"Black folks don't play the blues": the ascent of Gary Clark Jr.
Austin guitar hero brings chitlin to the 2012 festival circuit
He went from “the gospel tent” to the main stage in Zilker Park, and it took only a decade.
As an 18-year-old graduate of Austin High, blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. played the very first ACL Festival in 2002. At the 2012 fest he performed in front of about 30,000 fans after destroying crowds everywhere but home in Austin all year. His full-length major label debut, Blak and Blu, came out among fanfare a couple weeks after ACL, but Clark’s career remains built on a live set that leaves palm prints on foreheads.
I had my only Jon Landau “future of…” discovery seeing Gary open for Bobby “Blue” Bland at the Victory Grill- the Austin version of James Brown at the Apollo- in July 2001. The place was so packed you couldn’t get to the restrooms. 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 didn’t know that this part of their youth would ever come back.
Every kid who’s played a guitar and sang in his or her bedroom knows the dream Gary Clark Jr. is living right now. The opposite of Joe’s Generic Bar on Sixth Street (where Clark played for tips as a teen) is playing for tens of thousands of wild-eyed fans night after night. His emphasis on tone and feel plus a lightning-quick thunder of notes put him in a class by himself. He’s the most exciting young guitarist since Robert Randolph. And Clark can sing.
This was the summer of lovin’ GCJ, with the bearded 28-year-old’s ACL appearance completing a 2012 Grand Slam that began at Coachella in April, took him to Bonnaroo in June, and then up to Lollapalooza in August. Killed it. Killed it. Killed it. Mixed in with the big four were appearances at Metallica’s Orion Music + More Fest, Jay-Z’s Made in America Festival, New Orleans’ R&B heavy Essence Music Festival, Sasquatch near Seattle, Alabama’s up-and-coming Hangout Music Festival and Milwaukee’s Summerfest.
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’s been striking while bookings are hot, but he knew he needed a great LP to sustain the flash, so he took his sweet time. Teased by The Bright Lights EP, the first half-album to ever be the lead review in Rolling Stone, the debut LP took a year and a half to record. Forget about writing songs on the tour bus; most of the 13 tracks on Blak and Blu are old Clark tunes re-recorded with a new band, including Austin’s J.J. Johnson on drums and touring guitarist Eric Zapata, another AHS alum.
From South by Southwest in mid-March until last week, Clark didn’t spend a single night in Austin. Asked in June if he still lived in a rented house off Brodie Lane, Clark laughed, “I hope so.” The new album ends with “Next Door Neighbor Blues,” an acoustic number that plays off his fear of coming home to find his belongings piled up in front of the house.
“I miss my family like crazy,” he said of his three sisters and parents. “My oldest sister had a baby and my youngest sister graduated from high school and I wasn’t there, which really hurt.”
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 at age 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, a sitting U.S. president who led a standing ovation, 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.
When he and his sisters were young, father “Big Gary” tried to organize them into a family group, but the younger Gary, who once wanted to be the next Michael Jackson and claims to have the Thriller moves down, was born to go solo.
He lived on the edge of his bed, where a permanent dent attests to the hundreds of hours he spent trying to figure out “how did they get that sound?” Clark spent five years, ages 13 to 18, trying to replicate what he heard on records, and the last decade trying to duplicate what he heard in his head.
Backstage at Bonnaroo, where I traveled in June 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.
Yet like a young MJ, Clark doesn’t seem comfortable with media attention. When it came time for our 30-minute interview, with a publicist nearby keeping time, the words to his song “Don’t Owe You a Thing” rang true. “Me and this guitar is all you get.” He repeats each question to give himself more time to think.
Don’t mistake Clark’s shyness for aloofness. He didn’t like to talk about himself (or Warners didn’t want him to during the mystique-building process), which made 15 hours of driving each way to Bonnaroo seem silly in retrospect. I walked in pain, two weeks before my hip replacement, so Gary’s the only act I saw before I got back in my car for the long ride home.
It ended up being one hour of driving for each minute of the interview, but I had to take what the label offered. Profiling a veteran of Austin’s music trenches who’s making a name for themselves nationally is something I’ve almost never had the opportunity to do in over 35 years of covering local music. For every Timbuk3, Butthole Surfers, Fabulous Thunderbirds or Spoon, there are dozens of Sincolas, Poi Dog Ponderings, and David Garzas who “just can’t miss,” but do. 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 is no Texas Flood. Nor is it trying to be. Co-producer Mike Elizondo helmed projects as dissimilar as Mastodon, Fiona Apple, 50 Cent, Maroon 5, and Avenged Sevenfold, so he met Clark at the crossroads of being both comforted and challenged by the limitations of the blues.
“I have so many influences – Bob Marley, Parliament-Funkadelic, hip-hop, jazz, Jackson 5,” said Clark, whose Covington Junior High vocal group Young Soul won the school’s talent show. “They’ve been creeping in to my sound.”
No doubt to the dismay of label marketers, Blak and Blu is all over the place. Lead-off single “Ain’t Messin ‘Round” doesn’t include those words and the album sequencing feels picked out of a hat. If it sounds patched together, that’s because it was. The only unifying constant is 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 reasoned.
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 Hubert Sumlin and Muddy Waters harmonica icon James Cotton. The 15-year-olds were hooked.
“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.”
But the Austin blues treadmill can wear you down and at 19, Clark took his first trip to New York City in 2003. 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 current “who’s hot” status owes 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.
He had previously released three self-produced local CDs, playing every instrument on 110, named after the apartment he recorded it in. After Crossroads, Warner Bros. signed Clark and Sheryl Crow’s manager Scooter Weintraub took over the young bluesman’s career based on that one song – that single performance in Chicago. Who needs American Idol?
A dozen years after his Austin High classmate stunned Clark with the assertion that the blues are played only by white people, an older African-American approached the guitarist after rehearsal for a PBS performance and thanked him for keeping alive the tradition forged by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and many, many more Blacks who migrated to urban centers and electrified old field hollers.
“It was such an honor to meet President Obama,” acknowledged Clark of February’s “Red, White and Blues” event in the East Room of the White House. The commander in chief, seated with the first lady in the front row the next night, bobbed his head enthusiastically as Clark’s music took him back to the south side of Chicago. “Here I was, this black guy from Austin, Texas, up there with Buddy Guy and B.B. King, playing for the first black president.
“I felt like I was a part of history.”
That event was a footnote compared to the true legacy Clark’s helping expand. He’s the latest car on that Texas blues train going from Blind Lemon Jefferson to T-Bone Walker to Lightnin’ Hopkins to Freddy King, and continuing through Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Gatemouth Brown, Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan. That’s his lineage.
The blues had a baby and that baby’s name is Gary Clark Jr.