Pam Tillis and Phil Vassar are packing up the sleigh — OK, more like a tour bus — to deliver holiday songs and hits.

The two country artists have plenty of both from which to choose, and Warren’s Robins Theatre will be the second stop on the tour on Dec. 1.

Tillis, who was married to songwriter and Liberty native Bob DiPiero from 1991 to 1998, is a Grammy and CMA winner whose country hits include ‘Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life),” “Maybe It Was Memphis,” “Shake the Sugar Tree,” “When You Walk in the Room” and “In Between Dances.”

Vassar got his start writing hits for others and was named country songwriter of the year by the publishing company ASCAP in 1999. As a performer, Vassar has recorded more than 15 top 40 country singles, including the chart toppers “Just Another Day in Paradise” and “In a Real Love.”

Both also have recorded Christmas albums — Tillis in 2007 with “Just in Time for Christmas” and Vassar in 2011 with “Noel.”

Vassar did a phone interview in mid-November to promote the upcoming tour. That may seem a little early for some to talk about Christmas, but as Vassar explained it’s nothing compared to recording a Christmas album in Nashville in August. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

TICKET: Have you and Pam Tillis done a holiday tour before?

VASSAR: Never have. We were label mates at Arista and I’ve known Pam forever. She’s such a great singer and writer. We’ve done shows over the years together but never a Christmas tour.

TICKET: What will the structure of the show be?

VASSAR: Each artist will do their thing, their hits, and then we’ll do some holiday stuff together. So I’m excited about that. That ought to be great.

TICKET: I know the tour hasn’t started yet, but have the two of you been going back and forth, putting together the setlist?

VASSAR: We’re getting together again on Tuesday next week to finalize everything. We have video and all this stuff. It’s always a production, but I love Pam, I love playing with her. She’s just the real thing and can really, really sing. We’re going to have a good time

TICKET: What are the challenges of putting together a set list where “Six Pack Summer” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” can work side by side?

VASSAR: That’s funny you say that. We have a lot of hits to do and, of course, I do the hits I wrote for Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, JoDee Messina. You’re trying to keep some kind of holiday theme. I guess you can have palm trees with lights on them at the beach. A lot of that stuff is with video. I’ve been talking to my video guy about that.

TICKET: What are your feelings on Christmas music in general? I know for your album “Noel,” you did a split between traditional stuff like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and some newer things. What do you gravitate to?

VASSAR: It was fun to try to write Christmas songs. I’d never really done that before that record. Being a writer, you want to write something like that, but who’s ever going to beat “The Christmas Song,” the classics? I want to do some of the songs we wrote for the Christmas album and some classics too, make it interesting for everyone if we can. It’s hard to please everybody but you try to.

TICKET: What were some of your favorites growing up?

VASSAR: With my grandmother and my mom, it was always Nat King Cole. I loved that music, that guy’s voice. Sinatra. I love the Christmas stuff Dean Martin did. That’s old, old stuff, but it’s what I grew up with. My family was big on that stuff, so whenever I hear that now, it reminds me of being a kid.

But it’s fun to get some new stuff out there, and that’s really why I wanted to do that Christmas record. I love it. It’s one of the funnest records I ever recorded. We cut the whole thing in a day. I’d never done that on a record. And I like the way it turned out. I’m very happy with it.

TICKET: I’ve interviewed a lot of artists who’ve made Christmas albums, and they always seem to record them in the summer. Was that the case with you?

VASSAR: I think it was the end of summer. I want to say it was August, so it was a 100 degrees in Nashville. To get the vibe, we were putting up decorations in the studio.

TICKET: The holiday tour takes you through 2023. What’s the plan for 2024?

VASSAR: I took a lot of time off this past year. I’ve been on the road for so long, 25 years, it was time. I can’t wait to get back out there. We’re already booking big festivals for next year. It’s still fun to see your friends out there on the road. I just did this Ronnie Milsap tribute (to celebrate more than 50 years of performing and his retirement), where I saw Trace (Adkins), Tracy Lawrence, Terry Clark, so many people. And it was great to see Ronnie. I’ve done shows with him for decades. It was a little bittersweet, but he sure deserves a break.

TICKET: For many acts, it’s not even about the money. They just seem to love being on the road.

VASSAR: It’s funny. We do take a break at the end of the year. January is a slow month. We rest a little bit, but everybody is so ready to get back out by March. “OK, let’s get out of here. I’m going stir crazy.” But I’m really excited about getting back out there and blasting it again, because it’s been a little bit.

Submitted photo
Youngstown native Bob George is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which is devoted to preserving recorded music history and other related memorabilia.

Bob George has lots of stories.

The Youngstown native lived in New York during the birth of the punk movement. He did radio shows in England where then-unknown musicians like Ian Curtis of Joy Division would hand him their 45s in hopes of airplay. He stayed at the compound of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, where he slept on the floor with his wives, and he attended the baptism for one of the Gipsy Kings’ children.

He’s traveled through Colombia in search of records, a trip that required protection from members of a drug cartel. And he has a white label promo copy of the Rolling Stones’ debut album on Decca Records UK that was signed by the entire band. He found it underneath a stack of dog urine-soaked newspapers.

George has even more records than he has stories, millions of them.

He is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which has a collection of more than 3 million sound recordings, about 2,500 signed by the artists who made them and all but one without dog urine stains. There also are 30,000 music books and millions of pieces of supporting material — posters, fliers, press kits, sheet music, etc.

ARC has records that can’t be found at the Library of Congress, and resources that have been used by filmmakers ranging from Martin Scorsese to Ken Burns. Scorsese serves on its advisory board along with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Keith Richards, Paul Simon, Todd Rundgren and Nile Rodgers (David Bowie and Lou Reed are former board members).

“A lot of the people I set up chairs for (at concerts) and did menial things for ended up serving on my board,” George said.

The beginning

The interests in music, art and collecting that led to the creation of the archive started with a childhood in Youngstown and Poland.

“I grew up on Midlothian, the inner city, the wrong side of the tracks, and then my parents did well and we moved to Poland, Ohio, which was pretty ritzy at the time,” George said. “The school band in Poland was the Human Beinz (who went on to have a top 10 hit with “Nobody But Me”). Mike Tatman, who was a friend, played drums with them.”

George remembered buying music at Record Rendezvous, hearing Boots Bell on the radio and being a member of the Carousel Teen Club. He still has his membership card. And the first autograph he ever got was from young actor Sue Lyon at a screening of “Lolita” at what is now Powers Auditorium.

Art also was a major interest growing up.

“Mrs. Butler, whose family started the Butler (Institute of American Art), lived right outside of Poland,” George said. “I would go there on Saturdays. She had a barn set up that was refurbished and had art materials there for kids to play with. That really got me started. And my uncle, Jon Naberezny, was head of the art department at Youngstown State for a while and has pieces in the Butler.”

After graduating from Poland in 1967 or ’68 (George couldn’t remember which year), he went to the University of Michigan, where he studied art and also worked at Canterbury House, an Episcopal campus ministry that also hosted concerts.

There he set up chairs for shows by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and where he saw Detroit-area acts like Commander Cody and Iggy Pop & the Stooges.

New York

In 1974 George got a scholarship from the Whitney Museum to study in New York.

“The Whitney was great,” George said. “They gave me a 3,000-square-foot studio, seminars … They didn’t care what art you made, but they wanted you to understand how the art world worked, which made me want to not be an artist.”

Through the program, he met people like composer Philip Glass and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and he moved to the city at a time when its punk rock scene was exploding.

“I got to be a hippie and a punk,” George said. ” Nobody was famous then. There was only one restaurant in lower Manhattan and everyone showed up there at the end of the day. I got to meet David Bowie and Lou Reed and everybody in that scene, David Byrne. That was really cool. You didn’t have to talk to their handlers first.”

George started collecting the music being made at the time, in many cases 45s that were self-released or put out on small labels in limited quantities.

That led to creating with Martha DeFoe “Volume: International Discography of the New Wave,” the first comprehensive catalog of the music from that underground scene, and the book led to an invitation to do radio shows for renowned BBC DJ John Peel.

George also tried to help his friend Anderson get a label deal for her experimental song “O Superman.” When Seymour Stein (Sire Records), Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic Records) and Richard Branson (Virgin Records) turned him down, he created his own label and released it himself.

The eight-minute song made it to number two on the UK charts and was a hit in several other countries. George said his only artistic contribution to the song was making it longer, so it would generate more royalties from that UK airplay.

The start of the archive

Through these different paths as a fan, DJ and label owner, George amassed a personal collection of about 47,000 records.

“Once I did the book, everyone was sending me records,” he said. “A friend who started the archive with me, David Wheeler, said, ‘We’ve got to save this. This stuff is going to disappear. It’s very ephemeral.’

“Nobody wanted my records. I had mostly punk, reggae, world music, artistic and experimental stuff and hip hop. In ’84, ’85, I tried to give it away — Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, NYU (New York University). Nobody was interested. If you put all of that together. That’s kind of what music is today.”

ARChive spends about $10,000 a year on new acquisitions. The overwhelming majority of the collection came through donations.

Agent, producer and label owner Jeep Holland, who George met in Detroit, donated his collection of 125,000 albums. It was so big, it was causing his Boston-area home to sink from the weight of it (that’s also where George found that signed Rolling Stones album).

Keith Richards has donated his collection of blues recordings. New York Times critics John Rockwell and Jon Pareles have donated their personal collections.

Looking to move

The ARChive of Contemporary Music currently is located in Hyde Park, N.Y. The building was donated, George said, but it’s in an area that is zoned agricultural with little parking, and it’s not the kind of neighborhood where folks want semi-trailer trucks coming and going with the latest massive collection being donated.

The archive is not open to the general public and can’t be at its current location, so the search is underway for a new home.

When reminded that there are many big, empty buildings in his hometown, George said, “If you have a 100,000-square-foot building in great shape, $10 million to donate and someone in town who has the clout and power to get it done, we’ll be glad to move.”

Essentially, the archive is looking for a donor on par with James Smithson, who 185 years ago donated the money that created the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

George believes the archive’s collection is as important to preserve as the items in the Smithsonian’s collections. While they have worked with the Internet Archive to digitize portions of their recordings, but digital storage companies go out of business, data gets corrupted, CDs and DVDs deteriorate.

“We have this debate — which is going to last longer, the physical item or the digital version? One nice thing about vinyl, it never disappears. It gets dirty, but the information doesn’t get lost from oxidation, dropouts. CDs are not mechanical. Anything that’s not mechanical, it can’t possibly be preserved. You can’t build a chip at home, but you can take a bicycle wheel, a rubber band, a cone of paper and a bundle of sewing needles and you can play that record.”

Once that benefactor and new location is found, George would like to return to being a globe-traveling searcher of new sounds and new music.

While being surrounded by every possible record one can imagine sounds like a dream job for many, George said his days don’t have much to do with listening to music.

“I’ve become a petty bureaucrat who’s trying to keep it alive … I really don’t want to run a big institution. In the ’80s I had my best time,” he said, as he rattled off a few of the many countries he’s visited and people he’s met. “That’s what I really enjoy.”