Neal McCoy had yet to have a bona fide hit when his album “No Doubt About It” was released this year onto a scene already glutted with aspiring Nashville stars.
The new collection was McCoy’s third, and, contrary to its title, he had more than a little doubt about it.
“I was thinking, `This may be it,’ ” the 34-year-old small-town Texan recalls. “Because record labels as a rule don’t hang around with an artist that long anymore. It was kind of scary. We thought we had good material on this album, but we thought we had good material on the last two, too.
“My wife and I have been at this thing for a long time, and we were kind of thinking that if I didn’t hit with this, maybe we could move to Las Vegas and I could become just an entertainer. I thought, `Maybe I’m not cut out to be a recording act.’ “
McCoy’s doubts have been dramatically dispelled by his latest album’s first two singles. One, the title song, went all the way to the No. 1 spot on the country hit charts. The other, “Wink” (or “Wank,” as McCoy pronounces it, with a Texas twang), not only followed it to the same pinnacle but also encamped there for a month.
Thus a man who for several years has been considered by a lot of industry observers to be one of the field’s more promising crowd-pleasers-yet who still was mowing lawns to supplement his living as recently as five years ago-now finds himself drawing bigger crowds to please.
McCoy would have to be a positive thinker to have hung around as long as he has, and he is. He recalls that along with his early misgivings about “No Doubt About It,” there were also some hopeful signs. One was that toward the end of the run of his second album, “Where Forever Begins,” a final single titled “Now I Pray for Rain” managed to crack the Top 20, peaking at No. 19.
“We at least felt like we were making momentum,” he says.
An emphatically good-humored half-Irish-American/half-Filipino (a “Texapino,” he dubs himself), McCoy is one of country music’s more iconoclastic figures. For one thing, he candidly confesses to not having listened to or sung country music exclusively all his life. For another, he performs occasional swing, big-band, pop and soul songs in his stage shows. For a third, he has the confidence to go onstage armed with no set list, preferring instead to feel out audiences and perform whatever kind of material each seems to want to hear.
Adding to his distinctiveness are two other unlikely facts: He has had three names since he started singing, and the star whose influence initially pushed him toward show business wasn’t Merle Haggard or George Jones; it was Michael Jackson. Yes, that Michael Jackson.
“I think more than anything it was his age,” McCoy muses. “Because we’re the same age. I was 8 or 9 watching `American Bandstand’ on TV, and I saw him come on with the Jackson Five and thought, `Look at this kid. He’s my age, and here he is singing and dancing. He probably doesn’t have to go to school or do anything. He’s just singing and dancing.’
“That’s kind of what put the spark in me and made me think, `That’s what I want to do.’ “
His hopes, though, weren’t terribly high. Born Neal McGaughey and reared in the modest town of Jacksonville, Texas, his place of residence to this day, McCoy didn’t regard his chances at a show-business career as very good-especially since, although he heard the country hits that got onto mainstream radio, country wasn’t his music of choice. Throughout school, singing in “choirs and stuff like that,” he preferred non-country sounds.
As he finished junior college and began moving into a succession of real-world jobs to earn a living-selling women’s shoes, surveying and lawn mowing-he continued to feel that if he ever got the chance, he could be an entertainer because he got along well with people.
So he continued to sing. In 1981, while performing in a steakhouse in Longview, Texas, with a small combo that “worked over in a corner, singing standards and easy-listening stuff,” he entered a talent contest at a nightclub in Dallas. Country star Janie Fricke turned up as a judge.
“She was with Charley Pride’s management company at the time, and she ended up introducing me to Charley,” McCoy remembers. “Then Charley came out to see me at another little contest, and I guess he liked something about me. He took me under his wing and let me start opening shows for him.”
Thanks to Pride’s drawing power, McGaughey-who began spelling his name phonetically, as McGoy, because the other way was hard for people to pronounce-suddenly was performing before thousands of people on weekends. When Pride left RCA and signed with a new Nashville record company called 16th Avenue, McGoy, still mowing lawns, also was signed to a 16th Avenue contract.
Then his dramatic progress began to stall. The record company never was able to establish itself and, after a year, let him go. He and Pride amicably parted ways about 1990. The next year he signed with Atlantic Records, where Atlantic boss Rick Blackburn asked him to change his name to McCoy because “that’s what everybody’s calling you.”
Atlantic was just establishing a new office in Nashville, and it must have seemed like 16th Avenue deja vu. McCoy saw his early records released with little impact, and when Atlantic finally did begin to achieve market muscle, it was via the work of Tracy Lawrence, Confederate Railroad and megahot John Michael Montgomery.
McCoy’s impact began to be felt after Blackburn placed him with his third Atlantic producer, Barry Beckett, a vaunted veteran who had had big success with Confederate Railroad.
“Barry and I went out to dinner, just us two, and we really hit it off,” McCoy says. “I’m pretty loud and obnoxious and outgoing and he’s the opposite, so I really listened to what he had to say. In the studio, he just let me go in there and be myself.”
Which is something his two previous producers hadn’t quite done. Beckett, who cut his teeth on soul music in Muscle Shoals, Ala., found in McCoy the deep feeling for black music that obviously had been there ever since his initial admiration of Michael Jackson.
“No Doubt About It” doesn’t go overboard in that direction, but it has three strong cuts-“Heaven,” “Something Moving in Me” and the title song-that are particularly, if subtly, soulish.
Beckett obviously also helped make him more commercially country, but a lot of the credit for that seems due to McCoy himself. Beckett never told him to pronounce “Wink” as “Wank”; McCoy says he put the Texas drawl to the word without even realizing it.
What Beckett did do was go out and see McCoy onstage before they started planning the album. He saw a down-to-earth performer who appears to do whatever he can to appeal, a man whose unpredictable shows often have their country songs interspersed with such diverse fare as, say, Quincy Jones and James Ingram’s “Just Once” or pop standards such as “Paper Moon.”
His ability to use this unlikely diversity to bring audiences to their feet was what caused Atlantic’s Blackburn to keep making albums with McCoy when he and most other Nashville record executives were sending other aspiring stars home after just a shot or two.
“He’s a natural entertainer, a guy who was working 250 dates a year without a hit, and you can’t abandon somebody like that,” Blackburn says.
“We had a conversation in the spring of last year when he was real down. We just rode around for about six hours and I told him, `The problem isn’t you, it’s me. I’ve got to get the right songs. But I promise you we’re going to make a great record.’ And it turned out we did.
“We always thought he could maybe be our biggest act, and I had no intention of not staying with him. Don’t write that I stuck with him. Write that he stuck with me.”
