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Rating: Guy Clark, hunched over a guitar, adjusts its bridge and strings with the precision of a true luthier. It’s not a magic trick; he doesn’t wear surgical gloves. As he works, he mumbles with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth with the confident nonchalance of someone whose relationship with wood is so daily that where his fingers end "a guitar must somehow begin."
This scene of rare intensity is hidden in the heart of the film "Heartworn Highways," a blurred and discontinuous tribute to country. Just as he repairs guitars, Guy Clark constructs songs. I use the present tense because Guy Clark’s craftsmanship is timeless. His songs are truly his own, thanks to the unmistakable timbre of his sandpaper voice, but the chords and words are the archetype of oral storytelling carried by the wind and wanderers from land to land.
The arrangements of "Old Number One" are simple, but simple in the way only hard work can provide; songs carved, planed, chiseled, with quiet dedication: working alongside Guy in his artisan workshop are fiddler Johnny Gimble, discreet pianist David Briggs, Chip and Reggie Young on the guitars, but also a young apprentice named Steve Earle, who maybe wouldn’t have composed a "Mercenary Song" if he hadn’t matured in the radiant penumbra of the master, perhaps meditating on the notes and words of "L. A. Freeway," an atypical outlaw song if ever there was one.
The arrangements are simple and dress the words with sober authenticity because, as Eduardo De Filippo said, if you seek form you find nothing, if you seek life you find form. And the entire record exudes life, whether it follows the wandering of a fiddler from Kentucky or dwells on the brief encounter between a hitchhiker and a disillusioned waitress who part ways after one night simply because "she just had to go to work and he just had to go." For each portrait, one could identify a musical genre worn with grace, from talking blues to ballad to honky tonk, but it would be an injustice to the evocative power of the music, because it’s no longer about genres but about states of mind, morning light, the scent of air...
When the needle lifts from the record, only one problem remains... where do I find another record to listen to without its being "just music" erasing from the room the flavor of lived life that Guy Clark managed to evoke? Townes Van Zandt? John Prine singing “Sam Stone”? Maybe, they might do, I’m not saying no, but I might just lower the tonearm of the turntable again and indulge in another dance with "Rita Ballou"....
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