Gary Clark Jr. (2019)

One Liner: New school guitar legend from Austin

Wikipedia Genre: Blues rock, soul, R&B
Home: Austin, Texas

Poster Position: 2
Day: Saturday
Both Weekends.

Thoughts:  The initial artist announced by the Festival!  So I get to jump right in before the lineup is even announced!  Woohoo!  Before I get in to it, I'm freaking pumped to see GCJr again.  His show at ACL a few years back was mind blowingly great.

Clark is from Austin.  Went to Austin High (LOYAL FOREVER, YO!).  And he has been very cool to Austin since then, helping to bankroll the re-opening of classic club Antone's, recording locally at Arlyn Studios, and staying put in town when he could have easily picked up and left town for one of the coasts.  I don't know why it should matter, but it makes me very happy to know he is homegrown and still pays back the city.

His live album from 2014 was one of my top ten albums of the year.  His full album from 2012, Blak and Blu, is also great, but the live version of his tracks are just so damn good. So much passion and fire and shredding ear candy.  I love the fact that he can go from molten hot lava guitar domination to a more tender, nimble guitar style at the drop of a hat. See the transition between "Numb" and "Please Come Home" on Blak and Blu. Here is "Numb," just so you can taste the sludge:

I mean, come on!  That is so good!  4.8 million streams.

I saw him when he came to ACL a few years back and was just straight up blown away.  I never got to see Jimi or Stevie turn their guitar into a weapon of blues-flavored rock and roll fury, but I love hearing someone so obviously steeped in their tradition.  His most popular track from that first album is "Bright Lights," which boasts 19.2 million streams.

If you haven't played this guy's music before, you seriously need to go enjoy it.  If you don't like rock, or are scared of good music, at least go listen for the skill the guy has on his instrument.  One more video that I have to add to this, its not his top song on Spotify or anything, and this isn't the sick version on the Live album that they've played it on KUTX, but it still shows the amazingness of what he's got going on when he plays "When My Train Pulls In" live.

Seriously, the live version of that track is killer.  I can't play jack crap on the guitar - the F chord was more than my fingers could bear.  But I can sure as hell hear when something is transcendentally fantastic.  I've heard that song 40 times by now, but I still just got goosebumps listening to him hammer his solos out.  So good!  

Now, since those two early albums, he's put out two new discs - 2015's The Story of Sonny Boy Slim and 2019's This Land.  I reviewed both, and neither of them is perfect, but when they are on, then they are freaking good stuff.  The thing that I wish is that he would get a big time producer and just see what that would be like, to be the guitar wizard with someone else there to help his music bang.  Might be interesting to try, but I guess he is loyal to his people.

Sonny Boy Slim has some fun detours on it.  This album picks up where Black and Blu left off, but sounds like he wanted to flex his creative muscles a little more.  He still has the blues-guitar-God stuff on here ("Stay" or "Grinder"), classic crossroad blues ("Shake"), and acoustic hymns ("Church"), but then he also goes further afield with dance-ish stuff ("Can't Sleep") or 80's falsetto-drenched rhythm and blues ("Down to Ride"). "Wings" sounds like John Legend.  This music is all over the place.  "Grinder" is the second most streamed, and that is the one I want to hear more of (not the love song "Our Love," which just barely has more streams).  

Yeah, baby.  Red hot guitar action.  I know the normal touchstone for guitar heroes from Austin is Stevie Ray Vaughan, but for some reason this album makes me think more of the collaboration SRV did with his brother, Jimmie Vaughan - Family Style.  I thought that album was the good stuff back in the day.  Like a combination of bombing guitar mastery, along with an Austin-ified lite blues swagger, and some left-field weirdness for good measure. While I'd like to hear more molten guitar lick thunder on here, I like the album. 

His new album - This Land - is a little more uneven for me.  The lead single and title track is a stone cold killer.  A burning indictment of America right now, apparently based on an interaction that Clark had with a neighbor of his newly acquired ranch outside of Austin (who refused to believe that Clark could possibly be the owner of the ranch next door), with a killer chorus that includes him spitting out the line "fuck you, I'm America's son, this is where I came from."  I can't even believe that Clark is still having to deal with shit like that today, but I guess that's easy for me to think.  I love the anger and power of the song.  Video is killer too.

Sadly though, the rest of the album doesn't have that same power.  The songs seem to be unfocused, stuck in this limbo of the Austin-centric bluesy-guitar-slinger soft-rock but legit guitar sound (except for the freaky weird things like the reggae swagger of "Feelin' Like a Million").  Not that these other tunes are bad, I like the unhinged energy of "Gotta Get Into Something" or the Stones-ey swagger of "The Governor."  In fact, when I heard "Gotta Get Into Something" again on the radio the other day all I could do was just turn it up and rock out.  Great track.
But after the power, both of lyrics and licks, in "This Land," many of these other songs feel like a slog.  The boring Marvin Gaye/Curtis Mayfield-ish soul track "Feed the Babies," all about mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters coming together to help the babies and teaching them to love.  Or the falsetto love fest of "Pearl Cadillac," like a Prince b-side that he wrote the lyrics to on the fly.  Or the usual tropes like "standing on the corner with my heart in my hand" and "I can't do it without youuuuu!" from "Guitar Man."


But listening to the new live album that he put out in 2017 - Live North America 2016 - I'm again reminded that when he does his thing live, it covers up any R&B slowdown that I wouldn't seek out with a white-hot blanket of guitar fuzz and solo fireworks.
Definitely going to see him.  There would have to be someone pretty major opposite his show for me to skip.