Craftsman. Guy Clark stepped into that label nearly three decades ago, and it's been stuck to the bottom of his boot ever since. The comparison has been the same for years: His best friend, the late great Townes Van Zandt, was the mad poet; Guy Clark was the craftsman, the storyteller.| Does he ever tire of the label? "Yeah, I do," Clark says, before pausing to reflect. "And I guess I could have done something about it at the time, but it's like, shit, call it what you want. I'm a writer. I've already done what I do."
It's not an inappropriate description. Clark's songs reflect a sense of nuance and detail that comes with a well-honed writing hand. His talent for building and repairing guitars, as well as a former stint as a carpenter, don't do much to dispel the label. But pigeonholing Guy Clark as a craftsman is akin to calling Michael Jordan a jock; it fails to capture all that makes Clark one of the finest songwriters since Woody Guthrie.
Clark's songs are well crafted. They do tell great stories with consummate detail. But perhaps their most striking quality is that they still stand sturdily when separated from the music. Despite myriad covers by top shelf musicians and interpreters -- from Johnny Cash to Ricky Skaggs, Texas legends from Nanci Griffith to Jerry Jeff Walker, and contemporary country kids from Vince Gill to Steve Wariner -- Clark's spare arrangements of his own songs nearly always trump the more bombastic versions.
"Of course I do 'em better than anybody else -- I wrote 'em," Clark says, half joking. "The only one exception I can think of -- remember that old cowboy actor, Slim Pickins? He read 'Desperados Waiting for a Train' as a poem on a record he put out with the music going underneath it. It's stunning."
"There ain't no money in poetry/That's what sets the poet free," he sings on the title track of Cold Dog Soup, his eleventh album. Clark is notoriously independent in writing, performing and recording his albums. Yet he claims he's never above trying to write a song when a platinum artist is fishing for new material. "I'm not trying to be that artsy," he says laughing. "You know, no sell out too small." It seems Clark fits Kris Kristofferson's description of Johnny Cash, "a walking contradiction."
Clark's style of work reflects this contradiction. On one hand there's the new track "Red River," in which he returns to the natural creation that has appeared and reappeared in his songs over the years. On Cold Dog Soup, Clark finally got around to spotlighting the river that ran through his childhood memories. Well, not exactly. "I wrote that song over twenty years ago," Clark says, dispelling any notion that he takes shortcuts with his work. "I could never get it quite right; something that didn't come across. And I finally fixed a couple of lines. You know, all you got to do is be patient. Both of my parents were from Oklahoma, and my grandmother lived right by the Red River. So it was back and forth. And you know, John Wayne. Hell, it's the Red River man."
Another standout on the new album is the surreal title track, which features a summit of (mostly) dead, underground poets holding court in a West Coast club. "I wrote that song with a friend of mine named Mark Sanders," he says. "We were just sitting around talking. And it turned out that we were both playing in this club in San Diego, or Mission Beach in like 1970. We didn't know each other then. But that was the club we played. And Tom Waits was the doorman. Literally. And I don't know, we just got to goofing on it. And it was more like an impressionist painting, but as true as we could make it. I like songs like that, so I write them."
Cold Dog Soup seems pulled from the genre that Van Zandt dubbed "sky songs"; songs that arrived in tact with no rolling up of the sleeves. Despite his reputation as the consummate story songwriter, Clark is equally comfortable with both forms. "It's both and that's good," he says of his balance between these different brands of songs. "There's something to really be said for working hard and having something to show for it. It doesn't all fall out of the sky, nor is it all drudgery."
That said, while recording his latest album, Clark did the unthinkable in today's bigger, better, faster biz: he stuck with a formula that has worked for him for decades. "It was just me and Verlon and Darrell," he says of the sessions with longtime cohorts and champions of the lost art of understated picking, Verlon Thompson and Darrell Scott. "We just sat in a circle in the center of the room, everything wide open, and we just played it live. And all the vocals are live like that. It's just a collaborative, creative process. We made a joke about it: We would get just a beautiful little reverb sound on the vocals with everything, just kind of like a living room, and then just turn it off. Kind of like making a real dry martini."
It's the very picture of complacency, and Clark makes no excuses for the rare comfort zone he's found in his work. "Yeah, shit...it's the best job I ever had," he says simply. "I mean, I'm in no rush. The only reason I got to record is if I got ten or twelve new songs. It's totally up to me. Like I said, nobody's making me do anything." Some people work a lifetime to achieve the kind of vocational freedom that Guy Clark has found. He laughs, "I don't know, it seems real simple."
ANDREW DANSBY
(November 15, 1999)