Not long ago, an obscure Nashville musician cowrote a song about a man`s shock of recognition that the failure of his marriage was not his wife`s fault.
Something about this lyric, Aaron Tippin recalls, engaged him more than most others he had helped create.
”Every time we`d work on writing it,” he remembers, ”I`d say, `Man, this thing is great. It`s so true, so touching.`
”Then one day I was sitting listening to it with a bunch of people in the room, and it suddenly hit me how much that song was me. I had to get out of the room. I thought, `They`ll know this is me.` ”
Tippin is obviously the protagonist in most of his material; it simply is too powerful, too real to have come from anywhere except deep inside.
Its air of reality is thickened almost to the point of the surreal when he himself does the singing; his voice is the most uncompromisingly
”hillbilly,” to use his own description, on today`s Nashville scene. In fact, his sound is hardly less than a musical shadow of Hank Williams.
Ironically, Tippin`s sound probably would have stood no chance in modern Nashville before Randy Travis led the roots movement that has spawned a horde of neo-traditionalists such as Ricky Van Shelton, Dwight Yoakam, Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Mark Chesnutt.
”They would have laughed me out of here five years ago,” Tippin says.
”They” are applauding now, but Tippin`s talent and distinctiveness do not necessarily spell huge stardom. He is presently gaining national notice with his recording of ”You`ve Got to Stand for Something,” a song he cowrote. But his rural style can hardly be assumed to be an automatic hit on the airwaves of urban country radio stations above the Mason-Dixon Line.
His music is attracting the attention of such non-country observers as Rolling Stone magazine. And RCA Records is shrewdly softening the resistance of urban country radio by sending Tippin on a Boston-to-Seattle tour of 120 stations.
”I`m lucky to have fallen into the hands of very good people,” Tippin says. Then shakes his head. ”Naw,” he adds, ”that ain`t luck; that`s God. I get looked out after.”
Born in Pensacola, Fla., the son of a military flying instructor, Tippin did most of his growing up on a 120-acre farm in the hills around Greenville, S.C. He raised a couple of prize-winning hogs and generally, he says, ”grew up like any other hillbilly kid.”
Well, not quite. Courtesy of flying lessons from his father, he soloed at an age when most teenagers are still anxiously awaiting driver`s licenses. In high school, ”(I) didn`t have a hot rod car; I had an airplane,” Tippin recalls.
”That`s kind of what I wanted to do, be an aviator,” he continues.
”But I got so used to having fun with flying that when it came time to make a living at it, I didn`t like that very well.
”I was just wanting to move into the airlines so I could have a good job and good flying hours. But after two or three years as a corporate pilot, when I saw I wasn`t going to make it to the airlines because of the (cutbacks caused by the) energy crunch, I decided I`d think about something else.”
He turned to what had been a hobby. He had become enthralled by a kind of country music most young people his age ridiculed-if, indeed, they listened to it at all. At first, he ridiculed it, too.
”One night when me and my buddies were in the 7th or 8th grade, one of
`em got an eight-track portable tape player for Christmas,” he says.
”We didn`t have anything to play on it except an old Hank Williams Sr. greatest-hits tape that belonged to his daddy, so we plugged that thing in. At first it was too much for me to grasp, and we had a time making fun of it. Thought it was real funny.
”But we kept on listening to it, and when it came time for me to go home, I took that tape with me and played it in my car and then at the house. I kept playing it until I completely wore it out.
”By that time, I was lost in country music. I realized it`s the truest, most authentic soul music there is.”
Resistant to ”anything that looked advanced,” he started out playing bluegrass music, he says. He soon switched to country, which was more in demand in the local honkytonks.
Then he and a friend named Buddy Brock began writing songs together, and one night they took one titled ”Happy Birthday, Jesus” to Vicki Bird, a Nashville singer.
Bird, now a cast member of the syndicated ”Hee Haw” TV show, took their song to her publisher, who signed Tippin as a part-time writer. He quickly found a pipe-welding job in Russellville, Ky., and agreed to work nights so his days could be devoted to writing songs 60 miles away in Nashville.
”That`s where the craft of songwriting finally started coming to me,”
he says.
”When I sit down to write a song, I want to entertain somebody with it. I want the point to be very clear and for the song to be a little story. I believe country listeners want to say, `That`s my life on the radio.` Or
`That`s my buddy Joe`s life, old Susie`s life.` That`s what they want to hear, whether it`s happy, sad or otherwise.
”And it can`t be complicated. You have to remember that the people who`re going to be listening to it aren`t sitting there with a book open;
they`re doing something. He`s running an airhammer or driving a tractor-trailer, she`s cooking or ironing. They`re always doing something else, and your song has to be strong enough to get into their minds through whatever it is they`re doing.”
He soon signed with Opryland Music as a fulltime songwriter. Opryland sent some demonstration recordings of Tippin`s songs to RCA; RCA ended up wanting the singer as badly as it wanted the songs.
To get the perfect instrumentation for his ultracountry voice, Tippin spent six months recording five songs with two different producers-
traditionalist Ray Baker and more progressive Doug Johnson-before RCA settled on eclectic Emory Gordy as his album`s producer.
The result, which also bears the title of the single ”You`ve Got to Stand for Something,” is scheduled to hit the marketplace Jan. 22.
Is Nashville-supposedly awash in traditionalism-ready for a latter-day Hank Williams?
”That`s what me and Emory think we really done,” Tippin says. ”We think we brought that same feeling (of Williams` all-out rural emotion) to 1990; we`re just trying to do it in a little bit different way.”
Tippin has done it a different way with a vengeance. The album`s title song is about a now-antique kind of man who takes pride in standing up instead of knuckling under. ”The Man Who Came Between Us (Was Me)” movingly recalls the demise of Tippin`s own 10-year marriage. ”Ain`t That a Hell of a Note”
hilariously recounts the lines of a Dear John letter.
And a gloriously-yodeled thing titled ”She Made a Memory out of Me,”
tentatively scheduled to be the album`s third single, could be the sleeper of 1991.
”I ain`t popped the top on the champagne yet,” Tippin says. ”This is my job, what I`ve been working for, and when I go after something I stay after it. My old daddy always said, `Keep your head down and keep swinging,` and that`s what I`m trying to do.”
He can`t help but feel encouraged being part of a movement that continually is making country music stronger.
Looking back on the pop direction that almost killed Nashville`s commerciality in the early 1980s-and contrasting that with a present climate in which the new traditionalism is harvesting pop-sized record sales-Tippin capsulizes the past mistake:
”We spent years chasing a dollar bill by trying to go out and reach
(pop) fans, instead of sitting over here and playing what we play and seeing if they`ll come over to us,” Tippin says.
”The reason why they`re starting to come over now is because we ain`t plastic no more. We`re the real thang.”
