Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It: Guy Clark

Has Guy Clark ever recorded a bad song or released an unlistenable album? Certainly not, so why, you may be wondering include his catalogue in this series? Well, it is because Guy Clark was an acknowledged songwriter having been a founding influence on the Texas Troubadour tradition, and provided songs for the emerging folk country sounds of the new roots music that emerged in the ‘70s, eventually leading to what is now called americana, before he released his major label recording debut for RCA’s Nashville branch. This meant that he had had ten years to hone his songwriting skills and build an impressive catalogue of songs before he had to pay too much attention to his recorded sound.

If you look at various polls and lists, including those on Americana UK,  the general consensus is that Guy Clark’s 1975 debut album, “Old No. 1”, is probably his best. This view is based on the peerless songs it contains, including ‘L.A. Freeway’ and ‘Desperados Waiting For A Train’, and the influence it has had. However, while it is very difficult to argue that “Old No. 1” isn’t Clark’s best collection of individual songs, this feature contends that it isn’t the best representative example of him as an overall artist. When he was signed to RCA they allocated producer Mike Lipskin who recorded Clark with the Memphis Boys and assorted Muscle Shoals musicians. While RCA was happy with the recording, believing it would fit with the then-current Nashville sound, Guy Clark felt it was too country and wasn’t representative of him and refused to have the record released. That left him with a problem as most of the recording budget had been spent, so he went into the studio with his friend Neil Wilburn and his demo tracks and added parts with the help of various friends such as Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.

The RCA version of “Old No. 1” was never released and while Guy Clark and Neil Wilburn’s version was a great critical success, this success was not matched commercially, something the RCA version might have addressed. This tension between the way Clark viewed himself as an artist, and the commercial expectations that major labels had for their artists, was a feature of his early career. He left RCA after his second album, 1976’s “Texas Cookin’ ”, and then moved to Warner Bros. for three albums which again were critical successes but didn’t meet the commercial expectations of the label, before signing with Barry Poss’s Sugar Hill label. By the time Guy Clark joined Sugar Hill he knew who he was as an artist and what sound he wanted, and the label was more than willing to help him achieve his artistic objectives, so much so, that the relationship between Clark and Sugar Hill became symbiotic with Clark helping the label to define its ethos throughout the ‘90s as an americana as well as a bluegrass label. Clark left the label when Barry Poss stopped being president in 2002 after he had sold the label to the Welk Music Group in 1998. Sugar Hill’s live album, 1997’s “Keepers” contains versions of many of Guy Clark’s greatest earlier songs in versions that Clark himself reputedly preferred to the original recordings from the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

As always with these sort of features it is good to hear what readers think, do you agree or disagree with opinions expressed in the future, so don’t be shy with your comments.

Can’t Live With It: “Guy Clark” (1978)

Let’s be clear from the outset, “Guy Clark” is not an album that I can’t live with as it does have some merit, and any fan of Guy Clark should at least hear it, but I do think it is his worst overall album even though it does show part of his development as an overall artist. Guy Clark left RCA because they wanted to sell him to the then-country music audience, something he wasn’t prepared to cooperate with. His reputation as a songwriter was such that Warner Bros. had no qualms about picking him up. While the label may have seemed more hip than RCA as it was based in Los Angeles and in 1978 it had Gram Parsons’ solo albums, Emmylou Harris, and Rodney Crowell; however, Guy Clark’s records were managed by the Nashville arm of the company and were still being aimed at the then-country music audience.

Warner Bros. were keen to release some Guy Clark product, which was a bit of a problem because he was short of new songs at the time. Clark produced the sessions for what became “Guy Clark” with Neil Wilburn, and they brought in members of Willie Nelson’s band, Bee Spears and Mickey Raphael, Albert Lee from Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band, plus various Memphis and Nashville musicians, with guests Rodney Crowell and his friend Kay Oslin, better known later as K. T. Oslin. The sound was a lot richer than the acoustic folk sound of his later career, not only featuring a lot of musicians but also including instruments like a cello. The shortage of original songs was addressed by including four cover versions. According to Clark, this was the first album that he started to really pay attention to how his vocals sounded and were recorded.

The album opens with ‘Fool On The Roof’ and closes with a guitar piece ‘Fool On The Roof Blues’, which is a nice reminder that the blues was a major influence on Clark. Jerry Jeff Walker recorded Clark’s ‘Comfort And Crazy’ before Clark recorded it for this album. Clark himself said that he didn’t think he ever played the song live because it didn’t feel complete. ‘Fools For Each Other’ was written about his wife Susanna, and this was probably the most high-profile track on the album as it was released as a single and was subsequently successfully covered by Johnny Rodriguez and Ed Bruce as a duet with Lynn Anderson. Clark’s time in Houston is the inspiration for ‘Houston Kid’, and ‘Shade Of All Greens’ shows that Clark’s wit is still alive and well.

The covers include Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘In The Jailhouse Now’ which was an established part of Clark’s live show. It was joined by Rodney Crowell’s ‘Voila, An American Dream’, and Walter Cowart’s ‘One Paper Kid’ which was first covered by Emmylou Harris on “Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town”. The Townes Van Zandt cover was ‘Don’t Take It To Bad’.

Warner Bros. released the album with little real promotion and it barely registered with the label’s perceived audience. Guy Clark’s two subsequent Warner Bros albums continued to show him search for his true sound and included better songs and both were produced by Rodney Crowell. 1981’s “The South Coast Of Texas” is a very good album with a great collection of songs and a sound by Crowell that was similar to what he took to the bank with his then-wife, Roseanne Cash, and 1984’s “Better Days” saw a move towards a more folk-based sound and it included the first versions of ‘The Randall Knife’ and ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’.

Can’t Live Without It: “The Dark” (2002)

“The Dark” was Guy Clark’s last record for Sugar Hill, and it is his best overall recording for the label. Also, while Clark continued to write great songs and record excellent albums for Dualtone Records until his death, age and health probably meant that he never quite matched the overall excellence of “The Dark”, taking in the songs, performance and production, which makes it to these ears his most representative work as a complete artist. He is joined by his regular band at the time of Darrell Scott, Verlon Thompson, and Shawn Camp, with guests Tim O’Brien, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, on what is a first for Guy Clark, an album that is comprised of co-writes, except for the mandatory Townes Van Zandt cover.

The songs on the album sit squarely in the Texas storytelling tradition and the overall sense is maybe a little darker than we are used to from Guy Clark. Evidently, it took Clark fifteen years to write a song with Buddy Mondlock and then he wrote two, the opening track ‘Mud’ and the title track.  ‘Mud’ uses mud as a metaphor for life itself, and the title track ‘The Dark’ isn’t as dark as it may initially seem. Clark and Shawn Camp continue the story of ‘Sis Draper’, first begun on “Cold Dog Soup”, with ‘Magnolia Wind’ and ‘Solder’s Joy, 1864’, a song about Sis Draper’s fiddling great-great-grandfather. On one of his visits to Terry Allen, Allen told him someone had shot his dog and the pair wrote ‘Queenie’s Song’ to preserve the incident for posterity. Clark claims that the inspiration for the story song ‘Arizona Star’, written with Rich Alves, was a real woman from his early days in Nashville. Two songs were written with Clark’s neighbour, noted lyricist Steve Nelson, ‘Dancin’ Days’ and ‘Off the Map’. Simplicity can be a powerful songwriting tool if it’s used properly, and this is what Guy Clark and Ray Stephenson achieve on ‘Homeless’ with Guy Clark’s spoken lyrics. The diversity that Guy Clark was able to achieve by working with other writers is clear from ‘She Loves to Ride Horses’, written with Keith Sykes about Syke’s wife, and ‘Bag of Bones’, written with Gary Nicholson about Nicholson’s father. True to his own tradition, Clark includes his version of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’, which was a personal favourite.

The acoustic arrangements and sound on “The Dark” are just about the perfect setting for Guy Clark’s songs, the musicians are almost telepathic in their playing, and Clark’s vocals are probably the best of his career. Some people may feel that the fact this is Clark’s first album that didn’t include any solo-written songs means it can’t be his best album, but we need to remember that every album he recorded after this also didn’t include solo-written songs. Guy Clark himself said that co-writing helps take his songwriting to new and surprising places.

Finally, just a little postscript on the album cover, which also just happens to be about a perfect match for the overall feel of “The Dark”. Guy Clark was also a noted luthier, and all the guitars he made have his signature and bloody thumbprint that can be seen through the sound hole. He originally wanted the album cover to feature a photograph of the sound hole of one of his guitars, but Sugar Hill wanted to just have his bloody thumbprint on a black background. After a tussle, Sugar Hill won out, and Guy Clark’s most representative and perfect album got its perfect cover.

Guy Clark is an artist whose catalogue repays the effort of a full investigation. Just because someone is a great songwriter doesn’t always mean they are necessarily a great recording artist, and Guy Clark the great recording artist took a while to emerge from his chrysalis. Not only did he have to find his style and sound, but he also had to battle the assumptions of his labels that he could be sold to the mainstream country market. Sugar Hill gave Clark the freedom to be truly himself, and his presence on the label allowed it to flourish in the emerging Americana market, a perfect meeting of label and artist.