A Radio-Active Apprenticeship

Growing up in a small prairie town called Medicine Hat, Terri Clark had little to do as a young girl except listen to the stream of country music hits pouring out of the radio.

“I listened to a lot of music, especially in my teenage years,” she said. “Reba McEntire, Ricky Skaggs, the Judds, Randy Travis. I was influenced by all of them. I tried to emulate them and sing like them. I studied the history of the Grand Ole Opry, Patsy Cline. I became obsessed with it.”

If it all sounds like the beginning of a quintessentially American country music biography, there’s a big difference here: Medicine Hat, a name that would seem to go hand-in-hand with a state such as Wyoming or Arizona, was actually in the frozen plains of Alberta, Canada. Which, of course, made a young girl’s dreams of becoming a country music star even more exotic and romantic.

“I was never content staying in Canada,” said Clark, 28, who performs Sunday and Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana. “I really wanted to move to Nashville. I wanted to get a good jump on things, and to do that, I had to be in Nashville,” she said in a recent telephone interview.

Ambitious and focused at 18, Clark realized phase one of her dreams and moved, all by her lonesome, to the country music capital of the world.

“It was definitely a giant leap of faith,” she said. “But I knew what I wanted, and I knew it would take a while, so I didn’t want to waste any time. I was very determined.”

Almost immediately, Clark found a local honky-tonk called Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and took a job singing for tips. It was her first professional gig.

Clark turned out to be right about it taking a while for her career to take off; in fact, eight years passed before she was offered that elusive record deal and her dreams began to be realized. Until then, Clark worked as a waitress, secretary, house painter, retail clerk and bartender.

But when Clark’s self-titled debut album was finally released on Mercury Records in 1995, it was sweet redemption. “Terri Clark” went on to be certified gold, yielded a No. 3 hit in “Better Things to Do” and netted the young singer a bumper crop of industry awards--including Billboard magazine’s Top New Female Artist, TNN/Music City News’ Female Star of Tomorrow and the Canadian Country Music Assn.’s Album of the Year and Song of the Year honors.

Clark’s follow-up, “Just the Same,” was released in November and shows every sign of duplicating or surpassing its predecessor’s success. Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” a past hit for Linda Ronstadt, shot up to No. 3 on the charts late last year, while a second single, “Emotional Girl,” will be released this month.

“Just the Same” is a rocking showcase for Clark’s roughhewn approach to country music. Her vocals are throaty and muscular like Ronstadt’s but with an easy-yodeling edge. The studio band--featuring the stellar talents of steel guitar player Paul Franklin--percolates through a hearty menu of country boogies and swamp rockers. And the material, mostly written by Clark with songwriting partners Tom Shapiro and Chris Waters, is uniformly bare-boned but infectious, omitting the overproduced, “countrypolitan” slickness quotient of so much Nashville product these days.

“My personality tends to be one of the more assertive types, and the music on this album is definitely an extension of me as a person,” Clark said. “I like to keep things simple and uncomplicated, and that’s the way my music is too. I really think it’s important to keep things simple in country music, let the music speak for itself and don’t overload it with all kinds of trinkets and bells and whistles and stuff.”

The little girl from Medicine Hat has grown up to be what she once dreamed of. And when Clark goes home to visit old friends--as she did only last week to a town gripped by a subzero cold spell--it’s her own voice coming over the same airwaves that held her spellbound as a child.

“In the past year, everything I ever dreamed for myself has come true, every dream and every goal I ever set,” she said. “Well, I haven’t won a [Country Music Assn.] award--that’s one thing I would still love to do as sort of icing on the cake. But I’ve only been at it a year, and I sit down and look at everything that’s happened, and it amazes me. I couldn’t have hoped for anything more. If I died tomorrow, I’d be happy.”

* Who: Terri Clark.

* When: Sunday and Monday, 7 and 10 p.m.

* Where: Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana.

* Whereabouts: Exit the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway at Dyer Road. From the north, go right on Grand Avenue, then take the first right, Brookhollow Drive; from the south, go left under the overpass, right on Grand and right on Brookhollow.

* Wherewithal: $34.50.

* Where to call: (714) 549-1512.