+1/2 -- Early `80s mixed bag from country hitmaker - Country music hall of famer Mel Tillis had five very successful careers at once. His songs, starting with Webb Pierce s 1957 hit I m Tired, continued to find placement with top stars into the `80s. His recording career yielded hits throughout the 70s and into the early 80s, while his live performances drew an audience on the road and at his theater in Branson for decades after the chart entries stopped. In parallel, his stutter-studded humor made him a popular TV performer, and he appeared on the big screen in films like W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, Every Which Way But Loose and Smokey and the Bandit II. With all that going on, it s not surprising that Tillis latter-day releases for Elektra receded into the background, even as they yielded his last sustained string of chart hits of. The first three of his five Elektra LPs have been given their first-ever CD reissues, and though they don t quite measure up to his earlier work for MCA and MGM, neither do they document an artist in decline.Having tried smoother sounds on 1979 s Me and Pepper and a turn to western swing on 1980 s Your Body is An Outlaw, neither of Tillis first two Elektra albums repeated his earlier chart-topping success. They d spun off top-10 singles, but no monster hits. That changed with the title track to Tillis second LP of 1980, Southern Rain. Penned by Roger Murrah, the song s strong images of Southern life were written by a homesick Alabaman who d relocated to Nashville. It provided something of a pastoral flipside to Tillis own Detroit City, which had chronicled the homesickness of a Northern-based Southerner. Throughout the LP, producer Jimmy Bowen mostly kept things simple and country, emphasizing Tillis roots. The few slips include the overly-sentimental ballad Million Old Goodbyes and the strings on Shame On You, Shame On Me.Highlights here include the gospel harmonies of One Night Fever, the warm phased guitar (ala Waylon Jennings) on Time Has Treated You Well, and the superb two-stepping Pyramid of Cans, with its clever lyric of a drinking monument under which the singer buries his broken hearted memories. There s plenty of twang and a Ray Price shuffle beat on Forgive Me for Giving You the Blues, and Sandy Pinkard s Here s Lookin at You is a nice follow-up to his earlier Coca-Cola Cowboy. Tillis ran out of gas by album s end, with Louisiana Lonely salvaged by the background singers, and Sweet Desire plodding along in mid-tempo MOR balladry.Though this album s title track became Tillis final country #1, the energy offered up on the preceding Your Body is an Outlaw wasn t fully sustained here, the country settings work well, but Tillis didn t seem engaged by some of the song selections. He recorded two more albums for Elektra (the duet album Mel and Nancy with Nancy Sinatra and It s a Long Way to Daytona) before returning to MCA for another short-run. Tillis five album stint at Elektra produced some good work, though in general it never compared with his 1970 s releases. This and the previous LPs (particularly Your Body is an Outlaw) are worth hearing, but only after you ve sampled his earlier classics. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com]