Guy Clark crafted songs that resonated with truth
Guy Clark rolled up his sleeves before going to work. If he was posing for a photo, his cuffs would be buttoned. If he was writing, strumming or piecing together a guitar, the sleeves would be up past his elbows.
Best known as one of the great songwriters of the 20th century, Clark took unassuming characters and mundane happenings and projected them into narratives with epic scope. Among Texas songwriters, only Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt compare to Clark, who died at age 74 Tuesday morning at his Nashville home, after a long illness.
“I stepped into his home once, and it was full of art and guitars; it was this place full of artistic creation,” Lyle Lovett,
a friend and admirer of Clark’s work, told the Houston Chronicle in 2012. “And that reaches into his songs as well. We’re all trying to get to the same place through our discovery of things that make us feel like we’re OK. That’s basically what music and art does. You want to find a mutual point of view with somebody who understands how you feel.
“Guy’s a master at expressing feeling in songs.”
Off the stage, this respected luthier retreated to his workbench in Nashville and built beautiful flamenco-style guitars. The image of Clark, sleeves rolled, working with wood or words, earned him a reputation as a craftsman, a word that became the title of one of his recordings. “Workbench Songs” was another. But Clark’s methodical process for creating things obscured a bright creative fire. He was a craftsman like other craftsmen — Faulkner, Twain, Picasso, which is to say he was an artist first. But Clark’s frame of choice was the four-minute folk song. Within it he built worlds.
“Guy Clark was the best self-editor I’ve ever come across,” said singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell. “He had lines that other songwriters could hang a career on, but Guy would throw them out if they didn’t fit the narrative. That was the technical part of his skill as a writer.
“He was also like Cheever or Larry McMurtry in that he wrote about simple people and turned their narratives into something profound about the human condition. He had this song, ‘Out in the Parking Lot,’ I don’t know. It’s like a Van Gogh painting.”
Other artists repeatedly went to Clark’s well over the years — many whose fame eclipsed his own. Emmylou Harris covered Clark in the ’70s. Ricky Skaggs in the ’80s. Kenny Chesney made “Hemingway’s Whiskey” the title track of his 2010 album.
Probably the bestknown of Clark’s numerous great works is “Desperados Waiting For a Train,” popularized by Jerry Jeff Walker in the ’70s and The Highwaymen in the ’80s. The song is emblematic of Clark’s narrative gifts, packing an old man’s lifetime into just a few lines as seen through the eyes of his young companion.
As told by Clark, simple lives carried weight worthy of the big screen.
Texas characters
Clark’s youth spanned the width of Texas, from Monahans out west, where his grandmother ran a boarding house, to Rockport on the Gulf Coast, where his father had his own law practice.
Clark worked summers at the shipyard in Rockport and didn’t pick up a guitar until he was well into his teens. But he said he was always attuned to the stories of people he encountered, even as a kid. Years later they would populate some of his songs.
The characters were “mostly drawn from someone I knew or a lot of times something you’d hear about secondhand,” he said. “It all has to ring true.”
Clark moved to Houston in the 1960s, working a series of jobs during the day, including a stint as art director for Channels 11 and 13.
At night he found a coffeehouse/folk scene that included players like Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury, who admired local blues greats like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb.
Clark and Van Zandt became figureheads of sorts, two stylistically different founts of songwriting genius, whose careers would inspire admiration and invite comparison for years.
“He was nine years older than me, and he had such presence,” said songwriter Eric Taylor, a friend who Clark mentored. “Guy Charles (his middle name) just took my breath away.”
Clark and Van Zandt were a study in contrasts. Van Zandt was electrocuted by the divine fire, to use William Faulkner’s description of James Joyce, whereas Clark learned to harness it. Where Van Zandt looked into the abyss, Clark was more focused on life, particularly the slow passage of time, which he conveyed with masterful ease.
A decade could pass in a Clark song without seeming like a narrative contrivance. Though he hadn’t made a record at that point, Clark’s songs caught the ear of Jerry Jeff Walker, another singersongwriter who would soon become one of Clark’s earliest champions.
By 1970 Clark ditched Houston for Los Angeles with his wife, Susanna, a painter and songwriter. Dark-eyed, dark-haired and handsome, the pair looked like a couple of actors. Clark hoped to find a song publishing deal, but instead he found a job in a dobro factory in a city that never suited him.
To his credit, Clark came out of Los Angeles with a classic song. “L.A. Freeway” takes a simple feeling of alienation and infuses it with a sense of conspiratorial grandiosity. “If I could just get off of this L.A. freeway without getting killed or caught,” he sang, “I’d be down that road in a cloud of smoke for some land that I ain’t bought.”
That land ended up being in Nashville, where Clark finally got a publishing deal. Walker helped establish him as a major songwriting voice when he included two of Clark’s songs — “That Old Time Feeling” and “L.A. Freeway” — on his self-titled 1972 album.
In Nashville, Clark and his wife set up an opendoored home that became an epicenter for songwriters making music that fell to the left of Nashville’s comfort zone.
They housed, fed and nurtured young talents, many of them souls like Steve Earle and Crowell who were hungry for food, drink and writing lessons.
For years, Clark continued to use his industry connections to help artists whose work he felt strongly about. “Guy passed my demo tape all around Nashville,” Lovett said. “I got into town, and Guy had given it to everybody. At that point I’d never even met him.”
In 1975 Clark put out his first album, “Old No. 1,” on RCA. The album shows no rust more than 40 years later, a masterpiece comprising 10 story song dioramas that have been recirculated by other artists since. But Clark’s songs were always best narrated by his raspy voice.
His writing was detailed without being cumbersome, sentimental without being treacly. Collaborators described Clark’s process of writing on graph paper, using one box per letter. His use of words was precise.
“Texas Cookin’ ” followed a year later. The title track celebrated food, and “Anyhow, I Love You” celebrated companionship. “I wouldn’t trade a tree for the way I feel about you in the morning, anyhow, I love you,” Clark sang.
“I love that line,” Lovett said. “Nobody else would’ve written it that way. It’s just a beautiful love song. He’s such a tender-hearted person and a sensitive person. Yet such a strong, larger than life figure at the same time. Those contrasts made him interesting.”
Clark would roll up his sleeves every two to five years or, as he put it, “whenever I get 10 good songs together,” for another album.
Clark pumped songs onto the country charts in the ’80s, but through others’ voices. Crowell, Bobby Bare, Vince Gill and Steve Wariner all charted with songs he wrote.
Fame never found Clark as a recording artist, but then he is the one who wrote, “there ain’t no money in poetry, that’s what sets the poet free.”
He relished such freedom.
“Guy Charles put it best. He said, ‘The only rule we had was there ain’t no rules,’ ” Taylor said.
‘A dream come true’
One night 15 years ago at New York City’s Bottom Line, Clark looked out at the crowd and sighed. “I suppose they’ll get after me if I smoke up here,” he said, referring to a recently passed smoking ban. Clark’s eyebrows raised with his shoulders in a shrug, and he wrenched a cigarette between his teeth and lit up anyway.
That approach carried over to his work, which like Clark was distinctive, tough and sensitive.
Clark looked indestructible in the ’90s, which is when his old friend Van Zandt checked out — years of hard living resulted in a fatal heart attack on New Year’s Day 1997.
“I signed up for this gig 30 years ago,” Clark said between tears at the funeral, as he tuned his guitar.
Unlike Van Zandt, whose skills deteriorated toward the end of his life, Clark continued to impress with “Dublin Blues” in 1995, “Cold Dog Soup” in 1999 and “The Dark” in 2002 — works made by an aged master.
“It’s kind of a dream come true to have a room where you write songs and build guitars,” Clark said. “You get stuck writing songs, and you just get up and work. It’s a right brain/left brain thing. Writing is so cerebral. You stare out a window trying to conjure something up. But four steps away you have this real hand/eye type stuff. They sort of feed off one another.”
Clark briefly broke from performing after being diagnosed with leukemia in the early 2000s, but he continued to write. His thick white hair returned, and so did he, touring behind “Workbench Songs” in 2006 and “Somedays the Song Writes You” in 2009.
A 30-song tribute album, “This One’s For Him,” was released in 2011, with contributions by Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Crowell, Lovett and others.
Clark’s pace gradually slowed, though. Susanna died in 2012. A year later Clark put out “My Favorite Picture of You,” inspired by a Polaroid of his wife.
“It’s just a moment in time you can’t have back,” he sang.
The album would be Clark’s last, and like his others — like his songs, and like his guitars — it was perfectly constructed.
Craftsmanship carries a certain amount of pride, but Clark knew there was more to his work than that. He’d leave the songs behind to speak for themselves. And they will.