Austin Blues: the Old Man and the Teen
Though 70 years apart in age, Pinetop Perkins and Gary Clark Jr. were in the same scene
Two of the coolest things about being a music critic in Austin were 1) meeting the legends who made this city home in their final years, and 2) discovering young talent ready to bust out.
Muddy Waters’ longtime piano player Pinetop Perkins was a ninetysomething chainsmoker when he hit the clubs almost nightly, after moving here in 2003. He was entirely approachable, and when fans asked him about some of the all-time Delta greats, rattling off names like Robert Johnson, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James. He would just nod and say, "I knowed 'em."
We can say the same thing about Pinetop and Howlin’ Wolf’s great guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who both passed away in 2011. They walked among us and made us proud to belong to a city that loved and respected blues legends.
Around the same time, new blues history was being made by Gary Clark Jr., who, as a 17-year-old, stole the show from Bobby “Blue” Bland at the Victory Grill in July 2001. Clark joined the Blues Specialists for three numbers and it was like seeing a teen B.B. King on “the Chitlin Circuit”- not just the guitar playing, but the singing. When he tore off some stinging leads on the Albert Collins song “If You Love Me Like You Say,” a booth of middle-aged Black women lost their shit. “Play it Baybee! Give me some blues, child!” they said as they sprung out of their seats. They didn’t know that this part of their youth would ever come back.
The legend and the teen, born seven decades apart, were both part of the new millenium Austin blues scene that hung out at Joe’s Generic and Babe’s on Sixth Street when they weren’t at Antone’s on Fifth. When the blues become your life, age and race and comfort don’t really matter.
Pintop was 97 when he accepted the Grammy with Willie “Big Eyes” Smith for best traditional blues album (Joined at the Hip) in February 2011. Who else could win a competitive award six years after their Lifetime Achievement honor?
The next year Clark completed the festival grand slam by performing on main stages at Coachella in April, Bonnaroo in June, Lollapalooza in August and ACL Fest in October. Killed it. Killed it. Killed it. Totally destroyed.
Pinetop’s goal was to live to be 100, and he almost made it, but died of a heart attack the month after the ‘11 Grammys. He smoked every day since 1922, ate all his meals at McDonald’s, drank whiskey until he was 85, and outlived Jack Lalanne!
His playfulness used to sometimes annoy Muddy, who said Pinetop was “once a man, twice a child.” But fellow Waters sideman Bob Margolin said, “you couldn’t be mad at Pinetop. He lived in the moment ... which could be why he lived so long."
A typical scene at Antone’s in 2010: The crowd steps back a bit to make a path for the old man with a cane. The wisp in a yachting cap takes a chair near the shoeshine stand, while his fulltime assistant Barry Nowlin pulls over a table and takes CDs and DVDs out of a black bag and lays them out. “Mr. Pinetop’s in the house,” someone said as the blues legend lit a cigarette. A woman approached the table, and leaned over her cleavage to hug Pinetop. “You got what I need,” he said, “but I’m too old to do anything about it.”
Everybody laughed, and no one told Pinetop he couldn’t smoke in the club. Just his presence made Austin a little cooler.
As the piano player for Sonny Boy II’s King Biscuit Time radio program in the ‘40s, and his 11 years with Muddy Waters, Pinetop earned his own chapter in blues history. But like that relative youngster Willie Nelson, 20 years his junior, Pine was not one to sit at home and think about all he'd accomplished. Although he didn't quite have the chops of 1969, when Muddy pulled him out of Earl Hooker’s band to replace the great Otis Spann, Perkins could still hang with young blues bands, whose members often got on their cell phones during breaks. "You're not going to believe who I just played with!"
Cab-driving musicians volunteered to be on call to take Pinetop to “McDaniel’s,” as he called McDonald’s, or to the airport, where he’d be greeted at the curb with a boarding pass. “We don't even have to ask," his manager Pat Morgan said in 2010.
"Pinetop is the classic Chicago blues piano player," summated Marcia Ball, who was blissfully present every night when the Muddy Waters Blues Band, with Perkins on piano, played for a week at the original Antone's soon after it opened on Sixth Street in 1975. That cover charge was tuition for a crash course in Chicago blues.
Club owner Clifford Antone, all of 26 at the time, remained close to Perkins through the years, and when he heard that the blues great was living in LaPorte, Ind., with no money and one to look after him, he and others in Austin, including former Muddy harmonica player James Cotton, arranged for Perkins to move here in late 2003.
Grammy's MusiCares assistance program stepped in to help pay emergency expenses for Perkins, who found Nowlin in the phone book, and offered him the job by saying, “I want you to be my boy."
One of Nowlin’s jobs the first two years was to drive Perkins and Clifford Antone to the clubs at night. One of the stops was the Broken Spoke to hang out with James White, who had become Clifford’s closest club owner friend. If the honky tonk band had a piano, Pinetop would usually sit it for a boogie-woogie number that would satisfying jitterbuggers. He played along to country, too.
"For me, Austin's been a place where we all came because there's a pure love of music, with no discrimination of styles," Marcia Ball said. "To see Pinetop at the Broken Spoke just tied together so much of what Austin's about musically."
Knowing adulation is the best medicine, Antone gave other blues pioneers a place to land. You’d see Sumlin, who invented many of the blues and rock riffs we take for granted, at Antone’s every night with a big smile. He’d get up and jam, but the younger hotshot guitarists would be careful not to show Hubert up. That was against the code.
Perkins and Antone were almost inseparable. "It was really an ageless thing," said Clifford's sister Susan. "When Clifford died (heart attack in May 2006), Pine was devastated." Missing his friend, Perkins thought about moving away, but couldn’t leave Austin’s love.
What the town got was a walkin', talkin', boogie-woogie-playing monument to the blues. A live counterpart to the Stevie statue. When the Rolling Stones played Austin for the first time, at Zilker Park in October 2006, the local attraction they most wanted to see was Pinetop Perkins backstage at their show.
It was Perkins, after all, who helped lay down the blueprint for what Memphis producer Sam Phillips called the first rock 'n' roll record in 1951. "Rocket 88" is credited to Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, a band that didn't exist, but it was actually the work of Ike Turner's Rhythm Kings with Brenston on vocals. The driving tune about a powerful car was recorded in the same Memphis studio that would give birth to Elvis Presley's yelp three years later. Turner's idol and mentor growing up in Clarksdale, Miss. was Pinetop Perkins, who taught Ike how to set the rhythm with his left hand on the piano, while aping horn lines with his right hand.
Born in Belzoni, Miss., in 1913 and raised in the Honey Island area of the Delta bottoms, Joe Willie Perkins got his nickname from “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie,” a 1929 hit by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, that Perkins covered in 1953. The original “Pinetop” was shot to death at a dance in Chicago just weeks after his hit was released. But Pinetop II outlived all his friends and relatives. His jampacked funeral was in Austin, not Chicago, where he lived most of his life and made his name. His family was here.
GARY CLARK JR.: AIN’T MESSIN’ WITH THE KID
As a fresh graduate of Austin High, Gary Clark played the very first ACL Festival in 2002, on the smallest stage. At the 2012 fest he performed in front of about 30,000 fans. His full-length major label debut, Blak and Blu, came out on Warner Brothers a couple weeks after ACL, but Clark’s career remains built on a live set that leaves palm prints on foreheads.
Today, the term urban music refers to R&B and rap, but Clark Jr. reminds us that blues was the original urban music, called “race music” in the 1920s, when Blind Lemon Jefferson emerged from Dallas as the nation’s first country blues recording star. With a mastery of the form that’s both natural and psychedelic, this son of a South Austin car salesman has become his generation’s guitar hero, a young Black man proudly taking back the blues in a white world. Sometimes you can go through an entire Clark review without reading the name Jimi Hendrix.
Strike and sustain are guitarist terms that also apply to Clark’s career. He was striking while bookings were hottest, but he knew he needed a great LP to sustain the flash. If he wasn’t on the road he was in the studio. In 2012, when I profiled Clark for Texas Monthly, he hadn’t spent a single night in Austin between SXSW in March and ACL Fest in October. Asked in June if he still lived in a rented house off Brodie Lane, Clark laughed, “I hope so.”
“Hotwire”
Hendrix was inspired by Buddy Guy, who was inspired by Lightnin’ Slim- and that’s the guy Clark wanted to be when blues took over his life just after he turned 13. He wasn’t aware that it was unique for a young African-American to follow the genre’s originators until a teammate on the Austin High J.V. basketball team informed him, “Black folks don’t play the blues.” Knowing he was performing for more than tips and chicks, Clark spent as much time learning as burning. Authenticity is the bacon of Clark’s buffet and among those who’ve piled on the gritty blues reborn are a Beatle named Paul, President Obama, who led a standing ovation at a White House concert, and the older brother of the last young blues guitarist to cause such a stir.
“There are certain things that can’t be taught,” said Jimmie Vaughan, who brought Clark to the attention of Eric Clapton, a major figure in the young bluesman’s rise. “You either get it or you don’t, and even as a 13-year-old, Gary got it. He understands that a solo has a beginning, a middle, and an end. He sings like he plays and he plays like he sings. So smooth.”
Among those who mentored “Hotwire,” as he was nicknamed by the older cats, was vintage Austin blues guitarist W.C. Clark, who played with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton in Triple Threat Revue. When the two got talking about family after a gig at Momo’s, they realized they were actually second cousins.
Backstage at Bonnaroo, where I traveled in June 2012 to interview Clark for Texas Monthly, seemingly every black person he encountered – the guards, the stagehands, the clean-up crew, other musicians – shook his hand, called out a “hey, man,” or gave him a nod and thumbs up. And Clark interacted, very much in his element. He knows he’s got folks rooting for him.
I came all that way to find that the label’s strategy was to limit Gary’s press exposure until the album came out. Even Texas Monthly, with its long lead times, held no clout. With a 30-minute limit, it ended up being one hour of driving for each minute of interview, but I had to take what the label offered. Profiling a veteran of Austin’s music trenches making a name for themselves nationally is something I’ve almost never had the opportunity to do in almost 40 years of covering local music. One has to go back to Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983 to find an Austinite who had a point in his career where Clark found himself in 2012.
Blak and Blu was no Texas Flood. Although it won a Grammy and debuted at #6 on Billboard, sales dropped off and critics kinda yawned. Amazing guitarist, but not much of a songwriter was the tag. Lead-off single “Ain’t Messin’ ‘Round” doesn’t include those words in the lyrics.
To the dismay of label marketers, Blak and Blu was all over the place, its sequencing seemingly picked out of a hat. The only unifier was Clark’s playing, nasty fingerpicking that goes back to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Albert Collins. On that alone, Clark will continue to be called “savior of the blues,” a term to which he’s grown an aversion.
“It’s strange to be called the future or the savior of the blues, because there are so many great musicians that I look up to who’ve kept it going for years,” he said.
But nobody else has made the blues cool to the hip-hop generation. When Warner Bros. held a party for Clark in Manhattan in June 2012, among those on hand were not only actor Leonardo DiCaprio, but Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, Questlove of the Roots, and super-producer Pharrell Williams. Alicia Keys, after duetting with Clark on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at a New York City benefit, gushed for everyone to “Google Gary Clark Jr.” We’ll save you the trouble.
Getting his first guitar, an Ibanez RX20 electric, for Christmas in 1996 at age 12, Clark went to the library and checked out a book on guitar instruction. By his birthday in February, he was working out SRV’s “Pride and Joy” with his friend since third grade, Eve Monsees, who got Clark interested in playing blues guitar when they were in junior high. The two started making the rounds at local clubs, then had a dream fulfilled as teens when Clifford Antone called them onstage to jam with Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Sumlin and Muddy Waters harmonica icon James Cotton. Gary and Eve were 15.
“Gary picked up on it right away,” Monsees said. “He has such an instinctive understanding of music that he can play all sorts of instruments, from the drums, bass and keyboards to violin and sax.” With an older sister and a younger sister playing bass and drums, respectively, Clark’s father, a salesman, tried to mold his offspring into a family band. “He thought he was going to be the next Joe Jackson,” Clark said in 2008, with a chuckle, in reference to the strict patriarch of the Jackson 5. But the Clark kids weren’t down with rehearsing together for hours. Gary Clark Jr. was more in tune with practicing alone in his room all day. There was a big dent in the side of his bed.
“The main thing I learned from people like Jimmie Vaughan and Tony Redman was that it’s not about the flashy solos, it’s about the feel,” Clark said. “The tone is more important than how many notes you can play in 30 seconds.” But Gary can shred when he wants to.
“As soon as I got a hold of a guitar, my grades suffered,” admitted Clark, who jammed often until last call at Joe’s, Babe’s, and Antone’s on school nights. “My parents were telling me, ‘Keep your studies up,’ but I felt I was getting the best education possible down in the clubs.”
“You’re gonna know my name”
But the Austin blues treadmill can wear you down and at 19, Clark took his first trip to New York City. He met up with friends and did the town that first night and, like the lyrics of an old Jimmy Reed song, the teenager in the old bluesman fedora got lost in the bright lights of the big city. Gary and friends happened upon Madison Square Garden and he stopped and stared a long time. One day…
The next morning Gary picked up a guitar and made the Reed song his own with a declaration. “You’re gonna know my name by the end of the night!” Over a steadfast guitar rhythm he sang those words over and over until he had never believed anything more. Gary Clark, who added the Jr., just as Stevie Vaughan added the Ray for cooler billing, had come to the crossroads of his career and knew he had to get back to Texas, to rededicate himself to finding a style that would make him stand out from the crowd.
On his 21st birthday at the Continental Club, Clark floored film director John Sayles, in town searching for a young African-American musician to play lead character Sonny Blake in the 2007 film Honeydripper. Sayles said he thought he’d have to settle for an actor pretending to play guitar and “felt very lucky to have found Gary. The hardest part was getting Gary to be cocky, because that’s not naturally the way he is,” said Sayles.
That was all B.C: Before Crossroads. Clark’s “who’s hot” status owed almost everything to seven sensational minutes onstage at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Chicago, in June 2010. Demonstrating a growth in confidence to go with the beard, Clark did his take on “Bright Lights, Big City” and just as Jimmie Vaughan had long advised him, he made every note count. Guitarist Doyle Bramhall II had to coax Gary to the center of the stage, and the kid from Slaughter Lane has been there ever since. Here’s that performance, which has been viewed more than 24 million times:
Clark married Australian model Nicole Trunfilo in 2016, and later that year bought a 50-acre ranch in Hays County. They have three children, and he has three Grammys.
Ooh. Well done!
Snooks Eaglin - blind dude out of NOLA also was a frequent Antones-ian that could play the eff out of his guitar.