Music
The Entertainer
Neal McCoy wins fans by break-dancing, cracking jokes, and wiggling his behind onstage. He sings too, but that’s beside the point.
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McCoy also toys with racial mores, bonding with his lily-white crowd by making fun of people as dark as himself—like his Hispanic guitarist. “I had to hire him because the government made me,” he announces onstage. “It’s that white thing. You have a bunch of white guys, you’ve gotta hire a minority. He don’t even know how to play the guitar.” McCoy will give a you-meanie lecture to a security guard who shoos away fans who’ve come forward to snap his picture—but when she gets embarrassed, he’ll play the dog-eyed penitent. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says. “You’re just doin’ your job, and I love you for it.” He’ll bounce to stage left, where a woman does sign language for deaf audience members, and run his words together so that she can’t interpret. He’ll spray the crowd with a water hose on a sweltering day. He’ll shame front-row latecomers in a 15,000-seat arena by stopping in mid-song, bringing up the house lights, and having the crowd give the transgressors a standing ovation. “Bet you’ll never be late again,” he’ll quip.
Such shenanigans work up enough of a froth that major stars won’t go on after him. When Pam Tillis did, in Bloomsberg, Pennsylvania, she woke up to a front-page headline that read Mccoy Steals Show From Headliner Tillis. Concert promoter Todd Boltin of Ohio-based Variety Attractions says the only act he’d “maybe” put on after McCoy is Garth Brooks. Of course, Brooks, like other megastars who’ve won the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award, has the advantage of big screens, light shows, and smoke. McCoy, who dreams of winning it, doesn’t. “We’ll have a few little ol’ can lights and a couple of spots, hopefully,” he says. “Given what we have to work with, I think we deserve the award.”
Such confidence served McCoy well back in Jacksonville, where he grew up. His father, Hubert McGaughey, a Texas A&M—educated civil engineer, met his mother, Virginia, during a tour of duty in Manila in the fifties and brought her back to the States. She cooked rice daily, listened to Frank Sinatra, and spoke enough Tagalog (the native language of Filipinos) for young Neal to learn how to cuss and count to ten. At age nine he watched the Jackson 5 sing on television and decided that he too would be a famous singer so he wouldn’t have to go to school. Although his brother and sister applied themselves in class, Neal says he was a “loafer” and a “schemer” who regularly told teachers that a dog had eaten his homework. “The teacher would almost say, ‘Well, that’s all right, Neal, but try to not let that happen again,’” he recalls. “I’m a guy the smart guys hated because it almost wasn’t fair.” He graduated in 1976 and, with the help of grants and a music scholarship, spent two years at Lon Morris College, though he says he can’t remember what he studied: “It didn’t matter. I wanted to sing.”
To that end, he headed about ten miles north to the big city of Longview, where he got his first job selling shoes at the mall. One night at a disco, he fell for Melinda Williams, the fetching daughter of a junior college basketball coach. She refused to slow dance when he approached her, but before the night was over, he had gotten her on the dance floor and even kissed her. They married five months later. (A daughter, Miki, arrived in 1986; son Swayde, named for a character on a soap opera, was born in 1994.)
By 1981, McCoy had gone to work as a land surveyor, but he had begun to play small gigs at local clubs and was singing easy-listening covers every weekend at Canton’s Chinese restaurant. After three years without much success, one of his co-workers showed him an ad in the Dallas Morning News for a talent contest at the now-defunct Belle Star nightclub. “I said, ‘I’m gonna go up to Dallas and show them people how to sing,’” says McCoy, though he knew only one country song all the way through: Ronnie Milsap’s “It Was Almost Like a Song.” Still, he took it to the winner’s circle. Contest judge Janie Fricke, a country star in her own right, arranged for him to meet the legendary Charley Pride, who made McCoy his opening act across the country for the next seven years. “I told him, if you need me to tell you anything, ask me,” recalls Pride. “But he didn’t need to be told. He always had stage presence.” So that he’d be free to travel on weekends, McCoy started his own lawn-mowing service, printing up business cards that read “Warning: May Be Caught Singing on the Job—Additional Charge for Requests.”
In 1990 he set out on his own to do traveling gigs, creating enough buzz that Rick Blackburn, the president of Atlantic Records’ fledgling office in Nashville, tapped him as his first act (at which time Neal changed his last name to the easier-to-spell “McCoy”). His debut CD, At This Moment—a hapless hodgepodge of pop, R&B, and traditional country—didn’t crack the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, and his second effort, 1992’s Where Forever Begins, fared only a little better, sending one single, “Now I Pray for Rain,” to number nineteen. Having spent $1 million on McCoy, Atlantic execs were eager to drop him, but Blackburn persuaded them not to. “I just kept thinking that if we could capture on disc what he does onstage,” Blackburn says, “it was just a matter of time.”
Indeed, McCoy’s next try, 1994’s No Doubt About It, did the trick, bypassing traditional country and opting for the R&B-laced tunes and ballads more suited to his style. That disc went platinum, selling a million units, as did its follow-up in 1995, You Gotta Love That. Last year’s Greatest Hits will likely go platinum, and his current release, Be Good at It, has already placed one single, “If You Can’t Be Good, Be Good at It,” in the top twenty. His next big hit could be another single from that album, “Party On,” which was co-written by seventies tunesmith Paul Williams (who penned some of the monster hits of McCoy’s beloved Carpenters). But, as always, the product is incidental to McCoy, who is on the road 260 days each year. “And I want to be entertainer of the year every night,” he says.
Yes, he very much has his eye on that Country Music Association trophy, and he’s hired a new management team to get him in the running. The odds against him are huge, since voting tends to be based on sales and politics. Nonetheless, some industry bigwigs have confided to him that if his name ever appears on the final ballot, he’ll win. Indeed, given his success back at the mall in Longview, you might say Neal McCoy is a shoe-in.
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