Aug. 4, 1973: Songwriter and novelist Gary Clark
Portrait of an artist at the crossroads of a career. Would it be music or literature or the groves of academe?
Aug. 4, 1973
They don’t build attics or garrets in suburbia. The closest
facsimile is Gary Clark’s vaunted basement, the one he chuckles about in his
regular Sunday night performances in the baronial darkness of the
One floor below his wife’s parents’ neat and airy living
room not far from the Dover, Gary lives on the intimate periphery of a pool
table, having cleared away enough of the neglected collection of old toys,
games and furniture down there to sleep and write and set up a stereo.
* * *
HE’S HOLED OUT THERE since he brought his wife, Carole, and his three-year-old daughter,
Stephanie, east from
A publisher is what
“I’ve contacted Jan Robinson, who’s the literary agent for
Taylor Caldwell,” he explains. “Not that my writing’s anything like hers, but
if Jan likes my stuff she can line up a publisher. Things look very good
there.”
* * *
UNTIL HE’S PUBLISHED, the next step in his writing career – becoming an artist-in-residence
at a major college – will be hard to take. In the academic world, one has to
make it as an artist first.
But he hopes that Rosary Hill, where he’s been teaching a
creative writing course this summer, will take him on and so right now he’s
preparing resumes which outline not only his imaginative work, but also his
considerable academic background.
Included in it is something called the Center for the Study
of Genius, an idea which came to him this week. He thinks he’d like to set it
up here in
“There’d be a $3 membership fee,” he says, “and we’d start
with a newsletter. We’d build a library with the money and it would be open to
people from all disciplines. If it comes off, it could be one of the most
exciting things I’ve been into.”
Gary, who’s 26, has been into enough things to fill several
lifetimes – rock musician, computer specialist, college football player,
graduate student in philosophy and psychology, groundskeeper at
He cut off his rock music career, which started while he
was in
He’d begun as an accordion player (“That’s how I was able
to pick up piano later,” he says), then switched to drums when the drummer with
his high school group failed to show up for a practice.
* * *
“WE MUST HAVE PLAYED ‘Twist and Shout’ 100 times that night,” he says. “The neighbors
called the police.”
He was with The Chancellors, which imitated The Beatles;
The Insanes (“We were pretty good for the time,” he says); and left them to
join The Fifth Column.
“We were patterned after The Hollies rather than The
Beatles,”
“We had the amps, the big Voxs – not too many people had
that kind of equipment in those days. We had three managers, two here and one
in
“I don’t pay that much attention to equipment any more. To
make it these days, you need three things – talent, imagination and genius. I
have a $50 Tokay guitar. It doesn’t matter that I have the best guitar.”
* * *
WHEN HE QUIT
The Fifth Column, he shut himself off from music completely to follow his
academic career, ignoring the radio and records from 1966 until last year.
Hamstrung by poor marks in high school – his guidance
counselor told him to forget about college – he went first to Erie County
Technical Institute, learned about computers and worked in local banks.
Then he landed an acceptance at Arkansas State College,
majoring in business and economics and playing flanker on the football team.
His academic turning point came when he and two teammates transferred to
Southwestern at
“That October in football practice,” he relates, “I was
running a sideline pattern and our quarterback, he threw bullets, the kind that
make your hands sting, he threw one that I had to lean behind for. I snapped my
back and that was it for football.
* * *
“I WAS LUCKY
I was in a place like that where everything academic was there, waiting for me
to jump into it,” he says, picking up a cardboard college desk calendar with an
ivy-covered ball on it.
“It’s a small liberal arts college patterned after
The spirit entered him and gave him an honors degree in
psychology. Then he sought a graduate school, looking for a distinguished
mentor.
First there was the
Next, Purdue and Calvin Schrag (“Existence & Being”),
which he dropped after two months to work out his first novel. He supported his
family by mowing campus lawns.
* * *
“I’D SOONER CUT GRASS or work in a factory,” he says. “It’s dirty, hot and
raunchy, but I like that. I go crazy in offices. The super-cleanliness gets to
me.”
He also picked up guitar in
“When I sit down to write, the ideas are latent, buried
within the feeling, and the chords concretize what’s going on,” he says.
“The words somehow go into the melody, like in ‘Golden
Summer’ – ‘You can hear the rainbow crack behind the sun.’ The melodies are
closer to my emotional life. That’s why it’s a feeling instead of a thought.”
He compromises his repertoire of 90 original songs only for
an occasional Beatles number – a strategy better suited for concerts and folk
clubs than the buffed and polished supper club troubadour circuit, where a
performer without a bag full of pop songs is as unwelcome as a customer in
dungarees.
A couple free concerts, one at
In a bold move to accelerate his fortunes, he tried to
reach John Lennon at Lennon’s new Upper West Side
“His male secretary called back when I wasn’t home,”
“Grandiloquent fellow that he is, I though he just might
listen to my tapes. When I do things like this, I’m glad I don’t have very much
money, because if I did, I’d be a gambler.
* * *
“I’VE BEEN WORKING at writing for two years and people ask how I can have all these poems
and songs and things. It’s just you have to know where to cut things off. I
mean, I go without breakfast or lunch sometimes so I can have time to write.
“That’s why I’m so keen on genius. I think there are a lot
of people walking around with great stuff in their heads. What you have to do
is take the time and scrape away the veneer.
“I tell my students they don’t have to worry about
punctuation and syntax and all the stuff you do in freshman composition and
they breathe a sigh of relief. It’s better if you’re a craftsman, but you have
to have the ideas first.
“If you have the Dionysian inspiration first, then you can
come up with the Apollonian detail later. I’d rather have the chariot than to
just sit there with empty reins.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTOS:
Three shots of Gary Clark in conversation, with quotes from the story. Left: “I’m
glad I don’t have very much money, because if I did, I’d be a gambler.” Center:
“He threw me one I had to lean behind for. I snapped my back and that was it
for football.” Right: “We must have played ‘Twist and Shout’ 100 times that
night.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Gary Clark followed the literary trail. By
1980, he had published a novel inspired by Nordic mythology, “The Clearing,”
the first installment of what he was calling “The Scandinavian Trilogy,” and
appeared as a speaker in a writers' series at SUNY Brockport. But then the trail grows cold.
Could he have become the Gary Clark who’s the bird-loving
nature columnist in the
Or is he Gary Wayne Clark, the multi-talented tech
mogul, novelist and Grammy Award-winning songwriter living in
Comments
Post a Comment