TASTE MAKERS : TRACY CHAPMAN

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Top selling folk singer-songwriter, a voice on behalf of the nation’s underclass. Her concern: “There’s only so far you can push people . . . before they push back, and I’ve seen that in my life.”

“Music was never just a hobby for me,” Tracy Chapman said shortly after her debut album was released in April. “I’d pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time.

“I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals. One reason (the songs don’t) sound like most of the things you hear on the radio is I didn’t listen a lot to the radio. I tended to be more isolated.”

Because her folk-flavored tales about the struggles of society’s underclass were so distant from the cheery or dance-oriented music generally found on Top 40 radio, Chapman didn’t even think about being signed by a major record label.

She figured her only chance to get her highly personalized brand of urban folk on record was a small independent label like Rounder Records.

But Brian Koppelman, son of music publishing titan Charles Koppelman, heard Chapman sing two years ago while they were both students at Tufts University in Boston.

He was so impressed that he introduced her to his father, who, in turn, got her an audition with Bob Krasnow, chairman of Elektra Records. He signed her and put her in touch with manager Elliot Roberts, whose clients over the years have included such acclaimed figures as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

Even with that powerful backing, Chapman seemed like a longshot commercially when her album, titled simply “Tracy Chapman,” was released. At best, she might get some good reviews and build enough of a cult audience to lay the foundation for a breakthrough two or three albums down the line.

But Krasnow was convinced she could find a big audience immediately. “I think people are looking for new voices and Tracy is a voice that seems right for these times,” he says.

“Just look around us today and see what’s going on from the board rooms to the streets . . . a lot of inequities in life today. When someone can (point them out) in a song or any kind of a story, that has got to touch people.”

Not only did the album prove an extraordinary success in this country, but Chapman also was hailed as the arrival of the year in England. Total sales to date: More than 6 million copies.

By introducing songs about welfare mothers and children victimized by racism to the charts, Chapman sent a liberating message to the pop world--including record executive and radio station program directors--that pop audiences are willing to deal with music of substance.

Her story, too, provides an unusually instructive study in how a songwriter’s vision is shaped by her environment.

“I am a black person . . . a woman . . . a singer-songwriter, but I’m not necessarily any of those things first,” she has said. “The things that people choose to highlight really come from the kinds of things they’re most interested in.”

One reason Chapman arrives, at 24, as such an accomplished writer and performer is that music has played a major part in her life for as long as she can remember. Many of her themes--which deal with the struggle for dignity and self-reliance--seem tied to childhood images.

Chapman, whose only fashion statement is her sort of dreadlock hair style, was born and raised in a mostly black working-class neighborhood of Cleveland. Her parents separated when she was 4.

“I was very aware of all the struggles my mother was going through, being a single parent and a black woman trying to raise two kids,” she has said. At the same time, she noticed “all these forces in society making things more difficult than they ought to be.”

There was always a lot of music around the house. She took clarinet lessons at school and played the organ around the house, and her mother had lots of records by Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye and Mahalia Jackson.

Thanks to a minority placement program called A Better Chance, Chapman was awarded a scholarship to the Wooster School, a small private school in Danbury, Conn. While there, she started listening to contemporary folk--Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, others--and the style seemed ideal for the personalized songs Chapman wanted to write. After moving to Tufts, where she studied anthropology, she began to sing in clubs and coffee houses in the area.

Brian Koppelman said he first heard about Chapman through a friend. “The first song I heard her do was ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution’ (which is the first song on her album). I was floored.”

Despite the commentary and occasional rage in her music, Chapman, however, doesn’t consider herself a protest singer.

“When people think of protest, they think about something outside , something separate from their happy times and everything else that they do,” she has explained. “But everything’s very integrated in my songs. . . . There’s part of me that’s a part of all the people that I create in my songs.”

At the same time, there’s a ring of urgency to songs such as “Revolution.” Sample line: “Poor people gonna rise up / And take their share. . . / Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution.”

About the song, she has said, “There’s only so far you can push people before they start to push back, and I’ve seen that in my life. . . . It’s wrong not to encourage people to hope or to dream or even to consider what’s thought to be impossible. . . . For me and my family, that was one of the only things that kept us going.”

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.