Clint Black has a message for a recording engineer in Houston: "Tell Dan I said 'Hey!' ... and that he's not an idiot."
Dan Yeaney, 47, who lived in Penn Hills as a youngster, often has told the story about the one that got away.
Around 1986, Black was just another aspiring singer in Texas, and Yeaney, then head of the audio department at Houston's Lincoln Institute, knew his way around a production studio.
Black, who was hoping to make a demo, looked Yeaney up; Yeaney agreed to go hear him sing at a club called Cardee's, where Black was a warm-up act.
"I thought he was very talented, I liked his voice," Yeaney says. But Black sang others' songs, not his own material. "I told him afterward that I never heard 'Clint Black.' ... I recognized talent, but I hadn't heard him."
Within three years, Black was one of Nashville's dazzling new stars, singing self-penned chart-toppers such as "Killin' Time" and "Nobody's Home." And Yeaney, who had passed up the chance to work with Black, was kicking himself.
"I tell people I'm an idiot," Yeaney says.
Black says he doesn't clearly recall the encounter, but adds that he would advise Yeaney not to take it too hard - Black apparently didn't, even though Yeaney says he told him "until he figured out who he was, there was nothing for me to work with."
Black affirms that, during his Houston nightclub era, he sang mostly covers of George Strait tunes. "He wouldn't have heard me," Black says of Yeaney. Although Black says he had been writing songs back then, "I wouldn't do very much of my own stuff (onstage), because I felt like it didn't belong until I had developed it into what I wanted it to be."
For Black, the conversation faded from memory partly because Yeaney's reservations were well-founded, and partly because greater setbacks were to follow.
"Tell him if he's an idiot, there are bigger idiots in Nashville," says Black, remembering that, after he left Houston, the stakes in his career were higher and the business meetings more brutal. "I took demos of several of the songs that were on 'Killin' Time' to one record label that turned me down, and (to) one producer who turned me down - said he didn't hear any hits."
Black, who was soon picked up by record label RCA and producer James Stroud, can shrug off those memories now. "That stuff happens," he says. "There are countless stories about people like myself who were turned down, ignored, rejected, whatever, and went on to have success."
On the flip side, there are countless stories such as Yeaney's, too. "There was a guy who tells a story about me coming into his club, auditioning to play evenings," Black remembers. The club owner failed to hear the singer's talent, dismissively telling Black's agent, "Maybe he's worth beer and peanuts."
Black, 40, has been worth a whole lot of beer and peanuts since his 1989 debut album, "Killin' Time," gave him five hit country singles: "A Better Man," "Walkin' Away," "Nobody's Home," and the title track, all of which went to No. 1, as well as "Nothing's News."
Only two of those songs made it onto Black's first greatest-hits compilation in 1996; there were just too many to choose from.
For the album he is promoting on his current tour, "Greatest Hits II," Black was able to play a little catch-up. He and his band, Black says, "put together our wish list, and from there I made it into my own wish list." That list includes "Nothing's News," "Walkin' Away" and "Nobody's Home," as well as popular duets with his wife, Lisa Hartman Black, and collaborations with singer-songwriter Steve Wariner.
After taking a summer off from touring - his daughter, Lily Pearl, was born in spring 2001 - Black again took to the road July 4. Pittsburgh is the third stop on this tour, and the singer plans to bring an eight-member band and a grand piano to the stage at Point State Park, where Black will be the headliner of Saturday's Dollar Bank Jamboree.
As on "Greatest Hits II," concertgoers can expect to hear a mixture of the old and new. The disc contains four new tracks - a sign of Black's continued push forward in his career. "I'm not just putting together a bunch of my hits and a couple of new songs; I really wanted to make this as much as it could be," he says of the CD.
The collection of songs on "Greatest Hits II" also shows "the span of my growth," Black says. "I learned a lot about making records in the past 12 years; I learned a lot about myself as a performer. I've worked very hard to improve on my vocal skills and my guitar-playing skills, and my harmonica playing has come along as a natural course, being the first instrument that I picked up."
Black acknowledges that some fans remain attached to the lonesome sound of his early hits and are reluctant to embrace the orchestral, lusher-sounding duets with his wife.
Still, Black says, his career represents "a span, and anybody who wants to look for it can see where improvements have been made."
On Saturday, jamboree-goers can put themselves in Yeaney's shoes, and judge the singer for themselves.
| Dollar Bank Jamboree |
