Pam Tillis, currently vying with Trisha Yearwood for status as country music`s hottest new female, confesses she worried late last year about her first shows with George Strait.
He`s known for the stateliness of his performance and the easy swing of his music, whereas, Tillis says, she herself hits a stage ”like I just drank five cups of espresso.
”I thought, `Is this too different? Does this work?` ” recalls Tillis, scheduled to open for longtime supergroup Alabama March 22 at Star Plaza in Merrillville, Ind.
”I thought maybe they`d get somebody a little closer to George`s style, but the difference is complementary, and it`s great for a semi-rookie like me to see somebody like that making crowds go berserk. It doesn`t hurt, of course, that every single song he plays is a No. 1 record.
”I goof around a lot. I feel that he started the invasion of the hunks in country music, and I tell the women-they can`t believe I say it-`If you think the show is fun to watch from out there, you should see it from backstage.` They love it. You can see them turning to the guys with them and saying, `She`s talking about his butt.`
”If George knew half the crap I said onstage, he`d die.”
If Strait knows anything about country music, he knew in advance what he was getting in this particular opening act: a highly seasoned young performer who finally is carving out a name. It is one that connotes impassioned singing, intelligent lyrics, big hits and a large dash of the wacky wit of her singer-songwriter-comic father, Mel Tillis.
What other country female, young or otherwise, would christen her band the Mystic Biscuits? Or write (and even record for her next album) such a brainily humorous song as ”Cleopatra, Queen Of Denial”? Or routinely achieve standing ovations opening shows for such better-known males as Strait, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, Ricky Van Shelton and Travis Tritt?
Tall, with flashing Irish eyes and Cherokee cheekbones, Tillis in normal conversation seems the gentlest of souls, quietly second-guessing or poking fun at herself. She says, for instance, that all of last year, the first of her stardom, she spent being ”scared to death.
”I was a nervous wreck,” she continues. ”It`s like the rational side of you goes, `You deserve this`-because for so many years, you know, I couldn`t get arrested while I felt I was doing quality work-but the emotional side of you is saying something completely different.
”On the (1991 Country Music Association) awards show I was going, `Do I belong here? What am I doing? I`ve done this all my life, and I`m scared to death.` I probably would have been more relaxed if I hadn`t been (performing) on the show. It was like a tryout for new people they think might make it:
They put you on, and if you don`t fall apart you get to stay in the business a few more years.”
She was frightened for so much of last year, she adds, because she had to try to build a whole show around her debut hit, ”Don`t Tell Me What To Do,” surrounding it with a lot of non-hit material on her excellent first album,
”Put Yourself In My Place.”
This year, she says, she still sings a lot of album cuts never released as singles, both from the current album and a forthcoming one expected out this fall, but things have changed drastically since the release of her current-and 4th consecutive-hit, ”Maybe It Was Memphis.”
”Part of it`s just confidence,” she says. ”I`m real sensitive to a crowd. I can tell whether they`re sitting there going, `Prove it,` or whether they`re just going, `Great! Here she is!`
”I still do stuff from the album that hasn`t been singles, and even if I get to feeling real nervous I know I`m going to get to `Memphis` at the end and everything`s going to be OK.
”I`m relaxing.”
Well, comparatively, at least. Tillis is getting a reputation as a ball-of-fire stage act in the rock-influenced, no-holds-barred spirit so recently popularized across America by Garth Brooks. She says she gets so
”rushed” with adrenalin during performances that it`s ”almost hard for me to sing.
”I`ve got so much energy to try to force through two little vocal cords and make it sound right,” she explains. ”I just want to go. . .”-at which point she bursts into the half-yodeling scream of the Tarzan jungle call.
Tillis` vocal cords sound anything but small. Her album, which appears certain to reach certification as gold (500,000-selling) by the time her next one reaches the marketplace, is filled with singing so passionate that it seems to emanate from her her whole being.
Another important facet of ”Put Yourself In My Place” is that much of its material was written or co-written by Tillis herself and most of the rest was found by her-a fact that surprises none of her peers, who have been finding themselves knocked out by her distinctive repertoire at Nashville venues for years.
The title song of ”Put Yourself In My Place” she co-wrote in a few minutes just prior to a recording session, and it turned out to be a Top 10 country hit. ”One Of Those Things,” which topped out at No. 4 on the country charts, is also Tillis-written.
The No. 1 single, ”Don`t Tell Me What To Do,” she says she heard three or four years ago being done by Marty Stuart and a band at a little Nashville nightclub. The current single, ”Maybe It Was Memphis,” which reached No. 2, she has been performing on her shows for five years.
She says her next album is going to be in the same spirit as ”Put Yourself In My Place”: ”over half of it straight-ahead country with these
(more experimental) flourishes.
”I think that works for me,” she says. ”There are a couple of more progressive things on the new record, but there`s also some country on there that`s countrier than the last.”
She grins.
”I`m honkin`. I`m going to make you cry in your beer.”
One of the few things she seems to regret about the radical increase in her popularity is the lack of free time and its effect on her songwriting. She continues to regard herself as a writer and has come to realize recently why that feeling is so strong in her.
She and her husband, Nashville songwriter Bob DiPiero, recently visited her father`s house and got into a singing session, she recalls. The relationship between Tillis and her father has been complicated by his divorce from her mother during her impressionable teens and her early decision to go her own way professionally rather than capitalize on his influence and his business organization.
She only visits his house a couple of times a year, she says, but the most recent time was ”magic.” As they were getting ready to leave, she says, DiPiero sang a song, and then she sang one, and her father ”loved” both. She then asked her father to sing a song, ”and we were off and running.
”I was really surprised to find a real similarity,” she adds. ”I don`t know how it happened, and it certainly wasn`t intentional, but if you listen to the way he wrote and the way I try to, there`s an . . . off-centeredness to both that`s amazing.
”I`ve done my own deal for so many years and have made it a point not to pay attention to what he was doing so I would not emulate him that I was really surprised. It`s the same way with my brother, Mel Junior. There`s this same humor and the way we use words. It`s funny but just a little . . . left.”
Tillis departed her father`s home that evening with ”a clearer sense of my heritage,” she says-and, apparently, a desire to explore it more.
She says she and her husband have started a ”really cool-sounding song” to which she is going to ask her father to write the verses. To a suggestion that a Pam and Mel Tillis show might be a real crowd-pleaser, she agrees; with all their obvious wide differences, generational and otherwise, there is also a common thread of wacky skepticism.
”It`s almost,” she says, ”as if there`s a common voice writing the songs.”
