The Cosmic Country movement was "just a lot of fun. It was people playing kinda-sorta country music, for an audience that had never really connected with it."
—Guy Clark

So, what was your first Guy Clark song? Not necessarily your current favorite, or the very first one you ever heard. But which was the first Guy Clark song that grabbed you by the lapel and demanded your attention, the first you ever took drinking and stared in the eye at 3 a.m.? The first that dared you to do something stupid or brave, or goaded you to do something kind and loving?

The tall Texan's been writing great American tunes—love songs, story songs, funny songs, heartbreaking songs, and even superior food songs—for nearly 30 years now. Even if you're not a rabid Guy Clark fan, chances are, if you're into honest music of any sort, you've encountered at least some of Clark's repertoire.

So which was your first one?

For me, it was "Desperados Waiting For A Train." I came upon the song via Jerry Jeff Walker's Viva Terlingua, that seminal collection of early '70s Texas songs. "Desperados" is the story of an old man and a young boy who looks up to him as friend and hero: "He's a drifter, a driller of oil wells/He's an old school man of the world/He taught me how to drive his car when he was too drunk to/And he'd wink and give me money for the girls...." The verse that always get to me is the one in which the boy realizes the old man is rapidly aging. "To me he was a hero of this country/So why's he all dressed up like them old men?" In that harsh moment the kid realizes the old man's mortality, that his own time on earth is limited, that nothing is permanent. The story is too strange, too sad, too damn sweet not to be true.

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Turns out the old man was Clark's grandmother's boyfriend, and the story is typical of Clark's uncanny ability to translate the joys and pains and deeply human characters of real life into song. Clark was born in the little West Texas town of Monahans a month and a day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His father, Ellis Leon Clark, was an attorney, a good man immortalized in another moving song, "The Randall Knife." It's about a blade that the songwriter's mother gave her husband before he went off to battle in WWII, and how the well-made knife came to symbolize his father's life. The saddest part of the song is not when his father dies, but when young Clark accidentally breaks part of the blade off at a Boy Scout camping trip. "I hid it from him for awhile/But the knife and he were one/He put it in his bottom drawer/Without a hard word one."

Although his boyhood adventures—and the characters he met in the hotel his grandmother ran in his hometown—inspired many of Clark's songs, he did not start writing tunes as a professional musician until his early 30s. "I guess I made a decision to do it about in 1971," says Clark. "I'd worked different jobs around. I had a couple of guitar shops, you know, guitar repair and just different stuff. I'd gone to several colleges. But about the time I was 30 I actually decided to try to make a go of it." At the time he was singing mainly traditional folk music and the odd Bob Dylan song, and he'd only written a handful of original songs. "The only one you'd recognize might be 'Step Inside This House,' which Lyle Lovett did on his new album. [It's the title song of Lovett's 1998 double CD tribute to the Texas songwriters he idolized as a youth.] That was actually the first song I ever wrote.... I figured if Townes Van Zandt could do it, anybody could do it."

Even though the legendary Van Zandt has been dead for a couple of years (he died on New Year's Day 1997, the same day of the year as Hank Williams and soul troubadour Ted Hawkins), Clark seems to enjoy gently ribbing his late pal and musical co-conspirator. Clark recalls the early years in the mid '60s with Van Zandt and how they hooked up. "He lived in Houston, I lived in Houston. We just sort of ran into each other around folk music circles." The two would remain close friends for 35 years. Van Zandt basically drank himself to death, but Clark said he did not see it coming. "Everybody's gonna die," he says. "You can't foresee something like that. He was in as good of shape as he'd ever been."

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Clark & Thompson at the 1999 Thirsty Ear Festival. Photo by Jack Kotz

Van Zandt wasn't the only influential musician floating around the Houston folk scene in those days. There were a couple of Texas blues titans named Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin' Hopkins who were revered in that circuit. "Mance, I knew him, yeah," Clark says. "Oh hell yeah, he was a great, charming gentleman. I met him in the '60s in Houston, him and Lightnin' both." Clark proudly admits being influenced by these bluesmen. "My song 'Texas Cookin' '—I was actually trying to learn to play one of Mance's songs when that song came out."

Clark's time in the Houston folk community also introduced him Ronald Crosby, better known as Jerry Jeff Walker, who would greatly influence Clark's future career as a songwriter. "I've known Jerry since the mid '60s. You know he was one of those guys hitchhiking around the country playing folk music and writing songs." Walker, who had enjoyed a minor hit with his own "Mr. Bojangles" (a major hit for The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in '71) recorded two Clark songs—"Old Time Feeling" and "L.A. Freeway"—on his self-titled '72 album. "That was the first one that got me any recognition," Clark says.

But Walker was not the first to cover a Guy Clark song. "Actually the first song that I ever had anyone cut was called 'A Nickel For The Fiddler,' which the Everly Brothers did. They did it in 1972, I guess. It was the last album they made together before they broke up. It was on my first album too."

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Clark eventually married and moved to Nashville—"but of course Texas was always home"—right about the time a frustrated singer/songwriter named Willie Nelson made musical history by leaving Nashville to set up base in Austin. Jerry Jeff Walker, his hitchhiking days behind him, also moved to the Texas capital and the strange and still influential Outlaw Country movement or Cosmic Cowboy scene was born. One of the most important musical monuments of that era was Walker's Viva Terlingua, and the most powerful tune on the album is "Desperados Waiting For A Train." Even though he was no longer living in Texas, Clark was viewed as royalty in Cosmic Cowboydom because of his songs.

"It was just a lot of fun," he recalls. "It was people playing kind-of country music—you know kinda, sorta country music, for an audience that had never really connected with it. I don't know, everybody was having the most fun they could and playin' the best music they could."

Clark himself scored a recording contract with RCA and, in 1975, released his first album, Old No. 1, which was loaded with great songs like "Desperados," "Texas 1947," "L. A. Freeway," "A Nickel For The Fiddler," "That Old Time Feeling," "Let Him Roll" (a touching tale of a wino and the whore he loved), and one that Clark says is his favorite of his own tunes, "She Ain't Goin' Nowhere."

"It's just a really succinct piece of writing," he says in a no-brag manner. "It just came out so quick and uncluttered. I didn't have to work on it too hard." Indeed, some of Clark's finest images can be found in this song. "And the wind had it's way with her hair/And the blues had a way with her smile/And she had a way of her own/Like prisoners have a way with a file."

Between 1976 and 1983 four more albums followed—Texas Cookin', Guy Clark, The South Coast of Texas, and Better Days (the last three on Warner Brothers). The more songs he wrote, the more other performers would cover him. Ricky Skaggs had a hit in the early '80s with "Heartbroke." Waylon Jennings recorded "I Take My Comfort In You" and "The Old Mother's Locket Trick." Johnny Cash cut several Clark songs, including "The Last Gunfighter Ballad," "Let Him Roll," and "Texas 1947." A spate of non-Outlaw, decidedly un-Cosmic country stars like Kathy Mattea, Pirates of the Mississippi, Steve Wariner, and George Strait recorded various Clark songs. Even John Denver did a version of "Homegrown Tomatoes." But by the mid '80s, Clark's own records weren't selling.

That professional trough resulted in a six-year break from recording, but Clark returned to the studio in 1989 for Old Friends, an album on the independent label Sugar Hill. Joining him were Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill, and bluegrass picker Sam Bush. The songs were still coming, as evidenced in albums like Boats to Build (1992) and the classic Dublin Blues (1995). By then a younger generation of left-field country singer/songwriters—Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and Robert Earl Keen among them—were citing Clark as an important influence. As was another second-generation outlaw: Steve Earle. Although Earle is also a native Texan, Clark met him in Nashville. "Steve was my first bass player in the first little band I had in Nashville," he says. Was Earle a good bassist? Clark hesitates, then drawls, "Naw," followed by a hearty laugh.

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The mid '90s saw the release of Clark compilations from his RCA days (Essentials) as well as his Warner Brothers years (Craftsman, released on Philo in 1995). In 1997 Sugar Hill released Keepers, a masterful live recording of most his best-known songs. Clark not only sang his songs the way he thought they should sound, but on most cuts he tells the story of how the song came about.

Fans should rejoice that a new album—his first with mainly new material since Dublin Blues—is in the pipeline. "There's a lot of new ones nobody's ever heard. I went back and did two or three songs I've known forever. I did a Steve Earle song, 'Fort Worth Blues,' that he wrote about Townes. Then I did a song written by Keith Sykes and Anna McGariggle called 'Be Gone Forever,' which is 25 or 30 years old and had never even been recorded. And a song by Richard Dobson called 'Forever, For Always, For Certain.' All the rest are new ones." Clark is reluctant to name his new tunes, except for one titled "Cold Dog Soup."

"You're gonna have to wait for the others."