Clay Walker had stopped at a rib joint in Mississippi — country singers are always eating at rib joints in this kind of story — when a man in a tuxedo walked up.
His sister was out back, celebrating her wedding with friends and family. She was a huge fan, and …
“I wiped the barbecue sauce off my fingers, and I picked up my guitar.”
He was thinking about what to sing when he saw the bride’s father standing alone. Walker, who has two daughters, MaClay, 11, and Skylor, 7 — knew just the song.
“If he ever breaks your heart, I’ll be there.”
Not a lover speaking, but a father.
“Every dad feels that,” he said. “If there ever was a song I can dedicate to my daughters, that would be it.”
Walker went on to record a duet of “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” with Freddy Fender, the fellow Texan who made the song famous three decades earlier. It’s on “Fall,” Walker’s just-released CD, his latest bid to move from country music’s midlist to the big time.
First, though, he has to make it past the women who have filled the conference room of a Houston high-rise.
Hometown hero
What made these women dial a radio station over and over for the chance to attend a private mini-concert by Walker?
They like that he’s practically a hometown boy, born and raised on a farm outside Beaumont, east of Houston, and now living in a beach house in the island city of Galveston.
Along with the fans who buy his CDs, Walker has lived some of the pain that life dishes out. But that’s just the deep stuff, and appearances matter in this business.
“I love the way he looks,” Freddie Romero confided, just a bit wistfully. “I love his music.”
Like many of the women at Walker’s appearance, Romero has followed Walker’s career since his 1993 debut. Over the next 14 years, the stats added up: 11 No. 1 hits. Four platinum albums. Two gold albums.
Walker, 37, turned on the charm, his long brown curls peeking from beneath his black cowboy hat as he walked in to screams of “We love you.”
After opening with a rocking ” ‘Fore She Was Mama,” about a boy’s discovery of his mother’s past, Walker settled into a mix of risque banter and middle American pop culture references, segueing into a series of ballads from the new CD.
He feigned annoyance when a cell phone trilled. “If that wasn’t a Clay Walker ring tone, you’re out of here.”
“You’re not available,” several women shrieked.
“And your MySpace page isn’t up, either,” another called.
Walker shook his head.
Country music is not what it used to be.
There’s still heartbreak and drinking and people being done wrong, but even a quick stroll through Wal-Mart turns up an eclectic mix: Alan Jackson and George Strait for traditionalists, Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban for more modern tastes.
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The common thread is storytelling.
“Even though the sounds may be different, the main criterion for a great country song is a lyric that hits you on an emotional level, that tells a story or really makes you feel what the singer is conveying,” said Greg Frey, a music director at Houston country station KILT.
Van Rentz, Walker’s keyboard player and bandleader, said Walker’s vocals have always been hard to categorize. “He can sing blues and pop and country.”
It’s the business of country music that has changed, especially what gets played on the radio.
“You’re only as good as your last record for radio,” Rentz said.
And that makes the four-year break between “Fall” and Walker’s previous CD, “A Few Questions,” a precariously long time.
Walker said it took two years to get out of his contract with RCA and another two to choose and record the tracks for “Fall,” his first for Curb Records.
Part of the time was spent working with Fender, on what became Fender’s last recording before his death in October.
He knew Fender had lung cancer, and Fender knew Walker had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a decade earlier.
“We didn’t really talk about our illnesses,” Walker said. “When you have an illness and you’re with someone who does, nothing needs to be said.”
A new love
He did other things during the four-year break. He and his wife, Lori, divorced, and he is now in the full flush of new love.
He and model Jessica Craig — “the love of my life” — had been living in Houston but moved to Walker’s beach house last month as Walker ended a brutal nine-month stretch of working to complete and promote “Fall.”
He will tour for much of the summer, making the occasional day off at the beach especially sweet.
Anyone who’s even casually followed Walker’s career knows the basics: Beaumont farm boy got his start at 16, when he slipped away from his job as a night clerk at a Super 8 motel to deliver a tape to a local country radio station.
Sorry, he was told, it was against policy to play unsolicited demo tapes.
Chastened, he drove away, only to hear his tape playing.
Not that his struggles were over. After graduating from high school in 1987, Walker bounced around the Texas honky-tonk scene until landing his first record contract with Giant Records; his self-titled debut came out in 1993 and spawned three No. 1 singles.
Not a major star
He has had 32 songs on Billboard’s singles chart, although the industry’s biggest accolades continue to elude him.
Still, in Houston he’s hot, the city’s biggest homegrown country star, blessed with loyal fans.
When people heard he would sign autographs between 8 and 10 p.m. at a Wal-Mart outside Houston in 2003, they began lining up in the rain at 3 p.m. Walker stayed past midnight. Music is all about fantasy. Just listen to “Average Joe” from the new CD.
I wax the floors in the grocery store.
Drop off the boxes at your front door.
Yeah, I’m your Average Joe.
It’s been awhile since Walker has done any work resembling waxing the floor in a grocery store, of course. But not even a string of hits and a parking lot filled with adoring fans can inoculate you from real life.
Proof of that came not when his first record label went broke nor when his sixth CD only went gold, selling 500,000 copies rather than the 1 million needed to achieve platinum status.
Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996 at age 26.
… Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system, interrupting the flow of information from the brain to the body. Controlled by medication, Walker’s disease has been in remission for about nine years.
But when the first symptoms hit, he was devastated. He could only drag his right leg. He couldn’t move his right hand. His vision was blurry. For five years, only the people closest to Walker knew the truth.
Even after symptoms abated, Walker was reluctant to speak up.
“I was afraid the media wouldn’t understand the disease,” he said. “I was afraid people would think I was sick.”
He finally did go public, forming Band Against MS to raise money and serving as grand marshal of this year’s MS 150, a fundraiser bicycle ride from Houston to Austin.
‘Not in denial’
MS promises an uncertain future, but Walker said it has made life sweeter.
“I don’t know about the term ‘mind over matter,’ ” he said. “I just know that when I wake up, I don’t think about the multiple sclerosis. I’m definitely not in denial.” For now, he’s concentrating on the future.
Frey, of KILT, describes “Fall” as having “a lot of freshness, a renewed energy.”
He also noted that Walker co-wrote six of the CD’s 12 tracks.
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“That tells me they’re taking the bull by the horns and really, really being in the moment in their career,” he said.
But it’s been almost 15 years since Walker’s first album was released, and some people wonder if he is destined to remain just below the ranks of superstardom.
“I don’t know that it’s ever too late,” Frey said. “There are artists who reach a certain level and plateau there, and there are others who … all of a sudden pole-vault over that.”
It happened to Toby Keith, he said. Kenny Chesney too.
Clay Walker may be poised to make the leap.
The key, Walker said, is to be ready.
He was talking about meeting his girlfriend, but he could be talking about his career too.
– – –
About Clay Walker
Personal: Born Aug. 19, 1969, in Beaumont, Texas.
First album: “Clay Walker,” released in 1993 and produced three No. 1 singles, “What’s It To You,” “Live Until I Die” and “Dreaming With My Eyes Wide Open.”
Total album sales: 8 million and counting.
Fans know: Walker loves working cutting horses, fishing and playing golf.
Charity: Walker’s Band Against MS Foundation promotes awareness and raises money to find a cure for multiple sclerosis (bandagainstms.org).