The Clinton Of Country

By Josh Tyrangiel/Albuquerque

Before the curtain goes up at any concert venue around the country, the headlining act must engage in some backstage banter with local DJs, the children of corporate sponsors and whomever the Teamsters want to impress. The music industry calls this compulsory session the meet and greet, and because the spontaneity is scheduled and the patronage barely disguised, it is often the grimmest 15 minutes of any touring musician's day. But Tim McGraw loves it. He has his road crew set up a tent with a tiny stage and shabby-chic furniture. He keeps everyone plied with Bud Light, the beer he hawks in TV commercials. Then he saunters in, clasps each outstretched hand, delivers a perfectly timed moment of eye contact and sits down for a quick acoustic song that doubles as his vocal warm-up. When it's over, he exits to ferocious applause, reminding everyone, "As Americans, you have a responsibility to vote, so get out there and do it!"

It's no accident that McGraw, 37, has turned his professional obligation into a campaign whistle-stop. "I love politics," he says on the way back to his dressing room. "I love Bill Clinton. I think we should make him king. I'm talking the red robe, the turkey leg--everything." Then, because such things must be floated carefully and modestly, McGraw adds, "I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me."

Those who would dismiss McGraw out of hand should first remember Arnold Schwarzenegger (or country singer Jimmie Davis, who served two terms as Governor of Louisiana) and then give some thought to the vagaries of country music. Nashville is perhaps the most protocol-obsessed U.S. city outside of Washington, and McGraw is its smoothest operator. He has sold 30 million albums (his latest, Live Like You Were Dying, entered Billboard's album chart at No. 1) without being excessively cornpone or mindlessly pop. In the process, he has done what his predecessor Garth Brooks could not do: reach an audience outside his genre while remaining well liked within it. "Nashville hates anyone who has ambitions beyond Nashville," says a country record executive. "Shania, Garth Brooks get no respect in this town. But Tim has done a good job of disguising his motives--or of at least paying the proper respect to the industry."

In political terms, McGraw is a master at covering his base. "Country music has a lot of rules," he says. "It can be frustrating, but the key is figuring out which ones matter and which ones don't." The ones that matter are the ones he observes: live in Nashville, rely on the best country songwriters for material, dress the part, and keep your progressive politics (mostly) to yourself. "Onstage, I tell people to go vote," he says. "But what I vote for? Nobody cares. At least not right now." The rules McGraw breaks--by wearing a bad-guy black hat instead of the white one good guys wear, recording with his touring band, the Dancehall Doctors, as opposed to studio musicians--are so absurd that he seems just roguish when he flouts them.

His instincts for what he can get away with, as well as his fairy-tale life with his wife, singer Faith Hill, and their three daughters, have made McGraw Nashville royalty and given him unprecedented freedom to venture outside the country ghetto. "I'm a country singer," he says summarily. "I open my mouth--hell, I couldn't go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't love that kind of music and want that audience." Growing up in Start, La., McGraw was as much a fan of '70s AM radio as he was of Merle Haggard, and on McGraw's past tour he performed a surprisingly faithful cover of Tiny Dancer that left Elton John gushing. He has also taken the stage with good friend Kid Rock, an avowed conservative, and recently recorded a hip-hop ballad with Nelly for the rapper's new album. "Tim's supercool, man," says Nelly. "His taste in music is a lot broader than people think."

These adventures in being a uniter, not a divider, have raised McGraw's Q rating and brought him new fans--he is particularly popular with women--but they haven't changed the sound of his albums. That's because the people he counts on to vote with their wallets are diehard country centrists. On Live Like You Were Dying, there are traces of McGraw's love for the Eagles, James Taylor and even Robert Johnson, but they are faint traces. Most of the material has an edgeless, generic quality, both musically and thematically. Like most other country artists, McGraw sometimes writes his own songs, but unlike those others, he never records them--"because they're never any good," he says. He insists he would rather feel someone else's pain than express his own. "If you sing a song and tell somebody how you feel, that's good," says McGraw. "But if you can tell somebody how they feel, that's great. If you can get some old boy driving down the road in his pickup truck to kick the radio and go, 'F___! How did he know?' then you're really doing your job."

McGraw is not totally risk averse--a neutral mention of abortion on his 2002 hit Red Ragtop was a country watershed--but in general he is too cautious and too willing to compromise his individual perspective to be considered a significant artist. It's a shame, given that his biography is rich territory: he was born dirt poor, he discovered as an adolescent that his father was the late big-league pitcher Tug McGraw, and he was rejected by almost every record label for being too ordinary before becoming a star when Curb Records finally took a chance on him in 1992. But McGraw is still somehow greater than the sum of his songs, in large part because, while his message can appear calculated, his charisma is authentic. In concert, when he gets a chance to blast his exuberant Everydudeness to the back row, he can make even the most conventional music seem inspirational. He has, as TIME's Joe Klein wrote in frustration and admiration of Clinton in The Natural, the "ability to charm almost anyone under any circumstances."

While he waits for the right time for his Senate run, McGraw is doing the other thing that people with big personalities do. Director Peter Berg cast him as an alcoholic father and ex-athlete in Friday Night Lights, a high school football drama starring Billy Bob Thornton (due Oct. 15). "I didn't know if he could act," says Berg, "but what we were looking for was somebody who would just seem real to an audience. And Tim does that. You look at him, you believe what he has to say." McGraw thinks he simply fell into a part he could do without stretching. Hollywood interests him, but only a few minutes pass before his mind drifts back East, flying right over Nashville toward what may be his truest calling. "It'd be great to be in a position to do something good for people," he says. "Wouldn't Faith make a great Senator's wife?"