RIP Guy Clark!
(photo by Wyatt McSpadden, from "Texas Monthly" article) 

“There's a greyhound leaving at midnight
If you came with me it'd be like a dream
Come on Magdalene
Move with me Magdalene”

-from “Magdalene”, by Guy Clark

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYE-hFrQRug

 

Heroes have been on my mind a lot lately . . .  

 

In the song “Wild American”, Kris Kristofferson sings “heroes happen when you need ‘em”, which is certainly true.  All mine seem to be dying off or at least have one foot in the grave.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYHULA-DEg



Kris Kristofferson
(source: Wordpress.com)

I had tickets to a music festival this summer in Muskogee, Oklahoma, headlined by Merle Haggard.  But he died on his 79^th birthday doing what he loved.  RIP Merle!

 



Merle Haggard
(source: Chris Felver/Getty Images)       

And then there’s Guy Clark who died earlier this month.  He’s well known as the grandfather of Nashville and Austin singer-songwriters and in roots music, Americana and old country and blues circles.  But to me he simply wrote the best songs I’ve ever heard in my life.  Soul songs, from the Earth - about Mexicans and whores and lovers, guitars and pocket knives, the sweep of dark sky and stars in the Texas night, and let’s not forget good Texas cooking.  He played them all on a guitar he built himself.  They were so good I couldn’t help but pick up the guitar and learn to play his songs . . . to know for a little while the feel of his words as they rolled off my tongue, breath speaking, soul speaking, the pleasant pain in my fingers from all those Guy Clark chords. 

 He was also the first, along with his wife Susanna, to hear the words to that immortal song by Townes Van Zandt called "If I Needed You".  Some say it’s the best song ever written.  Townes was staying with Guy and Suzanna in Nashville.  And one morning after a long night of drinking and nightmares, he stumbled down the stairs and recited the lyrics of this song to Guy and Suzanna, which he’d dreamed the night before . . .   

 

Here’s Guy Clark singing Townes’ song “If I Needed You”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNPxpoqxbZQ

       

Jim Harrison, another hero, whom I’ve already written about.  He died this spring at the age of 79 doing what he loved at his ramshackle adobe casa in the Arizona desert, surrounded by coyotes and rattlesnakes not to mention several dozen Mexican migrants crossing through his backyard every day.  Word on the street was that he was working on a poem.  Apropos!  I figured Jim would be one of those to wander off into the woods and pull a Hemingway with a twelve-gauge shotgun, leaving the cleanup to the ravens and porcupines.  But I think he realized in the 70s that just knowing his daughter existed was enough to keep a man alive in the face of overwhelming despair.  



Drawing by Victoria

I’m struggling with stress and anxiety with work and family and minor personal neuroses, but I’m fighting against these spirit zapping tendencies in tiny ways, trying to hold on and be me in a world where value and success is about achieving the American Dream Donald Trump-style.   It seems my life is rather ADD these days, with little time to sit still in the quiet morning behind my desk or on the back patio sipping Mexican beer or coffee.  I’m daydreaming right now (and night dreaming too) of getting lost on distant highways riding my Lucinda and also spending time at the edge of the lake roasting marshmallows and playing water toy fetch with my dog Georgia. 

 

Earlier this spring I met a woman on the patio of the Red Cup.  Her name was Victoria, and she was literally bat shit crazy - bi-polar and a drunk.  It was an experience from the underworld which I haven’t experienced in a long time in my comfortable and clean middle class existence. 

 

We spent an afternoon talking and drinking beer and looking through her family pictures of a family who’d disowned her.  We spent the afternoon laughing.  Well, she would laugh mightily and then cry tears of unbelievable pain within the same sentence and breath.  She lived in an old, inherited house that was once grand but far from grand now.  She was poor as a church mouse, so much so that she didn’t have electricity or gas or even a toilet seat.    

 

We went upstairs to a room to see her paintings, a room slowly falling back to the Earth . . . plaster falling from the ceilings, water percolating through the cracks.  She showed me her colorful paintings and tattoo sketches from the 1970s.  My favorite tattoo sketch was one of a bikini clad biker girl sitting on a Harley chopper in front of a Peterbuilt truck, because it reminded me of my 1970s childhood and redneck biker/trucker uncles from Arkansas. 

 

For reasons I don’t quite understand she had an impact on me from an artistic point of view.  So I was thinking about changing the name of my motorcycle from Lucinda (named after Lucinda Williams) to Victoria.  But then I changed my mind because I found out a few weeks ago she died alone and crazed from some terrible blood clot. 

 

I knew back then that she didn’t have much time left on this earth.  I could see it in her eyes.  We talked about our heroes back then, sitting on her patio.  And in some strange way she became my hero that day.