Misbehavin’

Tanya Tucker, who plays the Freedman Forum in Anaheim on Halloween night, is akin in spirit to country music legends of old--the men, anyway.

The rock, rap, blues and jazz worlds condone unseemly behavior from their heroes, but modern country music expects proper conduct on the part of its practitioners, particularly its women.

Tucker is having none of it. She’s bad and proud of it. She gets loaded and flashes her breasts onstage. She has nervous breakdowns and stays in rehab. She sleeps with country music stars and punches them out when they don’t get along. She’s more like Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash than Reba McEntire, Barbara Mandrell or Loretta Lynn.

Like those bad boys, Tucker sings with her heart on her sleeve, relying on a husky instrument that reverberates with the clank of beer bottles, tears in the parking lot and “yee-haws” in the southern night.

“You step back, and it all seems like it happened to another person,” she said in a recent phone interview, sounding as if she just got done crying and smoking a pack of cigarettes.

“That’s just the way it goes. I don’t think; I just go; I just do it. I’ve always been like that--act now and think later,” Tucker said. “But I really don’t have any regrets. There’s been too many good points in my life to regret too much, although there might have been some people I regret having met. Other than that, I’m pretty content. I’ve had to go through some bad times to know who I am now and to learn what I’ve learned. It’s all a part of life.”

In March, Tucker released the album “Complicated” and a tell-all autobiography, “Nickel Dreams: My Life,” detailing triumphs and tragedies, visits to the Betty Ford Clinic, volatile romances with Glen Campbell and Haggard and a string of hit singles dating to 1972 with “Delta Dawn,” when she was 14.

Tucker, 39, looks no worse for wear. The wounds are in that voice.

“I’ve always had a bigger voice,” Tucker said. “It’s part of the attraction, you know? It’s just natural; I never took any kind of lessons. I’ve always had my own sound, and I can’t mess with that. So far, I’ve been doing OK.”

“Complicated” is a magnum opus, a statement of Tucker’s vast gifts as a singer and versatile stylist. On the eclectic album, Tucker does it all: There’s torch melodrama, playful western swing and mainstream country pop, all sung with stunningly honest emotion and produced to perfection by Gregg Brown.

So far, the album has failed to follow Tucker tradition and yield a hit single on the order of “Just Another Love,” “I Won’t Take Less Than Your Love,” “Soon” and “What Do I Do With Me.”

“I don’t pay much attention to the charts, but I don’t think ‘Complicated’s’ first single [‘Ridin’ Out the Heartache’] did much,” Tucker said. “I think this is the best album I’ve ever recorded.”

“There’s room enough for everybody--old country, new country,” she added. “At the time I did my ‘TNT’ album [a 1978 foray into pop music], Nashville was all ticked at me. Now they’re all doing it. They’re doing stuff I was doing years ago.”

A film version of Tucker’s life story is in development, but progress on the project hasn’t been going the way she would like.

“They want to do it for television, and I just don’t see it for television, and I’m having to fight for that,” she said. “Just another war I have to go through.”

Tucker said she’s not going to let career ups and downs get under her skin any more, instead investing her energy in raising her sons, age 8 and 6. She’s also in the “early stages” of a new romance, she said, declining to offer details.

On almost any other subject, Tucker speaks her mind:

“A lot of these young singers take things so seriously these days,” she said with a disdainful snigger. “They work out; they eat all the right foods; they say all the right things. A lot of the edge has gone out of it; it’s not raw anymore. It’s just not the same kind of country music that I grew up with.”

* Tanya Tucker performs Friday at the Freedman Forum, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets, $27.50 and $35, via Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000, or at the venue on the day of show. 8 p.m. Anthony Rivera and Raining Horseshoes open.