O.C Pop Music Review : Pam Tillis: Living Up to the Promise

Pam Tillis emerged in 1991 with all the predictable prerequisites for modern country stardom. She had the capable but indistinctive voice so typical of the new generation, video-ready good looks, a satchel of mainstream songs and a famous last name in an industry that never begrudges a good bloodline.

“This is year No. 3,” the singer crowed in her early show Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, “and we’re still out there making records and having hits. It’s amazing--I’ve still got a job!”

More than that, her performance showed she has grown to fill that job remarkably well. The bit of spunk that was hinted at in her singing three years ago has blossomed, so that she now spices up a novelty lyric with the sass of a mid-career Dolly Parton, and her serious singing has become a thing of its own.

In her 14-song set, she was often able to make even microwaved Nashville fare seem like home cooking. She took the hackneyed “Do You Know Where Your Man Is” (as in “It’s 10 O’Clock, do you know where . . . “) and dragged it into serious Tammy Wynette country with a vocal that seemed heartfelt, if acknowledgedly indebted to Wynette in its phrasing.

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Tillis made a passing mention of her famous father, Mel, and her Cherokee mother, but didn’t milk either connection. Saying how much she loves singing, she did note: “I never wanted to do anything else. Some people got a hardware store. I got a microphone.”

Despite recent personnel changes, her six-piece Mystic Biscuits band provided a spirited, responsive backing to Tillis’ vocals.

The songs ranged from her early hits, such as “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” “Maybe It Was Memphis” and the bluesy “Draggin’ My Chains”; through her sophomore 1992 “Homeward Looking Angel” album, with the feisty “Shake the Sugar Tree,” “Let That Pony Run” and “Cleopatra: Queen of Denial”; up to her current “Sweetheart’s Dance” album and even beyond it with an unrecorded new tune, “Tequila Mockingbird.”

She used that song to inaugurate an “unplugged” portion of her show. While the tune is the sort of fluff the title suggests, the acoustic setting was ideal for her voice, which proved to have far more nuance and character than her typical belting allows to shine through.

The softer approach laid out equally fertile territory for her band members. Former Vince Gill singer-fiddler-guitarist Andrea Zonn offered an eloquent, intimate fiddle solo that rose above the song’s pun-happy lyric.

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A far better marriage of song and setting came with the following number, “Melancholy Child,” which Tillis wrote with her husband, Bob DiPiero. It was nearly acoustic, with only the bass going electric, and given a minor-key Irish waft colored by pedal steel player Brook Langston’s switch to mandolin.

It clearly is a personal lyric, telling of a young mother, a father on the road and a child with “a black Irish temper and some solemn Cherokee,” and Tillis sang it as such, with a sad ache and a dollop of hope. If more of her performance could connect with the emotion she found here, Tillis would be in a class with Emmylou Harris.

As much as she’s grown in three years, there were few other moments Monday to hit near that mark. The hit “Spilled Perfume” certainly didn’t. Her current cover of Jackie DeShannon’s “When You Walk in the Room” was surprisingly lacking in the urgency DeShannon, the Searchers, Bruce Springsteen and others have brought to the tune.