Mike McClure Interview
Doug Burke:
Mike McClure has just released his 10th solo album with his band entitled Looking Up. Mike got his start in Stillwater, Oklahoma at the notorious Farm where he was a founding member of the band, The Great Divide and he produced many of the bands on the Oklahoma Red Dirt music scene, including favorites Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours and others. His song I'd Rather Have Nothing was recorded by Garth Brooks and released on The Lost Sessions and has sold over two million copies. He joins us today on Back Story Song to talk about those experiences and his songs from his new album, looking up.
Doug Burke:
Welcome to Back Story Song. I'm your host Doug Burke and we are here to help songwriters get found and discovered and heard. I have today with me Mike McClure of the Mike McClure band and formerly with The Great Divide Band. Mike, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Mike McClure:
Well, thanks for having me on. I'm glad to be here.
Doug Burke:
Mike, tell me, when did you start writing songs and why did you start writing songs?
Mike McClure:
Well when I was 10 years old in 1981, my family went to see Honeysuckle Rose, a Willie Nelson movie. And I just fell in love with it. So much so that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was the Honeysuckle Rose album. My aunt got if for me. Cheryl Lawson. Thank you. And I just completely fell in love with Willie Nelson and the idea of being a traveling musician and writing your own songs. Really I have that movie to blame for wanting to get in and try. So Willie was a big influence there. So when I was 10 I wanted my own guitar. My dad had a guitar and he had a handful of chords and he sang some old Merle Haggard songs and old Chad Mitchell Trio stuff around the house. So I wanted my own and I wanted a gut string like Willie's. So my dad took me to a flea market in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The guy asking $30 for this ... It was a RECCO. R-E-C-C-O. I think that's the name of it. But you could shoot arrows off of the strings. High action. And so dad bought that for me and I started taking some guitar lessons and learning chords and learning how to play. My dad and I sat down and tried to write a song together. I think the first thing we wrote was about a cowboy. Probably because I'd been really getting into Willie Nelson and all that kind of stuff.
Doug Burke:
I think Willie was probably an inspiration for a lot of songwriters. Do you remember what that song was called?
Mike McClure:
Something about a bull named Buster. Something about getting thrown off and then going back again. That's the last time we ever tried to write a song together. Yeah. Yeah, that's all I can remember. But that's what started it. And I'm thankful my dad had a guitar around where I could ... After seeing that movie, you know how kids imitate things and I just grabbed it and luckily it was there and just the right combination.
Doug Burke:
You grew up in this Oklahoma music scene. I guess it's called The Red Dirt Music scene. And your work is very, very guitar-based and I must say, I love your guitar work and what you do in the songs, especially the ones that we're going to talk about on the show today. Tell me about that Oklahoma scene where The Great Divide and the Mike McClure Band grew up.
Mike McClure:
Well, when I was going to high school ... I graduated in 1989. What was popular in the mainstream at the time was bands like Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne. More of the metal, or the hair metal rather. That was going on and I was real big into that. And then Kurt Cobain and Nirvana came along and kind of stomp danced that. And then music shifted towards grunge but a large group of people that grunge was like that's a little too heavy. And at the time it was a little too heavy for me. And I heard Garth Brooks singing Much Too Young To Feel This Damn Old. I was working in a lumber yard sweeping up the floor and I heard that I thought, "Man, that sounds like stuff I grew up on when I was younger." And so I started getting into that. Garth Brooks and Clint Black around that time. Hal Ketchum. They were all putting out really great country records. So I swung from rock and roll a little more to country at the time. And then I went to Stillwater to go to college and that's of course where Garth Brooks went to college and famously played there at Willie's Saloon before going out to Nashville. And so I wound up there and through that I met some older guys and they were in a music scene called Red Dirt. In Oklahoma our dirt's red as Mars in a lot of the places. And so that's what they called their music. And I formed The Great Divide with some cowboys from around there. They were old rodeo guys and they needed a guitar player. I'd just started being confident enough to say I'm a songwriter. A long way from the tough bull riding days when I was 10. I started really getting into it and thinking, "Well, I've got these songs and I'll give them a go." So we formed The Great Divide in '92. And about that time I was hanging out at a place called The Farm and it was this old farmhouse out west of town. There was a guy named Tom Skinner that would come through there all the time. There were a handful of musicians, the Red Dirt Rangers. It was just a place for artists if they were passing through, traveling musicians, they'd stop and stay at The Farm. There were always people picking and it was the first taste of bohemian reality for me. I came from a small conservative town in Oklahoma. Here it was a little bit different and I just ate it up. It was a place to sit. I just got through reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road and so it was like something right out of that novel.
Doug Burke:
Bohemian reality. I never heard of that.
Mike McClure:
I never have either. I think that just comes tumbling out there.
Doug Burke:
Sounds beautiful actually. Just sitting there listening to a bunch of pickers and singers.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, it was great. There were different kinds of artists. There were painters and poets and everybody just hanging out in the yard and it was just a magical time. And I've read a lot of books about music and it seems like those places, kind of vortexes tend to pop up whether it be Laurel Canyon way back in the day. And I felt really blessed to be able to be a part of that. And not only those locals were really good, Garth Brooks came out of that area. I really looked up to him. When he hit, it's kind of hard if you weren't ... I don't think younger people understand what a big impact he had on the world. It was pretty amazing. But the main thing for me was to get out of a town where there weren't many people that were playing instruments and writing songs into a town where a bunch of people were. And it came your turn around the campfire to play a song and man, all of a sudden it needed to be a good song. I played a few crappy ones and then afterward I'd just like, "Oh my god, those aren't stacking up." And it was my first place to be able to do that.
Doug Burke:
So one of the first songs we want to talk about on the show is one that was recorded by Cross Canadian Ragweed called Fighting For.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, this song, I wrote most of it. Cody helped me finish it up in the studio but a little bit before that. So Great Divide started '92 and then I met Cody right around that time, '93. And he started Cross Canadian Ragweed in '94. So when it came time for him to want to do a record with his band he came to me because he knew I'd recorded a couple of records with Lloyd Mains, who's a great well-renowned steel player and producer of stuff like Jerry Jeff Walker. So I got tied in with that. So I knew a little bit about putting records together and so I started being the producer for Cross Canadian Ragweed and we kind of grew up together. This was off of an '05 record that we did down in Austin at Cedar Creek. The interesting thing about this time period for me was, a guy named Tony Brown signed Cross Canadian Ragweed to Universal South Records. And he was the guy who used to work for MCA. He was the president of MCA Records who signed Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett. A lot of stuff I really, really liked and was super influential. And when Steve Earle made his Copperhead Road record, Tony Brown took him to a place in Memphis called Ardent Studios and he worked with a guy named Joe Hardy. And so when it came time for us to do this garage record with Ragweed, Tony Brown suggested I hook up with Joe Hardy. And so we got to talking and that was the first album that Joe mixed for me that I produced. And after that, we went on to produce my solo records together and he mixed all the other records I did. But we could get more into that later. This was my first top 40 song as a writer and Ragweed recorded it. It's got a pretty rock sound because I played on the rhythm. His rhythm guitar player was having a baby at the time. So I played on the rhythm track and those were chords I'd learned from learning the song Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne. There's some Randy Rhoads style of chords in there. Just kind of odd and they're more of a rock chord. And so I used those and the song turned out really cool and Cody decided that's the first one they wanted for the single and the record label got behind it. Hung one in the old top 40.
Doug Burke:
Starts with a guy who's been drinking and is a fabulous disaster and is in a fight with his girlfriend I guess. An argument, let's just say. Right?
Mike McClure:
Yeah. And I've been sober for a little over a year now and there's a lot of those time periods that were pretty alcohol-infused I guess would be a nice way to say it. But yeah, that was just one of many. I have a whole bunch of songs from that era that's somebody's drunk, somebody's in a fight because that was me. Not proud of it but that's where I was at the time and I've always tried to write what I'm going through. And I took that fabulous disaster line because Cross Canadian Ragweed got really big around this time. They'd come back to Oklahoma to play and it would just be a madhouse. And they wanted to play this bar called The Wormy Dog that they owned. So they just named the band The Fabulous Disasters. Not many people knew that that was them and they would go in and play kind of a semi-private party. I nicked than line from them and stuck it in there.
Doug Burke:
The other line I like in this song is sometimes I feel like a broken stone rolling down your hill. Don't know how a broken stone actually rolls.
Mike McClure:
Not worth a damn. Yeah, later I started singing like a broken stone rolling up your hill would be even harder.
Doug Burke:
And was this inspired by a woman that you remember?
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I was married for 21 years up until about two years ago. It was just a mess from the start really and towards the end it started getting ... We weren't the right people for each other. And we'd made a decision when we were younger that didn't really pan out over time. And so it's dealing with that and being in the middle of that situation and at the time, not really having the tools to know how to get out of that. The only tool I had was really trying to write a song about it. Because I knew if I could get it out of my head and onto paper and out there then it would give it a place to live rather than inside of my head.
Doug Burke:
I usually ask my songwriters on the show about their love songs and how their girlfriend or wife reacted to them playing that song for them the first time. How did your girlfriend or wife react when you played this song for her the first time?
Mike McClure:
That would have been under the, "Oh those were Cody's idea."
Doug Burke:
Blame it on your co-writer, huh?
Mike McClure:
Absolutely. That's what they're there for.
Doug Burke:
That's funny. She must have known you weren't getting along all the time.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of a common theme in some of my songs that would tend to crop up and all the more sign that it's something I should have dealt with a long time ago. But that's something I've learned as I've gotten older. Instead of pouring alcohol on top of those things or ... It's getting down and rooting them out. I think of all the time I could have had when I was wasting that time with alcohol or whatever instead of getting down to it. I got down to it in the song but I really didn't solve anything. I just kind of painted the picture of it and just let it sit there without the resolution.
Doug Burke:
Another song you wrote in this era is The Funeral, which you co-wrote with Evan Felker of Turnpike Troubadours. I love this as a story song.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. And I don't write a whole lot of story songs. I have a handful of them and this one was one. I think sometimes it's easier when you're co-writing to write a story song as you make up this story together and flush the characters out which is what we did. And Evan is a great songwriter. When we wrote this song it was their second album. They had recorded an album called Bossier City. Somebody sent me ... It might have been Evan, sent me a recording of Bossier City and I thought it was a cover because it was so good. Thought man, this sounds like a classic song.
Doug Burke:
That's a great song when it sounds like a cover out of the gate.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Yeah. It really did. I don't know if he took that as a compliment. I meant it to be. So they got ahold of me, their band, and wanted to record. Well, actually a kid named John Fullbright who's a great Okie musician, was playing keyboards for me and he traveled with me for about three years. I say kid, he's a grown man now. But at the time he was a kid and young. He was in Turnpike for a little while in the inception and then he encouraged them to come to my house to record, my studio, The Boohatch, which is here in Oklahoma. And I'd just started really learning how to engineer myself. I'd been a producer before where I'd come in the room and work with the band putting the songs together and putting the album together and someone else would engineer for me. So through working with Joe Hardy over the years, he just taught me hands-on how to do it. So Turnpike was the first band that came into my studio. I had a little Motu two-channel recorder and that's how we started. Some days they paid me in change. I thought it was amazing.
Doug Burke:
Actual coins?
Mike McClure:
Yeah, actual coinage. Yeah. Worth a whole lot now in the pandemic. Little did I know. But yeah, they showed up and they were really green and young and didn't quite have all their songs finished for that and Evan and I were sitting around one night after everybody left and he said, "Man, I got this story. I want it to be about this guy." And he had the first few lines, which was stage right enter Jimmy, counterfeit James Dean, pocket full of delta blues and cheap amphetamines. And I was like, "Oh, that's great. That's a great start." So we just got to talking about who this character would be and I always wanted to do some sort of prodigal son returns and nobody cares, instead of killing the fatted calf of the prodigal. He comes home and the only reason he's come home is because of this funeral for his dad. The dad was the only one that really cared about the guy in the family. It's a really hard look at that. So this guy comes home and the mom asks him towards the end, "Why's it take a funeral to bring you back to town?" That was fun writing with him. And then Turnpike, they recorded it there. And then I recorded it on my album called Onion. And I did more of a rock and roll version of it and theirs is a little slower. We actually tried to do it together one time at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa and our versions are so different from each other it was really kind of a train wreck. I kept trying to guess his version, he kept trying to guess mine.
Doug Burke:
They're in the same key though, right?
Mike McClure:
I don't even remember if it was.
Doug Burke:
Maybe that was the problem.
Mike McClure:
I think that was part of the problem, yeah. He kicked it off in a different key and I'm going, "Oh, let me transpose real quick and try to remember." I do really like that song. Evan was big into reading John Steinbeck at the time and he got me into reading Steinbeck. Just the way he paints a picture, really very beautifully descriptive.
Doug Burke:
But this is a song about a guy named Jimmy who left home, comes back as the prodigal son for his father's funeral, and really there's nothing home for him. There's no reason for him to come home other than his dad's funeral.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. And there is kind of an ulterior motive. There's his dad's .38, which is hidden in the trunk of this car. And Jimmy knows about it and soon as mom goes to sleep he's going to go get it. He thinks in his mind that he's the rightful owner of that gun no matter what a will or something says. So there's kind of that part of it. Jimmy's a little bit of an outlier.
Doug Burke:
I had to look up who Betty Page was. I sort of knew. Everybody knows James Dean, but Betty Page.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, but that was one of Evan's lines. It's, "With her feet up on the dashboard like a burned-out Betty Page." Yeah, Betty Page being the old pin-up model from ... Early '50s maybe? I'm not super sure what the time period was. But yeah, there's sometimes live I'll throw out with her feet up on the dashboard like a burned-out Jimmy Page, which is a-
Doug Burke:
Different image.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Completely different lady. Honestly, that album that appeared on Turnpike is called Diamonds and Gasoline, their album. I'm super proud of that one. One, the fact that was the first one that I did here at my house. Saying, "Okay, I have a studio now. This is what I want to try to do for a while." And it turned out really great. I did that one and then the next one I did was Damn Quails Down the Hatch. They're another great Okie band.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. You're at the heart of this whole Okie red dirt scene. It's pretty amazing some of the people you've worked with there. It's quite a groundswell of music. And it's kind of a roots-rock country sound. It's a real fusion. Sort of like Oklahoma's in the middle of America.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of the people that wind up in America are some of the ... There's just some characters. We were talking before we started rolling about songwriters being characters and studying characters to put into their songs. And I just think how a lot of people wound up in Oklahoma after the dust bowl. My family was here during that and they stayed instead of going out to California. And the people that stayed are just a hardscrabble people. They're characters and they'll take nothing and make a little something out of it. I think that comes across in the music and the people. It is the center of America. We're kind of the crossroads of I-35 and I-40 and there's just all kinds of folks jumping off here and we’re not lacking for characters for sure.
Doug Burke:
What is it that you love about Oklahoma Mike?
Mike McClure:
I really love where I'm at. I'm in southeastern Oklahoma and there's the Arbuckle Mountains. It's nowhere near the beauty of Utah up there as far as that, but a lot of the trees that I grew up around as a kid. My folks had 10 acres, thankful enough to grow up on, south of Tecumseh, Oklahoma, which is kind of in the center. And full of trees and a big creek that ran through and I grew up playing outside and making up games in my head and entertaining myself. And then moving down here to Ada where I'm at now, we've also got the little mountain range and there's a place called Platt National Park. It's just really, really pretty with natural springs that pop up and cold springs and it's just a really nice area. There's really good folks around here. There are. I know everybody has their good folks, but we do too.
Doug Burke:
This part of nature is in both the title of your next band, The Great Divide, and one of the songs that you recorded with them that you wrote called Out In The Fields.
Mike McClure:
That's on my solo record.
Doug Burke:
Sorry. The first album you did record after leaving The Great Divide. Sorry.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. That's one of the reasons that I did leave, other than the normal artistic differences everybody cites when they leave a band. I remember whining about The Great Divide breaking up at one point. I was opening for Ray Wylie Hubbard who's a great songwriter and I was kind of whining about that and he goes, "Hey man, even the Beatles broke up." And I was like, "Yeah. Well, that's a good point." And I moved on. But in '98 we signed to Atlantic Records out of Nashville. And we did two albums, '98 and '99. We did Breaking the Storm and Revolutions with Atlantic. And after that Atlantic was kind of going downhill. Well, Nashville as a whole, the bigger companies were shutting down and we got in on the end of the glory days. So we left Atlantic and went to Broken Bow. They were in Nashville. And I really felt like the band had wanted to do an album in Nashville and I was okay with that. I thought it was a really good record. And I sat in on meetings with this manager that The Great Divide guys wanted and I wasn't necessarily for. The idea shifted from making an album to making 10 possible singles. And I just didn't like that at all because I'm, and still am, a fan of an album and putting the whole album on and letting it take you for a ride. And I feel like that was getting lost to where that's something that we really tried to do with the earlier Great Divide things. Just that mentality shift I just couldn't really align myself with. It just felt like time for me to go try to do something else because in a way I felt like I was in a band where I was writing the songs, singing the songs, playing the guitar. I was getting outvoted with what to do with those things. That was definitely my perception at the time, whether that's reality or not. So this first album, Everything Upside Down, was the first one that I did with a band outside of The Great Divide. I would have to wait a year and a half to do an album. So I just had all these songs all built up because I was writing all the time and I still do. So when it came time to do that album I came out and I put out a 19 song album.
Doug Burke:
Wow.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I was just dying to get these songs out there. Especially when you're younger and you don't have a whole lot of stuff out there and you're just like, "Oh man if the world could hear this song or this one, I'd get in a different tax bracket."
Doug Burke:
So Out In The Fields is from your first solo effort in the Mike McClure Band. And I love the guitar work on this. And I especially like how you go from an intro with a very light guitar and then you crank it up and crank it down and crank it up.
Mike McClure:
What's funny is I'd been listening to Nirvana about that time, which was the very band that kind of drove me into the arms of country again. But later in my life I really got into them. That soft, loud, soft, loud thing. I really liked it.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. They're famous for that. They would do that every song before they would record it and decide which way they liked it better.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I just love the dynamics of that. Just really punches you in the face when it's time. That was a song about out in the fields, almost gone, I got to keep on keeping on. It was just talking about getting out of that band and I equate it to being down on the floor while they're drawing knives on me. It wasn't that bad but that was certainly the feeling of the thing at the time. I felt like a typical artist being oppressed type of thing. I just wanted to be able to say what I wanted to say and how and not worry that there's a fiddle on this and if I want a fiddle on it then I want to put it on there for a different reason, not to try to get radio play. I wanted to make the art and then find the place to push the art.
Doug Burke:
I like the way you break it down to just the base drum and snare at the end with the audience hand clapping.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. That's one of those big Randy Owens from Alabama overhead claps.
Doug Burke:
Right.
Mike McClure:
My brother's five years older than me. I grew up hearing some of the older rock and roll all the time at the house and Neil Young I just always really liked how he had these little melodies with his guitar for intros. So I borrowed some from Neil Young in that aspect on this tune. But this album I wanted to put together a really killer rock and roll band and I got a guitar player named Rodney Pyeatt out of Texas. He does some of the other guitars that are on this record and he's really great. He actually used to play for Selena. Do you remember her?
Doug Burke:
Uh-huh.
Mike McClure:
The Spanish gal that got shot. He played for her for a while and Rick Trevino and some other people. But when we got together he got a chance to get some of his rock and roll licks out too from being in bands where that '80s kind of stuff really didn't fly with a lot of people but us old hardcore holdouts still loved it. We just went for it. Just said, "All right, let's make this as rock as we can." On that album especially. There's a song called Wild Child that's a fictional look at Elvis riding around in a car and blacking out. Yeah, there's just some really wild guitar stuff on there and Rodney brought a lot of that too it and I got a chance to play some more guitar as well and flush out an album with guitars instead of fiddle steel.
Doug Burke:
A lot of your songs have such incredible guitar work but they have these great classic chord progressions, but the guitar fills in my mind really stands out and they grab you.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Man, thank you. I'm really a big fan of that ... Not to just play something as fast as you can. I really like hook type guitar playing where there's a singable solo. One of my absolute favorite guitar players, Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, just how he puts those parts in there. Not just okay here's some space to fill. Play something flashy or this or that. But something really fits the song, adds to the song, lifts it up. I've always been a fan of that so that's what I was trying for.
Doug Burke:
Well, I think you got it on Out In The Fields. It's a really great rock song if you ask me. But who did?
Mike McClure:
I am.
Doug Burke:
So now you got some new stuff coming out that we want to talk about. The first one we want to cover is a song called Holiday Blown.
Mike McClure:
Right. Yeah, this song, I started talking about myself in the first verse. I've had some dealings with other chemicals as well and it's easy to do when you're in this line of work. And then I thought, "Oh, I don't want to be too honest here," at the time of writing it. In the second verse, I started bringing in my mom's dad, my grandpa. His name was Charles Stapp. And he was a tank mechanic in World War II in the march to Berlin. When he came back home from that, my mom said he'd just changed and he stayed drunk all the time. He'd go to work in the garage and drink all day and then come home and pass out. Eventually, he died from alcohol at the age of 41 on the couch. And this was right before Christmas. And my mom was 16 years old. I've tried to wrap my head around that and there's a certain sense of going, "Well, man why'd you do that to your kids?" And then on the other hand I sit and think, "Well, I never went to Berlin and had to try to fix a tank while people were firing at me." PTSD wasn't something that was talked about back then. People just came home from the war and they tried to deal with it the best way that they could and unfortunately at that time it was a bottle. And I did the same thing in my life. I'm thankful for being sober now and getting some clarity and actually making some great changes in my life that affect my own children so I don't go down that same route. But that song is really trying to look at addiction with a little bit of empathy. Because I need it myself and I've thought about it a lot with that situation with my grandpa. All I have's photographs and looking at him and my mom as a youngster and trying to imagine what that'd be like at 16 and imagine what that Christmas was like. That's where Holiday Blown came in is mama want to know why daddy had to go and blow another holiday. The why was from bringing a nightmare home from overseas. That's something that I've really had to go through and examine in my own life. Like what's going to keep me from going down this same route where someday I'm laying dead and my kids have to figure out how to get through life without a dad? That should have snapped me to it earlier but it just didn't. It just took me some time to grow up. Finally figure out that well hey man, I can do something about this and I can do it right now.
Doug Burke:
Well, we're glad you did Mike. We're glad you did.
Mike McClure:
Well, thanks.
Doug Burke:
Glad to have you here. We're glad that you're still making great music. This first is very kind of hardcore with morphine and amphetamines and I get kind of what you're saying there. I was trying to understand was the second verse where you go, "Baby likes white noise, baby likes the highway when it hums, baby likes static bleeding in on the radio station. Makes it sound far away, makes it feel far away."
Mike McClure:
Yeah, that is a weird one, isn't it?
Doug Burke:
It's different. I mean, it's not about the drugs or the alcohol there.
Mike McClure:
No. You know what? I get in this stream of consciousness thing when I'm writing. On a good day, when things are going good, I'm not analyzing what I'm saying. They just come out. And later I can go back and kind of pick apart and go, oh. It seems to me to be the subconscious talking. And if I can let the subconscious talk, man, sometimes it really makes for great art. Sometimes it'll use abstract images and stuff. And looking back, I know my mother, she got me addicted to white noise. She had a thing called a sleep mate. This little machine you turn on, it sounds like a fan and you go to sleep to it. I started doing that as I got older and I was just picturing her liking white noise and why. Some reason there's something ... And I don't know if it's to everybody, but to a lot of people, a background white noise like a fan, there's something comforting to it because I think it gives the brain something to focus on other than picking problems apart. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. It seems to be that way for me to where I can be sitting there and my mind's just racing and I'll put on some sort of recording of a train going down a track and I'll nod right out. Or a highway humming. Where I grew up in Tecumseh, you could hear the highway from our house. It was in the distance so it wasn't like a real noisy, annoying one. It was kind of romantic.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. And mostly you hear it at night when everything's quiet, right?
Mike McClure:
Yeah. And I'd have my bedroom window open and I could hear the semis going down. It was a decent size little two-lane highway. You didn't hear it all the time. And that just kind of was in my subconscious too. In a sense when you're younger, that wanting to get out and see the world, that was the way to it out on the highway. That image of a radio station kind of being a little staticky and coming back in, that's kind of the way I pictured some of my mom's life without ... It was like you didn't really want to tune that dial exactly on it because it was too painful. I think that there's a certain aspect of that.
Doug Burke:
This is a song to your mother, to your children, to your family?
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Yeah, and my grandpa. I never got to know him. And just try to somehow find some peace and some love with the whole situation instead of just ... It was a tragedy, really. And it's just trying to make some sense of that with a little bit of compassion to where I'm not holding it over his memory or anything like that. And that's important to me. I think that resonates somehow in the soul.
Doug Burke:
One of the other songs on your new album ... What's the new album called by the way?
Mike McClure:
Looking Up.
Doug Burke:
Looking Up. And you released it in September, right?
Mike McClure:
Uh-huh. September 25th.
Doug Burke:
One of the songs on it is called Here I Am. Another amazing guitar work song, which is your signature I think.
Mike McClure:
Well, thanks, man. I started out as a guitar player. I wanted to be Jimmy Page or Keith Richards just over there playing cool guitar while some other guy pranced around and shook his hair around. I never really wanted to be a singer. It just happened as I became a songwriter. I just needed to, "Okay, these are my own words. I should say them myself and be able to be okay with however good I think that is." But this song, this Here I Am, this is all about the relationship I'm in now. Her name's Chrislyn Lawrence and she used to be my booking agent back in 2005. She worked for a little company down in San Marcus that booked my band. And we were always friends and really hit it off, really liked each other and were honest friends. And when I was going through my divorce I happened to run into her. She was out of a relationship that had been a long one and hadn't been a good one. And we got together and she really brought a lot of love to me and taught me how to turn that love inside and start loving myself as opposed to … She just gave me some tools. She dragged me to a yoga class in Austin. I'd never been and thought, "Okay, what am I going to do?" This hillbilly from Oklahoma.
Doug Burke:
Downward dog is what you're going to do.
Mike McClure:
So she got me into that and I've done that for about a year and a half now. Just every day get on the mat and stretch and meditate. And just a lot of calming stuff. She brought that aspect to my life because it was just chaos man, really. If I hadn't run into her by the time I got a divorce it would have just been a disastrous train wreck. So I'm super thankful for that and just being able to pull out a lot of these problems into the light. That's a big theme that runs throughout the album is how much I kept in the dark. What I kept hidden as far as addictions or what have you, and feelings. And she's really given me a safe place to bring these feelings up and get them out into the light and they're not nearly as scary and they're not nearly as numbed up the way I was doing it. And they can be fixed and you can have some growth. I think that with being in a band you really don't push yourself sometimes to grow emotionally because you show up to a bar, you load your gear in and have a couple cocktails, people show up and they want you to drink. They expect you to kind of be the life of the party and I lived that for a long time. It's just there wasn't any growth involved in it. I could have kept doing that for the rest of my life and it'd have worked out okay, but I never would have grown and now I'm experiencing life at a lot higher frequency if that makes any sense.
Doug Burke:
One of the things I love about the song Here I Am is the harmonies at the end, which is not on every one of your songs. Tell me about how you laid that down.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, that's Chrislyn, my partner, singing with me.
Doug Burke:
Oh, get out. So you brought her in the bridge at the end.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. This is real man. Yeah. She's a great singer and a writer and her and I co-wrote another song on here called Little Bit of Love. Man, this whole song was about our relationship and me coming out of a darker spot into some light and her pulling me up. And then I wrote the bridge for this thing and it just screamed for another vocal and who better than her to jump on there with me. It gives it a different lift because she's not in the other parts of the song. Here's this other voice coming out that lifts it up and then at the very end I get to take it out with a solo in there. Yeah, it's just been a lot of feeling that has been accumulating over the past two years got to be exercised and put down on this record.
Doug Burke:
So here's a love song and you write it for your new girlfriend and how did she react when you played it for her the first time?
Mike McClure:
She always plays it really cool.
Doug Burke:
You mean even if she doesn't like it she's going to tell you she likes it. Is that what super-cool means? She'll tell you the truth?
Mike McClure:
Yeah, she'll tell me the truth definitely. Like I was in here writing ... I write a newsletter for people that sign up on my website. And she'd kind of been on me to do it and I wasn't really in the mood and I sit down and I knock something out and she goes, "Are you done?" And then I knew, "Nope. I guess I'm not done." No, she holds my feet to the fire. She's been the biggest cheerleader I've ever had as far as like, "Hell yeah, these are good. Let's get these out there." And she's really great at organizing and help get the Kickstarter program together. Campaign, sorry. Raised enough money to hire independent promotion and press vinyl and I'm just super excited about that. I haven't done that in years. Probably since the late '90s. So to actually have a team pushing the record and getting it up in the charts it's pretty exciting for me, especially at 50.
Doug Burke:
Mike, one of the questions I ask all of the songwriters, or most of the songwriters on my show is if you could pick a song or songs and any voice or band to sing one of your songs, what song and voice would you choose?
Mike McClure:
Well, that actually came true for me with Garth Brooks. I'd written a song called I'd Rather Have Nothing and I recorded it with The Great Divide. That was back in '94. And in '96 one of the guys in the band, Scott Lester, he got ahold of Garth on the phone and said, "Hey, we've got this band and we got questions on how to do it." So Garth sent out a tour bus one night at midnight in Stillwater and picked our whole band up and we went out to Nashville and spent a couple days with him just hanging out playing guitars, playing basketball. It was really mind-blowing. This was '96 and Garth was at the height of his powers and I couldn't believe my luck. And then in '96 I played him that song and he goes, "Man, play that again." And played it a few more times and he said a little later, he goes, "You care if I cut this song?"
Doug Burke:
What do you say to that question?
Mike McClure:
Hell yeah. So I started spending that money a thousand ways in my mind and then about a year later after that I got a call on my answering machine when I got home in Stillwater and it was Garth and he said, "Hey man, I recorded that song and my producer really didn't think it was right for this record. I'd like to hold onto it but feel free to pitch it around and stuff." So I was just deflated. And then about right around 2005 I got a call from Garth's lawyers in Nashville and had some paperwork for me to sign. He was releasing a box set that included an album called The Lost Sessions and he had put that song on there. So I finally got that Garth cut.
Doug Burke:
I'd Rather Have Nothing.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I had to wait about 10 years for that but that finally happened. Just hearing his voice doing my work ... And another cool thing I'd like to say about Garth is he changed the chorus and rewrote it and made it better. And I said, "Well, let's redo the writing split on here where I split it with you." And he goes, "No. Just keep your name on it. You'll make a lot more money."
Doug Burke:
Oh, that was nice of him.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I mean, on one hand, honestly back then at the time I was like, "Man, I'd really like to have my name next to Garth's on a co-write." It'd be, just as a writer, some feather in your cap. But really looking back he made me a lot of extra money and I definitely needed that at the time. So that was super cool and hearing somebody that I think back to sweeping that broom around the lumber yard and hearing Much Too Young and kind of set me on that course. And then to wind up having him singing one of my songs from right around that era, that was a really cool thing. But yeah, I have ideas all day long about other people. I've got this song I wrote called Outlaw's Prayer. And this story, it's about this kind of Billy the Kid type character who's escaping the law, heading to Mexico. But the twist of it is he gets shot and a preacher finds him and drags him to safety and patches him up and buries his guns and he told the Federales that he died. So he has this chance at rebirth. And that's the idea of the song. I'd really like Willie Nelson to do it. But back in 2000, Great Divide, we opened for Willie at Sturgis in South Dakota at the hog rally. And we got to go on Willie's bus afterward and got to talk and have a puff with the man. And I was telling him about this song and I said, "Yeah, it kind of ties into like The Red Headed Stranger. Because he was the preacher in The Red Headed Stranger. And I said, "I picture The Red Headed Stranger preacher being the guy to save this guy who's escaping the law." And he goes, "Well, play it for me." I said, "Well man, I didn't bring my guitar on here." And he hollered at his sister Bobby and she brought Trigger down the hallway.
Doug Burke:
Oh my goodness.
Mike McClure:
Yeah. Handed it to me. I couldn't believe it, man. Because that was the guitar that made me-
Doug Burke:
It's kind of like round-tripping your whole life story. You're 10 years old, you wanted to play something like Trigger with the gut strings and now you're getting to do it.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, and there it was.
Doug Burke:
In his bus after smoking with Willie. This is like the whole thing.
Mike McClure:
Yeah, I think I'm done. Yeah, I remember trying to tune it. I was sitting there. It was a little out of tune and I hit it and I started turning one of those pegs and it started creak, creak, creak. And I was like, "Oh god, I'm going to break it." So I said, "Man, will you tune it? I'm nervous." And he laughed and tuned it and then I played him Outlaw's Prayer. He said, "Oh, that's really cool." And then I haven't seen him since.
Doug Burke:
Well, maybe we'll get Willie to record that. Maybe our fans can get this song in front of Willie. Well, Mike McClure from the Mike McClure Band, we love having you show. Come back again when you drop your next solo album. The current one's called Looking Up. Your 10th solo album out there with the Mike McClure Band and we wish you the best. Thank you for coming on Back Story Song. And I have to thank DJ Wyatt Schmidt in the booth.
Mike McClure:
DJ Wyatt.
Doug Burke:
Making these things sound so great. Thank you and you can listen to DJ Wyatt Schmidt's music out there on the internet. And I got to thank my Social Media Director, MC Owens, for all your help in getting our listeners. Please share this episode with your friends on your social media. We're here to get these songwriters heard and get their songs listened to so they can make a living. Mike, you got anything to wrap us up with our ad?
Mike McClure:
Yeah. I just wanted to tell people to check out mikemcclureband.com. That's my web page and that's M-C-C-L-U-R-E. And all kinds of stuff on there. I do Zoom concerts now that I can't travel and also do lyric sheets of people's favorite songs. I handwrite lyrics. And all kinds of musical information over there as well.
