No Taming Her Country

NASHVILLE —  The traditional stereotype of the hard-drinking, hard-living country music singer has been replaced in recent years by the clean-cut, business-minded performer of modern Nashville.

But there’s still Tanya Tucker.

“Everybody is trying to be real cool these days, you know,” Tucker says during an interview, commenting on the domesticated surface of modern country music. “The old era is kind of over, you know? Everybody is in the business mode these days, as opposed to just wanting to go out and get after it.”

She acknowledges that she’s different. It’s important to her sanity that she occasionally “get out and get down,” as she puts it, to relieve the stress of her career and her busy schedule.

“You feel like you’re on the edge about half the time in this business,” she explains. “There’s a lot of pressure, and people handle it differently.”

Tucker, 38, handles it by occasionally hitting the town and making a spectacle of herself. Last month, after taping a segment for the NBC-TV program “Dateline,” she took interviewer Stone Phillips out for dinner and drinks. They wound up on Printer’s Alley, which includes a strip of nightclubs and music bars in downtown Nashville, where Tucker crashed a party hosted by Sony Music.

Before long, she jumped onstage without an invitation, commandeering the microphone between performances by country singers Ty Herndon and Joe Diffie. She hurled an off-color epithet at Herndon, then responded to an audience request by hiking her blouse and flashing her breasts. “Both of them,” as she told Oprah Winfrey a few days later while taping a segment of the TV host’s syndicated talk show.

Tucker’s been shocking the prudish and the conventional since 1972, when, at age 13, she began recording Southern gothic story songs, some spiced with steamy lyrics. Under the guidance of Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who provided her with a dramatic musical setting that blended gospel-influenced arrangements with outlandish and suggestive lyrics, Tucker became country music’s youngest star and one of its most controversial performers.

As with current country music sensation LeAnn Rimes, part of Tucker’s appeal derived from the fact that she was a young girl with an adult woman’s voice. Her first hit was “Delta Dawn,” about a woman who gradually goes insane. Other early ‘70s hits included the suggestive “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” and the provocative “No Man’s Land,” about a rape victim who, while working years later as a prison nurse, lets her attacker die rather than treat him.

Twenty-five years after “Delta Dawn,” Tucker looks back at her dramatic life story in an autobiography, “Nickel Dreams,” written with music industry publicist Patsi Bale Cox. The title of the book, just published by Hyperion, comes from a Mac MacAnally song about a little girl who dreams of becoming a famous singer, only to discover stardom wasn’t the golden road she expected.

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Tucker acknowledges that her life story unfolds with an over-the-top melodrama that could have come from one of her early songs. “I didn’t live them then,” she says, “but I lived them later, for sure.”

She denies that she was inspired to write a book as a response to ex-fiance Glen Campbell’s autobiography, which portrayed her as a tempestuous spirit who lured him away from his wife and led him deeper into drug and alcohol abuse. But others encouraged her to tell her side of the story. “I didn’t do it because of that,” she says. “But, more than anything else, that was why everyone else started pushing me harder to go ahead and do it.”

She struggled to get it done. She missed several deadlines, and the initial publisher, Bantam, refused to issue an early draft.

“They didn’t want to hear about my beginnings,” she says. “They wanted sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. And I couldn’t do that.”

Released from their Bantam contract, Tucker and Cox took the book to Hyperion.

“Nickel Dreams” is strong on anecdotal tales and short on reflection. At one point, she recalls how her father suggested that she’d become too flashy and gone too Hollywood and that she should get back to being Tanya Tucker.

“How do I get back to being Tanya Tucker when I don’t know who or what a Tanya Tucker is?” she asks. It’s a theme she returns to often, suggesting that her life often has been shaped by forces beyond her control.

Along the way, she speaks of liaisons with a string of singers and actors, many of them older than her. Besides Campbell, she includes stories about Don Johnson, Merle Haggard, Andy Gibb, Desi Arnaz Jr., Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall and soap opera actor Ben Reed, the father of her two children, 7-year-old Presley and 5-year-old Beau. Some were just friends, she says, and not the quick romances the tabloids suggested.

She doesn’t deny episodes of heavy partying. She recounts how, on the most violent night of her turbulent relationship with Campbell, the two would stop shouting at each other to snort cocaine, then go back to fighting. Tucker ended up with a large gash in her leg, caused when she kicked out a window to get back into the house after Campbell had locked her out, and two missing front teeth, which she said were knocked out by Campbell’s elbow in a fit of anger. (Campbell has described his relationship with Tucker as “abusive,” but denies knocking out her teeth.)

Elsewhere, she tells of being pushed down Nashville’s Music Row in a shopping cart by singer Gary Stewart and songwriter Dean Dillon after the three spent the night drinking and doing drugs. Tucker, who was in her early 20s at the time, had written her first song after the all-night binge. She wanted to present it to a music publisher, but she was too inebriated to walk. On another occasion, after another all-nighter, she showed up at 9 a.m. at the office of Clive Davis, the president of Arista Records, to confront him about what she felt was a lack of promotion of her 1982 album, “Changes.”

“The way I’ve lived has had its costs. There were a lot of difficult times. It’s easy to talk about now, but they were difficult then.”

Along with the book, Tucker has released her 30th album, “Complicated,” which could have served as “the perfect title” for her life story, she says. The album includes a song with a taunting chorus, “You don’t do it, but you think about it.”

Asked about that song, she responds, “Yeah, well, I go ahead and do it. They just think about it. I do it.”

* Tanya Tucker will sign copies of her autobiography, “Nickel Dreams,” April 11 at Costco, 10950 Sherman Way, Burbank, 12:30 p.m. (818) 840-8115; and at Brentano’s, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City, 6 p.m. (310) 785-0204.