Clark, who headlines sold-out shows at the 8x10 in Baltimore Friday and the District’s Red Palace on Saturday, won’t release his major-label debut album until next year, but some have already crowned him the three-way heir to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. But his promise stretches beyond that. The 27-year-old Austin native isn’t resuscitating the blues so much as trying to wrestle it into the future.
“Wow,” says wow guy after a cover of Elizabeth Cotton’s ancient “Freight Train,” which Clark sings as if it were a ’70s R&B ballad conjured from thin air. Then his band dials up the volume and Clark’s right hand becomes a blur, chopping time into fuzzy fragments. Has he been playing this solo for five minutes? Fifty?
It’s easy for Clark to get lost in his music, too. “There’s nothing like just sitting at the house and being by myself with the guitar and just going,” he says. “Four hours will go by, and you’ll be like, ‘Whoa. I don’t know what that was, but I went somewhere.’ ”
Right now, he’s in the Manhattan showroom of fashion designer John Varvatos, where he’s just been fitted for some new suits. After this, he’ll head over to the club for the sound check.
More than a decade after he was first heralded as a prodigy of the Texas blues scene, Clark is poised to become the overnight success story of 2012. In 2001, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson proclaimed May 3 “Gary Clark Jr. Day,” and he’s been recording and touring ever since. He also tried his hand at acting in the 2007 John Sayles film, “Honeydripper.”
But Clark’s latest, biggest break didn’t come until June 2010, when he turned heads at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Chicago. Warner Bros. signed him soon after and recently released “The Bright Lights EP,” a four-song appetizer that Rolling Stone touted on its best albums of 2011 list as “richer than most full-length records.”
The EP’s standout track, “Bright Lights” brandishes a menacing riff and a refrain that registers somewhere between threat and prophecy: “You’re gonna know my name by the end of the night.”
But where Clark’s music exudes ferocious heat, his personality is all gentle warmth. He speaks soft and slow, his voice barely audible as he reminisces about the B.B. King and Johnny “Guitar” Watson records that his car-salesman dad used to play in the house — records that made him want to play, too.
“It made everything easier,” Clark says of taking up the guitar. “I was kind of a shy kid, didn’t really talk much. I had a lot to say but didn’t really know how to say it. Being able to play guitar, bend notes a certain way and play some chords — they kind of talked for me.”
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