Years ago, Barbra Streisand`s producers wanted one of country singer-songwriter Larry Gatlin`s songs for a Streisand album-if Gatlin would agree to split the song`s publishing royalties with them.
Gatlin recalls that he rudely refused.
”I said, `Yeah, when she`ll split her next movie with me, I`ll split the publishing,` ” he remembers.
”That stupid, asinine, egotistical remark cost me a million bucks. That album of hers has sold 20 million copies worldwide.”
The anecdote is quintessential Gatlin, capturing both the cool cockiness of his past and the mellower reflectiveness of now.
He and his talented brothers are winding down their principal trade of the past two decades. Beginning in 1993, they no longer will board a bus each week to make one-night stops across America.
”It got to the point where I`d dread seeing that bus pull up in front of the office,” Gatlin says as the brothers prepare for Chicago-area ”Adios”
performances June 7 at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet and Aug. 8 at the Heartland America Air Show at DuPage County Airport.
”I want the people to understand that I`m not tired of singing the music for them. I still love to do that with my brothers. But the road finally has taken its toll. So . . . adios.”
Well, not quite. A flat retirement announcement preceding a Gatlin vocal cord surgery in 1991 has been amended now to a plethora of plans for non-traveling activity by this trio that arguably owned the most accomplished harmonic sound ever heard in Nashville.
Their proliferating plans now include:
– A Gatlin theater and hotel complex in Branson, Mo., where, during the next decade, the Gatlins expect to spend between four and six months a year singing for their fans.
– A Gatlin Brothers Music City Grille in Minneapolis, where they will market their father`s barbecue sauce, exhibit country music memorabilia they have collected over 30 years and personally perform two or three weekends annually in the mammoth Mall of America.
– Two different projects by which Larry, the trio`s lead singer and principal songwriter, aims to enter the field of musical theater.
”I have aspirations to go and do some things on Broadway,” he says.
”I`ve been talking off and on for five months with the people at the `Will Rogers Follies` in New York about doing that show in the future.
”I think Mac Davis is doing it now, after Keith Carradine had a year`s successful run. Mac is a very talented man and will be great as Will Rogers, and sometime in the future, when he decides to leave, I`ve talked to them about doing it. We`re negotiating right now.”
One might assume Gatlin was attracted to Broadway by the work of his friend and fellow Texan Gary Morris a few years ago in the lead of ”Les Miserables.”
Gatlin says that did add impetus to his ambitions but adds that he himself auditioned for a Los Angeles production of ”Les Miz” before Morris appeared in the one on Broadway. He was turned down, he says, by directors who told him he ”sang it beautifully” but didn`t ”have the experience” in musical theater.
The Will Rogers role isn`t Gatlin`s only interest in the world of sets and greasepaint, either. Not by a long shot.
”For the past 10 years, off and on, I`ve been working on a musical called `Alive and Well and Living in the Land of Dreams,` ” he says.
”Its plot is loosely based on a song called `The Mannequin` that I wrote and sang on our `Alive And Well` album. The song`s about a mannequin in a New Orleans window that`s in love with a `wo-mannequin` in a window across the street.
”The mannequin sees and writes about everything that happens on that street in New Orleans. There are good guys, bad guys, preachers, hookers, kids, mannequins-some alive, some dead. It`s the best music I`ve written in 20 years.”
After Gatlin mentioned his play in a 1991 interview with syndicated talk- radio host Larry King, he got a letter from the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bristol, Pa.
He says Bristol director Susan Atkinson and he now have co-authored the libretto for a Bristol production of his play, and Atkinson ”has been very gracious and patient with me” regarding the possible ”Will Rogers”
opportunity.
”We had the thing scheduled in Bristol next April and May, but she has given me some leeway to reschedule it sometime later if the Broadway thing comes,” he says. ”They realize that the Broadway situation could bring us even more credibility and turn some of the attention of that community to our Bristol project.”
Reflecting on a country career that sometimes has been disappointing in some respects, Gatlin seems positively affected by his renunciation of drugs and alcohol a few years ago.
He says he was ”humbled” by an outpouring of ”letters, phone calls, flowers, fruit baskets, balloons and inquiries” from fans ”all over the world” during the hospitalization for throat surgery.
Born in the west Texas oilfields, the highly intelligent former University of Houston football player and English major got country music`s attention after catching the eye of star Dottie West at a Las Vegas audition in 1971. Soon he was in Nashville, hailed as a stunning singer and one of a handful of highly literate new songwriters.
Composing and singing such hits as ”Broken Lady,” ”I Don`t Wanna Cry,” ”I`ve Done Enough Dyin` Today” and the signature classic ”All The Gold In California,” he-teamed with his brothers-became one of his field`s best-known stars. He also gained a reputation for abrasiveness and egotism, and his group`s albums sometimes suffered from weakness of material, almost all of it written by himself.
He now says some of his mistakes originated in drug and alcohol abuse. Other career errors were rooted in his personality.
”I was the angriest man I`ve ever known,” he says. ”The man I was mad at was the guy in the mirror. I was a perfectionist, and I saw myself living one way and claiming to live another. The hypocrisy and insanity of going out there being a child of God and a Christian, proclaiming the good news that there was a different way to live, and then not being able to live it myself, I hated that. I hated me. So I had a burr under my blanket for everyone.
”Now, with my life back in order, I still screw up, but Larry is Larry`s own best friend now. Larry realizes that he has character defects and faults and failures, but his No. 1 priority is to be the best Larry Gatlin he can be.”
The group`s recording future isn`t so definite. He says that if their
”dear friend Jimmy Bowen,” the Nashville boss of Liberty Records, ”wants us to make records and sell `em out of the trunk of his car, that`s fine with me.”
He adds, however, that Bowen has told him the Gatlins ”don`t have to be a radio star and a records star to be a star; you are a star already.”
The first single off the Gatlins` new ”Adios” album, the Roy Orbisonesque ”Pretty Woman Have Mercy,” hasn`t ”done doodly,” he says, but he has hopes for a follow-up if Liberty chooses to release a song called
”Star Spangled Broken Heart” (which he says evokes more response in concert than any Gatlin hit besides ”All The Gold In California”).
He also notes that the Gatlins haven`t had a true hit in nearly a decade. ”I wish all the radio stations would play our records, but if it ain`t going to happen, let`s go on,” he says.
Asked a particularly difficult question-whether he thinks the Gatlins ever have been accorded full credit for their huge abilities-he expresses gratitude for the compliment and then haltingly answers, no, that up to the present their career hasn`t reached ”the heights I dreamed we could go.
”I say that,” he adds, ”but I also turn around and say this: We`re not through. God only knows what`s going to happen tomorrow.”
