The recent ascension of John Anderson`s ”Straight Tequila Nights” on the country music charts brings an overdue resurrection of a major Nashville stylist.
Anderson, winner of several of Nashville`s top awards during the early-1980s era of his zany country-and-pop smash ”Swingin`,” now sees light at the end of what has been a pretty long tunnel of semi-obscurity.
”A lot of our fans thought we had gotten rich and retired,” the rural Floridian says with a laugh. ”That wasn`t the case, of course.”
What was the case?
”We`ve never gotten under about 120 shows a year,” Anderson says. ”But the size of the jobs and the markets we were playing were the kind a lot of people never heard about. Little places, small towns.
”All the time, though, we were building fans. Those folks hadn`t forgotten us. They`d stand outside the bus in the autograph line and say,
`Man, where have you been? We can`t find your records, and we don`t hear you on the radio.` You`d have to just say, `We`re working on all that.` They didn`t want to hear the whole story of why and what and who.”
At 37, Anderson is still not much older than most of the hot new males at the top of the current Nashville heap, but enduring his long night of the soul has seasoned not only his rurally-adept vocals but the person behind them.
It has shown him, he says, what is important and what isn`t. What isn`t is the ”why and what and who” of his drop from stardom. What is important is music, not the fleeting ego-gratification of being a celebrity.
He says he learned he wasn`t one of those performers who makes a run at popularity and then, when the establishment decides his run is over, retreats to another line of work.
”Anybody like me isn`t going to be run off,” Anderson says in his quiet but direct way. ”I`m here, regardless of what level. If we lost everything and were just going around little lounges playing as a single act, I`d learn to deal with it.
”Maybe, though, it won`t ever get to that.”
Certainly not if what`s happening now is any indication. A striking single about a torch-carrying woman, ”Straight Tequila Nights” has put Anderson back in the country Top 10, and a new Anderson album to be released this week by BNA Records, ”Seminole Wind,” contains other cuts calculated to continue his career rejuvenation.
Anderson says he believes the current recording has been a commercial success because it`s ”more like what radio and a lot of my fans probably had been waiting for me to do: straight-ahead country.
”I think there`s still plenty of room for the rockabilly type of sound in our music, and we`ll always do it. But this goes to show me that we better not get too far away from good old country.”
That`s not only where today`s Nashville market is, it is what brought Anderson to prominence with such hits as ”I`m Just An Old Chunk Of Coal,”
”Wild And Blue” and ”1959.”
Then came the million-selling ”Swingin` ” and the also-No. 1 ”Black Sheep,” both of which were gloriously loud and actually more rock than rockabilly. But his earlier music had endeared him to country fans who at that time weren`t hearing near enough traditional country on the radio, and for these people ”Swingin` ” and ”Black Sheep” represented a dismaying turn to the left.
After that, the wheels began coming off.
”Things started going sour right after `Black Sheep,` ” he says. Then, laughing, he says it was as if he became country music`s black sheep. ”It was like I was doomed by my own record.”
The reason was ”turmoil,” he says. ”Conflicts. Warner Bros. had a big falling-out with my manager at the time, which in turn caused us to have big falling-outs with them. Looking back now, it was all so ridiculous and stupid. Most of those people are real good people, and I`m sure I could`ve worked it out. But I was on the road, and my spokesman was who they were having trouble with.
”I`ve learned a lot from all that, and there`s really nobody to blame. A lot of it I`ve chalked up to fate. One of the most gratifying feelings now is that after all the talk and the trying to figure out what the problem was, all of a sudden we`ve got a hit and there`s not a problem. In country music, a hit cures about anything.”
Notwithstanding the instrumental din of ”Black Sheep” and its kindred successor, ”Let Somebody Else Drive,” Anderson contends-with considerable justification-that even during that period he ”never really got away from country music.
”Some folks seem to think we went rock `n` roll or something, but that wasn`t the case at all,” he says. ”We`ve always had good country songs on the albums, and the basic part of my fans are good hardcore country people;
that`s mostly who we play for. It was just a matter of the singles that were released.”
Singles, though, are released to radio and, unfortunately for Anderson, constitute the basis on which most consumers decide whether to buy albums. The pop success of ”Swingin` ” had been an aberration, and after it many of his singles seemed to be chosen with the pop/rock market, rather than country`s fans and radio programmers, in mind.
He says that as his radio airplay and sales dwindled sharply and talk spread that he was singing ”the wrong kind of music,” there was a misconception in Nashville that he was difficult.
”I`ve never considered myself hard to work with,” he says, ”but it doesn`t take much to get that kind of reputation: just telling somebody you might think they were wrong, especially when they were in a job that had an influence on your whole career.
”I`ve taken my licks for having guts,” he says with a chuckle. ”I`ve learned to have not as much guts. And a little more brains.”
After several years with Warner Bros., he went on to a briefer stint at MCA. Despite his reputation, he retained many music-industry admirers; they loved the distinctive voice and its capacity to turn verses into velvet and choruses into steel.
When BMG started the BNA label as a Nashville sister to RCA and Arista, BNA executives enthusiastically signed Anderson even though they knew, he says, ”that it would be somewhat of a comeback process.” When the first Anderson single they released, ”Who Took Our Love,” went nowhere last fall, they were undeterred, proceeding to issue an attention-getting video of
”Straight Tequila Night.”
Anderson is doing his part, too. Evidences of a willingness to try to meet the Nashville establishment halfway are there now in the noticeably, though not radically, trimmed hair and beard. And the album he has given BNA to work with contains material that verges on greatness.
Besides ”Straight Tequila Night,” there is the torridly-sultry backseat parking song, ”Steamy Windows.” There are the traditionally country ”Last Night I Laid Your Memory to Rest” and ”Let Go of the Stone” and the more modernistic ”When It Comes to You.” Especially, there is the poignant New South anthem ”Look Away.”
”I`m noticing that young people are really responding to that one,”
Anderson says of ”Look Away,” which-without waving Dixie flags and ranting neo-Ku Kluxism-unforgettably reminisces about the South that existed before the arrival of interstates and shopping malls.
To Anderson`s great credit, during the worst of his ordeal of the past few years, he hasn`t allowed himself to become publicly bitter, to vilify others. He labored in deepening obscurity with a manner that outwardly seemed almost philosophical.
With success returning, he still exhibits that manner.
”Maybe I had a bit of learning to do before we could go any further.”
