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What Are They Saying?
Here is the complete interview |
| Jim Bessman: | I caught up with Travis Tritt backstage at his performance at the Big Bang Concert Series. When his debut single, "County Club," became a top ten hit in 1989, Travis Tritt became a full-fledged member of the Country Music community. But while the Marietta, Georgia native grew up listening to such Country Music legends as Porter Wagner, Dolly Parton, George Jones and Buck Owens, his own special signature style of Country Music owed equally to the great Southern Rock heroes of his teenage years like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker and Charlie Daniels. In another hit song from his 1990 debut album, which was also entitled "Country Club," Tritt clearly set forth the formula which has since made him, not only one of the most successful Country artists of the decade, but one of the most significant. The name of the song was "Put Some Drive In Your Country." And in it, Tritt set forth his personal musical philosophy in combining the classic Country he was raised on with the exciting mix of Blues and R&B which formed the basis for what came to be known as Southern Rock. While he has stayed true to this philosophy in the albums that followed, he has also stayed true to his roots, as outlined in the semi-autobiographical song from "Country Club" called "Son Of The New South." In it, the farmer's son spoke with pride about the South and Southern people of today, which, contrary to stereotype, isn't at all just rednecks and hillbillies. |
 | When I say, talking about the New South, it incorporates all of the answers or responses to the stereotypes that the South's been labeled with for so long. This is a completely different, new group of people with a completely different mindset than what you had fifty years ago in the South. Larry Alderman and I wrote that song together and we were sitting around talking about the differences and a lot of the things that have changed over the years, a lot of the things that still need to change. But definitely, being from a place so close to Atlanta, (I was born and raised in Marietta, Georgia, which is literally a 25-minute drive from downtown Atlanta) watching Atlanta grow, and the suburbs of Atlanta grow into this little small New York of the South, basically, I think it's really inspiring to people like me. You know? Because we still can retain all the Southern charm and the Southern hospitality, and the wonderful things that the South is known for, and hopefully still be able to stamp out some of the racism things that we've had put upon us over the years, some of the other stereotypes that we have, you know, back woods, etc. ItÕs very much like Country Music, which has evolved over the years and has taken on a lot of influences from a lot of other places, including Rock & Roll and Blues and, and all these different things. I think that, as the South has expanded its horizons and has grown, Country Music also has too, because so much of that comes out of the South. And I think we've managed to pull all of the good things out of our past and bring on some good things of a new nature, as well. And I think that's very good and very positive for both the South and for Country Music. |
| Jim Bessman: | Tritt's roots in Country Music extend back to age three when he would snap his fingers to Roger Miller's classic hit, "King Of The Road." By the time he reached fourth grade he was singing the song in class, accompanying himself on guitar. He diligently studied Johnny Cash and Mack Davis, as both had their own T.V. shows. But he also sang in church and he later wrote the song, "Bible Belt," from his 1991 album, "It's All About To Change," about a wayward preacher at his church. This illustrates Tritt's song writing approach of writing from his experience in a simple and direct manner. Indeed, his huge hit, "Here's A Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares," which was also on "It's All About To Change," was written the night he was handed his second divorce papers. |
| I have a lot of songwriter friends, naturally and some of them tend to write from a very fictional standpoint and there are times that I really wish that I could write that way. I look at people like Charlie Daniels. I've always used Charlie as a great example, because Charlie is one of these people who - you can give him the name of a fictional place and a fictional character and he will write you a song about this fictional character in this fictional place and it'll be wonderful. I have wished sometimes that I could write that way, because quite frankly, I'd have a whole lot more material. But I tend to write things that are so about my life, things that I'm experiencing, things that I'm going through. And chances are very good that if you're hearing a song that I've done on the radio that I've written, it's usually a song that talks about something that I'm either going through at that particular time or have been through in my life. I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself. And even though I live a wonderful life that a lot of people only dream about, in many ways, I'm just like the average guy next door. I go through the same emotions that everybody else goes through, the acquisition of love, the loss of it, how I feel about my country, how I feel about my job, how I feel about the people I work with, how I feel about my peers and just all these different things. And, those are feelings that every person in this country experiences at some point or another. I think that that's the key to being a successful songwriter. When you can write a song that the average Joe can get in his car or his pickup truck or whatever, going to work, and he turns it on, and he hears a song that jumps out of the radio. It sounds like that the person singing it has been reading this guy's mail. I mean, when you have that kind of a connection with the audience as a songwriter, you've done your job. And it moves somebody. And I think that for me to continue to be able to do that I have to continue to be able to write about things that I know about, and those are the things that I've experienced personally. |
| Jim Bessman: | It was while playing music at a local Black church that Tritt observed a deeply soulful Black Gospel singing influence which he soon applied to the music he was beginning to fashion out of many seemingly diverse sources. Besides the classic Country stars and Southern Rock greats, he explored the Blues of Muddy Waters and the R&B of Ray Charles. Then there was Country's so-called "outlaw movement" pioneered by the likes of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, not to mention Hank Williams, Jr., whose own blend of Country and Rock Music and renegade personality paved the way for Tritt's. Seventies rock groups like The Eagles also held sway over Tritt, who saw a common thread running through all these different musical genres and styles and put it to expert use. |
| I think it is a sad statement about so many people that either from their background, from their raising, or either from their own personal limitations, that they limit themselves to only being interested in one specific type of music. I grew up listening to a wide array of everything from bluegrass to straight-ahead Country Music, Country Classics, George Jones, Haggard, Lester Flat and Earl Scruggs to people like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker some of the Blues Classics. From that on into modern-day Rock and Rollers, people like Journey, Boston, The Eagles, ELO - it's just a wide variety. I found something about the music in each specific case that I liked and I tried to just incorporate all those different things into the music that I turned out. I guess the thing that I like about all those types of music and the thing that drew me to them is because I found that I could sing those types of music. Music that I couldn't sing, I never liked. I guess that's why I never got into opera. Because I couldn't sing it! I couldn't do Pavoratti. I have a respect for it, but at the same time, I always liked stuff that I could go around and hum to myself or sing to myself. I liked experimenting with a lot of different styles. So, it always saddens me when I see young people, or even older people for that matter, who are limited to one specific type of music. They don't really allow themselves to experience so many types of music out there that are so wonderful to listen to. And there's good parts and bad parts, I guess, to all of them. The thing is to go out and experiment with these different things. It's sort of like teaching a child to learn how to eat. There's so many things out there that are wonderful if you just try a little taste of them. And that's what I always tried to do growing up. And thank God I was in a position where I was in a part of the United States that was centrally located between a junction of so many types of music. |
| Jim Bessman: | Paying his dues on the club circuit, Tritt eventually impressed a Warner Bros. Records executive with his potential. Warner Bros. usually didn't make videos for new artists, but made an exception in Tritt's case. And the video for "Country Club" helped Tritt land his manager, Ken Kragen, who was famous for guiding the careers of Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie. But later videos proved equally momentous. The stunning video for "Anymore," in which he played a disabled Vietnam Veteran, was an early indication of Tritt's acting talents, which would later be more fully realized in the feature films, "The Cowboy Way" and Sergeant Bilko." And for the video for "Take It Easy," which was Tritt's contribution to "The Common Thread, The Songs Of The Eagles" album, he not only reunited the quarrelsome group for the shoot, but set the stage for their immensely successful reunion tours. |
| Videos have always been important for me. And I came along at a time when video was just sort of coming into its own in Country Music. My career kind of grew up as videos grew up. But, it's more important now, rather than doing a video just for the sake of doing a video, it's more important now to do videos only when they really mean something, and when you can really make a connection with the audience with them. So that's what we try to do at this point. I mean, by this time, hopefully everybody knows what I look like. And I'm not trying to establish myself as a new artist anymore. So, it only makes sense to do videos that really can reach out and touch a part of people and make them remember that song. That's why videos like "Anymore" were extremely important for me. Videos like "Tell Me I Was Dreamin'," "More Than You'll Ever Know," were extremely important because they gave me an opportunity to do something unusual and out of the ordinary. Quite frankly, you know, that's what you try to do at radio as well. You try to do something that, when in a long string of songs that comes on the radio, that something's gonna jump out of that pack and be special and be different and catch the listener's ear. And, with videos, you try to do the very same thing. You try to reach out and grab the viewersÕ eye. And you make sure that you leave a lasting impression with those people. That's basically the criteria that I look for. Obviously, when we did "Take It Easy" with The Eagles, that was an opportunity to do something phenomenal, not just in Country Music, but in all music. Because The Eagles did not play together for 14 years. This was the first time that these guys had assembled together in 14 years. And people say, "Well, you know, you did this wonderful thing by reuniting The Eagles." I'll be honest with you, all I wanted to do was just make a great video. We were doing a song that was part of an album that had some fabulous performances by some of the best people in Country Music, paying tribute to one of the greatest groups that's ever been in music, period. And, they asked me, which I was very honored that they did, the folks at Giant Records asked me if I would release the single. And I did. And then they said, "Well, we wanna do a video." And I said, "Wow, guys! If you're gonna do a video, it's gotta be really special." And they said, "Like what, for example?" And I said, "Like get The Eagles back together." There was a huge amount of laughter. 'Cause I was very naive. I thought, well you know, call up Don Henley and call up Glenn Fry and let's get this thing together, man. And everybody said, Òit's just not that simple.Ó And I think my being so naive was the key to making that video work. Because I just basically said, "Guys, you never know until you try." And it was that naive approach to that situation that got us on the telephone with Don Henley, and got him to agree. And then got Glenn Frey to agree. And then once we got those two guys involved, it was a matter of picking up the telephone and calling up Joe Walsh, and calling up Timothy B. Schmit and talking to all these guys and getting them all involved. If I live to be a hundred years old, that will stand out to me, as one of the greatest days in the world. Because I got to be an Eagle for a day. And that's the greatest experience I think I've ever had in my entire life. All the wonderful things that happened subsequently are wonderful and fabulous. But the thing that I'll always remember is that I assembled a group of wonderful musicians together again for the first time in a long time to do a video that I think will stand up in the test of time as being something very, very special and very, very strong. |
| Jim Bessman: | Besides The Eagles, Tritt furthered the career of his friend, Marty Stewart, when he decided to record Stewart's "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", with Stewart singing along. The duet hit led to a Grammy in 1993, more duets and two tours, the aptly-named "No Hats Tour" in 1992 and last year's "Double Trouble Tour." |
| Marty Stewart and I met, backstage at a CMA Awards. It was my first CMA Award show that I'd ever attended. This was 1989. I was walking down the hallway, and literally, was just star-struck. Because here I was, first time at a major award show like this, first time to get a chance to rub elbows with some of my heroes. And I remember walking down the hall backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and seeing Johnny Cash one second. The next second it was Loretta Lynn. The next second it was Ricky Skaggs. The next second it was Larry Gatlin. These are all people that I've admired my entire life. And to have an opportunity to be up there rubbing elbows with these guys was just a great thrill. And also seeing some of the new guys, my contemporaries - people like Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks and Clint Black, and old Marty Stewart. I saw Marty from a few feet away. All I'd seen of Marty was what he'd done on CMT and the Nashville Network in the form of video. He was kinda just coming into his own, although, he'd been around forever. And he and I passed each other and I just kinda pointed at him. I said, "You know what? I really like you, Man." And he pointed back and he said, "You know what? I really like you, too." And that was our first introduction. A few weeks later he sent me a song. I was in the studio working, and he sent a song called, "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'." He'd been considering the song for his album and he just ran out of room. And he said, "This would be a great song for you." And I loved it. We recorded it. As the song sort of took its own character on, we asked Marty to come in and sing a verse on it, which he agreed to. He also played guitar on that particular cut. And, it just worked. There was a magical chemistry. People have asked me what it is about Marty and I, and I really, to be honest with you, cannot put my finger on exactly what it is, except to tell you that he and I have a chemistry together when we're around each other that just clicks. It just works. I've got a lot of great friends in Country Music that I love dearly and it's great to see them when you get a chance to seem them, either out on the road or at award shows or whatever, and say hello and talk to them. But Marty is one of those rare exceptions to the rule, that he is literally like the brother I never had. He is so much in tune with my way of thinking and so much in tune with my feelings about the business, about music in general, about performing. Just all of those different things. And we just clicked. It just worked. I love him dearly. He's one of the few people in this business that I know that I can pick up the telephone and call him at three or four o'clock in the morning and find him anywhere, wake him up in any hotel room across the country, and say, "Hey, Brother, I need to talk to you about something." And he is there. And he knows I'm the same for him. And that's a very, very special thing that you don't find normally in this world, especially in the Country Music business or in the entertainment field. You don't find that too often. He's a gem. And he's a diamond, and I'm so thankful for his friendship and so thankful for the fact that we have the kind of relationship that we have. |
| Jim Bessman: | How did you get the names of the two tours? |
| Marty and I were talking about going out on tour together because "Whiskey Ain't Workin'" was very successful. It was a number-one record for us and we started at Fan Fare in Nashville. We started getting a lot of cross-collateralization, if you will. You know, a lot of people that were coming over to my booth and saying, "Oh, yeah, we just saw Marty," and so on and so forth and we would get together and we'd pose for pictures and it would just be electric. We would take all of my response and all of his response and it was like times two. It was a great situation. We started realizing that, hey, maybe this is something we need to take on the road. And I believe it was Marty's manager, Bonnie Garner, who came up with the thing. We were talking about all the big acts in Country Music, aside from myself at that time, with the influx of the Alan Jacksons and the Clint Blacks and the Garth Brooks and all these different people, that I was about the only guy, besides Marty, that didn't wear a cowboy hat. And so Bonnie kind of picked up on that and she said, "Why don't we call it the 'No Hats Tour'?" And then somebody came up with this idea of a cowboy hat with a circle and the slash through it. And it was just a great thing. It just came up. We got a lot of controversy out of it. We raised enough eyebrows to get Garth Brooks in the middle of a TV Guide interview to stop and make a comment about it. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand what was going on. And for guys like us, that was the greatest thing in the world, because he obviously was the biggest seller, he had the most things going for him in Country Music and to make a guy like that stop in the middle of a press conference, with all of these people out there, and talk about me and Marty Stewart, and if it's positive, if it's negative, I don't really care at that point. The fact is, he's bringing up something to the nation, that's the best publicity you could ever imagine. And Marty called me up and said, "Did you hear what Garth Brooks just said about us in this press conference"? And I said, "Yeah, I sure did." He says, "I'm high-fiving you over the phone, Brother." He said, "We've got something really good here." It turned out to be some of the best publicity that we could've possibly gotten. I compare it to the amount of publicity that talking about the song, "Achy Breaky Heart" gave to Billy Ray Cyrus, from my standpoint. It was a great thing. It just seemed to work. Then when we came back together for the second tour. Marty and I had been in the studio working on my new album and Marty's new album as well. We had written a song together called "Double Trouble." Paul Kinnerley came up with the title and Marty and I wrote it down in Key West, Florida. We wrote this song and it just seemed like just a natural thing for that to be the title of the tour, because, obviously when we get together, there's twice the trouble than there was before. So it was just a natural thing. Just fell in line. |
| Jim Bessman: | "Double Trouble" was a song from Tritt's most recent album, "The Restless Kind." The album was his first since a greatest hits compilation as well as a special award from Warner Bros. commemorating Tritt's first fourteen million in album sales. "The Restless Kind" was also Tritt's first album that wasn't produced by Greg Brown. This time Tritt co-produced with Don Was, the star rock album producer who had begun producing Country albums as well and who previously produced the "Rhythm, Country and Blues" album featuring a duet with Tritt and Soul Music Diva, Patti Labelle. |
| I had worked on a couple of projects with Don Was before we did this last album together. He produced the "Country Rhythm and Blues album," which I really had a blast doing. I also worked with him on an album that was sort of a Graceland tribute album. The thing that I noticed coming in and working with Don was that I had come from a background of working with a guy that was a producer and it was very understood, Greg Brown was the producer of my albums. I understood that, even though I wrote a lot of the songs and I performed them and I was very much involved in how the arrangements went. When it came to the actual production, I wasn't that involved. Not as involved as I would've liked to have been. Of course, you can't argue with success. We had a tremendous run of great records that sold extremely well with Greg. But after the "Greatest Hits" album came out and we had sort of achieved that part of my career by being able to even have a greatest hits album, I felt as though that was sort of closing the first chapter of my career and the beginning of a new one. That new chapter, I wanted to get even more involved in the production of my records and how my records actually sounded. As a singer and a songwriter, I think you hear songs in your head, how they're gonna come out on tape before you ever even go in and start recording the first cuts. And a lot of times, the way that I heard them in my head when I was working with Greg and the way they actually came out were pretty different. And so I wanted to, first of all, co-produce. Second of all, I wanted to be able to work with a person that I knew would be open-minded enough to come in and take my ideas and take those thoughts that I had prior to cutting anything in the studio and really take them into consideration and try to make this the album in its final form that I had heard in my head before we started. I walked into the first session that I did with Don which was the "Country Rhythm and Blues" session with Patti Labelle, and I suggested a lot of things in that particular session--how I thought the tracks should sound, where I thought lead breaks should go how the stacking of the instruments should be. And I blurted these things out. And not only did he listen to what I had to say, but he actually used my ideas in the recording of that track. And he did the same thing when we did the Elvis album. And that was something that I was looking for. Because a lot of times in Nashville producers can tend to be a little heavy-handed. And, so when it came time to look for a partner, to go in and co-produce this next album with, that was going to be the opening chapter of the new career or the second chapter of Travis Tritt, I basically immediately went to Don Was because of my past experience, and was fortunate enough to find that he had some time on his hands and was able to work with me. I'm always flattered and thrilled at the fact that I had an opportunity to work with a guy of this caliber, because, on any given week, you can call him up and he's either working with The Rolling Stones, or he's working with Joe Cocker, or he's working with Willie Nelson, or he's working with Kris Kristopherson, or he's working with Waylon or he's working with Bonnie Raitt and that was a real thrill. And Don was very complimentary. And, in that entire process of working on that album, I don't think we ever had a disagreement about anything. And if we had, I feel certain, in my heart of hearts, that he would have said, "Travis, it is your name on the album. These are your songs. This is your project. You go with what your gut tells you to go with, and I'll back you one hundred percent." And I believe he would have. I believe he would've stepped aside and let the artist come through in the art. And that is something very rare. And I think that's one of the things that has made Don Was such a fabulous producer in the fact that he is able, through that type of thought process, to bring out the very, very best in people, and let the best that the artist has to offer shine through. |
| Jim Bessman: | In 1994, Tritt accompanied the album "Ten Feet Tall And Bulletproof," with an autobiography with the same title. |
| My bus driver is a wonderful person, and he's a guy that on occasion will come up with just a great phrase, you know. I tell him he ought to be on my payroll as a part-time songwriter, 'cause he comes up with some really great phrases. He mentioned one night, "You ought to write a song called 'Ten Feet Tall And Bulletproof.'Ò That's a phrase I've been hearing all my life, about guys that would let their ego overload their ability sometimes. So, I wrote the song. And I actually wrote the song before we did the book. And it just seemed like a natural for that particular album and that particular song and then the book to be titled that, because I was kinda poking fun at myself. I think that's always healthy to do. I had seen all these articles about outlaw and renegade and rebel rocker and this, that and the other. I just kinda thought the one thing you never do in this business is you never buy your own ticket. I just started thinking, there are times when I could really be ten feet tall and bulletproof or at least think I was, and the whole song, if you listen to it, is poking fun at myself. So when they called me about doing a book, my first response was, "I'm too young to do a biography, guys." And they said, "Well, we really feel like that you've got a strong fan base and you've got some things to say that your fans would love to hear." I did it very reluctantly, but, it just so happened that the book, the album, all those things came out at the same time. I guess it was more than anything else, sort of a marketing idea, at least how it started out. But, it turned out to be a theme that ran through all these different things and a tour all at the same time. So, you know, it was a good thing and I'm proud that we did it and I think that, more than anything else, when you talk about the humorous aspect of that song, that's what I wanted the book to be. I wanted the book to be informative. I wanted it to be insightful. But more than anything else, I wanted to kind of have it take a humorous look at life in general, and some of the experiences that you go through. Because that's, quite frankly, how I've gotten through a lot of my toughest times, is by trying to attach humor to the situation. And I think if you can laugh at yourself, you can laugh at just about anything. |
| Jim Bessman: | In his book, Tritt noted that his induction into Country Music's historic Grand Ole Opry was one of the three greatest things that ever happened to him--the others being his first platinum album and winning the Country Music Association's Horizon Award. |
| The Grand Ole Opry stands still as one of the biggest traditional gods, if you will, that we pay homage to in the business. In Country Music, there's not a single person whose grandfather or father doesn't have a story about listening to the Grand Ole Opry around a little small A.M. radio or one of those big console A.M. radios, when they were a kid. My dad told me about it when he was young. I listened to the Grand Ole Opry, watched it on television when I was young. Every person in Country Music, I think, has got a story like that. It really makes you sort of revere this wonderful institution that has been put into place and has been a mainstay for so many years from everybody from the legendary Hank Williams to Roy Acuff to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, to Johnny Cash to Marty Robbins, all these people that I basically grew up on, and listened to their records and listened to them on the radio, because that's what my dad loved. And through his love for it I grew to love it. And when you realize that that's the same spot that these people got their start, and it was revered by them as well, it really kind of puts a lump in your throat when you're asked to perform on the Opry. I always thought that I was too rowdy, and too much of a rocker, or too heavily influenced by the other side to be asked to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry. When I was inducted, I was the youngest member that had ever been inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. I guess the added excitement of never thinking that I would be there mixed with what tremendously high esteem that that particular institution is held in by my family, and by all the people that I know, to be a part of that institution is just absolutely one of the coolest things that I could ever be associated with. I will cherish my induction into the Grand Ole Opry till the day I die. I firmly believe what Porter Wagoner told me the night that I was inducted, and that is, if you treat the Opry as your friend and you take care of the Opry, that the Opry will always be there to take care of you. And I believe that wholeheartedly. |
| Jim Bessman: | One of George Jones' greatest hits was "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes." In it, the great Country singer wondered which young Country singers, if any, could follow in the footsteps of the legendary Country stars who made the Opry the Mother Church of Country Music. That Travis Tritt has stepped up to his idol's challenge is now obvious. That in itself is no small feat. But Travis Tritt has done it in a manner that is compellingly original, while always respectful of Country Music's grand traditions. At a time in Country Music history where virtually everyone is complaining about the lack of stand-out song writing, unique sound and artistic growth, Travis Tritt stands firmly on solid ground. |
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