Imaginary Lover

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable locked on a smooth one for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have ever sat in a parking lot with the windows down and a six-pack on the seat, you already know the groove. Imaginary Lover by the Atlanta Rhythm Section, off the 1978 album Champagne Jam, is the kind of record that slides in sideways and stays. Buddy Buie, Dean Daughtry, and Robert Nix wrote it, Ronnie Hammond sang it like he had all the time in the world, and the thing went to number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 9 up in Canada. The album itself parked at number 7 on the Billboard 200, the biggest commercial ride the Doraville boys ever took. Over at THE ZOO we still treat it like a deep-cut secret even though half the country has hummed the chorus in a truck stop.

The backstory on how the song got cut is pure Southern studio hustle. By 1977 the label was tired of waiting on a smash. The band had put out fine records, the kind musicians respect and accountants frown at, and the company handed them about 45 days to come up with a winner. They answered with Champagne Jam, cut at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia, with Buddy Buie and Robert Nix producing and Rodney Mills engineering. Live band tracking first, then Hammond stacking those velvet harmonies on top. Barry Bailey and J.R. Cobb on guitars, Paul Goddard on bass, Daughtry on the keys, Nix on the drums. That room had already hosted Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe South, and Dickey Betts. Champagne Jam was the house band finally cashing the check they had been writing for everybody else.

Ask the writers what the song is about and you get a straight answer with a grin. In an interview for the Musicians Hall of Fame, and again when a fan caught Buie at the Georgia Music Awards, somebody finally put the question on the table: was Imaginary Lover about masturbation? Buie did not dodge it. He said yes. Hammond used to introduce it from the stage with a line the Zoo Freaks still quote: this song is about a great American pastime, it is not baseball, but it does have to do with balls. The lyric sells the fantasy as cleaner than the real thing. No arguments, no rejection, no boredom, just private pleasure that never talks back. Nancy Sinatra later cut her own version for a 1998 album called Sheet Music, which tells you the tune traveled farther than a Georgia parking lot.

There is a little ad-lib buried in the track that only makes sense if you were in the room. While they were cutting Champagne Jam, Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life was brand new and spinning in the studio. On Isn't She Lovely, Wonder is in the tub with his daughter and tells her to get out of the water. Hammond flipped the line on the fly into get out of the water, Stevie, and they left it in. A friend of the songwriters out of South Carolina passed that story along years later, and it fits the loose way those sessions ran. Nothing was too sacred to poke, and nothing good got erased just because it was an accident.

The wildest accident happened after the record left the building. In 1978 an FM jock dropped a promo copy of Champagne Jam on the platter and left the speed at 45 instead of 33. Hammond's vocal jumped up into a range that sounded, to a room full of people waiting on the next Fleetwood Mac album, exactly like Stevie Nicks. The phones lit up. Folks wanted the new Mac tune. The jock, smelling a good bit, let it ride. Word got to Nicks in Los Angeles. She went out and bought the record, played it fast, and told Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone that she got chills. It sounded exactly like something she would sing, the way she would sing it. She even slipped the sped-up track in with demos for what became Tusk and played it for Christine McVie, who complimented her on the song, thinking it was hers. One telling of the tale has McVie pulling over at a payphone, convinced Nicks had cut a solo record behind the band's back. Fleetwood Mac's engineer later heard that the Atlanta Rhythm Section did not find the mix-up quite as funny as the Mac camp did. Fair enough. Their record had just been borrowed by somebody else's legend.

How the band got to that room is a longer ride, and it starts with session cats who were already famous for other people's hits. In the spring of 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 been in the Classics IV, the outfit behind Spooky, Stormy, and Traces. Buie pulled in three players from the Candymen, the band that had backed Roy Orbison: singer Rodney Justo, keyboardist Dean Daughtry, and drummer Robert Nix. Guitarist Barry Bailey and bassist Paul Goddard had also done time behind Orbison. The house band cut tracks for other artists, then Buie, Cobb, and Lowery decided the players deserved their own name. They christened them the Atlanta Rhythm Section around May 1970. A demo of instrumentals landed a deal with Decca, and the self-titled debut came out in January 1972.

Justo split after that first album failed to catch, headed for New York session work, and Ronnie Hammond stepped in for Back Up Against the Wall in 1973. Hammond had been singing Buie's demos, and the fit was immediate. The records kept coming, polished Southern rock with more radio in it than the Allman Brothers or Skynyrd, until A Rock and Roll Alternative went gold on the back of So Into You. Champagne Jam was the next swing, and Imaginary Lover was the single that proved the 45-day dare had worked. The band landed in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1996. The classic lineup is gone now, Hammond, Nix, Goddard, Cobb, Bailey, and Daughtry all passed, but the songs still roll, and original singer Rodney Justo came back to carry the name on the road.

If you want the straight dope from the camp that still books the dates, the band keeps the lights on at their official site, Atlanta Rhythm Section, where Champagne Jam and Imaginary Lover still sit right in the middle of the story. They post road news and old photos on Facebook and keep a running gallery over on Instagram. Fans who want to trade set lists and old ticket stubs gather in the Atlanta Rhythm Section Tribute Page group. Spin it again when the lane gets quiet. The imaginary one never argues about the volume.