Apart from his ever-present black cowboy hat, the first thing you notice when you see Clint Black onstage is how at ease he seems. After ten years in the spotlight and innumerable shows, Black is in total command during his performances. He jokes with the audience, tells stories, sings, and plays up a storm.

In addition to his well-documented vocal and songwriting talents, Black is also an impressive multi-instrumentalist, playing harmonica and guitar. On his latest tour, he even jammed on the drums during an encore. And unlike many stars who leave the details to their bandleaders and technicians, Black is very involved with the inner workings of his show, from the arrangements to the order of songs to the configuration of the monitor system. He is without a doubt a musician's musician.

Black heard his musical calling at age 13, when he first picked up the harmonica. He later taught himself to play guitar and ended up dropping out of high school to pursue his performance career. After years of playing the club circuit, he was discovered and signed to RCA at age 25. His 1989 debut album, Killin' Time, produced five number-one singles, including “A Better Man,” and his career was off and running. Since then, Black has gone on to record numerous CDs, win countless awards, and log endless miles on the road.

When we caught up with him at the State Theater in Easton, Pennsylvania, Black was touring to support his most recent release, D'lectrified, an all-acoustic studio record. At the time we spoke to him, Black had been on the road for more than four months straight, mostly touring with his own ten-piece band but also doing some dates as a sideman for his buddy Jimmy Buffett. Long tours are nothing new for Black, who performed 124 dates in support of his last CD, Nothin' but the Taillights.

Whereas some artists play the same cookie-cutter set night in and night out, Black is constantly changing his show — which usually runs for close to two hours — based on the size and type of venue he's playing. “We played everything from 1,000-seat, in-the-round venues to 60,000 people in the [Astrodome] for the rodeo, or sheds with a 20,000-seat capacity, and it's different for every one,” Black says. “For a big venue, like the Dome or a big amphitheater, I talk less about the music and just play — kind of what [Jimmy] Buffett calls the rock set. You hit them with songs, one after another. Tell them a little bit, but don't try to tell them any stories. Just hit them hard with a bunch of the hits and some album cuts we love to play, and try to have a dynamic show.”

When playing a smaller venue, he adopts a more personal approach: “I'll talk a lot more. I've got stories that get a lot of laughs, and I interact with the audience. I'm pretty good on my feet in dealing with a heckler or somebody who's throwing out a request.” Black's wit is in evidence at the Easton show as he gently silences a too-vocal concertgoer using the old comedian's line, “When we want hecklers, we hire professionals.”

Black has another very effective technique for handling an audience: “The one thing I don't do is try to act like we don't make mistakes, like everything's perfect. What really makes a show special, for us and for the crowd, is if something goes wrong and I let the audience in on it and make light of it. It's live, so I don't pretend nothing happened.” Although this flies in the face of a performer's natural inclination to act like nothing's wrong — even when disaster strikes — it's worked well for Black. “It's very funny, and we get a lot of laughs ourselves,” he says.

Hearing oneself onstage is key to putting on a successful show, and Black utilizes a sophisticated monitoring system controlled by a fully automated Midas XL4 console to help keep sonic problems at bay. “In different environments,” he says, “sometimes I can't find my tonal center. If I'm having a hard time getting in tune, it's going to be mix related.” While all of the players in the band wear in-ear monitors, Black has a more unorthodox monitoring setup for himself: he wears a single ear monitor in his left ear and has the other side of his stereo mix pumped through a large floor wedge on his right (the Midas XL4 provides individual stereo mixes for his band members, too).

Black's personal mix consists of mostly vocals in his ear monitor and the rest of the band in his wedge. “I've got a signal for bringing the wedge up or down, and I can bring the ear monitor up or down myself,” he explains. “I'm constantly working it. I've got wedges downstage; as I'm moving around, I can position myself to hear them with my right ear.”

Black formerly wore a pair of in-ear monitors, but the sound didn't satisfy him. “It just doesn't feel big enough inside the mix to hear the band and myself well enough to get all the nuances I'm after with my performance. In many cases, everything just becomes one narrow band of sound. Once I took one ear out, it made a world of difference.”

To give himself more control, Black uses a Yamaha 02R (set up offstage) to fine-tune the sound of the rest of the band in his monitor mix: “It allows me to EQ and compress other people's instruments without their hearing it, so I can thin out the bass guitar without making the bass player sick, and do things post their mix.”

Black also has a series of signals worked out with his monitor mixer for making various changes during the set. “If I need more 1 kHz on my voice, I just point to my Adam's apple,” he explains. “If I need more background vocals, I touch my shoulder; if I need less, I touch my arm. If I need more bottom in anything, I touch my butt and point to whatever it is and point up or down. Things like that, like a pitcher and a catcher.”

Keeping the stage volume low and minimizing the number of open mics prevents leakage and keeps the sound more controllable. One step Black and his crew have taken is to position a clear-plastic sound barrier around drummer Dick Gay during all performances. In addition, all the band's acoustic guitars (on some tunes, three are playing at one time), as well as the acoustic bass guitar that bassist Jake Willemain uses on certain songs, are run direct.

Unfortunately, in some venues even Black's sophisticated monitoring system can't keep the lousy acoustics at bay. “There aren't many venues designed with optimum acoustics,” Black points out, “especially the sheds. They're the worst. We played the Starplex Amphitheater in Dallas for 20,000 people, just a great crowd. And the sound in the building was terrible.”

In acoustically challenged venues, the sound of the mains often overwhelms the monitors. “We're getting so much sound back from the house that it's almost impossible to play our best,” Black says. “The studio environment isn't perfect, either, but at least you're just hearing what's coming through the cans. The perfect environment is sitting in a room together, with everything at a nice, even volume where you can hear everybody without everything in your ears. But I'm often frustrated with the venues.”

Because Black is so particular about how things sound, his pianist, Dane Bryant, tours with a Yamaha C7 grand piano. “It's great, I'm telling you,” Black enthuses. “Anybody out there playing on the road with even the best Kurzweil who thinks it sounds pretty close … well, I can tell you it doesn't. I love the Kurzweil. I actually own a K2500, and it's great for many things. But if you're trying to sing with a piano, there's no match for the real thing.”

Of course, touring with a real piano presents its own set of problems, the most persistent of which is tuning. To combat this, Black hired a full-time piano tuner from Nashville to accompany the band on tour. “He tunes and retunes. When we were hiring guys city to city, you never knew what you were going to get. But he's got it as consistent as it can be. Sometimes the temperature changes can be so drastic that we'll hear the piano go sharp at night as it gets cold. I think anybody out there listening — if you're playing in 60 degrees — knows it's not going to be the best show. The fiddles and guitars are just freakin' out.”

Black is also very exacting about the sound of his acoustic guitars. Before this tour, he went through an interesting procedure to get them sounding as genuine as possible through the sound system. “I set up a monitor wedge like I use,” he recalls, “and a real-time analyzer. I played the guitars acoustically and saw what they were doing on the graph.” He then plugged in his favorite acoustic and equalized it — using two Neve preamps that are part of his stage rig — until the reading on the real-time analyzer matched, as closely as possible, what it had been for the guitars acoustically. “Once I got my favorite guitar pretty well matched up,” he explains, “sounding out of the speaker like the guitar sounds acoustically, then we started messing with all my others of the same model until we could get them to sound like my favorite.”

Black received the prototype of his Clint Black-signature acoustic from Taylor (see Fig. 1) later in the tour, and the sound completely blew him away: “I plugged the signature model in and it was ‘just forget about it.’ It was even and rich, and the low end was there, but really tight.”

Although Black travels with a number of electrics, he's mostly been using a custom-built axe from Brian Moore Guitars run through a Roland VG-8. He uses the VG-8 to mimic a variety of sounds, including that of a Strat, Tele, and a six-string bass (on the song “Killing Time”). However, Black has been considering getting the real thing instead of using modeled tones. “I'm using my time off coming up to set up an amp and get some sounds,” he says, “and move away from the processed sound.”

Black is a strong finger-style acoustic player, and he's been playing more and more electric lead guitar in his shows. Although he's got two very talented guitarists in his band, Hayden Nicholas and Martin Young, Black enjoys playing electric and feels proud of the fact that his technique has improved a great deal over the years. “I've become a better guitar player than I set out to be,” he says. “I played in clubs as a soloist for years, and all I really wanted was to accompany myself and sing and play harmonica. But over the past four or five years, with Hayden's help, I've made some strides in my guitar playing and made some breakthroughs that led me toward some woodshedding. I started really applying myself, and on my previous album, Nothin' but the Taillights, I made the decision to do all the electric guitars and then I pushed myself to pull it off. With the exception of three songs,” he adds, “I did manage.”

Nicholas, Black's longtime songwriting partner, is also the musical director of the touring band, and acts as a go-between with the rest of the players. “He's a real rock,” Black says, “and not just from a musical standpoint. He's also a barometer for me, so I don't lose touch with what everybody's thinking and feeling.”

Black and Nicholas also do the arrangements, with the help of the band. “Everybody throws ideas around,” Black explains. “In a lot of cases, Hayden and I will talk about what we can do to make this more interesting for us without depriving the audience of whatever attachment they have to that song. And then he'll go in and do a sound check before I get there and introduce it to everybody — get them thinking about it and trying out a couple of things — and take it in whatever direction I see it going.”

The sound check is when the band members, led by Black, let their musical hair down. “I'll walk out onstage during the sound check, start doing a lick, and get my drummer going, and the bass player joins in and we jam,” he says. “We have some fun for a while, and then we do anything we need to work on. And I'll jump on the drums and play all the songs I know, and go eat!”

One of the sound-check songs Black likes to play on drums is “Josie” by Steely Dan; his background singer and percussionist, Steve Real, handles vocals. At the end of the long Nothin' but the Taillights tour, Black decided on the spur of the moment to do the song during an encore. “I just surprised [Steve Real] and said, ‘Guess what? It's “Josie.”’ And we've been doing that as part of the regular encore set.” Not surprisingly, Black more than holds his own on the drums.

Black has spent the past ten years as the leader of his band and has gotten used to being the boss. So when Jimmy Buffett asked him to fill in as a sideman on some dates with the Parrot Heads last summer, it required a bit of an adjustment. “It was fun. I would do it again any day,” Black says. “But it's his show. And there is that little bit of a strange feeling of just showing up at sound check — I'm used to showing up at my own sound check and saying, ‘Hey, let's jam on some Steely Dan,’ or ‘Let's do some [James Taylor].’ You don't do that with Jimmy. You show up and you see what Jimmy wants to do, and it's his deal.”

Nevertheless, Black enjoyed his stint as a band member. “I played a lot of guitar and sang a couple of verses here and there,” he recalls. “I played a lot of rhythm, joined him on about the tenth song, and stayed up there the rest of the night as a sideman playing rhythm guitar and a little bit of [guitar] fills. I did a little bit of electric guitar and a little bit of harp. I was up there for 15 or 16 songs.” He also enjoyed the whole vibe of being in Buffett's band. “I would come out in a cowboy hat, Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and bare feet. And I was a Parrot Head for a little while. Hell, I'll always be a Parrot Head. I was a Coral Reefer for a little while; it was a blast.”

While playing with Buffett was only a slight departure stylistically, Black has been branching out musically, and he considers himself more than just the country traditionalist he was ten years ago. “If you listen to D'lectrified, it's got its traditional moments; it's got its jazz-blues, and ‘No Time to Kill’ with Bruce Hornsby is a jazz-rock, Hornsby, Steely Dan-ish type of thing. I think I'm always going to manage to fit in because I love country music. I'm always writing country music, but I'm also pushing the edge because I want to make music I love. My mind doesn't work in a way that would allow me to be satisfied if I were always trying to fit in.”

Though some rail against it, Black doesn't think the rock influence that has reshaped country since the early '90s is necessarily a bad thing. “I meet a lot of guys who were in country music who grew up idolizing the Beatles,” he says. “It's just a matter of the audience. We're a different generation, and if you look back to the beginning of country music, it's always evolved. And there's always been some sound that wasn't really country that became the definition of country: Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and the Bakersfield sound, and Bob Wills before that.”

In general, Black believes eclecticism goes hand in hand with good musicianship. “Look at my album collection from way back, and there's Leon Russell and the Shelter People Live, there's Ted Nugent and the Grateful Dead. It really runs the gamut. There's Merle Haggard's Greatest Hits and Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage.” He also expresses surprise at musicians who want to listen to only one style: “Anybody who could possibly be attached to only one kind of music has got to be into it for another reason.”

So what's next for Black? For one, he plans to pursue other interests, including television directing — he's directed his own videos since 1993 — and music producing. “I'm really interested in producing other artists,” he explains, “whether they're established or up-and-coming.”

Spring 2001 will see the release of an as-yet-untitled CD for Black, who says he hasn't settled on all the material: “I'm working on the idea of it. I've got more than enough songs written. But I'm going to write some more a couple of weeks after this tour is over.” Before this CD comes out, he also plans to release a single featuring a duet with his wife, Lisa Hartman Black. This follows up on the success of “When I Say I Do,” another duet with her from D'lectrified. “I'm real excited about this song,” he says. “I think people will really like it, and not in the same way they liked ‘When I Say I Do.’ It will have the same kind of message but be more dynamic.”

After so much success and so many years in the business, Black's biggest challenge — from a musical standpoint — may be avoiding the “been there, done that” syndrome and finding projects that hold his interest. “Musically, the future for me is kind of frightening,” he says, “because I got so much satisfaction from making D'lectrified that I'm afraid I won't get that feeling again.” D'lectrified was particularly gratifying for Black because it was the first record he produced entirely on his own. It was also a concept album — it didn't include any electric instruments — so it presented a unique challenge.

“I have to throw a real curveball to myself to rise to some occasion I don't know about, to get that kind of satisfaction,” Black observes, “like people that climb a particular mountain and then have to go find a taller mountain. They will be heartbroken once they've climbed that and there are no longer any taller mountains.” One gets a sneaking suspicion, however, that Black will find plenty more mountains worth climbing.

Mike Levine is the editor of Onstage.