On Memorial Day weekend of 1988, singer-songwriter Mark Collie was dressing for a wedding when his mind transported him to another scene.
”I had flashbacks to dressing for Daddy`s funeral,” recalls Collie, an impressive new Nashville talent.
”I guess what did it was seeing a lot of things on TV that week, the patriotic salutes everywhere I looked; anyway, this chorus came out of the blue. It was so personal, I didn`t think I`d ever sing it for anybody. In fact, it was such an emotional experience that I sort of put it away from me for a while. I thought, `I don`t know if I want to write this or not.`
”But later I was driving between Nashville and Memphis, and it started coming out again. I think it was going to be written by somebody and I just happened to be the one it got sent through.”
Perhaps the most striking song on Collie`s soon-to-be-released debut collection, ”Another Old Soldier” creates a composite of military heroism, yet does it in such a stark and surreal way that anyone must empathize with the wounded military hero for the physical and mental cost of his devotion to duty.
Collie`s album, ”Hardin County Line,” has a lot of less-serious stuff on it, of course. There`s the first single, the upbeat and tongue-in-cheek
”Something With a Ring to It.” There`s the just-released second single, a different spin on an old saw titled ”Looks Aren`t Everything.” And there`s also the title song, a latter-day, less-violent version of ”Thunder Road.”
But the one most likely to stick in a listener`s mind is the dirge for a decorated, totally disabled ex-serviceman who ”fades away” in a local Veterans Administration Hospital. More than anybody else, the ex-serviceman portrayed in the song resembles Collie`s father.
”He had all the flesh shot off his legs in a B-24 bomber in World War II,” the son explains. ”The plane went down, and they were taken prisoner in Turkey. A handful of them miraculously made it out of there, and he got the Silver Star and the Purple Heart and everything else you can get. But he never recovered psychologically.
”He was a talented man, Hollywood-handsome, who had some great moments in his life. I remember when I was a little bitty boy watching him ride in a parade, but I also remember other pictures of him that weren`t so beautiful. He struggled with alcoholism, fighting his own private war through most of my childhood. And he passed away in the VA Hospital in Nashville seven years ago.”
The singer grew up in little Waynesboro, Tenn. His father`s charisma was such that Collie`s mother married and divorced him three times, and their four sons and one daughter did without much prosperity.
Having written songs since age 12, and having played them in hard-nosed honky-tonks along the Alabama state line since high school, Collie turned to music full time in 1976, heading for Memphis at 21 to try to recapture the rural, rocking spirit of the music of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Collie wears the dead-eyed rural look of somebody who might be found relief-driving for Robert Mitchum in ”Thunder Road.”
Similarly, his music has a distinctive and nostalgic bare-bones guitar sound that one associates with country music of the `50s and `60s. But its nostalgia is muscular, a kind that could survive and prevail in clubs with names like Club 13, Johnny`s Club, the Doghouse and the Black Cat.
”My band is called the Dogs,” he notes. ”We`ve been known as the Underdogs, the Junkyard Dogs, the Backyard Dogs and the Stray Dogs. Finally, it just got to be the Dogs.”
When he showcased himself and his Dogs in Nashville one night last year, he drew a houseful of record executives, and MCA-Nashville boss Tony Brown beat his competitors by phoning Los Angeles from his car and getting authorization to sign Collie that evening.
Even though the influential Billboard magazine hit charts have undergone a change that weighs them toward large metropolitan stations-ones that seldom gamble on playing songs by new artists-Collie saw ”Something With a Ring to It” reach a respectable No. 30.
With ”Looks Aren`t Everything”-as well as the album-now about to make their appearances, Collie finds himself opening shows for such performers as Charlie Daniels and Lorrie Morgan, and he says his music works well in a show- opening role.
”I think we have something to offer that you`re not going to find on a lot of records and stages these days,” he says. ”It sounds like a five- or six-piece band, the kind of music I used to play at Club 13 and Johnny`s Club.”
He indicates that, while performing may give him a sense of power, songwriting offers the longest-lingering feel of glory.
”Now that I`ve written 200 or 300 terrible songs and maybe 100 good ones and five or six exceptional ones, I think I`ve learned the craft well enough to have an idea about what my limitations are,” he says. ”I`m always afraid I`m going to come off sounding like I think I really know what I`m talking about, and in reality I don`t. Like anything else, you just have to do it a lot. Some songs I don`t feel like I write at all, so I can`t take full credit for them. `Old Soldier` is one of those.
”Every idea-probably even every title-has probably already been written by somebody. The hard thing is to find a spot somebody hasn`t already stood in to look from.”
