Gary Clark Jr Live: Album Review
Two years ago Gary Clark Jr. released his debut Major Label album, Blak and Blu. It was supposed to be a proclamation, a re-heralding of The Blues to the masses. Gary was to be a prophet.
People in the know always talk about The Blues as this dying art form, like an endangered species that needs protecting, but it’s been that way since the beginning. Blues has had more lives than cat, more burials than the pharaohs… more revivals than my Charmander on my old GameBoy Colour.
In the late 1940s, Muddy Waters reinvigorated The Blues by going electric. In the 1960s Eric Clapton and associates brought the music to Britain and to white folks, both reviving the careers of the old masters and furthering the art-form themselves. In the 1980s it was Stevie Ray Vaughan with his hearty influences and his signature Stratocaster. Since then? The odd rumblings… until Gary Clark Jr.
This guy was the Real Deal. A virtuoso and a purist. I happen to think that Blak and Blu was one of the very best albums of 2012, though not too many agree with me theere. The problem was that it was so vast, picking up a bunch of different ideas, messing with different genres and sounds. The songs were all great, it just wasn’t a cohesive whole… and it wasn’t a straight blues album. People don’t like it when they don’t get what they were expecting.
So imagine how the purists must have felt when he opened his first official live album, the aptly titled Gary Clark Jr. Live, with Catfish Blues. It takes 50 seconds before any instrument other than Clark’s immaculately toned guitar can be heard. This is raw, this is real. This is The Blues. Then he even follows that up with Next Door Neighbor Blues, which was that final track off his album, a little country-blues back-porch type thing. It’s like a statement of intent.
It’s always hard to shake the feeling with this guy that he’s just going through the motions. Part of that is because of his natural laidback, carefree, Dude-ness. The rest is because he’s so damn good that he makes it seem easy. It isn’t.
A live album seems a little presumptuous after just one major label album and an EP, but Clark has no trouble filling it out. 96 minutes of electric bluesery the likes of which no relevant, young, guitar slinger has matched since Stevie Ray. This is the stuff that led to Clapton giving him a big break at his Crossroads Festival a while back. He trundles and swaggers through 10 of the 13 tracks on Blak and Blue, all 4 from the Bright Lights EP (there were some double ups) and a few well-worn blues classics.
Catfish Blues was the first of them, a song originally done by Robert Petway in 1941 and famously covered by Muddy Waters along with about a billion sloppy bar players searching for ‘integrity’. He also tackles B.B. King’s ‘Three O’Clock Blues’ and Albert Collins’ ‘If Trouble Was Money’ before closing with ‘When The Sun Goes Down’, which is one of those blues standards with a mix and match of lyrics from other songs that’s been reinterpreted a thousand times, each burying whatever origins it may have had even deeper. Ray Charles did a version.
Clark doesn’t exactly reinvent the songs here. Next Door Neighbor Blues gets the full band/electric treatment, while Blak and Blu (the song) is translated from a hip hop experiment to solo, moody, guitar fodder. I quite like it, though I preferred NDNB as an old fashioned acoustic jam. But the songs had to fit into the live band’s formula. (The band is red-hot, btw).
It was the hip-hop experiments that I think turned a few people off of his album, which is a shame because I really enjoyed the eclecticism. Just because he plays the blues doesn’t mean he has to be a revivalist. He should be encouraged to take the form and expand on it, integrate new ideas and let the juices flow. It worked when Muddy Waters plugged in and went electric. Plenty of rappers have used the blues as a sampling point yet too few blues guys and gals go the other way. And the ones that do get ostracised or rebranded as ‘rock stars’ or something. They forget that the blues is the most innovative and fluid of all American music genres and they lock themselves up behind those 12 bars.
Live albums always seem sorta unnecessary. It’s not like this one was capturing the madness at Altamont, or Dylan going electric or anything. There’s no point here at which it feels like anything extraordinary is happening. It’s just a flagpole for where he’s at in his career, a souvenir of a year or two of straight touring. Man, but it’s cool to listen to. It’s an hour and a half of perhaps this generation’s most promising guitarist bending notes and showing off all those same tricks as from his album… only without the studio shine. He does some hard Chicago flavoured stuff, some deep burners, some soulful blends (the solo for ‘Please Come Home’ has never not melted me in any form I’ve heard it), some rock and roll raves, some Hendrixian guitar porn (literally – he covers Third Stone From The Sun), some R&B… so good.
At some point in the future, Clark is gonna put out an album so good that the critics all swoon, and it won’t be just recycling the traditional stuff. His first album was a bit of a mixtape of ideas and he’s so good that he can follow up on them all. Plus he’d had a decade of working and tinkering on these songs. You can understand if it wasn’t that cohesive. Just in case people were hung up on what he’s doing now though, Gary Clark Jr. Live has thrown down the gauntlet.