When Walker and his girlfriend Susan married, Guy and Susanna joined them on their honeymoon in Barbados.
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“We had a good time,” Walker says. “In fact, while we were there, I learned ‘Coat from the Cold.’ Guy had just written it. I ended up putting it on the next album. We were sitting there at dinner one night. My wife’s real salty, and we were having an argument over something, and I said something like, ‘Oh, it’s just like you to say that.’ My wife picked up a piece of fish and threw it. Hit me right between the eyes. I think I bolted myself into the bedroom and passed out. Guy got a picture of my bare ass on the bed when I had to get up and unbolt the door to go to the bathroom.
“Susanna painted a picture on the front porch. There was one of those glass balls they use to mark where you can park your boat and anchor it. She painted it. Just as she was finishing it, a bird flew over it and shit on the side of the painting. She had to smudge it off. We still have that painting. We had it framed. It hangs in our house in Belize, and we always think of her when we’re there. We smile and think of that porch. That was one of our great trips.”
Another visual chronicler, photographer Jim McGuire, built a studio in an old mom-and-pop grocery store at the corner of Forty-Fifth Street and Wyoming Avenue in the Nashville neighborhood of Sylvan Park. He dug what was happening in the music scene and soon made his living photographing the coolest of the cool up-and-comers in his storefront studio. McGuire’s business exploded, and he called his friend Bob Miller to join him in Nashville. Miller drove down from New Jersey. Known as the Grease Brothers, McGuire and Miller worked on cars when they weren’t photographing the new class of songwriters and singers. Word spread around town that McGuire’s studio was a haven for picking parties and goofing off.
Guy and Susanna moved back into Nashville when the owner of the rented log cabin on the lake reclaimed his house. The Clarks settled in an apartment on Thirty-First Street and Wellington Avenue near Vanderbilt University and stumbling distance from Bishop’s Pub. Townes still crashed at their place when he was in town, which was often. “We lived in an upstairs apartment that was full of mice,” Guy says. “Townes and I got drunk one afternoon, and I had a grocery paper sack. Townes got the broom. I would hold the sack. Mice would come around this wall—bap! right in that sack. We caught six or seven mice. Had them all in the sack and decided it was time to go to Bishop’s Pub. Walked in and dumped that sack on the pool table. Oh shit.”
Although the place was much smaller, and the bigger parties took place at McGuire’s, the Clarks still opened their home to pickers and partiers. “I was in there one night and I distinctly remember David Allan Coe being there, and Townes played ‘If I Needed You,’” John Lomax III says. “David said: ‘That’s a great song, man. Mind if I do something with it?’ Townes said, ‘No, but give me credit as a writer.’ So David Allan Coe came up with ‘Would You Lay with Me in a Field of Stone’ and claimed sole writer. Several years later, some attorney tried to sue Townes for stealing David’s song until somebody pointed out that it had been on a record three years before David claimed to have written it. I would always bug Townes about that. I’d say, ‘Man, why don’t you get on that guy and sue him for stealing your song?’ He looked at me and said, ‘John, I’m out there on the road by myself. David Allan travels with a biker gang.’ ‘Yeah, I see your point.’”
When Walker got the test pressing for ¡Viva Terlingua!, he brought it to McGuire’s studio. “I always brought my test pressings to McGuire’s,” Walker says. “We’d all meet over there and of course his camera was all set up, and we would mug and jump around and have a cocktail or two or eight.” McGuire photographed Jerry Jeff, Susan, Guy, and Susanna together and displayed the pictures next to the ones he’d shot of Guy, Townes, and Susanna together.
Another night, McGuire, Susanna, Guy, and Townes went to the Tennessee State Fair. Townes won two oversized stuffed dogs by tossing washers into milk bottles. Guy and Townes were accomplished at washer pitching, a talent they learned in Texas where pitching washers is a poor man’s horseshoes. At Luckenbach, Guy won a lot of money before his opponents realized he was unbeatable in washers. “Washer pitching is an art,” Guy says. “The game was invented by oil-field workers in West Texas. It’s the first game I learned as a kid. They use big old washers on the oil rigs, about the size of silver dollars. You bury tin cans in the ground about twenty feet apart and pitch them into the cans.” After the fair, the foursome returned to McGuire’s studio where he photographed Guy and Townes brandishing the stuffed dogs like bayonets.
Songwriter Keith Sykes often popped in and out of Nashville. On one trip, he stayed with Guy and Susanna in the spring of 1974. He had met the Clarks through Jerry Jeff a couple of years earlier. “I stayed with them for a week,” Sykes says. “Every day Guy and I would walk to the liquor store, and there was a big fiberglass horse out in front for Palomino Whiskey, so that’s the kind of whiskey we bought. We bought a fifth of that stuff every day and would have to replenish it the next day. It was such a great camaraderie. We would just sit around and play and sing. There might be six or seven of us. It would get to be my turn and Guy would always say ‘Country Morning Music!’ So I played that song more than any other for people because Guy just loved it and it was the one he wanted to hear.”
