He talks like a Texan who has played more than a few times from the back of a flatbed truck or behind chicken wire in a dusty dive bar. Delbert McClinton is no doubt a son of the Lone Star State, born in Lubbock just four years after his gifted homeboy Buddy Holly. Although Holly's career was tragically cut short, McClinton's is notable for its longevity. Indeed, McClinton is a survivor unbowed by the storms of a life in music.
McClinton's career dates back to what qualifies as prehistory in the music business. By the time he played one of the most memorable harmonica parts in the history of recorded music, behind Bruce Channel on “Hey Baby” in 1962, McClinton already had paid dues on a hardscrabble regional blues scene, an unlikely white boy sharing the stage with blues legends years before such pairings became fashionable. From there McClinton traveled to England, where he again raced ahead of history by getting to know and share harp licks with a young John Lennon. He came home and put together a band called the Rondells, whose mixture of Texas grit and Merseybeat pop echoed what Doug Sahm had started doing with the Sir Douglas Quintet.
You could write several books just about McClinton's activities since then. What matters is that he treated that time as a gradual learning curve, drawing from multiple influences and building an original voice as a songwriter and performer. His better-known efforts include “Two More Bottles of Wine,” recorded by Emmylou Harris; “B-Movie Box Car Blues,” from the Blues Brothers soundtrack; and “Good Man, Good Woman,” the duet he recorded with Bonnie Raitt in 1992.
In the mid-'70s, McClinton's genre-hopping style earned him identification with the “outlaw country” movement, just as today he's most often categorized as an Americana artist. The truth is, McClinton is that rarest of musicians: an honest-to-God original, oblivious of stylistic labels and suspicious of those who aren't.
LEARN FROM THE MASTERS
Asked to explain how he sustained a career as a songwriter for so long with that attitude, McClinton gives a short laugh — the kind of macho, aw-shucks chuckle that you just can't develop if you're brought up in Boston — and starts thinking it through.
“Well, it's because writing is something I couldn't help but do,” he says. “Before I was writing songs, when I was a kid, I was writing poetry. It just evolved into songwriting once I learned a few chords on the guitar.”
During a long warm-up period before he wrote his first song, he apprenticed as a backup musician for some of the nation's top blues artists. In the late '50s and early '60s, McClinton worked in the Fort Worth, Texas, area with a cover band called the Straitjackets. That was before the Beatles ushered in the era when, as McClinton ruefully puts it, “everybody in the world was in a band.” By his count, only four full-time bands played in town then.
“I was in the best one,” he says. “We played songs of the people we liked. We'd get a Bobby Bland album and learn three or four songs off it. See, all those blues guys were real big around Fort Worth — a lot of it due to a dance that was real popular there called the Push. That music was what they needed for that dance. So that got to be a real inside thing — for us to do music that wasn't necessarily on the radio so much.”
The word spread among blues headliners that the Straitjackets were the players to call for backup in Fort Worth. The list was long: Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buster Brown, Big Joe Turner, O. C. Smith, Freddie King, Lightnin' Hopkins, and McClinton's favorite, Jimmy Reed. They'd work without rehearsal or, at most, get a brief rundown of what key each song was in, how fast it usually went, and how it might end. The gigs taught McClinton how to present material onstage and, indirectly, how to write songs that would go over with the crowd.
“I played with those guys because I wanted to make music,” he says. “I didn't have my own songs at the time, so I just did other people's. But that did evolve into my growth as a songwriter.”
YOUR FIRST TIME
McClinton didn't do original material until the early '70s. Having moved to Los Angeles, he formed a duo with Glen Clark, another transplanted Texan. Billed as Delbert and Glen, they built a setlist from the songs they'd written during the previous few years. Then they took the act on the road for a three-month tour opening for John Mayall.
“That was the first time I had ever gone out and done a show with just my songs,” McClinton says. “I was so nervous about it that I would just shake. To let somebody hear the songs you've written is kind of layin' it all wide open.”
McClinton is glad that he forced himself to present his work to customers whose attitudes ranged from indifferent to hostile. That was more helpful than auditioning in front of friends and family. “People you don't know, they'll tell you if it sucks,” he says.
THE SONGWRITER'S CHALLENGE
It's a different world now — one that is especially tough on up-and-coming songwriters, as McClinton sees it. He believes the music business's growing domination of the creative process is to blame. “I know some brilliant writers,” he says, “yet they operate out of a corner where they're going to write a song for an artist, so they can't say anything this artist wouldn't say or in a way this artist wouldn't say it. These people will take perfectly good songs and rehash them to fit somebody. That's because we live in a time when there are about three record companies in the U.S. and about six people who determine what gets played on radio. That's all I'm going to say.”
Gently prodded for more, he says, fuming, “You know, I can't hardly talk about this without starting to preach, but I'll try. Everything is in such a category. I did an interview a while back, and somebody asked me who I'd like to do a duet with. I said, ‘Merle Haggard.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but he's really country.’ What is country anymore? For the most part, it's '70s bubblegum pop music.
“That's got to change, and the only way to change it is for brilliant young artists to find a way around the corporate jive,” McClinton says. “I'll take that one step further: there's a massive lot of people who shouldn't be writing at all. This is real delicate to dance around, but everybody in the world thinks they're in the music business. There's no law that you can pull up and say, ‘Sorry, but you're not allowed to write songs.’ But a lot of these people just have to stop.”
Why? You can almost hear his nostrils flare as he says, “Because they can't write, and everybody's got to wade through all their shit.”
