In the early ’90s, McClinton was invited to be a part of a lineup for a blues concert aboard a cruise ship. “I was stuck on a boat with fourteen bands,” he recalls. “The blues has got to be good or it gets old really quick.” After doing two tours of duty with that cruise, McClinton and Goldstein realized they could do their own cruise, “and do it better,” he says. Along with a friend, they leased a ship, invited some acts aboard, and started the Sandy Beaches Cruise, now in its ninth year. “The first three years we had to eat it. We lost money,” McClinton says, laughing. “But now, we have a great time. It’s a really fun week, and I’m totally exhausted at the end of the week. But it’s worth it.”
The 1990s continued to be a time of growing success for McClinton. From 1990-93, he issued three new albums on major label Curb, plus “Best Of” collection. In 1992 he won a Grammy for his duet with Bonnie Raitt on “Good Man/Good Woman”; the following year he enjoyed a huge hit with Tanya Tucker when they recorded “Tell Me About It”, which was nominated for a Grammy and a Country Music Association award.
In 1997, McClinton seemed poised to have the biggest hit of his career with One Of The Fortunate Few on Rising Tide, a relatively new Universal imprint. But record-label misfortune doomed him once again. Three months after the album’s release, Universal shut down Rising Tide and pulled all promotion for the album. “It was at that point we decided we could do it better ourselves,” McClinton said.
He and Goldstein started looking into ways they could get McClinton’s music out on their own. They explored all their options before deciding to record a new album themselves and simply lease it out to a record company. McClinton financed the recording of Nothing Personal himself and eventually licensed it to New West, which released the album in March 2001.
It ended up being the biggest hit of his career. Nothing Personal won a Grammy for best contemporary blues album and at press time is still in the top ten of the Billboard blues album chart. It was rated as the #1 Americana album of 2001 by Album Network and garnered McClinton appearances on such shows as “Saturday Night Live”, “The Late Show With David Letterman”, “Austin City Limits” and “Mountain Stage”.
The success of Nothing Personal led McClinton to feel some pressure when he began preparing his new album, but it also gave him the confidence to do what he wanted. “All that happened with that record, it really gave me a nice little lift,” McClinton says. He had planned on re-recording his greatest hits (that’s still in the works — about half the tracks have already been recorded) and releasing them after Nothing Personal, but since he had been on a writing streak, he decided to go ahead and make a new album.
“I had been writing a lot and we just went in and did them,” he says. “After I’ve written a song, I don’t like to let them hang around. Sometimes they can lose their magic if you do that.” Room To Breathe was recorded in less than a week, and half of the record is composed of live takes.
“Sometimes when you’re in the studio, it just doesn’t work, but when we went in for this album — well, it was the best three days I’ve ever had in the studio,” McClinton says, scooting to the edge of his seat. “I was expecting the worst and we had the best time. And we captured that. We captured how much fun we were having.”
That fun is instantly apparent as the album opens with “Same Kind Of Crazy”. The rollicking musical intro steers straight into McClinton’s vocals, and you can practically hear his smile when he sings, “We stay all tangled up in each other’s arms and it’s so nice/She talks in her sleep, but she always gets my name right.”
Even “Smooth Talk”, a song criticizing television evangelists, is upbeat. Backed by Lynn Williams’ funky drums, McClinton happily skewers the smooth talkers by stepping into their shoes: “I can help you get to heaven/Right here on channel seven,” he sings.
McClinton frets his eyebrows together when discussing the song. “It’s just so absurd, those people who get on television and beg for money. They’re jokes. I mean, just look at them,” he laughs. “People like that — who will take money from good people — they’ll do anything for a buck.”
The subject matter is peppier on “Jungle Room”, in which McClinton’s voice goes from a high celebration to a low growl as he summons the spirit of a great juke joint. “Fred Knobloch and I wrote that about all those little smoky hole-in-the-wall bars that are the best places in the world to do a show,” he says. The horns, drums and guitars beckon as Delbert sings of “ice cold beer and homemade shine,” in a place “where you can lick your wounds.”
The vibe continues with the wild breakdowns of “Blues About You Baby” — as much fun as a singer has ever had singing about the blues — and “Lone Star Blues”, in which McClinton is joined by a raucous eighteen-person chorus in the form of Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Marcia Ball, the Flatlanders, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and many others. All the background vocalists are fellow Texans except for Emmylou Harris, whom McClinton calls “an honorary Texan.”
In “Won’t Be Me”, McClinton sings, “Who’s gonna butter your bread for you/Who’s gonna fix your tea/Who’s gonna chase away your blues/Who’s gonna let you break their heart” while a dance-to-it beat runs behind him. A similar rhythm pumps along in “Ain’t Lost Nothing” and “Money Honey”. Then there’s “The Rub”, a horns-laden crime song that McClinton calls his favorite cut on the album, simply because “it came out of nowhere and it pleases me.”
