How to go
What: A Tillis Family Christmas featuring Mel and Pam Tillis
When: 8 p.m. Dec. 11
Where: Kuss Auditorium
Tickets: $20 to $54; visit pac.clarkstate.edu or call (937) 328-3874.
SPRINGFIELD — When Mel Tillis informs you that, up until three years ago, he’d never heard of Robert Plant, or Led Zeppelin, it’s entirely conceivable he’s pulling your leg.
After all, the 78-year-old country music legend is in the midst of a career resurgence — as a comedian.
No joke.
At last check, his first comedy album, “You Ain’t Gonna Believe This,” was holding the No. 3 spot on the Billboard comedy chart, meaning he’s keeping company these days with the likes of Lewis Black and Dane Cook.
So back to this Robert Plant thing ...
Tillis had never heard of the guy until just a few years ago, when Plant and Alison Krauss covered his song “Stick With Me Baby” — once a minor hit for the Everly Brothers back in 1961 — on their blockbuster, Grammy-winning “Raising Sand” album.
Maybe I misunderstood.
It’s Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Freaking Zeppelin.
“And she’s buying the stairway to heaven ...”
“Hey, hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove ...”
That guy.
Turns out, I heard right.
He’d never heard of Mr. Plant.
But, much to Tillis’ delight, he’s actually pretty popular.
“When the check arrived in the mail,” Tillis explained, “I said, ‘I’ve got to meet that guy.’ ”
When Tillis comes to town on Dec. 11 as part of A Tillis Family Christmas — a concert that also features his famous daughter, Pam Tillis — it’s an opportunity to pay your respects to one of the last greats.
Of the four guys who banded together in the late ’90s and called themselves the Old Dogs, only two are left.
Waylon Jennings and Jerry Reed have gone, leaving just Tillis and Bobby Bare.
Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007 — the same year Plant and Krauss covered “Stick With Me Baby” — Tillis has been a witness to countless changes in country music.
“I’ve been in the business for 54 years now,” he said, later describing how he initially drove to Nashville with a pregnant wife and $29 to their name in a ’49 Mercury with a hole in the windshield.
A half-century later, Tillis probably has every right to be a cranky old coot if he wants to be.
He could look at what passes for country today and rant and rave, like an 80-year-old Ray Price did before coming to play Kuss Auditorium in 2006.
“In my opinion,” Price growled back then, “it’s a well-planned thing by Hollywood and New York to destroy the real country music to sell rock ’n’ roll. And bad rock, most of it.”
Fair enough.
But Tillis has grown old with his humor intact.
“My daughter, Pam, said, ‘Daddy, they’re signing fetuses,’ ” he deadpanned, adding, “Taylor Swift is doing great. More power to her.”
Stutterin’ boy
Tillis learned at an early age not to take things, especially himself, too seriously.
A chronic stutterer who grew up near Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, he was at first self-conscious of his speech impediment.
“Lord, yes. Especially when I started in school,” he recalled. “I didn’t know I stuttered.”
He vividly remembers coming home crying to his mom.
“She said, ‘If they’re going to laugh at you, give them something to laugh about,’ ” he said. “My show business career started that day.”
His new comedy album features material culled from performances at his old theater in Branson, Mo., between 1990 and 2002.
“I’ve always told stories on stage,” he said. “The more I talk, the less I stutter. So it’s a good medicine.
“Humor is the best medicine.”
He recorded every show in Branson, so there’s plenty more where this came from.
“I’ve got enough for 15 or 20 CDs,” he said. “I’m on cloud nine, I really am.”
Once a frequent guest on the TV shows hosted by Porter Wagoner and Glen Campbell, Tillis still seems like the most unlikely guy to ever have won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award, as he did in 1976.
He had a string of No. 1 hits throughout the ’70s, from “I Ain’t Never” in ’72 to “Coca-Cola Cowboy” in ’79.
“That was kind of slow in coming,” he said. “I wanted to sing, but they told me they didn’t need any stuttering singers. They said they didn’t make the records that big.”
So he first found work behind the scenes, writing big hits throughout the ’50s and ’60s for Price, Brenda Lee, Bobby Bare, Kenny Rogers and others.
He’s probably best remembered from that time for the songs he wrote for Webb Pierce, and what an unlikely pairing that must have been — a stuttering songwriter and a guy with a habit of singing off key.
But Pierce had a field day in the late ’50s with a host of Tillis songs, including “I’m Tired,” “Honky Tonk Song” and the original version of “I Ain’t Never.”
Mental revenge
As Robert Plant recently proved, there’s still a lot of life left in Tillis’ songs.
On his newest album, Jamey Johnson covers “Mental Revenge,” a Tillis song originally recorded by Waylon in 1967.
So what’s the secret to songwriting?
Tillis, frankly, doesn’t have a clue.
“They’re gifts,” he said. “They really are. I’m not that damn smart. I’ve been told that, too, a bunch of times.”
Hearing Tillis talk — stutters and all — it becomes obvious that the great ones have always made it look effortless.
He talks of writing “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” a No. 6 pop hit in 1969 for Kenny Rogers, while stuck in traffic.
“Johnny Cash was on the radio singing, ‘Don’t take your guns to town, son, leave your guns at home,’ ” he recalled. “By the time I got home, I had the song written.”
In regards to “Stick With Me Baby,” one of the most glorious songs on the album “A Date With the Everly Brothers,” he remembers the Everlys asking him one day in the studio if he had any new songs.
He walked out to his car and finished the song on the spot, right there in his El Camino.
Even as he nears 80, Tillis is still writing, and just a month ago gave Kenny Rogers a song called “Babies.”
“I figured he’d want another hit,” Tillis deadpanned.
He was joking, of course, but there’s always some truth in comedy.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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