A year ago last August, 1988 Female Vocalist of the Year K.T. Oslin was at a Nashville party when she noticed that people were saying hello and quickly moving on.
Remembering that the Country Music Association`s 1989 awards nominations were supposed to be announced that day, she turned to her manager, Stan Moress, and asked if the announcement had been made yet.
”He kind of gazed off into the distance,” she recalls. ”His eyes glazed over, and he said, `Well, uh, yeah.`
”I said, `Wellllll?` ” she says, humorously shrilling the question.
”He said, `Well, uh, we . . . weren`t nominated.` I looked at him. `Not for anything?` I said. He said, `No.` ”
Telling the story, her surprise is still evident more than a year later. She shakes her head and half-smiles.
”I don`t know whether I`ll ever know why I wasn`t nominated,” she says, her voice dropping to a near-whisper.
She does not blame the country establishment for her humiliation. Rather, she seems to perceive correctly that at least one reason for it was her truly overnight success.
”Winning all those awards was wonderful and fabulous,” she says, ”but I wish it hadn`t gone down that way. I wish I had been able to come into this business the way most people do; get a little better and a little more well-known and finally have a record that clicks and then, after I`d done a little dues-paying, start winning awards.
”I came out of the chute and, boom, won everything. Where do you go from there? I had nowhere to go but down. Hopefully, if you do worthy work, you can hit it again. If not, then it`s still fine. People still buy my records.”
As a result of her grueling baptism of fire, she says she ”doesn`t feel like as much of an outsider as I used to.
”People have sort of gotten used to my strange ways,” she adds. ”I think we`re all starting to enjoy each other now.
”But I kind of enjoy the fury, the furor, that I cause. At least it means I`m being creative. I don`t just put a steel (guitar) on my records and `sang lahk thi-yus` and sneak by.”
Sneaking by isn`t Oslin`s style. The New York-apprenticed ex-actress has lived determinedly on the edge during her four-year Nashville career, for the most part successfully.
The fortysomething singer took the Tennessee capital by storm in 1987 with a generation-defining song called ” `80s Ladies.” Today she has a newly released third album, ”Love in a Small Town”-that contains the No. 1 hit ”Come Next Monday,” the fastest-rising single of her career, and a lot of other impressive material.
In between, though, Oslin has faced significant problems, and the ignominy of not being renominated the year after she had captured the female vocalist crown wasn`t the only one.
” `80s Ladies” pushed the somewhat-solitary Oslin out of her Manhattan apartment and into a touring bus that almost never came home. When it did, that home-for logistical reasons-had to be Nashville, where Oslin had bought a nice house, one she never had time to furnish.
”I was coming home to a house with a bed and a kitchen table and empty rooms,” she recalls. ”It didn`t feel like my home. And the hotel rooms didn`t feel like my home. The bus was not my home, and I never was able to get back to my (New York) apartment anymore. I was going, `I don`t have a home.`
”So I hated the road. I felt trapped in the bus and trapped in the hotels. Just because of the way I had to do everything, my attitude was bad about everything. I was not enjoying a lot of this.”
Since then, she has put herself through what she calls an ”attitude adjustment.” In the face of dire warnings from her advisors that if she left the limelight for more than a moment she would be forgotten, she quit the concert trail toward the end of 1989 and, she says, ”told everybody, `Leave me alone. I can`t tell you when I`m going back on the road, and I can`t tell you when I`m going to have another album ready.`
”I came off the road, didn`t do interviews and stayed home,” she says.
”I put my house together, bought furniture and made it a home instead of a house. It took me months to become a human.
”Then I walked up to my music room and sat down and started to work-and enjoyed it again. I had missed (song)writing, missed that place I go to inside myself where I`m so happy when I`m creative. I had not had that for two years, because I can`t write on the road.
”So I put the album together and was ready to tour again. And here I am.”
Her problems, however, weren`t over. The album wasn`t ready when she hit the road again in July. ”This Woman” had sold more than a million copies, but it was two years old.
”It was rough-man, it was rough-but I won them over,” she recalls.
”And I picked up a lot of radio station support from people who were sort of not really into me because I didn`t really fit their format, but they saw how people responded to me. Yes, I do have a following and, no, they haven`t gone anywhere.
”When everybody told me, `If you`re not in their face all the time, they`ll forget you,` I said, `I don`t believe that.` I said, `I think if you let a long time go by and then come back with inferior material, no, it won`t work. But if you let a space go by and come back with good stuff, it will be there again.` ”
Oslin came back with good stuff. Along with ”Come Next Monday,” the new album includes the great, lyrically offbeat second single ”Mary and Willi”; the bittersweet love songs ”Still on My Mind” and ”New Way Home”; the naively enthusiastic ”Cornell Crawford” and the wonderfully blase old closer ”You Call Everybody Darlin`.”
She tried out several of these on her summer audiences and they
”worked,” as did the touring itself this time. Although the crowds were sometimes sparse, Oslin herself was recharged.
This time, she ”made a concerted effort to enjoy the road,” she says, and she succeeded. She and her road manager bought bicycles and pedaled around the cities she was playing. They patronized out-of-the-way restaurants and antique shops and brought along grills for impromptu cookouts.
”At one point, Ricky Van (Shelton) and Baillie & The Boys and I all circled our buses in this huge parking lot and cooked out,” she recalls.
”Diesel fuel and weenies cookin`-isn`t that the life? But just that silly little thing of grilling something and making a little guacamole in a plastic dish took the edge off always being out of your home.”
It also seems to have taken a lot of the edge off Oslin.
Although her career now appears to be gathering another surge of momentum from ”Come Next Monday” and the new album, she has just come off the road again and won`t go back on a sustained basis until spring.
When she does, she prefers to play more theaters solo instead of coliseums in the company of other acts, where she says she has to play to
”half his audience and half mine.
”You really need to be up close to me and intimate with me to get the full effect,” she says. ”I`m a hellacious live performer.”
To such a self-believer, not getting renominated for an award she won the year before is no more than a temporary setback. She says she was ”really disappointed for a couple of days” but then ”got over it.”
Although she refused to accept an invitation to be a presenter at the Country Music Association`s 1989 awards show, she accepted a similar invitation this year and says she enjoyed it profoundly.
”I didn`t have to sweat it out and didn`t have to perform,” she explains. ”All I had to do was blow my hair out and march up there and say,
`And the winner is . . . Clint Black!` I really enjoyed seeing everybody and saying hello.”
