Music has always been a big part of my life. I credit my father for exposing me to many different kinds of music. Country, Blues, Bluegrass, Rock & Roll, Gospel. I was a lucky boy.
My introduction to Guy Clark was by way of a Jerry Jeff Walker album I purchased about 1975 as he transitioned from a New York folkie to a Texas Troubadour. The album was simply titled Jerry Jeff Walker. In the liner notes he wrote a commentary on each song. One of the songs was L.A. Freeway. He said:
Both L.A. Freeway and Old Time Feelin’ were written by Guy Clark. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Gary White and myself go way back seven or eight years to Houston, Texas. Guy was making guitars then. I lived for a while on Guy & Gary’s couch on Fannin Street. Recently I had the chance to do so again in Nashville, where Guy is trying to get people to hear his songs. He told me once, “You know, I used to hear you & Townes play a new song every couple of days, but it never dawned on me that I could just write one of my own.” O.K. Sleepy John, it never dawned on me to build my own guitar, either.
Eager to hear new music, I went down to the local Head Shop which also had a record store in the back and bought Old No. 1. There wasn’t a bad song on the album. Perhaps my favorite was Texas – 1947:
A lot of musicians from my youth have passed on over the years. Some from self-inflicted wounds. Some from accidental tragedy. Some from old age. Guy Clark was one of those artists I “discovered” on my own and turned many other people on to over the years. We won’t hear about him constantly over the next months. Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and Beyonce won’t be singing his songs in tribute, to a national audience. There won’t be any MTV documentaries on his life. But he was, in my opinion, one of the great songwriters of our time. With his passing I officially feel old now. Rest easy, Sleepy John.
Mark
The first Guy Clark song I heard was LA Freeway by Jerry Jeff on a Houston radio station shortly after I stepped off a plane at IAH making my own escape from Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The song so resonated with my life at that moment, I went straight to buy the album. When I saw who wrote the song, I started to look for places he might play or other work he might have done.
Songwriters have a special place in my heart and they’re often ignored and unrecognized. The 1970s and early 1980s was a period of unparalleled creativity in Texas’ nascent music scene, but Guy was the dean of songwriters and no one challenged his seat. Though we had mutual friends and Susanna Clark was a close friend of my girlfriend in those days, I never met Clark personally. I drove around Texas to his gigs and sat in the summer heat in downtown Houston at the Old Quarter to hear him play. Susanna came by my house and gave us a painting one day before driving back to Nashville and we never saw her again.
Guy Clark even spoke lyrically…
… a wave of scrappy expatriate Texans overtaking Nashville that included Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and most notably, Van Zandt, whose lifelong friendships with both Clarks remain inextricable from the couple’s relationship.
Those days feel impossibly far away in the quiet of Clark’s house as he draws slowly on his cigarette.
“If you want good friends, they’re gonna cost you,” he notes as he exhales a thin line of smoke.
The dynamic power of Clark’s poetic talent was revealed when Vince Gill went into the studio to record The Randall Knife, a song about Guy and his father, and broke down and bawled in the middle of the session.
Finally, I’m going to dedicate this song this Guy, Live Forever, as the penultimate songwriters’ ode to immortality, by the inimitable colleague and friend of Clark’s, Billy Joe Shaver.
Texpat
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