I’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight

The Zoo Crew has got a soft one rolling for the Zoo Freaks, and it comes out of Doraville, Georgia, with a shrug and a wink. Atlanta Rhythm Section cut "I'm Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight" for the album Champagne Jam, and the thing still feels like a porch light left on after a long haul. Buddy Buie, Robert Nix, and Dean Daughtry wrote it, Buie produced it, and Ronnie Hammond sang it like a man who has already read the bad news and decided the newspaper can wait. The record came out of Studio One in Doraville in 1977, the same little room that had been the band's clubhouse since the start of the decade, and Polydor shipped the single in May 1978 with "The Ballad of Lois Malone" on the flip. It followed right behind "Imaginary Lover," and the album that held both of them went platinum and climbed to number seven.

The lyric is a Southern shrug dressed up as a pop song. The singer picks up the paper, sees a world full of trouble, calls the street a jungle and the job a rat race, and then tells the bartender to pour a double. He is not fixing anything. He is postponing it. Folks who lived with FM radio in 1978 remember how clean that chorus sat between the harder Southern rock of the day. ARS never tried to out-roar the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd. They polished the edges, kept the guitars warm, and let Hammond's voice carry the joke. Chart-wise it did the job. Billboard parked it at number 14, Cash Box at 16, the Canadian RPM chart at 15, and the adult contemporary list at 43. It barely left North America, which suits a song that sounds like it was written for a roomful of friends rather than a world tour.

There is a chart story attached to it that still makes old program directors grin. In August 1978 the top fourteen records on the Hot 100 froze in place for two straight weeks. Nothing moved. This single was the one sitting at number fourteen, part of what folks later called the Frozen Fourteen. When the ice finally broke, the song dropped straight out of the top forty. One week it was holding the line, the next it was gone. Radio people still talk about that stall the way ballplayers talk about a rain delay. The song itself did not change. The chart just refused to budge, and then it did.

The sleeve of Champagne Jam carries a quieter story. The band thanked JoJo Billingsley for background vocals on this very track, and thanked Artimus Pyle, on loan from Lynyrd Skynyrd, for percussion. Paul Davis, the Bang Records singer, added more backing voices. Billingsley, one of Skynyrd's Honkettes, later told an interviewer how the vocal came about. After the 1977 plane crash that took Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, and Dean Kilpatrick, drummer Robert Nix brought her into the Doraville studio, dimmed the lights, handed her a glass of wine, and played the new song. She sang. Nix and engineer Rodney Mills danced in the control room. Nix called it a smash. By the next session the mix had pushed her far back, which stung, but the credit stayed on the jacket. J.R. Cobb dedicated his side of the album to Van Zant, the Gaines siblings, and Kilpatrick. Nix dedicated his to the survivors. That is a lot of weight for a record whose title cut is about pouring champagne and tying one on.

The song never really left the set. Set-list keepers still rank it among the band's most played numbers, right behind "So Into You," "Champagne Jam," "Imaginary Lover," and their take on "Spooky." Decades on, the current lineup still drops it into the show, tucked between the title cut and the old Classics IV cover. Zoo Freaks who catch the band on a package bill with Firefall or Orleans are likely to hear Hammond's old melody come back around, now sung by the man who started the group in the first place.

That man is Rodney Justo, and the start of Atlanta Rhythm Section is a studio story more than a garage story. In 1970, engineer Rodney Mills opened Studio One in Doraville, a little town northeast of Atlanta, with backing from publisher Bill Lowery, producer and songwriter Buddy Buie, and guitarist J.R. Cobb. Buie and Cobb had already been through the Classics IV, the pop band behind "Spooky," "Stormy," and "Traces." Buie pulled in players he knew from the Candymen, the group that had backed Roy Orbison on the road: singer Rodney Justo, keyboardist Dean Daughtry, and drummer Robert Nix. Guitarist Barry Bailey and bassist Paul Goddard came out of the same Orbison circle. The bunch became the house band, cutting sessions for other artists, and somewhere around May 1970 they gave themselves a name. A demo of instrumentals turned into a two-record deal with MCA/Decca. The self-titled debut was tracked at Studio One in November 1971.

Justo sang that first album and then stepped away. Ronnie Hammond, who had been engineering at the studio, took the microphone for Back Up Against the Wall in 1973 and stayed through the hit years. The band kept making records that critics liked and radio mostly ignored until A Rock and Roll Alternative and "So Into You" broke through in 1977. Champagne Jam was the victory lap. Hammond left in the early eighties, came back later, and the classic lineup slowly passed on. Justo returned to the front after Hammond's death in 2011, and he is the last of the original six still out there with the name. He has told reporters he does not think of the crowd as fans so much as friends, and that the best part of the gig is the talking afterward. Georgia put the band in its Music Hall of Fame in 1996. The authorized history, written by Willie G. Moseley, lays the whole Doraville tale out for anyone who wants the long version.

If the Zoo Freaks want to chase the trail further, the band keeps a home base at Atlanta Rhythm Section, where Champagne Jam still sits among the records they brag on. Their Facebook page lives at The Atlanta Rhythm Section, the Instagram handle is atlanta_rhythm_section, and the X account is AtlantaRhythm. Fans also gather in the Atlanta Rhythm Section Tribute Page group, trading old posters and road stories. Over here on THE ZOO, the Crew will keep spinning the deep cuts, the champagne ones included, for anybody who would rather hear a record than scroll past one.