A Conversation with Guy Clark – HuffPost 8.19.13

Mike Ragogna: Guy, hey. My Favorite Picture Of You is your first studio album in about four years.

Guy Clark: Has it been that long?

MR: It seems it has, sir. In general, what’s your writing process like?

GC: Well, it’s different every time. I try to write about stuff I know about rather than just total fiction, I’m not especially good at that. If you’ve got something that sounds like a song, it probably is.

MR: Out of all of the songs on this project, if one were to start somewhere other than the first track, is there a song that you think might be a good place to learn a little more about Guy Clark?

GC: Well I would have to guess “The High Price Of Inspiration.”

MR: Nice, which is sort of what we were just talking about–inspiration.

GC: That’s a good place to start. They’re all personal songs, they’re not totally made up.

MR: In the song “Heroes,” a veteran returns, basically, changed. What inspired that? Was that a real person or just your feelings about the subject?

GC: There was either a newspaper article or a television documentary about the number of those young guys who come back from the Middle East who kill themselves. There are more suicides coming back from those wars over there than have ever been in the history of the United States–Vietnam, World War II, anything. More of these kids come back and kill themselves, simply because they can’t deal with what they did or what they saw. It was just something I felt like addressing. That’s where that’s coming from.

MR: And in a bigger sense, talking about them as being “heroes,” as in these people are unsung heroes of those wars.

GC: Yeah, I mean they are heroes. They just can’t live with what happened to them.

MR: Yeah, it’s very difficult. I think we’ve had wars before where it was more defined and you could see your place in it, but in these wars it seems like there was no definition. Planes going into the World Trade Center was almost the only reference they had before they got over there.

GC: Yeah, I think that’s probably true.

MR: Guy, there’s a Polaroid of Susanna that you’re holding on the front cover.

GC: Yes.

MR: When and where was that taken?

GC: Oh, it was taken probably in the late seventies or early eighties. It was taken in John Lomax’s house; he’s the grandson of the famous Lomax family. Townes Van Zandt… we’re in there drunk off our asses just being jerks and getting worse and Susanna had enough. She just walked out and said, “F**k you guys!” Somebody–it might have been Lomax–picked up a Polaroid camera and snapped that picture. It has always been my favorite picture of Susanna. I’ve saved it all of these years. It just said everything about Susanna.

MR: You guys have written songs together over the years in addition to doing your own stuff. What was it like collaborating creatively with your Susanna?

GC: Oh, it was not a planned thing. We didn’t do it very often. But when we did, it seemed to work well. We wrote a great song called “Black-Haired Boy,” and I helped her write “The Cape.” We just wrote whenever we felt like it, whenever it came up. She wrote with other people quite a bit. We didn’t try too hard at it, to keep it from getting tedious.

MR: I imagine you really still miss her, don’t you.

GC: Well, of course, sure. That’s forty years of glue to unstick.

MR: You’ve been given many awards in your life including the Americana Association’s Life Achievement in 2005, and in 2013 you received the Academy Of Country Music’s Poet’s Award along with Hank Williams. How did that feel?

GC: Well nobody invited me to the show, they didn’t pay my way to LA.

MR: Oh, dear God.

GC: I don’t now what it was, I had no idea what it was about. It was just something they did and I was pleasantly surprised and very flattered, but I think the poet’s award is sort of an afterthought.

MR: You’ve also had multiple Grammy award nominations.

GC: Oh yeah, I always get nominated the same year as Bob Dylan.

MR: [laughs] That’s terrible!

GC: Kind of precludes getting it.

MR: Remember in the mid-seventies when Paul Simon won Album of the Year and thanked Stevie Wonder for not having an album out that year?

GC: Yeah, right! That’s kind of the way I feel.

MR: Guy, you’re not only an icon but you sort of represent Texas. What are your thoughts on Texas these days? What’s going on?

GC: I’m from Texas and will always be from Texas, and if I ever break even, I’m moving back. It’s a wonderful place to be from. There’s a lot of history there and a lot of stuff that you know about and nobody else knows about.

MR: It’s almost like you can’t get off of that “L.A. Freeway.”

GC: Yeah! [laughs]

MR: That’s one of my favorite songs by you, “L.A. Freeway.” I think it introduced me to your songwriting.

GC: Oh good, good.

MR: There was a guy named Jim Dawson who did a cover of the song, too, that I thought was going to be a hit.

GC: Yeah, I remember him. I haven’t thought of him in years, but I do remember that.

MR: A lot of very talented people have covered your material such as Johnny Cash, Vince Gill, Ricky Scaggs… And I believe you were sort of a mentor of sorts to Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell, right?

GC: I’ve heard that term bandied about. I never felt like a mentor or tried to be a mentor, I was writing songs just like everybody else. If they chose to characterize it that way, I’m more than happy to help anybody do anything. Something about the term “mentor” doesn’t sit well with me.

MR: I guess a better way of saying it would be they were inspired by you?

GC: I’m sure they were because I was inspired by people.

MR: Who inspired you?

GC: Well, Townes and I were best friends for thirty or forty years, and I was always inspired by the quality of his work. You don’t want to be Townes or you don’t want to be like Townes, but you certainly want to aspire to be able to use the English language as well as he did. That’s the main thing. Plus he was the funniest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life. He was hilarious.

MR: Can you share a Townes/Guy story?

GC: If I had thought about it before you asked me that question I might have. Every day was a story, just like that picture on the cover of that album. Townes and I were in that house just being absolute jerks.

MR: You’ve been writing for about forty years and so many people have covered your material. Do you have any thoughts about your catalog, like what your favorite song is or highlights?

GC: I think always my favorite song has been “She Ain’t Going Nowhere.” Something about that song is just so succinct and so well written. It only took about forty-five minutes to write it. It just popped out. It’s a song I guess based on the way I feel about women and the way I was brought up. It just said it all, really.

MR: Are there any covers of your songs that you particularly like?

GC: Oh yeah, “Desperados Waiting For A Train.” Remember the old cowboy actor Slim Pickens? He read “Desperados Waiting For A Train” as a poem on an album he did. It was spine tingling.

MR: Geez, you’ve had adventures with everybody. Did you have a Jimmy Buffett wild night or two?

GC: Yeah, a couple! I’ve known Buffett a long time. He’s kind of drifted away, but I know him.

MR: Jerry Jeff Walker?

GC: Oh yeah, I’ve known Jerry, I don’t know, forty or fifty years. Jerry’s a big inspiration simply because he was actually doing it. People were always talking about him going on the road and being a traveling folk singer and all that stuff. Jerry did it. He was one of those guys. He writes so many songs that are just wonderful.

MR: What is your advice for new artists these days?

GC: Write what you know about. I don’t know… How do you tell a new artist who’s making a million bucks riding around on a magic bus just because some record company decided to get behind him but they can’t get on stage with a guitar and play a guitar for you. My advice to new artists is to be the best that you can and stay out of jail.

MR: [laughs] You wrote a couple of other songs that are personal favorites of mine such as Vince Gill’s recording of “Oklahoma Border Line.”

GC: Yeah, that’s a good song.

MR: And there was John Conlee’s “The Carpenter”

GC: Yeah, that was a wonderful surprise that John picked up on that song and did it and it was a hit. That’s another of my favorite songs.

MR: Steve Warner’s “Baby, I’m Yours”…

GC: Yeah, we wrote that for him to do.

MR: And then you have the Rodney Crowell collaboration, which is probably is one of my top five songs of yours, “She’s Crazy For Leaving.”

GC: Yeah, yeah. Rodney does that really well. Once in a while, when we’re together playing the same gig, we’ll try to remember it together.

MR: Guy, what is the one piece of advice you would give Guy Clark as he was starting out?

GC: You couldn’t tell him nothing.

MR: [laughs] Are you going to be touring in support of the album?

GC: As soon as I get my strength back. I’ve had both knees replaced fairly recently and an arterial bypass in one leg. I was kind of laid up for a couple of years and I kind of lost the muscle mass in my quadriceps. It’s really just debilitating. It f**ks with your balance, it f**ks with your balance, it f**ks with your ability to walk any distance or stand on stage. I got to where I had to sit down to play.

MR: But you’re making progress, right?

GC: Yeah, slowly. I’m seventy-one, it’s hard to build that muscle mass back, you know? But I get stronger every day and I work at it, as hard as I feel like.

MR: All right, boss. I wish you all the best and thank you for this interview.

GC: Oh, thanks. I appreciate it.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne