Family Guy
Documentary based on Susanna Clark’s journals and “the stuff that’s real”. By Michael Simmons. Without Getting Killed Or Caught ★★★★★
Dir: Tamara Saviano & Paul Whitfield SLOW UVALDE FILMS. ST.
“HE DIDN’T CARE about mainstream music,” said Susanna Clark of her husband Guy Clark. “His only desire was to write songs as great literature.”
Few wrote and sang songs as literate as Guy Clark. His two most famous were LA Freeway and Desperados Waiting For The Train. This bio-doc’s title is from the former – a tale of being stuck on notoriously labyrinthine Los Angeles roads. Like all of Clark’s songs, its story can be extrapolated into a universal theme – in this case craving escape from some hellish place. The latter song was a tribute to the hard-ass drifters he grew up with in West Texas, but it’s also about facing death with stoic strength.
Death pervades Without Getting Killed Or Caught and its three primary figures are gone: Guy and Susanna, and their best friend, the tragically fabled songwriter Townes Van Zandt. It’s a true-life Jules Et Jim, an extraordinary love triangle filled with great music. Directors Saviano and Whitfield let Clark tell the story through readings of her journals by actress Sissy Spacek and excerpts from her tape recorder that she spoke to as if it was human.
Guy and Van Zandt met in Houston folk coffeehouses in the mid-’60s. While grieving his girlfriend’s suicide, Clark fell in love with her sister Susanna Talley and they married. The peripatetic couple ended up in Nashville in 1971 and Guy got a song publishing deal. Susanna (a fine painter as well as songwriter) called their home “a hippy poet salon” where Guy mentored young ’uns like Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell. In 1975, he released his first album Old No. 1, a classic by every standard except commercially. He was unhappy with the production of his early records – he loathed attempts to commercialise and preferred stripped-down instrumentation.
“I was cursed with artistic integrity,” he says with no false modesty in one of the interviews he gave the film-makers. (Earle, Crowell, Vince Gill and other talking heads fill in the gaps.) By the late ’80s, Clark began making simpler recordings and by ’95 he reached the top of the Americana charts. “Guy Clark not only fit the aesthetic perfectly,” recalls one friend, “he helped define it.”
Meanwhile, the Clarks broke up and got back together, she wrote commercial country hits and Van Zandt drank himself to death. She was devastated and stayed in bed for 15 years until her death in 2012. Guy followed four years later. It’s a sad story, but the art it produced transcends the pain, as does their passion. “It’s a mythical love story,” admits Guy in a film that’s as soulful as its protagonists.