Singer-songwriter Suzy Bogguss was well on her way to country music stardom three years ago when something not so funny happened: The Nashville management of her record company changed.
Industry whirlwind Jimmy Bowen, who previously had headed the Nashville offices of Elektra, Warner Bros. and MCA, now took over the country division of Capitol Records. For Bogguss, who had had but one album-the critically successful ”Some- where Between”-the situation became ”a little scary,”
she says.
The small-town (Aledo) Illinois native was low on Capitol`s artist roster, but she refused to be intimidated. To say the least.
”The first time I went in to meet with Jimmy, I was kind of a smarty-pants,” she says. ”The first thing I said to him was, `So how long are you going to be at our label?` ”
From such inauspicious beginnings impressive things sometimes are made. For example, on Capitol`s recently renamed Liberty label Bogguss presently boasts:
– The hard-driving current single, ”Outbound Plane,” which is soaring up the country charts.
– The current album, ”Aces,” which is in the Top 30 and moving steadily upward, too.
– A striking profile which, three years after she won the Los Angeles-based Academy of Country Music`s Top New Female Vocalist Award, is
noticeably rising again.
The Bogguss-Bowen accommodation was hardly reached overnight, though. The way it happened measures the intelligence and grit of a woman who spent five pre-Nashville years performing around the western United States in the company of just a guitar and a dog.
Behind her bell-clear voice and appealingly self-effacing personality is a person not easily deflected from what she wants.
”Everything was really turned upside-down when the label changed over like that,” Bogguss recalls, ”and my initial response was defensive. Being one of the few artists who stayed on Capitol at that point, I was feeling pretty much on deck, and I wanted to insure that I got my turn at bat.”
She decided that her best approach was to be ”open” to Bowen and the new situation and she believes the new Capitol boss tried to be open toward her, too. Unfortunately, they needed more than openness.
Bogguss and Bowen ”ended up sort of stepping around each other and not totally being up front with each other,” she says. Working together without
”knowing each other at all,” they recorded her second album, ”Moment of Truth.” It turned out to be disappointing, not just to the country music market but to Bowen and Bogguss.
”It wasn`t bad material, and it wasn`t bad production,” she says. ”It was just tentative, a transition. We both stepped back from it and went, `This isn`t everything it could be.` When I started to do interviews for the album, I couldn`t speak highly of it. I couldn`t even lie.
”But by that time it was already out there. Jimmy`s pretty much of a bang, let`s-do-this-thing kind of decision-maker, and he backed off the album. Which made (country) radio (programmers) say, `They`re not behind this artist.` ”
The album`s first single, aptly titled ”Under the Gun,” was abandoned by Capitol shortly after its release and never made even the lowest reaches of the hit charts. Neither did the second single, ”All Things Made New Again,” which Bogguss describes as ”beautiful, but not really representative of who I am.”
Having begun her national career so promisingly with ”Somewhere Between,” she found herself sliding back toward oblivion. As she began to hunt songs for her crucial third album, she says she”went into survivalist mode.”
”I said to myself, `This is my shot. I`ve watched other people fade off the earth never to be seen again, and I`m not going to let that happen to me after doing all this work.` ”
With ”teeth clenched,” she set out to find the best pieces of material she could. A few weeks before she was scheduled to begin recording, she went into another meeting with Bowen and told him that although she had found
”five or six great” songs, she didn`t want to record until she had found 10.
”Then he got real serious about it,” she recalls. ”He called about five people, and the next thing I knew I had the greatest songs in the world.”
”Aces” is full of superior material, and, in typical Bogguss fashion, is well-sung. If it doesn`t follow the current Nashville line of neo-traditional fiddles and steel guitars, well, that`s typical of Bogguss, too.
Her first big hit was the country classic ”Somewhere Between,” and she is well-versed in traditional country records ranging from Patsy Montana to Ricky Skaggs.
”I have the greatest reverence for country music,” she says. ”I like to yodel, so you know I have a background in the real traditional side of it. And I believe that all of this music that we make from here on out has got to have the roots of country music in it.
”But I have come to think that for me, where I come from and my background and everything else, I need to sing about some stuff that hasn`t been sung about yet. I think the lyrics should be straight enough that people can get the drift of the song the first time they hear it, but as far as the production goes, I think it`s neat to put in little things that sparkle and surprise people later on.”
For her albums, she tends increasingly to choose lyrical jewels from off Nashville`s beaten paths. ”Outbound Plane” is from Nanci Griffith, the Texas poetess whose records are sold pop-folk rather than country. The title song of ”Aces” was written by another pop-folkish artist, Cheryl Wheeler. Working on her fourth album in a Nashville recording studio the other day, she finished up ”Drive South,” a song by another pop-folker, John Hiatt.
Bogguss herself isn`t so easy to pigeonhole. Also favoring songs such as Ian Tyson`s rodeo anthem ”Someday Soon” and Patsy Montana`s classic ”I Want To Be a Cowboy`s Sweetheart,” she seems less a pop-folk performer than a complex cowgirl.
Her arsenal of prospective hits has been strengthened by her marriage some three years ago to Nashville songwriter Doug Crider. On ”Aces” there is a Crider-cowritten masterpiece titled ”Letting Go,” which Bogguss says will be a single later this year.
It, too, is one of those songs that hardly fits the traditional Nashville format, but its lyrics are very moving. It concerns a daughter moving out of her parents` home to go out on her own ”where there`s room enough to fly”;
it applies, though, to countless other situations in life.
”I didn`t record the song before because I was always afraid it was too pop,” she confides. ”I was always afraid I would turn everybody off and they wouldn`t ever listen to me again, and I always got the same reaction from producers and other record people. But I always brought it up, because it haunted me.
”Then I lost my dog that I had had for 12 years, and that chorus came back to me about letting go. I had been having to leave her at home because she was getting old, and every time I would close down that garage door and have to see her eyes as I left to get on the bus and go on the road, I`d think about it.
”When she passed away it was almost a relief that I didn`t have to leave her at home anymore, because I could tell she couldn`t stand that. Thinking about that line in the song, `where there`s room enough to fly,` was a weird revelation to me, that she`s in a better place now and I`m in a better place, too.”
Bogguss smiles at the thought of her dog Duchess and adds that they had become so close, in their treks back and forth across America, that she
”couldn`t even bury her.
”I loved her so much,” she says, ”that I had her cremated and sprinkled her on the flowers that I had always yelled at her for lying in.”
