10 Stories of Music. 5) Guy Clark
Guy Clark — My Favorite Picture оf You If you don’t know that Guy Clark was one of the greatest storytellers to ever pick up a guitar, I don’t know what to tell you. But deep down, I envy you: rush to find “Old No.1” and that’s it.
But I want to tell you about his last album. It’s 2013, and the old storyteller is tired, but he’s ready to tell another story, the last one: his, the one about his love for Susanna.
It’s not his 73 years that make him tired, nor the first signs of the illness that will take him away just three years later. He’s tired because Susanna left the year before, consumed by cancer.
How do you recount 40 years of life spent together? So Guy takes an old photo from the ‘70s, “My Favorite Picture Of You.” It’s a Polaroid, he took it himself; Susanna is angry, she just told him that this time she’s really leaving him, he and his friend Townes Van Zandt (I don’t have to tell you who he is, do I?) are completely drunk and are behaving “like two fools.”
“Oh and you were so angry/It's hard to believe/We were lovers at all/There's a fire in your eyes/You've got your heart on your sleeve/A curse on your lips but all I can see/Is beautiful….”
When I’m asked what, for me, the most beautiful love song ever written is, I have no doubts.
Guy won’t be alone for long; in 2016, the same illness that took Susanna will take him as well.
He was tired, yes, but he wasn’t depressed. How can you be depressed if you’ve loved like that?
“I keep talking to all these doctors,” he said in one of his last interviews, “and I keep telling them, gentlemen, I just want to feel better. Would you happen to have any cocaine?”
Now excuse me, I want to go to her, wake her up and make her angry, and then make love.
