If You Go
- Who: Travis Tritt
- When: 8 p.m., Aug. 8-10
- Where: The Orleans Showroom
- Tickets: $60.50 to $88; 365-7075
Beyond the Sun
Record executives didn’t know what to do with Travis Tritt when they first signed him. He was a country singer clad in leather with hair down to his shoulders and a slightly disheveled look while his contemporaries wore cowboys hats and starched jeans.
The pop division of Warner Bros. in Atlanta and Los Angeles loved his sound, but the execs in Nashville were falling in love with new traditionalists such as Randy Travis, Ricky Van Shelton, Ricky Skaggs and Emmylou Harris.
“They didn’t understand me at all,” Tritt, 45, says during a telephone interview from his home in Marietta, Ga. “The comment was made numerous times: ‘We just don’t know what to do with this guy because that country rock thing is dead. It’s over.’ I thought, ‘Man, these guys haven’t been to a Charlie Daniels or a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Hank Williams Jr. show lately, have they?’ Also, I think a lot of them just couldn’t get past the long hair and the leather.”
His star was rising when his look was on the way out.
“All the people that were part of the same class I came out of, the class of ’89 — Garth Books, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Vince Gill — all those guys are very clean-cut, cowboy hats and so on and so forth — that’s their image,” Tritt says. “My image was nothing contrived. I was a product of the biker bars and the pool halls and the beer joints and the bowling alleys I had played for so many years before I ever got a record deal.”
Tritt came out of the chute strong with his first album, “Country Club,” released in 1990. Several songs on the album have become classics, including “I’m Gonna Be Somebody,” “Help Me Hold On,” “Sign of the Times” and “Son of the New South.”
Tritt, who will perform at the Orleans Friday through Sunday, talked to the Sun about his career.
How did you get into the business?
My mother says apparently I came out of the womb singing. Been singing as long as I can remember. Growing up as a kid I played in my grandfather’s church for a lot of years. I had had all types of different bands — bluegrass bands, country bands, country rock bands. But when I turned about 19, maybe 20, I got married and went to work for a heating and air-conditioning wholesale company. After about a year or so I started going around and just playing solo acts at little restaurants and bars close by my home. About a year later, when the marriage broke up, I decided that it was time for me to give that a really solid shot. After a very short period of time I realized I was making more money and having more fun at my night gig than I was at my day gig, so I decided to quit and give it a full-time shot. That was 25 years ago and we haven’t looked back since.
Who influenced you?
My influences were all over the place. I’m blessed and thankful for the opportunity to grow up where I did because growing up just outside of Atlanta, I always felt like I was kind of right in the middle of so many good things. Just to our south we had Macon, Ga., where, when I was a kid growing up, people like Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers were just setting the world on fire from there. Then just to our north we had Nashville, Tenn., where the Grand Ole Opry originated, and my parents and I listened to that religiously. Of course a little bit farther north we had bluegrass music out in the hills of Kentucky, and that was a big influence on me growing up. Just a little bit to our west was Delta blues, a huge, huge influence. Take all that and put a little bit of Southern gospel over the top of it and that’s where I come from.
Why did you leave Warner Bros.?
I started out with Warner Bros. on very rocky terms. I never felt the Nashville people really believed in me, even though for many years I was the largest-selling artist that they had had in the country division since Randy Travis. I didn’t feel like the understanding or the devotion to what I was trying to accomplish with my albums was there, so in 1998 a couple of things happened. First of all, my (new) wife and I had our first child, our daughter. I decided, as soon as I laid eyes on her, I’d like to do more of this, stay around the house and get to know her a little better and find out what this being a daddy thing is all about. I decided to do that and I took two years off from touring. I didn’t tour, I didn’t do anything. And the other thing, I made my mind up that I was going to finally — after all these years — get off of this record label and go somewhere where hopefully somebody appreciated and understood what I was trying to do. We left Warner Bros. in 1998 and then two years later we signed with Columbia, and we were with them for three albums. Our last album project was with a new upstart label in Nashville, Category 5. I think I’m pretty much to the point, and obviously a lot of other people are these days, I think my next project will be on my own record label.
The record industry seems to be in chaos right now.
They sort of did it to themselves, with all due respect. Country music radio is in the same boat. It’s because of the fact, I think, that for so many years they put the focus on what they believe is commercially viable and they’ve taken it out of the listeners’ hands. The listeners, a lot of times, don’t even get exposed to a lot of really, really great music out there because some corporate entity somewhere is making that decision for them based on what they think sells and what they think people want to hear. It’s now starting to turn out to be their downfall. The good news is that for established artists such as myself and especially for the country music listener, we’ve got more opportunities as artists to directly get our music out to the people than we’ve ever had before without having to go through radio and without having to go through record labels. And for the first time audiences are getting an opportunity to get exposed to music they had no idea existed. I think it’s a really exciting time.
That’s good for established artists, but what about the young ones?
If I was brand-new right now coming in, I’d be scared to death because it is tough. It’s so much more competitive now and getting more and more that way all the time. It costs more and more money for a record label to go out and promote it the way it needs to be promoted and to purchase things like a spot in the CD aisle at Wal-Mart. That’s something you have to purchase now. When I got in the business they’d give you that for free. It’s a totally changing business model. There are a lot of new, really talented people getting sucked up in that wake being created by these corporate entities, and that’s unfortunate. I root for people who are really good. The unfortunate part is, no matter how much talent you have, if you don’t have a name already, the odds are against you.
Have you started working on a new album after “Storm”?
Marty Stuart and I have been talking a little bit recently. We’re in the process of doing a few acoustic shows — just he and I, acoustic, no band, nobody else, just the two of us, a couple of guitars. We’re going to do maybe 15 of those shows this year in selected cities across the country. We’re actually talking about the possibility of co-producing my next project together. But we haven’t started writing anything for it and I haven’t started sitting down and putting the whole concept together.
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