‘He needs to be celebrated here’
‘A Night for Guy’ to honor the life and music of musician Clark on first anniversary of his death
After Billy Joe Shaver pulled a gun in a Lorena bar and shot a man in the face, the songwriter and musician called Dick DeGuerin.
That’s as close to the music industry as DeGuerin has gotten in his storied, decadeslong career representing some famous and infamous clients, including David Koresh, Robert Durst and Tom DeLay. In the process, DeGuerin has become one of the best-known attorneys in a state that has produced more than its share of highly visible attorneys.
DeGuerin, 76, has cultivated a reputation for fearlessness when it comes to taking on cases. Still, he admits to some anxiety about his most recent task. This Wednesday evening DeGuerin will stand before a different sort of assembled crowd and recite “The Randall Knife” — the most daunting song written by his friend, the legendary songwriter Guy Clark — at a tribute concert held on the first anniversary of Clark’s death.
“I’ve got to get this crack out of my voice, if I’m going to pull this off,” DeGuerin says.
He pauses and chuckles. “I’m not really a performer.”
Clark is one of the greatest songwriters ever to have called Houston home. He was born in Monahans and grew up in Rockport. And starting in the mid-1970s in Nashville, he made a name as a songwriter of uncommon poetry and depth. But between his youth on the Gulf Coast and his career in Nashville, Clark first wrote songs and performed at clubs in Houston.
He died May 17, 2016, after several years of poor health. In the months after Clark’s death, tribute concerts were organized in Nashville and Austin, both drawing well-known friends, peers and admirers: Chris Stapleton, Jerry Jeff Walker, Terry Allen, Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Jack Ingram.
Guitarist Shawn Parks, a Clark fan who owns and operates the Bojangles Music School, wanted to host an event to honor Clark in Houston, where he first identified as a musician.
“Anybody who knows anything about his story would point to Houston as the place he got rolling,” Parks says. “He needs to be celebrated here. This is where he really started to push to become one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived.”
Parks has assembled a group of nearly a dozen local musicians spanning country, blues, rock and folk to perform two Clark compositions each. And Parks will play guitar when perhaps the best-known performer takes a break from practicing law to honor his friend. DeGuerin and Clark met in 2001 when DeGuerin’s wife hired Clark to play her husband’s 60th birthday. They remained close the last 15 years of Clark’s life.
“You can tell that song is special to him,” Parks says. “He struggled at times to get through it, but it made the hair on my arms stand up.”
‘A true poet’
A Night for Guy will be held at Anderson Fair, the ageless songwriter haven in Montrose that was one of the clubs Clark would play in the early 1970s. In fact, the rocking chairs often found by the venue’s front door belonged to Clark’s family.
Proceeds from the show will be split, with a portion going to a documentary about Clark that will be released in 2019 and the rest going to Anderson Fair.
Clark once lived just a few blocks east of the club on Stratford, as did Eric Taylor, another storied songwriter who considered Clark a friend and mentor.
“One day I went down, and he had this double-L Martin guitar from the 1920s on his old oak kitchen table, and he was taking the top off it with a pocket knife,” Taylor says. “He was fearless on that kind of thing. A week later, I’d go by, and he’d have a Volkswagen engine sitting on the same oak kitchen table with newspaper underneath it.”
Clark was interested in the mechanics of how well-made things worked, whether it was a guitar, a car engine, a knife or a song.
“He was a true poet,” DeGuerin says. “A lot of people don’t know he was also a luthier who made his own guitars. That’s taxing and tedious work. But it also gives you time to think. And that’s what poets do. The exercise of poetry is putting succinctly these grand ideas. He certainly did that.”
Clark was peerless in his ability to compress lifetimes into three-minute songs. His eyes and ears were always attuned to those around him. He found epic stories in the ordinary lives of friends and family. One of Clark’s best-known songs, “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” told the story of an old man and his young friend with a mystique akin to that found in an old western film. The narrative had no real conflict other than the passing of time — the most universal antagonist in storytelling.
Clark was 34 when he made his first album, “Old No. 1,” which he released in 1975. An assured debut, the album has no errant songs, in part because of the time and energy Clark had spent to that point honing an art that he at times treated like a trade. He made only 13 albums in the subsequent 38 years. They’re his hand-made blades.
Of his process, Clark once told me, “I’ve never been under any pressure to do anything other than what I thought was right.”
For years, his career ran parallel to that of Townes Van Zandt, another Texan who was a fixture in Houston clubs in the early ’70s. Their friendship may have been forged around a common interest, writing songs, but they went about that interest differently. The mercurial Van Zandt was a storm chaser, looking to capture fleeting moments of genius. Clark was a fisherman, willing to sit all day with nothing to show for it. He wouldn’t let a song into the world unless he was sure it was ready.
“A lot of writers deal in ambiguity,” Parks says. “Guy didn’t do that. He knew exactly what he was talking about. Looking for universal emotion.”
Lovett, another friend who called Clark a mentor, pointed out “there’s no artistic artifice anywhere in his work. He had this ability to express things from his life that you could relate to. That gave his songs additional impact for me. As Guy would say on stage, ‘You can’t make this (expletive) up.’ ”
Van Zandt died young, at 52, in 1997, securing his mythology as a self-destructive genius.
Clark, three years his elder, just kept writing songs.
‘Knife’ still cuts deep
Dozens of Clark’s songs have been recorded by country artists as varied as Johnny Cash and Kenny Chesney.
“The Randall Knife” is one even his most talented admirers usually avoid. The song is sharp and weighty like its subject, a storied brand of blade first forged by Bo Randall in the 1930s.
Clark’s father, an attorney named Ellis Clark, came to own one of the knives before World War II, so the song tells. In the song, a young Clark breaks the tip off the knife by throwing it at a tree. Without a word, his father relegates the knife to a desk drawer, where it stays until his father’s death. When we got back to the house They asked me what I wanted Not the law books not the watch I need the things he’s haunted My hand burned for the Randall knife There in the bottom drawer And I found a tear for my father’s life
And all that it stood for. The rawness and directness of the song suggests no fictional embellishment, though a Clark biography published last year revealed Clark had taken some small creative license.
Biographer Tamara Saviano — who is now making the film about Clark — says Clark often would record conversations with friends or family. He did that when talking to his mother and sisters in 1981 after his father had died. He told the story of taking the knife to a Boy Scout jamboree, where he and a friend took turns throwing it at a tree. His friend threw it one last time, and the tip of the knife broke. Not surprisingly, the stoic Clark took responsibility in person and in song.
Saviano was surprised to hear the story when Clark gave her access to his tapes.
“I asked him about this guy, Victor Torres, who broke the knife,” she says. “And he said, ‘Wait, wait, wait: How did you know that?’ I held up the cassette. And he just laughed and said, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you about that, but I guess now I have to.’ If not for the tape, it wouldn’t have made it into the book.”
Clark’s mother took the knife to a specialist in Cuero, who ground the blade and restored the tip.
“You can tell it’s a little shorter than the scabbard,” DeGuerin says.
Today the knife is with Clark’s son, Travis, as it should be. He gets the blade, the rest of us have the song.
“It’s such a powerful song,” Lovett says, “about that journey or that right of passage for a child becoming a man. The knife is symbolic of what it means to be a man.”
The song is also about time and regret, accountability and emotion. The objects that bring us together and push us apart. The ways we fail to communicate with one another until it’s too late.
Vince Gill recorded “The Randall Knife” on a 2011 tribute album, “This One’s for Him,” which Saviano produced. But for the most part, musicians steer clear of it, possibly because it’s not a singer’s song. Clark’s recordings and performances of “The Randall Knife” usually featured a single guitar as accompaniment. His vocal was always more recitation than song, which makes it a difficult piece to handle.
“He was so good at putting so much story into just a few verses,” DeGuerin says. “That’s true of everything he did, even his more whimsical stuff. It always had deep meaning.
“My plan is to keep reciting this one over and over again until I get it right.”