billy ray, how are you? >> i'm doing great. >> my first question, did you ever have this terrible nagging feeling if you suddenly keeled over from a heart attack tomorrow, the headlines would be, miley cyrus dad dies of an achey breaky heart? >> if that were the case, that's what it's going to read. as ironic as my life is at times, that will probably be the way i go. >> you have had an extraordinarily checkered life. you've had great highs. great lows. fair liberal dose of scandal and drama and everything else. how would you -- as you approach your 50th birthday. by the way, you have weathered much better than i have. as you approach it, how would you sum up your life? >> i would sum it up as for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. for me, there's never been anything in the middle. it's always been white hot or ice cold. it i goes back to my childhood, you know, when i was either going through what a kid at that time might be going through in eastern kentucky. my mom and dad got divorced when i was 5 years old and a lot of adversities. there was the other side of my life i look back on now and go, wow, on one hand, that was the best of times, you know? just growing up, i had a lot of good friends. and always loved nature. and there was a lot of woods, obviously, the name floodwoods, kentucky, there was a lot of woods to go out and ride horses and play. so it was either really sad or really happy. there wasn't a whole lot in between. >> as a musician all your life, does being able to have both extremes in your life, is that good for the creative process? >> i'd kind of like to know some vanilla. like something in the middle. >> a quiet year. >> just have one good normal time. >> your daughter's inherited a slightly rebellious streak i would say as she gets a bit older. i've watched her incredible rise to fame. just as a general principle of the billy ray and miley life pattern, you can see a similar thing. where you were -- i love this line. your penny coastal preacher is a grandfather. a father who was a state legislature. and you a juvenile delinquent. >> to be honest, and again, it was that opposite equal reaction. my pappa was a pentacoastal preacher. on any given night, if i could get the police to chase me, that was a successful night. if they didn't chase me, then i was doing something wrong. now you're a father. when you see miley occasionally falling off the straight and narrow, do you recognize that slightly rebellious edge to her? >> of course. you know. i think certainly she gets a lot of that from her old man. >> what have you learned about yourself over the last 50 years? >> i've learned that it's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up. and that's kind of -- i think the key for everybody in life, you know. >> what's the key to getting back on your feet when you've had a big blow? >> dust yourself off. it's just like baseball. i compare life to a baseball game a lot of times. other times you know you dive in. you might get called out. you might get safe, whatever. you get that dirt on you. the first thing you want to do is collect yourself and dust yourself off. and life is a game of making adjustments, you know. and it's a journey. and i think that for all of us, including myself, i think it's a matter of going through this journey of life and sometimes you make good calls, sometimes you make bad calls. but the main thing is knowing the difference and making adjustments. >> what would you say has been the best and worst moments of your life? >> mm. well, the best. the best being here with you. >> of course. from the obvious. apart from that. >> apart from that, the best would be sitting on top of the hill with my kids. dad. sitting around a fire. roasting marshmallows. watching. talking about life. just living and being happy. >> existing in a blissful scenario. >> i think -- again, a lot of the times with the kids i, you know, sit around -- outside. i love being outside. we built big fires up on top of the hill. and sit out, look at the stars. roast marshmallows. wieners. those types of things with my kids. i wasn't good at sitting them down and saying, you know, let's do your algebra now. that wasn't my -- i wasn't good at that. wasn't good at doing that for myself, you know. >> that's kind of what teachers are for. >> maybe. >> why you send kids to school. i don't want to send all my time teaching my killeds th s thatki stuff. life lessons are much more important. steering them in a way that's going to make their lives more interesting. >> that's right. i taught them to ride motorcycles. horses. camp out. play baseball. >> what would you say has been the worst moment of your life? >> oh, gosh. i have several to choose from. >> the one you'd least like to go through again? >> gosh. >> power inflicted on you. what would you least want to go through? >> oh, my gosh. yesterday was my dad's birthday and he passed away about five years ago. of mesothey'll yom ma. i kind of want to say the day that he passed away was one of the worst days of my life. but quite frankly, yesterday, knowing it was his birthday, it was kind of reliving it all again. i still miss him a great deal. he was a great friend to me. a great dad. matter of fact, i try to model myself as a parent after my dad. >> what were his values he tried to instill in you? >> first of all, he had a real love of music. he had a love of people. and i find a lot of that is a whole lot of who i am to this day. i love people. that's why i make music. and i channel my emotions through that music and hopefully to translate to other people around the world, to touch people's lives. >> when you've been going through these little scrapes with miley in the last year or so, what advice would your dad have given you, do you think? ever think about it? ever wonder what he would have said? >> i share that with miley, with all my kids. if you ain't happy, it ain't working. you got to do what you do because you love it, not because you have to. >> i want to play you inevitably a little bit of the song that catapulted you into the global celebrity stratus fear. i was 27. i was in london. i remember this damn thing. everybody in the country was singing this song. so i've never forgotten that. so seeing you here in the flesh brings it all back. so i need to hear the music again. let's hear a little bit of "achey breaky heart." >> okay. ♪ don't tell my heart ♪ my achey breaky heart ♪ i just don't think he'd understand ♪ ♪ that if you tell my heart ♪ my achey breaky heart ♪ he might blow up ♪ and kill this man ♪ ooh whoo >> that is the greatest mullet in the history of music. never mind the song. what were you thinking with that hair? >> you know what? i think it started way back when i still thought i was going to be a baseball player. i thought i was going to be the catcher for the cincinnati reds. i wanted to be the next johnny bench. always kept my head kind of -- kind of like a little bird haircut. i think at some point i think i started growing a little tail. i think it grew -- >> a little tail? alligator. out of control. when you watch yourself, what are you honestly thinking? when you see yourself there? >> well, i do look extremely happy. >> well, you were number one in about 100 countries. >> and the year before that, i lived in my car. i was homeless. >> really? >> yeah. >> a year before that? >> a year before that. in 1991. >> so you would have been what, about 29? >> 29. >> 29 years old. you've got no money. you're living in your car. and what's the dream when you're living in that car? >> well, the dream was and the prayer was that i would pray that god would give me the wisdom and the vision to sing the songs i was supposed to sing, to do the things i was supposed to do, to be the person i was supposed to be, and through my life and my music, i prayed that god would give me the ability to represent the light and his love. and be something positive -- >> and the lord sent the world "achey breaky heart." >> actually, maybe he did. i'm sure -- however it ended up coming, it was odd, you know, i had -- >> what was the moment for you when you realized this song was going to change your life? >> well, i had ten songs recorded for the album. i was sitting in my guitar player's apartment the day we were rehearsing to go record the album and my producer played me a piece of the song. it just started. the guitar was chucking. they said, you can tell the world you never was my girl. you can burn my clothes up when i'm gone. and i stood up and said, "that's me, that's me." "i love it." because it was bar band trash. like, just rocking, just fun. >> 11:00 at the bar, everyone's had a few drinks. >> absolutely, boom. it just felt like a good time waiting to happen. i jumped up. i said "that's me." >> when did it explode? when did you get a call or you thought, wow, okay, this is going? >> the night we did the video in ashland, kentucky, that very nice, felt like something changed. i could feel like something's about to happen. quite frankly, it's really -- that's what i go on, is just instincts, and i did have a feeling that night, this feels like something about to happen. and then about a month later, we played a show called the ralph emery show on tnn. and it was a live show. at that time it was almost like being on johnny carson or ed sullivan show. that was kind of like my ed sullivan, the night we played that show. i felt the teeter go to totter that night. >> the teeter go to totter? i love that phrase. what happened when the teeter goes to totter? >> i got really busy, and started getting on a lot of airports and getting in a lot of limousines. >> everything had changed. >> i was, you know, just a kid from flatwoods, kentucky, that had a dream. i hadn't really travelled that much. >> we're going to take a little break and come back and talk about miley and how she's now experiencing exactly what her old man went through and what you feel about that. 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[ female announcer ] one a day women's. it's schwab at your fingertips wherever, whenever you want. one log in lets you monitor all of your balances and transfer between accounts, so your money can move as fast as you do. check out your portfolio, track the market with live updates. and execute trades anywhere and anytime the inspiration hits you. even deposit checks right from your phone. just take a picture, hit deposit and you're done. open an account today and put schwab mobile to work for you. back with my special guest billy ray cyrus. let's talk miley. unlike most of the world, when i read your recent controversial "gq" interview, i nodded my way through it. arizons a parent, i totally gote you're coming from. maybe emotional in parts. i actually thought, well, you know what, it had to be said. maybe the family had to read this. digest it. and think about what "hannah montana," this global phenomenon, had actually done to you as a family. >> i realized that i made a big mistake even giving that interview. it was the darkest time of my life. of dark. not -- i mean, it was dark. and turbulent and that would have been a real good time for me to probably go sit by the fire alone, you know? >> well, you were on your own. you were probably feeling pretty depressed. lonely. all the things that come with it. when i read it cold again yesterday. it wasn't so sure it was such a big mistake. >> yeah, i just think, you know, that wasn't a good time for me to do an interview. i'm sure of that. >> it's what you felt. >> i was definitely dealing -- >> you'd seen your family slightly fractured by -- and the fame aspect couldn't be irrelevant to it. >> i felt like and still feel like that, you know, my family was the definite of my life. that was the most important thing. what billy ray cyrus was all about. i seen it coming unravelled. again, probably even more so makes sense why it wasn't a really good time to give that interview. especially setting at my kitchen table in my home alone, you know. it just -- >> feeling sorry for yourself. >> yeah, the interview -- i probably was, you know, to be honest. it had been set up for quite some time. the interview was supposed to happen. it just wasn't supposed to happen like that. i kind of look back on it and go, man, it's like everything in life. you make some good calls. you made some bad ones. what you got to pray for is to know the difference between the two and to be able to make adjustments. >> how did miley actually react to the interview? >> shoot, i don't know, you know. >> the next time you spoke to her, what did she say? >> um, it was such a -- again, a dark time. i don't think there was a whole lot. it was more of just the emotions of seeing that our whole family was really falling apart. >> a hard time for you. >> yeah, it wasn't good. >> i want to play a little clip from "hannah montana" so we can see all the fuss is about. for the two people on the planet who haven't seen it. look at this. >> dad, you gave up your whole life so i could have my dream. how can i stop you from having yours? >> you kids are my dream. i didn't give up my career because i had to. i gave it up because i wanted to. >> i mean, pretty poignant, that clip. we chose that because i'd be talking to you about this period in your life. when you see that real life was mirroring that clip in many ways for you. you'd make sacrifices for your drawe daughter. she was this huge international star. the effect for whatever reason on your family was pretty cataclysmic. >> yes, sir, that's correct. it is ironic you show that clip. i think that's one of the things that really connected about "hannah montana" was the realism that wait a minute, this is art imitating art back to imitating life. it was so real that, you know, even miley originally she was going to be kiley. i just kept calling her miley. the producers said, hey, just go with miley. she's going to be miley, not kiley. i look back on it. i think that was the key moment in the story of "hannah montana." had it not been so real, had there not been so many moments that came right out of the pages of our life even down to the song i wrote about miley. one of the episodes called "ready, set, don't go," i wrote that song as miley left for california. the series was picked up. i knew that her life and our lives as a family was going to change. and my little girl was growing up. and just kind of came to me. just they were disappearing down the driveway. i came in and picked up my guitar. just wrote what the way feeling. >> what were you really feeling as she disappeared down the driveway? knowing the pitfalls of the business? knowing how many child stars in particular end up in a very dysfunctional way in their lives? >> i just knew that there was a whole lot of change ahead. i could just feel it. >> were you excited, wiere you worried? >> at the moment, it's best to just -- if you hear the words of the song, she's got to do what she's got to do. she's got dreams too big for this town. has to give it a shot. >> take you back to that driveway and say, okay, listen, you can start by getting in the car. you can stop her leaving now. you can stop this train before it leaves the station. the fame. the whole thing. would you take that option? >> no. this was miley's dream. this was her -- i believe -- >> same dream you had -- >> -- turn was to touch people's lives. to -- through her music and her life. i still believe. you know, her name was originally destiny hope. which i had given her the name before she was born. because i had a vision -- >> that wouldn't have worked -- >> it wouldn't have worked. i know. i felt it was her destiny to bring hope to the world. when i see her selling out arenas around the world or this tv show, making people laugh, bringing families into the living room together. and we always, you know, try to put positive messages in each episode if we could. and, you know, i do think that she -- this is her purpose, is -- her path. you know, i think she's a natural born singer/songwriter/entertainer. she's a great actress. she's got a lot to offer the world as -- >> well she certainly -- she has all those things. incredible talent. ul believable. when we come back, we're going to talk more miley. in particular, i'll race through this, naughty pictures in magazines. pole dancing at teen choice awards. bong gate. and underage drinking. >> is this about me? >> incredibly, not you. although it probably was actually. 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