The Eyes of a Clown

John Grammer

It’s hard, at sixty-five, to find beginnings. So many things seem to be tending the other way: one’s stamina, capacity for alcohol, tolerance for bullshit, and so on. My teaching career, a consistent source of joy, is more than forty years old and much nearer its end than its beginning. I can’t even say that I’m beginning to decline: my joints have ached for years, and I picked up my first pair of bifocals the day my son was born—and he’s twenty-four now.

But it’s still possible to become a beginner, which I did not long ago by taking up the guitar. I’ve never played an instrument before, or even learned to read music; somehow my parents, otherwise dutiful in pushing us in the direction of unrequested personal improvement, never even suggested that my brother or I take music lessons. It’s strange, because music kind of ran in both their families; my grandmother kept two pianos in her home, to permit duets, and played classical guitar as well; my uncle was a Julliard-trained operatic bass; and one of my clearest childhood memories is watching Dad in the living room late at night, comfortable in his unbuttoned dress shirt and boxers, playing jazz clarinet along with his favorite records. A beer at his elbow, the dog dozing at his feet, Kid Ory or George Lewis or the Preservation Hall band emanating from the big cabinet stereo, he’d settle into his chair, wet the reed, and start playing his way out of a stressful day and into the purest joy. And yet for some reason it didn’t occur to me that any comparable pleasure would be available to me.

But I’ve always been a fan. Like every high school kid, I heard on the radio the remarkably exact echoes of all my fantasies and fears. And in some ways the world started coming into focus for me when, in college, I began to develop the tastes that, Lord help me, I’ve never managed to shake. By luck I went to school in Nashville in the mid-seventies, when some pretty interesting things were happening on the edges of the city’s most famous export, country music. I don’t mean the people on country radio—not Lynn Anderson, Sonny James, Conway Twitty, Charley Rich—but the young rebels who were challenging them. They all came to town—Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Asleep at the Wheel, and all the other long-haired Texans who were just starting to make Austin weird; the Dirt Band and the cool old-timers with whom they had just made Will the Circle Be Unbroken, pickers like Earl Scruggs and Vassar Clements; serious wordsmiths like John Prine and Kris Kristofferson and the young Guy Clark; and in addition to these, all the unknowns, kids with guitars and a handful of their own songs, just trying to get heard on Music Row—and when they were in town, they’d come play at Vanderbilt. Sometimes in the big gymnasium (whose acoustics Kristofferson memorably compared to those of a toilet bowl) but often in the little campus movie theater, or the wine bar, or just on the terrace outside the Student Union. Even at the time it felt like being in on the beginning of something that might turn out to be important.

This music, as soon as I heard it, seemed to speak to and for me in a way that the stuff on the radio, the rock and pop acts from California or Britain or somewhere up East, never did. It felt—because it was—a lot closer to home, for one thing. In those days, if you were a kid from Texas going to school in Tennessee, the three TV networks, the movies, and pop music had all been telling you the same thing since you could remember: that real life was elsewhere, in New York, Chicago, L.A. So hearing a young person sing about a place you knew, in an accent that sounded familiar, felt affirming. But these singers also seemed smart in a way that appealed to the budding English major I was: they seemed to have read some books. They could float an original metaphor (what, I wanted to ask John Prine, does it mean to be “naked as the eyes of a clown?”) or to make you laugh (I was pretty sure I knew what he meant by an “illegal smile”) or to touch you with lyrics that seemed like little Hemingway stories:

It was white port that put that look in his eye
That grown men get when they need to cry.
And he sat down on the curb to rest
And his head just fell down on his chest.
He said “Every single day it gets
Just a little bit harder to handle, and yet . . .”
Then he lost the thread and his mind got cluttered
And the words just rolled off down the gutter

—from Guy Clark’s “Let Him Roll.”

They could give you authentic tragedy, as in Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” then summon Blakean ecstasy: “I’ve got a feeling,” Jerry Jeff Walker sang,

something that I can’t explain.
Like running naked in the high hill country rain.

That musical moment seemed important enough at the time to get a pretty good documentary made about itself, James Sazalapsky’s Heartworn Highways (1976), and several of the young rebels went on to have long careers—and to claim ever-expanding real estate in my record collection. Toward the end they were honored by the younger musicians they’d inspired. But now they’re dying off. Since 2016 we’ve lost Clark, Prine, Billy Joe Shaver, Jerry Jeff Walker, Eric Taylor, Dave Olney, and even their younger protégé Nanci Griffith. Willie Nelson of course appears immortal, but even he finally had to give up weed. If aches, pains, birthdays, and bifocals weren’t enough to do it, all this will make a fellow feel old.

But you know what makes a fellow feel young? Being a beginning guitar student. Not young in the way old people think they remember youth—a time of joy, hope, infinite possibility, and so forth. I mean the way being young really was: clumsy, uncertain, mistake-prone, easily embarrassed, subject to constant correction, sometimes well-nigh hopeless. Like most adults, I manage to spend most of my time doing things I’m good at and avoiding the other things. As a teacher I spend way too much time being the most competent person in the room. But once a week for a little over an hour (I’m only paying for 30 minutes, but my teacher Michael pities me and gives me the extra help I clearly need), I’m struggling to make my eyes, brain, and stiffening fingers do things they don’t want to do. As soon as one of them falls into line the other two start playing hooky. A lot of the time it feels like I’m losing ground, but I’m actually not. One by one I’m adding songs to my anemic repertoire, and they’re the ones I took up guitar to learn how to play, the ones that connect me to one joyous phase of my youth.

It wasn’t my idea. My wife, Elizabeth, who seems to know me better than I do, recognized that I knew all the words to all the songs the cowboys sang around the campfire at a dude ranch we visited several years ago and sensed in me a desire I didn’t know I had. For my birthday a few years ago she surprised me with a beautiful Alvarez acoustic and directed me to the local music shop for lessons. The proprietor, Michael Karr, is a guy my age, brilliant on a dozen instruments, a charismatic Christian and veteran of the Christian music scene. Michael is encouraging, and so are some of the professional musicians, true successors of Prine, Clark, and others, whom I’ve had the serial good luck to keep befriending over the years. Ketch Secor, the lead singer of Old Crow Medicine Show, picked out the guitar Elizabeth gave me and occasionally checks in to ask how the picking is coming. Bonnie Bishop, who owns part of a Grammy and wrote songs for the TV show Nashville, said “Buy a capo.” Amanda Shires, former student and cofounder of The Highwomen, gave me one of John Prine’s own guitar picks—with his name printed thereon—that I’m occasionally brave enough to play with. At my request Amanda once asked Mr. Prine what it meant to be “naked as the eyes of a clown.” It had to do with a clown’s make-up, he explained. Every part of him is covered and concealed, except his eyes. To be that naked is to be vulnerable. That’s kind of how it feels to be picking up music at this stage of life. Young—because I’m not that good at it—and old—also because I’m not that good at it. It’s uncomfortable, until suddenly it’s joyous, like running naked in the high hill country rain. I’m sticking with it, and I know what songs I’ll be working on.