Alan Jackson Getting Good ‘Mileage’

Nashville star Alan Jackson is high in the country hit charts and prominent on television with his national Ford truck commercials, but for the first time in eight years he was not among the Country Music Association’s annual awards nominees.

Some media observers attributed his ‘98 shutout to public reports of his brief separation from his wife, with whom he now has reconciled, and Jackson says he wouldn’t rule it out.

“I can see, with what little I know about the industry and the people who vote, that it could definitely affect the way people felt about the nominations,” says the singer.

“I don’t think it should. I try to keep artists’ music separate from their life. When we (he and wife Denise) were going through all that, it wasn’t anybody’s business really, but it definitely became public news.”

There’s no proof that the softening of Jackson’s ‘98 CMA support was blamed on his suddenly not-so-private life. During the same period for which Jackson was left out of the nominations, peer Vince Gill actually went through a divorce and still was nominated.

Jackson, whose demeanor is more retiring than Gill’s, professes not to really care.

“I haven’t got any hurt feelings,” he says. “They called and asked me to perform on (the CMA awards show). The good thing about it: I didn’t have to sit out there (in the audience) and wear a coat or something.

“You know, I was always proud to be nominated and I loved to win, but I learned right quick that it doesn’t really have a tremendous effect on your career, as far as record sales and ticket sales and all that. I lost for years — they hardly gave me anything until later on — and a lot of people that were beating me I was outselling.”

Jackson, who rivals George Strait for designation as the most “country” of country music’s top stars, is still selling well. His new album’s high-riding first single, the haunting and joltingly sensual “I’ll Go On Loving You,” is vying for the top of the country hit charts — despite at least one station’s refusal to play it on grounds that it is allegedly “immoral,” he reports.

In the same way that his double-platinum album “Everything I Love,” subtly portrayed a man going out of control (in such songs as the dark hit “Between the Devil and Me”), Jackson’s new ‘98 CD, appropriately titled “High Mileage,” depicts a prodigal reaping the cost of rashness.

Not surprisingly, the singer says his wife’s favorite song on the new collection is “Gone Crazy,” whose lyrics contrast a wife’s departure with another kind of departure on the part of her distraught husband; without ever leaving home, he too has “gone” — insane. Jackson says Denise particularly likes the lines that basically say, “It’s hard to learn that what you don’t think you need, you can’t live without.”

The 39-year-old singer says he and his wife, who cornered Glen Campbell in an airport one day to get her husband a foot inside his first Nashville door, are not only “back together” but “a lot better than when we were together before.” They both are “a lot happier than we’ve ever been,” and “so far it’s going real good,” he says.

Was it the music business that got between them?

“I think it definitely added fuel to the fire,” Jackson says, “but I think our stuff started a long time ago. We got married as kids and really didn’t know who we were, and kinda like a lot of people that have been married as long as we have, you’re just going to go through changes, and you’re growing apart and you’re living together and not liking each other: loving each other but not liking each other.

“I think what happened to us was the best thing, because both of us figured out a lot of our own problems, which helped us get right individually.

Then we wanted to see if we could still live together as a couple, and we can. She and I both agreed that it’s a lot of pain, but we think it’s going to have a better outcome than if we had just stayed trudging on like we were doing.”

His inner turmoil unquestionably benefited his art.

“High Mileage” contains several impressive songs obviously influenced by his marital problems, including “Gone Crazy” and another especially distinctive one titled “A Woman’s Love” - which he modestly describes as “just a bunch of facts, really.”

It also contains an unpretentious sociological masterpiece in “Little Man,” a moving musical eulogy to, of all people, the American small businessman.

Jackson says he wrote “Little Man” during the period when “things were kinda crazy in my life.” He recalls getting up one morning, getting into his car with no destination in mind, and finally ending up in Florida, where he revisited a lot of little “two-lane” towns he used to pass through on youthful trips to Daytona Beach from his native Newnan, Ga.

This time he saw courthouse squares with their businesses boarded up and most commerce being conducted by chain franchises and local outlets of national and multi-national corporations. For the names of the closed businesses in his song, Jackson used actual ones he remembered from his youth in Newnan, where he says some of the same phenomenon has occurred.

“I used to buy gas from an old Gulf station that Mr. Robinson owned,” he says. “You charged your gas on one ticket and paid it once a month. That wasn’t that long ago, but it’s not like that anymore. Corporations take over everything and really hurt that one-man entrepreneur kind of guy who starts his own business. I hate that, you know.

“I know there’s been a lot of good things from corporations taking over like that, but people who had their own little business, it was like a career for them. It wasn’t just a job.”