Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown – Sittin’ on the dock, with the world at bay
You could call Clarence Brown a seven-decade wonder. Closing in on 80, and here he is with an album that is vibrant and engaged. But you think you should get beyond the music and ask him how to live, ask him for some of that cantankerous wisdom. What he says is, “Pay attention! To what’s around you, what was behind you, and what’s in front of you. Pay attention, and you can avoid a lot of mistakes. I mean, you can’t avoid ’em all, but the worst ones you can.”
There is no question that generations of musicians have learned important lessons from observing Brown’s career. Albert Collins, Frank Zappa, Lonnie Brooks and Eric Clapton include themselves in that number. You wonder how many people have learned important lessons from observing Brown’s life. He’s ready for that one, with a chuckle.
“Well, some of ’em say they’ve learned, but I’m waitin’ to see when.”
Brown says a bunch of bluegrass players, Ricky Skaggs among them, have asked him to do an album. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says. “Sometimes I think on it, sometimes I don’t even worry about it. What will be, will be. And someone wants me to do an acoustic album. I don’t know, man. I’ll wait to the last minute, and I’ll say, well, I’m gonna do this kind of album. And that’s what I’ll do.
“You can worry yourself to death. I’ve got a good friend, he rehearses four and five hours. I say, ‘What you doin’ it for?’ You’re not going to learn a bit more pushin’ yourself into something that you can’t handle. Rehearsing four or five hours, what for? It don’t make you a better musician in the first place. It really don’t. It makes you find yourself meetin’ yourself on every turn.”
My generation is sorting out the events of September 11, not sure yet what they mean for ourselves or our country. We have nothing against which we may measure such a thing. In such times, it helps to put ourselves in the presence of our elders. The wise among them draw on experience preceding and paralleling our own and compose important lessons, if we will listen.
Sometimes the lessons arrive in direct quotes, sometimes they are oblique. Back To Bogalusa is a work of hope, dignity, and humor, delivered without pretension by an artist who is no longer surprised by the foolishness and evil men do, and yet is unwilling to yield the stage to bitterness or despair. He’s back out there touring, supporting the latest installation in a discography that stretches back to the 1940s. Between gigs, he sits on a porch in Louisiana with his pipe. The porch is built over water, and he can fish from his chair. He knows the gator is down there just beneath him, but it’s OK.
“We’ve got an agreement,” says Gate. “You don’t eat me, I won’t eat you.”
Equanimity, you see.
Michael Perry is a writer who shares bovine wisdom.