One of Nashville’s late-’80s stars whose richly recognizable voice has been sorely lacking on country radio in the clone-cursed mid-’90s, Ricky Van Shelton considered calling his overdue new CD “Not The Man I Used To Be.”
Suggested by the title of one of the album’s exceptional ballads, that designation would have been apropos.
The handsome ex-pipefitter from Grit, Va., a strong and complex yet shy performer who over the last decade has made and retained a markedly devoted corps of fans, is back for another shot at mainstream prominence via the new CD (ultimately titled “Making Plans”) and a personal outlook radically changed from his highest-profile years.
“I’m enjoying the music and everything,” he reports.
That in itself is a huge difference. An elementally artistic soul–a talented painter and a writer of children’s stories as well as one of Nashville’s most golden throats–the south-central Virginia native rose from the sort of “back roads” he celebrates in song.
Partly because of that, his stardom’s early years saw him tortured by a profound uneasiness in his new surroundings. Fear of flying restricted him to exhausting bus tours. He dreaded dining in restaurants because he had been accustomed to eating not much of anywhere besides home. A taste for drink sharpened under all the pressure, and performing became a continual grind because he kept having to do it with a hangover.
Such problems finally were documented in “She Stays” (Thomas Nelson Publishers), a book his wife Bettye coauthored in 1995. It profiled a marriage pushed to the breaking point by Shelton’s drinking, unfaithfulness and wild self-loathing, all of which evolved with stardom and transformed what should have been the happiest and most fulfilling years of his life into a gilded hell.
Then, in starting to turn his life around, he committed the apparent sin of waxing religious on a couple of incessantly re-run Christian TV shows.
“I went on a couple of Christian programs and told my story, and it helped people,” he says now. “I never went out to a country show and did it. I never mixed it up; I believe there’s a time and place for everything. But, you know, when you’re in the public’s eye and you mention God, they immediately start backing off.”
Perhaps the most eloquent testament to the extent of the change in Shelton today is that Bettye has stayed with him. For five years he hasn’t drunk alcohol. For that same length of time he has extended his shows to two hours-plus from the former 60 minutes or fewer. He has so vanquished his fear of flying that he now pilots his own plane.
Without losing his rurally rugged essence, he has slipped some bonds of its sometimes unsophisticated mindset.
“He has gone high-tech,” reports Michael Campbell, the manager who has been connected with Shelton through most of his career. “He e-mails radio stations all the time now, and the other day . . . he was on the computer looking for fly-in restaurants to go to lunch at.”
In the recording studio it’s been pretty much the same Shelton whom CBS Records executives first discovered back in 1986.
“He’s closer to the way he was in the beginning,” observes producer Steve Buckingham, comparing the experience of supervising the recording of Shelton’s new album with their work together on the initial ones. “His demeanor was very relaxed, and vocally he’s as good as I ever heard him.”
Yet there are important differences between the new album and its predecessors. For one thing, this one is on the RVS label instead of CBS or Sony, even though Shelton has continued to be a consistent winner on the fan-voted TNN-Music City News Awards and surely could have found a slot on one of the multiplicity of major labels populating the Nashville scene these days.
He says he didn’t want that kind of contract anymore. Rather, he wanted to make and market his own records. “Making Plans” is initially available at Wal-Mart, reputedly America’s top seller of country music, and the new album’s first single, “She Needs Me,” recently was mailed to every one of the 2,500 or so country radio stations in America (instead of just the 200 to 300 ones the trade magazines monitor to make up their hit lists).
Shelton could be on the threshold of his highest-ever recording earnings.
“Think about it,” he says. “Say I sell 100,000 CDs at $10 a pop: that’s one million bucks.”
Nowadays Shelton stays home from January through April but still performs 100 road shows annually, the demand for his services fueled by the generously long shows and their superiority to those of many younger singers.
“I’ve got a good fan base, and the price I charge to do a show is about the same as some of these new guys and gals are getting with just one or two hit records,” he says. “So I get plenty of work.”
His own hits number considerably more than one or two: ballads such as “Somebody Lied” and “Keep It Between the Lines” and uptempo tunes such as “Crime of Passion” and “Wild Man,” as well as the Dolly Parton duet “Rockin’ Years” and a string of memorable remakes of earlier country songs that included “Statue of a Fool,” “Life Turned Her That Way,” “From a Jack to a King,” and “Don’t We All Have the Right.”
The new album contains a lot of new material, including the exceptional “He’s Not the Man I Used to Be,” a Conway Twittyesque ballad that Shelton says is “another `Somebody Lied.’ ” The package also includes re-dos of three more country oldies: Mel Street’s “Borrowed Angel,” Merle Haggard’s “When The Feeling Goes Away” and Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton’s “Making Plans.”
“People ask me why I do these things,” he says of the remakes. “I do them because I like them and the people like them. A lot of (singers) won’t cut a song that’s been cut (before), but I ain’t that way. A good song’s a good song.”
To the observation that he has received criticism in the past for that point of view, he answers with characteristic self-assurance, one of the things about him that hasn’t changed:
“So what? People criticized the Beatles, too, and look at all the stuff they re-cut.”
