band. Hammond sang lead, Bailey played lead guitar, Cobb handled rhythm guitar and harmony, Daughtry sat on organ and piano, Goddard held the bass, and Nix played drums and added background vocals. Buie himself sang a little background on the album.

The way the Atlanta Rhythm Section got started is a studio story, not a garage story. In 1970, engineer Rodney Mills built Studio One in Doraville with music publisher Bill Lowery, producer and songwriter Buddy Buie, and guitarist-writer J. R. Cobb. The room became one of the main recording houses around Atlanta. Al Kooper, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe South, Bonnie Bramlett, Dickey Betts, B. J. Thomas, and Billy Joe Royal all passed through. Buie needed a house band that could cut tracks for other artists and, when the clock allowed, cut tracks for themselves. He pulled from two groups he already knew cold. From the Candymen, Roy Orbison’s road band, came singer Rodney Justo, keyboardist Dean Daughtry, and drummer Robert Nix. From the Classics IV, the pop band behind Spooky, Stormy, and Traces, came Daughtry again and J. R. Cobb. Guitarist Barry Bailey and bassist Paul Goddard had played together in other outfits and had also backed Orbison. Buie, Cobb, and Lowery named the outfit the Atlanta Rhythm Section. They cut a demo of instrumentals, landed a deal with Decca, and recorded the self-titled debut at Studio One in November 1971. It came out in January 1972.

That first record did not sell the way they hoped. Justo left for New York session work, and Ronnie Hammond stepped in on vocals for Back Up Against the Wall in 1973. From there the classic lineup ran through Third Annual Pipe Dream, Dog Days, Red Tape, A Rock and Roll Alternative, Champagne Jam, and Underdog. Champagne Jam, out in 1978, went platinum and gave them Imaginary Lover and I’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight. They played Grant Field at Georgia Tech in September 1977 on a bill with Heart, Foreigner, and Bob Seger, and they played Knebworth in England in June 1978 in front of about sixty thousand people, sharing the day with Genesis, Jefferson Starship, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The Georgia Music Hall of Fame brought them in during 1996. Nix left in 1979. Hammond, Bailey, Cobb, Goddard, Daughtry, and Buie have all since passed. Rodney Justo, the original singer, is back out front with a later lineup that still works the classic songs.

If you want the paper trail, the band’s own site keeps the full discography, and the page for A Rock and Roll Alternative lists Hitchhiker’s Hero right where it belongs, second song, Buie and Nix, three minutes and thirty-eight seconds. That home base is Atlanta Rhythm Section, and the discography that names the track sits at atlantarhythmsection.com/discography. The band posts road notes and show talk on Instagram at atlanta_rhythm_section. Fans keep a public tribute room going on Facebook, the Atlanta Rhythm Section Tribute Page, where old show stories and Champagne Jam memories still get passed around. The Zoo Crew will leave the needle in the groove a little longer for the Zoo Freaks. Stick out your thumb, and catch the rest of the freeform set over at THE ZOO.