Fans of Texas songwriter Guy Clark’s celebrated Old No I album finally got to hear the true story behind one of its best-loved songs, ‘LA Freeway’, at a packed Temple Bar Music Centre.
It transpires that Guy and wife Susanna finally upped stakes after their landlord – whose hobby, incidentally, was making his own bullets – chopped down a beautiful grapefruit tree out front because, he solemnly explained to the couple, its roots were undermining the patio. That was the moment the Clarks hit the road and why the song contains the barbed valediction: “Say goodbye to the landlord for me/that son of a bitch he always bored me.”
That’s typical of what you get with the big man: song and story, beautifully played and sung and spoken, full of red dirt poetry, the edginess of acoustic blues and enough good-time country spirit to leave the audience, as he’d put it himself, “cowboyed all to hell”.
Back in Dublin before an adoring crowd, Clark would have had to play all night to satisfy the numerous requests shouted at the stage – and it’s a testament to the quality of his writing that he probably left out as many classics as he performed.
Accompanied by the superb Vernal Thompson on guitar and backing vocals – and, at one point, giving way to his sidekick, for a fine mini-set – Clark unfurled a succession of memorable songs from one of the finest bodies of work in the American canon, including highlights such as ‘Desperadoes Waiting For A Train’, ‘Texas 1947’, ‘Texas Cooking’, ‘Let Him Roll’, ‘Dublin Blues’, ‘The Cape’ and ‘In The Parking Lot’.
Beautifully crafted, funny, touching, insightful and true, the bulk of Guy Clark’s work suggests that he is incapable of writing a dull line let alone a run of the mill song. And he makes the reviewer’s job easy by wrapping it all up himself.
Thus, ‘Stuff That Works’, another of the night’s highlights: ‘Stuff that works, stuff that holds up, the kinda stuff you don’t hang on the wall/Stuff that’s real, stuff you feel, the kinda stuff you reach for when you fall.”
Warmer, wiser and more genuinely life-enhancing than an entire library full of mind/body/spirit codswallop, Guy Clark has the kinda stuff you like to be around.