Guy Clark RIP

[Tony]

I have just seen that Guy Clark has died today.

Another great loss to music this year.

[Steven]

Very sad news. Guy Clark was a standard-bearer for authentic, uncompromising
lyrical expression for his fans and songwriters of substance. May he rest in peace.

[Kush]

wow another one shuffles of this mortal coil ! Steve Young, Merle Haggard and now Guy Clark - three who shaped my musical taste. In truth, Guy Clark has not been looking very good for a while now. There is a DVD on his life and music 'Without getting killed or Caught' - old friends gathered around Guy Clark just like always...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16IxUN-qEUc


Susanna, Oh Susanna when it comes my time
Won't you bury me south of that Red River line

Susanna Clark passed away before him..

[Kush]

Very nice article by Guy Clark's cousin...

http://www.chron.com/local/gray-matters ... 881345.php

Guy Clark taught me to see Texas, and to realize it was the stuff of song and poetry. The singer-songwriter, who was my cousin, died Tuesday, amid grief from the many artists who worked with him and covered his songs, from Steve Earle to Rodney Crowell to Rosanne Cash.

When I was a little girl, Guy visited us in Kingsville, playing the Mexican songs and flamenco beats that initially drew him to guitar. We sat on the patio by candlelight in the soft South Texas night with the cicadas for accompaniment. Guy was 24 years my senior, so I never knew him when he did not possess some degree of fame.

He was tall, handsome, dark-haired and charismatic, and I was a little in awe of him. My father, an English professor when Guy briefly was a student at Texas A&I, recognized even then that he was a poet.

For both Guy and me, poetry and literature made us. Guy's father, Ellis L. Clark, a lawyer who was Aransas County Attorney, didn't own a television. He spent evenings reading poetry with Guy and his sisters, Jan and Caroline. My parents did the same. The spoken word pounded into our brains and created writers. Jan remembers the family reading Stephen Vincent Benet, Robert Service, Longfellow, Whitman, and Ogden Nash. I spent long days at his parents' Rockport house, with his striking mercurial black-haired mother, Frances, and his debonair father.

Cigarette smoke and long conversations filled this house of sharp wit, beautiful words and cruelties, ice clinking in the glasses. There was much complication and pain in Guy's life, as in all lives. But even as he seemed at times to drown in his own difficulties, he turned hurt to song.

Later, I came to know Guy as an adult. After his concerts, we would retreat to one of the great hotels of Texas, The Driskill or the Menger, talking, laughing, sharing our pain, staying up all night catching up. He encouraged me in writing, and taught me to live as an artist — with passion — loving and creating without measure or fear. Through him I became familiar with some of the great songwriters of our time, like Townes van Zandt and Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and Lyle Lovett.

When I studied literature at Yale, my professors transmitted the notion that the green hills of England and the streets of New York were the subjects worthy of great writing. But I knew differently, because I had Guy. I knew that the parking lot behind a Texas bar was art: "Sittin' on the fender of someone else's truck, drinkin' Old Crow whiskey, and hot 7UP." He had worked on the shrimp boats of Rockport as a teenager, and he showed me that they were poetry, as they sailed for the Mexican Bay of Campeche with the deckhands singing "Adios Jolie Blonde."

I met Jack, the wildcatter in "Desperados Waiting for a Train," when visiting my Aunt Rossie, (Guy's grandmother), in the bleak little West Texas town of Monahans. She always fascinated me as a child because she had a wooden leg, which the doctor had amputated on the kitchen table when she was 12. She was a bootlegger and ran the Clark Hotel, where old men came to live and often stayed until they died. Jack was her boyfriend. I had seen the "old men with beer guts and dominoes, lying about their lives while they played." Because of Guy, the traditional New Haven bar of Mory's, where Yalies drank from silver cups and the Whiffenpoofs sang, held no more glamour for me than the Green Frog Café, where Jack sipped beer and played Moon and 42.

I will meet Guy's sisters in June, in Rockport, in the house where his parents lived, and Guy's grandmother before them. We'll eat the shrimp and hot sauce he loved, and watch the boats on the water. I'll remember him as a man I loved, as will they. But we also will look out on a world that is different because Guy Clark wrote about it. A true artist changes the way we see, and Guy Clark created a Texas of the imagination. As we gaze toward the watery horizon, perhaps we will spot a shrimper named Captain Flint in the distance, pushing off in a boat called the Miss Inclined. Maybe we even will see someone who looks a bit like a young Guy Clark, working the deck, pulling up the heavy nets.

Dr. Mary Lee Grant teaches history and political science at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. She is a specialist on the U.S. -Mexican border and a freelance writer.

[Steven]

Hi Kush,

Thank you for sharing Dr. Grant's excellent article. I especially enjoyed reading about the
presence of poetry in Guy Clark's upbringing. Guy Clark had some of the finest works of
poetry as learning models in his home.

Guy Clark would humble some songwriting contemporaries and himself by playing a recording
of Dylan Thomas reading poetry. No doubt, this brought about awe and played a part in the
setting of high artistic standards.

[Kush]

Hi Steven,

Yes I agree about the presence of poetry and literature and Guy Clark's life. Reading poetry every evening sounds very 19th century . I think some of his finest recordings are spoken word pieces and he had quite a few of them...Randall Knife, Homeless, The Dark, Let Him Roll to name a few off the top of my head. Those were no doubt influenced by his upbringing.
I came across two other articles from Texas Monthly online - these are from before his death and give a lot of details of his later life, the last years of Susanna Clark (a little sad) and his advocacy of all other artists and their music. Townes Van Zandt was a constant presence in their lives....

For the next five years Guy took care of both Susanna and Van Zandt, whose tendency to drink could no longer be euphemized as part of his job. Club owners didn’t want to book him anymore, and most of his gigs were on mini-tours Guy set up for the two of them. Guy would ensure that Van Zandt made it to airports, hotels, and the stage, none of which was easy. Or fun. On New Year’s Day 1997, a week after falling and breaking his hip, Van Zandt had a heart attack and died. And Susanna began her own long, slow descent.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/he ... g-nowhere/

http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture ... last-look/

I have not read the second article yet...

Desperados Waiting for a Train (Austin City Limits, 1977)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KKgfX1g_w

[Steven]

HI Kush,

Watching the 1977 video clip of "Desperados Waiting For A Train" that you linked to, and then
watching one of Guy Clark performing the song at his 70th birthday concert (now that he too
has passed away), illustrates some things going full circle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8wp1oDSekA.

[Kush]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the 70th birthday clip. The violin makes gives it a different and more melancholy vibe - suggesting that an old man is recalling something from his childhood (or maybe I am inventing that subjective interpretation in my mind !). Very different from the 1977 version which I prefer. Actually I would love to get hold of that particular ACL concert - the understated electric guitar is very cool.

Have been listening to a lot of Guy Clark since his death - mostly his debut album 'Old No.1' and the live album 'Keepers'...I think his best writing is in poetic expression of little snapshots of life...

South Coast of Texas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8B4kKBgCsY

The south coast of Texas is a thin slice of life
It' s salty and hard, it is stern as a knife
Where the wind is for blown up hurricanes for showin'
The snakes how to swim and the trees how to lean

...Ah this livin' on the edge of the waters of the world
Demands the dignity of whooping cranes
And the like of Gilbert Roland


Out in the Parking Lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58rrs7Wvdjo

He has forever immortalized the parking lot of a Texas bar for me...

Instant Coffee Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2_Me2V2jyQ

I read somewhere that he never played Instant Coffee Blues live...perhaps it is too personal. maybe a clue here...

She felt wholly empty like she felt it every time
He was feeling just the same 'cept he's trying to make it rhyme

Let Him Roll (spoken word by JT Van Zandt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4FTmCo8xE

Cold Dog Soup (spoken word by James McMurtry)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jwuzD-OHFE

He's full of angst and hillbilly haiku