A CONVERSATION WITH GUY CLARK (continued)

PM: Are you working on or making any guitars these days?

GC: Yeah. Can you hold one second?

PM: Certainly.

GC: I'm sorry to do this to you, but I've got to take this call.

PM: That's all right.

. . . . . . . .

GC: Sorry. I've been out of town so long, and people are calling.

PM: Everybody wants a piece of you.

GC: Yeah. A friend of mine just died, so...

PM: Oh, Mickey Newberry.

GC: Yeah. I got a call about that.

PM: I was just talking to Jeff Trager, he said that he'd talked to him last week, and that Mickey had just written a verse for "Sweet Memories." Mickey said, "But I can't sing it to you, man." He said, "I can't sing and I can't play the guitar." It just sounded so damn sad.

GC: Yeah, yeah. So anyway...

PM: Yeah. What's to be said about that? What about--oh, right, I asked you if you were working on or making any guitars?

GC: Oh, yeah. I have everything set up. I've got seven finished, built, since I started this little room a couple three years ago. But lately, I just haven't had the time to actually do any building. I've been on the road so much and doing this record and all the attendant bullshit that goes with it.

PM: You do a hell of a lot of gigging, don't you?

GC: Oh, yeah. I play all the time.

PM: You do, like, more than a hundred dates a year?

GC: No, I don't think so, probably about eighty. But by the time you get there and you get home, it winds up being a lot of time out. So I'm getting the itch to build, I know that. [laughs] I keep looking at my stacks of wood and what I can do with it.

PM: Where did you learn that, Guy?

GC: It's just something I've always done. In South Texas, the first guitar you get is a Mexican guitar. And the first one I got, the first thing I did was take it apart.

PM: From Parracho, right? [a legendary Mexican town where the majority of the whole population is involved in the making of guitars]

GC: Yeah, exactly. And it's just something that's always come very naturally to me. And I built about, I don't know, six, seven, eight guitars in Texas in the late 60s.

PM: Steel strings or gut strings?

GC: All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

PM: So the seven down in the shop are all gut strings, then?

GC: Oh, yeah. They're all flamenco negroes, which is a flamenco guitar with rosewood back and sides.

PM: So what will happen to those? Will you sell them to friends or shops?

GC: Oh, no. Right now I'm still experimenting and learning. I mean, it's really something that you've got to devote your life to if you want to get good at it. And I'm just--I kind of do it as therapy. But a couple of them are pretty good guitars. And I'm not selling any of them. I don't know what the outcome will be. I put a couple away for my grandkids, like that. So I don't know, who knows? Maybe I'll start building guitars for a living.

PM: I hope I get to play one sometime. continue

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