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International Country Music Association Newsletter
************************************************** Kevin Hughes Murder Rob Simbeck wrote the following article. It first appeared on the cover of "The Nashville Scene." The week of publication was August 8, 2002. Both the newspaper and Mr. Simbeck are known for their careful research and fairness. I have copied and pasted about 50 percent of Mr. Simbeck's article. There are a few paragraphs to which I will wish to call your special attention. My comments will be clearly marked and in parentheses. ************************************************** With a Bullet: The story of gold chains, doctored charts and a Music Row murder By Rob Simbeck Kevin Hughes was a clean kid caught in a dirty business. In 1989, he was the Nashville chart researcher at Cash Box magazine, which had once ranked with Billboard as the industry's most prestigious trade paper. For a 23-year-old who loved music and had made up his own charts growing up in rural Illinois, it should have been a dream job. The magazine delivered every aspect of the music industry, spotlighting both new and established artists and records. Its record charts ranked the nation's most popular albums and singles. But Hughes had walked into a dark netherworld of tough-guy record promoters who wore gold chains, drove Cadillacs and bilked aspiring singers out of fortunes. He soon learned these were people whose livelihoods depended on doctoring the very charts over which he had been put in charge. By the first week of March, Hughes was telling people that he had a big decision to make. He told his parents he wanted to come back home the following weekend to sort some things out. He never made it. On Thursday, March 9, 1989, he was gunned down on Music Row, the dream dying in a pool of blood on a cold, dark street. The Nashville dailies reported at first that it was a robbery gone bad in an area where violence was on the rise, but those who knew the situation suspected at once that it had been a hit. The names of two Music Row record promoters dominated the speculation that swirled instantly and never fully died, even after more than a decade without an arrest. The first, Chuck Dixon, died last December in Nashville, although plenty of people who knew him would feel more comfortable if they could see the body. The second, Richard F. "Tony" D'Antonio, was arrested in Las Vegas two weeks ago and charged with first-degree murder. The street hypothesis is that Dixon--a self-styled godfather of country music--ordered the murder, and D'Antonio carried it out. The police have released little information, but D'Antonio's arrest signifies that they subscribe to at least the latter half of the theory. Both men knew Hughes well. In addition to working as a record promoter, D'Antonio had been Cash Box's director of Nashville operations; he had, in fact, recruited Hughes as an unpaid intern from Belmont University. Dixon was omnipresent at Cash Box for many years. His clients dominated the paper's independent country chart, and he was close to its Los Angeles-based owner, George Albert. When Hughes was unwilling to participate in a well-known system of chart manipulation that helped defraud an endless string of naive country singers, the theory goes, he was killed. (Please note in this paragraph Gary Bradshaw is named as Chuck Dixon's partner. Please pay special attention his directly quoted comments. Rhett) In his heyday, Chuck Dixon was flashy, well dressed and obsessed with the Mafia. "He watched The Godfather--parts 1, 2 and 3--four or five times a week," says Gary Bradshaw, an enemy-turned-partner of Dixon's. "It was unreal." (Notice Bradshaw how Bradshaw describes his business partner. Rhett) Dixon, Bradshaw says, had once lived in the projects, poor and drinking too much. The memory of those days would stay with him. "He was scared to death of being broke again. Money meant everything in the world to him. Nothing else meant anything." A friend introduced Dixon to an established Nashville record promoter, who gave him some lists of radio stations, answered his questions and threw in a few pointers. It wasn't long before he was established, telling others to back off from places like Cash Box that he increasingly thought of as his territory. At some point, say those who knew him, he decided that intimidation would be a helpful business tool. He would approach acquaintances in his Cadillac, roll down the window and say, in a graveled, Godfather voice, "Hey, I want to see you." "He used to like to play that mob role to the hilt," says Tim Malchak, a singer who used Dixon's services in the late '80s and has generally good memories of him. "He liked to flaunt the fact that he had a lot of cash." (Here Bradshaw remembers getting his costume, for the role he would play, in Dixon's crime organization. Rhett) "If you didn't wear a lot of jewelry around there, then you weren't a promoter," Bradshaw remembers. "It was part of the show. I had a gold necklace, Nino Cerrutti suits. I came to Nashville one time in Levi's and a shirt. Chuck took me out to a clothing store and bought me a new suit, and he said I had to have these Florsheim shoes." Dixon's circle included D'Antonio, who referred to himself as "The Tone" and fancied himself a Mafia type as well. Dixon, though, was the undisputed boss. (An eyewitness describes Bradshaw's relationship with Dixon. Rhett) "He orchestrated everything with Bradshaw and Tony," says Robert Gentry, then an independent promoter who teamed up for a time with D'Antonio." I mean, they used to kiss his ring, you know what I'm saying?" D'Antonio worked briefly as an assistant to a promoter, but a chance encounter with a former Cash Box editor gave him an unexpected career boost. Tom McEntee had been a New York Cash Box staffer in the 1960s, when the magazine was at its peak of power and prestige. He had moved to Nashville and opened an industry tip sheet called The Country Music Survey--founding as an adjunct the annual conference that became the Country Radio Seminar. He then promoted for both major and independent labels. As the mid-'80s approached, though, he was between gigs, playing the Pac-Man machine in the lobby of the United Artists Tower on Music Row to kill time. D'Antonio started hanging around the machine as well, and the two became friendly. Cash Box Nashville vice-president/general manager Jim Sharp had just left the magazine, and owner George Albert hired McEntee to replace him. One of his first acts was to hire D'Antonio. "It was my first day, and I needed bodies," McEntee says. "Tony had worked in Vegas. I think he told me he had worked the crap tables and knew numbers. If somebody puts down a $6 bet and it's 35-to-1, you've got to be instantly figuring the payoff, and there are a lot of bets going around, so you had to be good with numbers. I said, 'Come on, I'll teach you how to be the chart man.' He worked his ass off seven days a week." Six months later, D'Antonio was handling the charts more or less himself. The paper had added more reporting stations and "he was overwhelmed," McEntee says. "He needed help, and I didn't have the budget to hire. I told him to call the colleges--MTSU, Belmont--and ask for interns. He interviewed this kid and said, 'I like him. Can we put him on?' I interviewed him too and thought he was fine, so I said, 'Go ahead.' " The unpaid intern, who would later drop out of Belmont when the job became full-time, was Kevin Hughes. Kevin Hughes grew up outside Carmi in southeastern Illinois. By the time he was a freshman in high school, he was obsessed with music, studying the Billboard magazines his parents would bring home from Evansville, and making up his own charts. He entered Belmont University in 1983 to study the music business, later changing his major to marketing. A fan of positive music, he was drawn more to rock and contemporary Christian than to country--he was an Amy Grant fan, and he listened to everything from Barry Manilow to Metallica. He was an intern at the Gospel Music Association before taking the Cash Box job, thrilled for a time to be part of a business whose calling card is fame, glamour and respectability. Eventually, though, he realized that much of the business was a churning engine of ego and greed, fed by a constant influx of fame-hungry singers with various levels of talent and accomplishment. They are fair game for all manner of businesses--recording studios, record labels, managers, record promoters--on a sliding scale of legitimacy and respectability, many with enough links to well-known companies and artists to provide an irresistible sheen to the newcomer. (Bradshaw admits scamming a lot of people for tens of thousands of dollars. His only regret is he was never involved in the really big scams. Rhett) "There were hundreds of them," Bradshaw says. "There was a turkey farmer down in Mississippi who got ripped off for half a million dollars by someone I knew. Another lady from Ohio told me she spent $450,000 on one album project for her husband, and I have to believe her. I personally was never fortunate enough to get involved in one of those deals. I do know a lot of these people who came here spent 25-, 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-thousand dollars like clockwork." Bradshaw, in fact, says he got into the business himself after being taken for $17,000 trying to help his son's singing career. Singers would quickly spend thousands--or tens of thousands--of dollars just getting a song recorded. Then it was time to talk with record promoters, who charged $1,500 or more to work a single. The promoter's job was to convince radio stations that reported to Cash Box to add the single to the station's playlist. With enough adds, the record would start moving up the Cash Box Indie Singles chart and might even crack the main Country Singles chart. The service seldom came as advertised. (Bradshaw admits the entire thing was nothing but a scam. He admits being paid to promote songs that never were delivered to the radio stations. Rhett) "I'd have certain disk jockeys who would add the records, and Chuck [Dixon] would have some," Bradshaw says. "The trick is that most of the time the record wasn't getting played or even delivered. I spent a lot of time going around to radio stations, and I never did hear one of our artists getting airplay." "I called up the radio stations," says former promoter Robert Gentry, "and some of them told me, 'I'm going to take care of you because you take care of me, but as far as actually playing, I ain't gonna play that crap--I'll lose my job.' And they'd send us fake charts." That, though, was not in itself enough to make the system work. "The fix was in at the office, not the radio stations," Gentry explains. "Tony was screwing with the charts. It would be too difficult to get 40, 50 or 60 stations sending phony playlists. I had plenty of stations where had four or five places where I could pick whatever I wanted, but to get it to No. 1 on anything you're going to have to move it up the chart at a lot of stations, and that can't be. That part was fixed at the office, and there was a direct relationship between advertising dollars spent at the magazine and position on the chart." (Bradshaw admits the entire scam was based on fraud and lies. Rhett) The bottom-line payoff was supposed to be a buzz and a chart presence irresistible to the major labels. "The pretense of the promoters," Bradshaw says, "is that if you do well on the independent charts, the majors will suck you right up, which was in fact just the opposite. Most majors wouldn't touch somebody on those charts." Working the independents, Gentry says unequivocally, amounted to "just screwing them out of money." (Bradshaw admits he knew it was a scam and he was a willing partner, in it. Rhett) The scam involved keeping a stable of disc jockeys at some reporting stations. "Chuck told me at one time he was paying out $2,000 a week--for everything from car tires and tune-ups to house payments--to disc jockeys," Bradshaw says. "You're talking about guys who were making $200 a week and didn't have the money to live like the stars. They'd come up for [the Country Radio Seminar] and get to hang around George Jones or Garth Brooks, and it was a big thrill for them. They were like groupies in a way." To read the rest of Mr. Simbeck's article visit
GraceLand Entertainment Takes Talent Search To Mississippi The Nashville office of GraceLand Entertainment will tour 5 Mississippi cities searching for new talent, next month. They will be searching for new talent in Country, Gospel, Pop, Rock, and Urban music. For details, email kingnotes@aol.com
Want To Lease Your Music To Foreign Record Distributors? We will be sending a representative to the MIDEM event, next January. Last year, more than 3900 music companies from 94 nations attended the event. We are still looking for top quality music of any style to represent. First, visit www.midem.com to read about last year's event. If you would like our representative to pitch your music to the foreign record distributors, please mail a copy of your album to: Attention: Midem Project ************************************************** |