It was in the
university town of Austin, Texas, that Gary Clark Jr. cut his teeth. The now 28-year-old started playing guitar as
a young teenager, drawing from the well of the blues, a steady stream that’s
sustained music for generations. It opened doors and set him on his way. He
frequented the musical haunts Austin has to offer, honing his chops, jamming
with luminaries from Jimmie Vaughn to Hubert Sumlin. A young guy playing the
blues, one of many in that part of the world.
“My [early] impression
was that he was an eager, rather clean-cut ‘kid’ having a huge amount of fun
playing raw, rocking blues shuffles and bouncing around the stage, flirting
with the many young women in the audience,” remembers Bruce Iglauer, head of Alligator
Records in the US, who’s known Clark “casually” for over a decade.
To hear Clark play
now, though, is a far cry from then. In the years since, he’s morphed and evolved
and has begun to explore. Today, Clark’s music is covered in a shiny rock ‘n’ roll
sheen. It dips into country territory before bouncing back with chugging r’n’b,
veering off to soul town and back to the rock. The blues is always there – it’s
in his DNA – but he ain’t a simple bluesman no more.
“I saw him [again]
18 months ago. He was doing much more extended jamming, using effects like a
fuzz box, wah wah and lots of distortion, sometimes playing to non-blues chord
changes and a lot of extended jamming without making chord changes at all,”
Iglauer says. “His persona was much more ‘slacker’, with an untrimmed beard,
knit hat and kind of a slightly spacey way of talking. His persona and his
music fit together both times, but they were markedly different.”
The sonic change
can most likely be put down to a basic need to evolve. Being African American,
there’s no doubt Clark was pigeonholed as a blues player and a blues player
only, and so any rebellious young person would want to buck that trend and move
away.
This he’s done,
and because the change has resulted in a more “accessible” sound – there are
Hendrix comparisons being made, and Lenny Kravitz parallels – Clark was picked
up by Warner Brothers Records, a major label, who released his Bright Lights EP in late 2010. They saw
in him a marketable way to bring roots music to the mainstream. The EP received
heavy-rock radio play, and so Clark is now no longer an unknown, but is about
to be introduced to the world at large.
And yet still that
blues tag sticks around. He’d probably be the first to say he’s not a blues player, and yet the press
persist – because of his background, his ethnicity, their own ignorance and
laziness.
“It’s interesting to me to hear him portrayed
this way,” muses Iglauer, whose Alligator Records is the biggest and longest-running
blues label in the States. “It doesn’t seem to me that Warner is marketing him
as a blues artist, and his new single reminds me more of Lenny Kravitz than the
blues. I’m by no means a purist, but it seems like Gary is trying a lot of
different music, some of it blues and blues-based.”
The phrase that pops up most is “saviour of the blues.” To anyone who
plays the blues, who is actually a blues player, who embodies the ethos of this
music, this is somewhat of an insult, an example of lazy journalism and a
serious misnomer, as longstanding music critic at the Sydney Morning Herald, Bernard Zuel, is quick to point out.
“He’s not the saviour of the blues,” Zuel says of Clark. “Such a
statement begs the question that the blues need saving in the first place. And
then in what way is he saving the blues? He is [a]
youngish musician showing that the blues has a place in contemporary music, but
for him as for many others, it’s only one element of his influences and his
performance.”
Despite what others are calling him, Gary Clark Jr. is on a new
trajectory. Those nights spent sweating it out in tiny Austin venues playing
12-bar blues are behind him. In front of him now is the whole world, the
support of a major label, a new record in Blak
& Blu (released last October) which sees him almost manically covering
a range of styles under the large, ungainly roots umbrella, looking for a more
universal sound – from the country tinge of ‘Travis County’, to the r’n’b
balladry of ‘You Saved Me’ and the new soul sound of the title track.
“I think he’s making himself into an acceptable mainstream blues-based
rock artist who hopefully will have a long career,” says Iglauer. Clark
wouldn’t have seen this coming, but he seems to be taking it in stride. “You gonna know my name by the end of the
night,” he sings on his cover of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’, and it
seems he’s not far wrong.
Samuel J. Fell
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