Will the real Gary Clark Jr please stand up? At The Tote in September, Clark tore through over an hour of dirty blues tempered with velvet-covered soul. By the end of the set, the crowd was transfixed by the guitarist’s talent, not to mention his sincerity and humility. Like The White Stripes in 2000, there was a sense this was a moment you wouldn’t experience again.
Clark’s debut album, Blak And Blu, is a mixed bag. The opening track, Ain’t Messin ‘Round, heralds Clark’s appearance like a street-smart rock’n’roller afforded messianic status by the corporate shakers of LA. Close your eyes, and you’re in 1979, and the coke is flooding the table, and the platitudes flying thick and fast.
On When My Train Pulls In, Clark is in Hendrix guitar-deity mode, scaling his fret board with manic aplomb; on Travis Country, it’s classic ’50s rock’n’roll in all its speedway boogie glory. Glitter Ain’t Gold nods in the general direction of The Dirtbombs in Ultraglide in Black mode, but Mick Collins is too cool for this shit. Numb is down and dirty, wading through the booze-and-pot memories of Bluesbreaker London; the cover of Hendrix’s Third Stone From The Sun (segueing into Little Johnny Taylor’s If You Like Me Like You Say) provides the obvious reference point; Next Door Neighbor Blues locates Clark within a blues tradition that stretches all the way down to depths of the Mississippi Delta.
Yet when Clark lurches into soul mode, there’s something not quite on the money. The title track has all the hallmarks of a single that topped the charts in 1978, and was never seen again. The Life looks for purpose and direction like a Hollywood starlet embracing the specious rhetoric of Scientology; Please Come Home follows in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye, but doesn’t quite keep up.
Failing a commercial fuck-up of career-destroying proportions, Clark won’t play The Tote again. And that’s a shame – because you can’t help but feeling it’s in such empathetic and intimate surroundings that his true talent comes to the fore.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Ain’t Messin’ ‘Round
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: JIMI HENDRIX, BUDDY GUY
In A Word: Soul
