mo’ Birthdays’ Gary Clark Jr | Don’s Tunes

Photo:Danny Clinch

Happy 41st birthday to Gary Clark Jr. !

"At a young age me and my friend Eve Monsees, we were hanging out with people who would play with Freddie King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Buddy Guy. And guys like Derek O'Brien, Jimmie Vaughan, Kim Wilson, and even you know the younger guys who came up after them like The Moeller Brothers, the Keller brothers in Austin, Texas - they were backing up guys like Pinetop Perkins and Hubert Sumlin when they would come to town, and guys like Willie Big Eyes Smith, James Cotton Bobby Blue Bland would come down.

I would go see Robert Cray, and, as a kid, my first time on stage with these blues greats was at Antone's Nightclub, which is legendary. My dad bothered Clifford Antone enough to get us up there, and it was these people I'm talking about — Hubert Sumlin, Mojo Buford, I mean, all these guys that have played with these legendary cats, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf — all that was passed down to me, and I had access to that whenever I wanted as a kid.

I would go down there Monday night, Blue Monday, and you never know who's gonna get up there. So, if James Cotton is in town, and I'm in town too, then I'm getting up there playing with James Cotton, and he'd be like, [in James Cotton's voice] 'play like this, you gotta play like this, young man. The rhythm, the tone need to be a little bit more better.'"

"So, as a kid, I got molded into it. I'd show up in town with a 60-watt Crate amp and my Ibanez Blazer, and they're like, 'Nawww, that don't go together.' That was kind of my inspiration for getting the Epiphone Casino. It was like, you need these tones to express these things in a certain way, if you want to play it like these guys."

"It's in the touch. I sat in a hotel room with Hubert Sumlin while he was playing his legendary Goldtop, Les Paul, and he said, 'It's all in my fingers. I didn't learn how to play with a plectrum. I get more feeling by using my fingers,' so I'm learning all these things about touch and feel and tone and how to manipulate the strings and bend the strings. I had firsthand education from the guys who invented this stuff, which was incredible for me, so I feel like I kind of have that advantage."

Interview JustinBeckner [UG Writer] 

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