Guy Clark always thought he was a folksinger, but as a performer with an acoustic guitar and a Texas accent, country music was the magnetic pole he couldn’t escape. Considered a maverick in Nashville, he became part of the ‘70s “outlaw country” gang that traded rhinestone suits and glossy production for thoughtful songwriting and homespun recordings. By the ‘90s Clark was a leading light in Americana, a loose-shoed genre that encompassed root, branch and twang.
The story of Guy Clark and his wife Susanna is told in Without Getting Caught or Killed by Milwaukee native Tamara Saviano, who co-directed and produced the documentary with Paul Whitfield and cowrote it with Bart Knaggs. Without Getting Caught explores the music and lives of the Clarks along with their longtime intimate associate, fellow songwriter Townes Van Zandt. As Susanna explains in the film, “Guy and I were married. Guy and Townes were best friends, but Townes and I were soulmates.”
Without Getting Caught doesn’t measure the angles of that triangle, and just as well. The narrative is mostly about the music and the process of songwriting inspired by the lives they led together.
Although home cassette recordings of Guy and Susanna are sometimes heard, throughout the film Sissy Spacek narrates from Susanna’s perspective, speaking words from her journal alongside recordings representing Guy’s reminiscences. The back and forth reveals love and tension, joy and disappointment. She left him for a few years after her song, “Come From the Heart,” became a hit for Kathy Mattea in 1989, but they reunited before her death from cancer in 2012. By the time Guy won a Grammy two years later, he was too ill to perform. He died of lymphoma in 2016.
The film strikes a perfect balance between Guy and Susanna, not only a muse for two acclaimed recording artists but an artist and songwriter in her own right. She was a debutant from Oklahoma society and he was a scion of West Texas, an austere country of harsh extremes where dusty rough-hewn towns stank of crude oil. He comes across as a latter-day Gary Cooper, stoic and emotionally pragmatic. He articulated his feelings through the jeweler’s precision of his lyrics.
Without Getting Caught or Killed collects some great stories. “LA Freeway,” whose 1972 version by Jerry Jeff Walker led to Guy’s recording contract, was written with Susanna’s eyebrow pencil on a paper takeout bag. “If you have a flash, write it down,” Guy said, sagely. “If you don’t, in five minutes you’ll forget it.”
Living in Luckenbach, Texas during the ‘70s, Guy and Susanna were the center of a pot-smoking, rural bohemian salon whose regulars included Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (among the stars interviewed for the film). The circle that gathered to talk and trade guitar chords were concerned with the art of their songs and their lives. By all recollections, scoring a hit was secondary, but none of them minded success when it came.
Opens Aug. 27 at AMC Mayfair.
