Audience Appreciates Guy Clark’s Easy Charm

Thu., Aug. 1, 1996

Don Adair Correspondent

Guy Clark Tuesday, July 30, Festival at Sandpoint

Guy Clark’s brilliant songs and easygoing delivery found an appreciative audience Tuesday at Sandpoint’s Panida Theater.

Clark’s show at the super-heated Panida was the opening concert of the 1996 Festival at Sandpoint. Local heroines, Wild Roses, opened.

Nothing’s perfect in this imperfect world, but Clark’s shiny little nuggets are as close as it gets. Spare and calm, they get at the important stuff, even when they make you laugh.

In one of his best new songs, “Ramblin’ Jack and Mahan,” champion bull-rider Larry Mahan crawls out from behind a couch during an all-nighter at Austin’s Driskill Hotel to impart a little wisdom to folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliot: “Jack, as far as I can see / mistakes are only horses in disguise / ain’t no need to ride ‘em over / ‘cause we could not ride ‘em different if we tried.”

On stage, Clark is a wry and engaging man who tells stories with the easy charm of a guy who knows his audience gets it. His tales - about when his wife took a limo from Nashville to Memphis, about the landlord of “L.A. Freeway” fame - add a new dimension to songs that his fans know by heart.

Clark’s characters are honest folk whose legacy is their work. They’re carpenters and boat builders, and if they play guitar, they buy their strings at the drugstore.

They’re the people who make the things he values - “Stuff that works / Stuff that holds up / The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall / Stuff that’s real / Stuff you feel / The kinda stuff you reach for when you fall.”

Which, when you get right down to it, is a pretty good description of the songs Clark writes.

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