If You Wanna Get To Heaven

If you wanna get to heaven, you have got to raise a little hell. That is not a sermon. That is a three-minute road map out of Springfield, Missouri, stamped on vinyl in 1973 and sent down the highway like a dare. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils cut “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” for their self-titled debut, the record fans still call the Quilt Album because the cover looks like Grandma’s bedspread got loose and joined a rock band. Steve Cash wrote the words. John Dillon laid down the guitar riff. The whole thing came together in less than half an hour, which is about as long as it takes a good idea to outrun a committee.

Cash and Dillon were not chasing a formula. They were Springfield boys who had already burned through a stack of band names, Family Tree, Burlap Socks, the Emergency Band, before somebody at a naming party in Kansas City floated Cosmic Corncob and His Amazing Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They kept the last half, which was plenty. The early lineup that walked into Olympic Studios in London that June and July of 1973 was a six-man string band that also knew how to plug in: Cash on harp and percussion, Dillon on guitar, fiddle, mandolin, dulcimer and just about anything with strings, Randle Chowning on lead guitar and steel, Buddy Brayfield on piano and organ, Michael “Supe” Granda on bass, and Larry Lee on drums, acoustic guitar and the occasional musical saw. Producer Glyn Johns, the same man who had already framed the Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin, sat behind the board with A&M’s David Anderle. Johns heard a folk record. The band and their manager heard a hit.

Here is the part the radio people still love to tell. When it came time to sequence the album, Johns left “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” off his preferred list. He did not hate it. He thought it was too much rock and roll next to the harmonies, the river songs and the country-girl portraits the rest of the sessions had delivered. Manager Stan Plesser pushed back hard. He had watched rooms light up when the band played it live, and he knew a radio record when it walked in wearing boots. Plesser won the argument. The track made the cut, the single shipped with “Spaceship Orion” on the flip, and by 1974 it was sitting at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 23 in Canada, and somewhere around half a million copies out the door. The album itself climbed to number 26. Not bad for a bunch of Missouri longhairs whose biggest previous stage had been a candlelit living-room audition that finally convinced Johns and Anderle to sign them on the first of May, 1973.

The lyric is pure Ozark mischief. Nobody is promising a choir robe. The deal is simple: if the gates are the goal, you had better kick up some dust on the way. Cash sings it like a man who has already decided the dust is the point. Dillon’s riff is a chicken-pickin’ hook with a grin on it, the kind of figure that makes a bar band reach for the volume knob and a festival crowd start stomping before the second verse. Harp stabs, stacked voices, a rhythm section that swings more than it stomps. It is southern rock only if you stretch the map far enough north to catch the Missouri hills, and country only if you let the electric guitars stay in the room. The Daredevils never picked a lane. On the same record you get “Chicken Train,” “Colorado Song,” “Standin’ on the Rock” and “Beauty in the River,” a patchwork as deliberate as that quilt on the jacket.

The song kept traveling after the chart run cooled. Hank Williams Jr. cut it for High Notes in 1982. Jeff Carson revisited it in the late ’90s. A version turned up under the restoration scene in The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning. It opens the 1991 PBS documentary Dancing Outlaw, the one about West Virginia flatfoot dancer Jesco White, and years later Rockstar parked it on Rebel Radio inside Grand Theft Auto V, with a digital Jesco cutting a rug beside the Alamo Sea. That is a long way from Olympic Studios, and it still fits. A song about raising a little hell does not need permission to show up wherever the floor is uneven.

The bigger hit came later. “Jackie Blue,” from the 1974 follow-up It’ll Shine When It Shines, went to number 3 and showed the softer, dreamier side of the same band, Larry Lee out front on a tune that almost nobody expected to be the career peak. “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” stayed the handshake. It is the one that introduced the name, the quilt, the harmonies and the hell-raising clause in a single spin. Bassist Supe Granda later wrote the band’s story down in a book called It Shined. The title is a nod to the second album and to the whole improbable run: A&M, London, a producer who almost talked them out of their first single, and a fan club that still answers to Dareheads.

The Daredevils never really quit the road. Lineups shifted, Cash passed, and the current crew still carries three of the founding voices’ spirit with John Dillon and Supe Granda among the long haul, plus players who can cover every corner of the catalog from the quilt songs to the later records. They have kept writing. Off the Beaten Path arrived in 2017, proof that the Missouri habit of mixing electric bluegrass, country rock and a poet’s aside did not retire when the major-label years did. Classic radio still leans on the early singles because they do what great freeform tracks always did: they sound like a place. Springfield, the Ozarks, a rented flat in London, a quilt somebody’s aunt might have stitched, and a chorus that refuses to behave.

Put the needle on track three of that debut and the room changes. Three minutes and four seconds, A&M yellow label, no apology in the groove. Cash on the vocal, Dillon’s riff doing the persuading, the rest of the band stacking the kind of harmony that made Johns book the ticket in the first place. It is not a power ballad and it is not a boogie checklist. It is a Missouri proposition set to a backbeat, and fifty years on it still clears the floor.

You can chase the rest of the catalog, the deep cuts, the live nights and the long story of the band, the same way we do it over at THE ZOO, where album rock still gets room to breathe and a song like this does not have to share the hour with a commercial. The Daredevils keep their own porch light on at theozarkmountaindaredevils.com, post the road news and the old photos on Facebook, and keep the newer snapshots rolling at Instagram. However you find them, start with the quilt and the hell-raising clause. If you wanna get to heaven, you already know the rest.