zoom
Most books on living legends (those self-written in particular) start off as a tale of sorrow and woe turned raucous and wonderfully wild, then back to woe, then they wind up with newfound reasons for changed living and an affirmation of the squeaky clean new self - usually involving God and children. Yuk. The very best thing about the now 38-year-old country singer Tanya Tucker is that she knows, smilingly too, there is no redemption. Tucker - with a tug in her throat that easily turns to a roar - gives us her all and more in her autobiography, Nickel Dreams: My Life (Hyperion), and her heartfelt new release, Complicated (Capitol). On TV talk shows lately she's been regaling the world with quaint tales of truck rides with Daddy, music biz struggles and triumphs, drugs, sleeping around, more drugs, and the inability to say "no" to practically anything or anybody - a sad, slightly wild twinkle appears in her eye. But it's a twinkle well earned. Put Nickel Dreams and Complicated together and we see a portrait of a girl impressed by the hard dustbowl life. Call it "Tucker tough." Tucker's father Beau, a strong Oklahoman, guided his little daughter through her first Nashville hit, 1974's "Delta Dawn" ("What's that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose?"), the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and a greatest hits collection - all by station wagon and all by the time she was 15. He took great physical and verbal pains to steer her away from those who wanted to exploit her youthful exhuberance and turn her into sexpot chicken. "One of the biggest problems throughout the early years was managers wanting to market me as a sex bomb," says Tucker, in a pre-recorded interview. "They didn't need to push me in that direction. I found it soon enough on my own!" Sure did. The book shifts quickly from country & western triumph to sex and drugs after leaving legendary C&W producer Billy Sherill and the confines of Tennessee for Los Angeles and a leather-clad rocker marketing scheme that resulted in 1978's TNT. "To suddenly find yourself with money in Southern California is a heady experience. I jumped right on the party wagon too. The fast lane is fun until you start to skid out of control." The ultimate in skid-marking though was her molto-explosive relationship with slick, jealous, coke-snortin' superstar Glen Campbell. That the twosome made a pert, '80s-perfect partyin' pair is obvious. That Campbell couldn't handle her off-color and crude (to him) ways made their drug-fueled relationship more volatile than a speed ball. "The reason we didn't make it was drugs, pure and simple," she says. "Also, Glen didn't think I was 'ladylike' enough around his Hollywood friends like Joe Namath, Milton Berle and James Garner. He was terribly jealous, whether it was over some guy in my band or Merle Haggard." While it ain't hard to figure who to fuck between Haggard or Campbell, Tucker spent the remainder of the '80s and early '90s "snakebit," taking in any number of loser dudes who thought they could handle her and her money. Upon leaving Hollywood (by way of her white knight father), she returned to Nashville where the partying continued even harder. Yet throughout it all - though victimized certainly at times by the most insinuatingly insidious - Tanya Tucker is no victim. A double dose of the Betty Ford clinic, two wonderful kids - her "ice cream cones" as she likes to call them - and soulfully inspired records like What Do I Do With Me, the new near-divinity of Complicated and, hell, even an eponymous four-CD box set, show that it would take a ton o' bricks to knock down young ol' Tanya Tucker. "Sometimes life smacks you in the face with a pie with one hand and hands you an ice cream cone in the other." Y'all come back, y'hear? |