Photo courtesy of Delbert McClinton

Delbert McClinton

Delbert McClinton may be more in control of his musical fate than he has been at any time during his five-decade career.

His latest record, "Acquired Taste," is part of a deal with New West Records that leaves him with full ownership of his records. Austin, Texas-based New West leases the product from McClinton for distribution and sales. Ultimately, McClinton owns the publishing rights and master recordings to all four albums he's made on the label.

He uses the word "magic" when talking about his situation, and it's certainly a change from the days when one label after another folded under him. And through all his career's slings and arrows, he's built something you can't write into a contract.

"I've got a great fan base," said McClinton, who headlines Saturday's Big Lick Blues Festival at Elmwood Park. "I can sell a couple hundred thousand records every time I put one out. That's pretty damn good. And it's a wonderful spot to be in, you know."

When McClinton and his band, Dick 50, take the stage Saturday, expect a history of roadhouse music -- blues, soul, R&B, country, rock 'n' roll, funk -- filtered through McClinton's Texas-deep sensibilities, songwriting chops and torn-soul vocal pipes.

The Lubbock, Texas, native, 68, can deliver it because he's been there. He was 17 years old when he first started working barroom stages. Those were years when everything was on radios and jukeboxes, and nightspot denizens wanted to hear it all.

"We're talking about the infancy of rock 'n' roll, was where I started," he said. "I was 14 years old when that started. I heard it all and knew it all. You couldn't help it ... if you pick up a song list from any month in 1954-5-6-7-8-9, it's amazing how many people exploded right then, and created their genre.

"It was a magic time, and I learned everything from that period and beyond. I loved Nat King Cole, Charles Brown, Duke Ellington, you know, all of that big-band stuff with arrangements."

McClinton, then in Fort Worth, Texas, started putting bands together in about 1956. Six years later, he got his first taste of the big time, playing harmonica on Bruce Channel's international No. 1 hit, "Hey! Baby." That hit song took McClinton to England, where he met the pre-fab Beatles.

It was that trip that gave birth to a long-lived urban legend: Delbert McClinton taught John Lennon to play harmonica. Not true, McClinton said. But when he traveled with Channel to England in 1962, the Beatles opened a couple of shows for his act, then attended a few more. Lennon, like a lot of players around London, wanted to pick McClinton's brain.

"You know, you have to put all this in context," he said. "This was before they changed the world. And every night over there, somebody in one of the other bands backstage would come up to me with a harmonica and say: 'Show me something. Show me how to play that.' Which is kind of hard to do with a harmonica. It wasn't just John. It was a lot of people.

"Anyway, we hung out, all told, for probably eight, 10 hours over the period of the few times that those guys were around. ... But you know, things like that get so romanticized that people don't want to hear the truth. But anyway, it's a good story."

McClinton got something out of it, too. The first night they met, he noticed that the Beatles were wearing a type of leather coat one couldn't find in Fort Worth. A band member -- he can't remember which one -- told him where he could get one.

The next night, "They had their leather jackets on, and I had mine," McClinton said.

Paul McCartney's younger brother, Mike, snapped a photo.

In the years since, McClinton has become better known for his voice than for his harp-blowing. And that purely American instrument is still in fine form on the Don Was-produced "Acquired Taste." The record is credited to both McClinton and his band, the mysteriously named and intensely smoking Dick 50.