RIP Guy Clark

Eat that Texas cookin' in the afterlife, Guy. Keep your belly and backbone from bumpin'.

 

Will do. Thanks!

 

These Texas guys are a pretty tight brotherhood. I know they write songs for each other and cover each other's stuff. Jerry Jeff did a version of "L.A. Freeway" and "Desperados Waiting For a Train," but I don't know which wrote which.

 

How can you mention all those great Texas songwriters and not mention Ray Wylie Hubbard?
Love Joe Ely - got into him in '93 when he joined Springsteen at back-to-back shows and played "Settle for Love". Bought the Love & Danger album a week or two later and never looked back. Got my dad into him with the next album (Letter to Laredo). I've seen Ely 2 or 3 times, but its been at least 10 years or more since I last caught him in concert.

 

I caught him in Birmingham a few years back at City Stages, a now defunct downtown street festival. He was doing a regular set on Friday night, but the festival opened at lunch on Friday with a couple of acts doing acoustic sets. One of them was Joe, unplugged, and I sat on the steps maybe fifteen feet in front of him. Great show. Funny memory... he had a guitarist who played with him who was all duded up in the Spanish Flamenco suit like Stevie Ray Vaughn used to wear, and I made a snide comment about his copycat wardrobe to my wife. Then Joe introduces him as "Taya, this fabulous flamenco guitarist from Seville". The wife just gave me the look, you know the one...

Ely was dynamite back in the '80s when Jesse Taylor was still in the band, with Flaco Jimenez. That's probably my favorite band of his, they really laid down the roadhouse Texas music, but it's all good, man.

Somehow I never got started on Ray Wylie, dunno why. So now I get to start on him and track down the Willis Allen Ramsey. Hope it's on Rhapsody or Spotify.

What I wouldn't do for a chicken fried steak and cream gravy along about now. Sigh.

 

"Hard Livin'" off of Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, solo. Good stuff.

"There ain't no cure for the honky tonk blues, and if they come up with something, I'll have built up an immunity".

 

Jerry Jeff wrote it.

 

Nope.

 

I love the old Austin City Limits shows where Willie would hold a guitar pull. He'd get about six or eight of these guys sitting in a circle playing their best songs together, or showing off the new one they'd just written. You never knew what would get played. They were really good shows.

 

I saw Joe Ely in London in 1978. Fantastic young artist.

 

Was that the tour with the Clash? Had to be. Damn. /envy