Tennessee Whiskey: The Dean Dillon Story

I'm a songwriter,

singer songwriter, you know, and I'm not...

by any stretch of the imagination,

George Strait. Hell, no.

When I figured out he could sing better than I could,

and he loved my songs, I thought, there you go.

That's the ticket.

You write the song, let him sing it.

You know, Dean and I, you know, we've had a special relationship,

no doubt about it.

The only other relationship, you know, that I can think of

is Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Dean Dillon and George Strait are brothers.

They've been brothers since they were both born.

He has a way of making you relive...

He-he's almost like a therapy session, in a way.

If you listen to a Dean Dillon song, he will make you

relive all the bad stuff in your life,

all the good stuff in your life,

and at the end you're okay.

He was one of the guys I aspired to.

I wanted to be like that.

And I came outta Texas worshiping Guy Clark

and Towns and those guys, and Dean had that kinda

cool soft spoken sensibility and those great rhymes.

When we would hang out at somebody's house

or in a bar or something in Texas, we would talk about

Dean Dillon being this genius songwriter,

I mean it was just like somebody beyond

that you would never meet and that was like, you know,

lived in the clouds and that would never happen.

Dean's just a... Dean's a first rate song writer.

He's-he's top of my list.

You know, George is here tonight

at T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Gonna get up tonight and sing a couple songs with him.

You know, always a thrill to hear him do one of my songs.

It never gets old.

Pink room.

Just perfect for a tough man to wear pink.

There you go.

All my fault.

We're gonna rock the hell out of it.

I want you to welcome my friend, Mr. Dean Dillon today.

I was unaware, when I first moved to town

of George Strait. One of the first songs I ever heard

of George Strait's, and it might've been his

first single, I'm not sure.

But I was a freshman in high school,

and I heard a song called "Unwound."

I didn't know Dean wrote that song,

but I knew I loved George's record, I loved it.

Then I found out who wrote it

and that's where I, after that, just about every song

you heard of George's, you found out Dean wrote that song.

Living, breathing, he's the greatest songwriter

in this city, there is no doubt about it.

I was here and got to see the last of these guys,

and I called 'em giants

that got to roam Music Row.

And hopefully I got to be in the room with 'em.

And the only thing I needed to do

was to stand back and keep my fucking mouth shut.

When this community talks about the 1% of songwriters,

the top 1%, Dean Dillon's been in that top 1%

for more than 30 years.

I don't even know if Dean knows how important

he was to my career.

I'd had, "Maybe It was Memphis,"

which was a song of the year. My song of the year.

But you're looking for that thing to get you

over the sophomore slump.

So second album, I got with Dean

and we wrote "Spilled Perfume,"

and that was my first platinum record.

Dean has a way of writing really simple songs

that said everything.

And there is a genius to that,

that it's, uh, you can't put your finger on.

You can't sit there and say,

you can't say, okay, this is how you write songs,

because nobody knows how to do it but Dean.

I just don't see that in country music today.

I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people

that go to Dean for songs, but I don't know

how many of 'em have his songs on every record

they ever recorded.

Spent my whole life doing it,

and there's nothing else to do, in my book.

I'm not gonna do anything else.

Or I can't do anything else.

I guess I could, but I don't think I'd be very good at it.

We were dirt poor.

My mother was a waitress in a truck stop.

She met my dad there at the restaurant.

He was a long haul trucker.

He was 40 years old and she was 18.

And my grandfather, Bryce Field,

He didn't particularly like that scenario.

Two weeks after I was born, my dad came to see me

for the first time.

He came in off the road, he'd been out on the road driving

and pulled down the driveway, this old gravel drive...

and the minute he pulled up next to the house,

my grandfather stepped out on the porch

and had a shotgun.

And he pulled the first trigger...

and hit him in the arm.

He threw up his arm,

and he hit him here in the arm,

pulled the other trigger, and knocked the gun barrel

up in the air or he'd a killed him.

He was just that kinda guy, my grandfather was.

Uh, and my dad, he threw that car in reverse, never came back.

And hell, I can't blame him.

If there was that kinda bad blood

between my grandfather and my father,

then I don't believe I would've stayed

in that situation, either, but shortly after that,

she got divorced and so my grandparents raised me.

The way he grew up and the hardships that he had

to face, you know, growing up,

certainly influenced

the way that he wrote and writes.

When you're as creative as Dean Dillon is,

and when you live inside your own insanity

like Dean does, I believe...

you channel everything that happened to you

as a young man and as a young person that gave you fuel

to go and try to create something beautiful

and wonderful and extraordinary.

When I was five years old, my mom remarried.

And they came and got me and took me

to Melvindale, Michigan, and it broke my heart.

Because I had been raised with my uncles,

when they told me we were moving back to Tennessee,

I jumped up for joy, and then they said,

but wait a minute, you can't go.

We're gonna take you to Virginia and drop you off

at your grandmother's, whom I'd never met.

So by the time, I was 10 years old,

I really didn't know who I belonged to.

The only friend I found in that whole thing

was that tiger stripe Stella guitar.

I slept with the damned thing.

My childhood was not great, either...

and so I think that had a lot of influences

on the way that I look at life,

and I'm sure he's the same way.

If there's a songwriter that's hypersensitive

to people and places and things and their surroundings,

it is Dean Dillon.

When millions of people gravitate to something,

and tears come out of their eyes

when they hear that song, you realize

how important it is, but also,

there's something really, really special

for all those words to land in the right place.

And he played "Marina Del Rey."

He goes, ah, he goes, ah, I don't think you're gonna

like this, but you know, it's just one of the songs

on here, just give it a listen.

He said, I don't think it's really for you,

but just listen to it.

And I listened to "Marina Del Rey,"

and I go, whoa, dude, can I have that?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles.

I think seven years old,

well, everybody in the world, I think,