{"id":5793,"date":"2025-07-05T08:40:58","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T12:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5793"},"modified":"2025-07-05T10:22:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T14:22:52","slug":"desperados-waiting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/desperados-waiting\/","title":{"rendered":"Desperados Waiting for a Train (Guy Clark)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Desperados Waiting for a Train (Guy Clark)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GykNSUI34RQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Once again, I don&#8217;t remember where I first heard this one or when I learned it &#8212; I would have said I first heard Guy Clark&#8217;s own version, from his brilliant debut album, <em>Old No. 1<\/em>, but I just checked and found <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-4436\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Guy-Clark-old-no1-e1634251270139.jpg?resize=220%2C220&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"220\" height=\"220\" \/>that it had already been recorded before that by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita Coolidge, David Allan Coe, and Tom Rush, which means a lot of other people would have been singing it in clubs and I could have heard it almost anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>It played a significant part in my life because I performed it during an interview on WERS, which had the best Boston Area folk music show in the 1980s, and Harry Lipson, who was producing lots of folk concerts including annual appearances by Guy Clark, was listening and liked my performance and invited me to appear on a two-day New England Folk Festival bill &#8212; I was the opening act on night one; the opener on night two was a local unknown named Tracy Chapman. All I remember about my set was that I took advantage of the unusually large audience to do my current favorite sing-along, &#8220;Duke of Earl.&#8221; I also remember a lot of flirting and socializing backstage, and got written up in the <em>Boston Globe<\/em>, and all in all it was a good weekend.<\/p>\n<p>This song is pretty generally acknowledged to be Guy&#8217;s masterpiece, a slice of autobiography about his relationship with his grandmother&#8217;s boyfriend when he was a kid in Monahans, Texas, a small town on the Texas-Pacific railway line, with a lot of sand, some oil wells, and not much else. It&#8217;s the sort of place that, for someone like me, who grew up in the urban East, conjures up images of &#8220;some old western movie&#8221; &#8212; and apparently even Guy thought of it that way in hindsight.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, it recalls the opening scene of Sergio Leone&#8217;s <em>Once Upon a Time in the West<\/em>, one of my all-time favorite movies: three desperados barge into the dispatcher&#8217;s office of a little station out in the middle of nowhere, lock him in a closet, then spend ten long, marvelous minutes of screen time waiting for a train.\u00a0<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5794 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-e1748878506721.jpg?resize=339%2C183&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"339\" height=\"183\" \/>One dozes in a chair, bothered by a fly; one stands outside the station, cracking his knuckles; one stands under the water tank, with drips of water falling on his hat. Finally the train arrives, stops for a moment, leaves again in a cloud of dust. As the dust swirls, we hear a lonesome harmonica; as it clears, we see Charles Bronson, standing on the other side of the tracks, playing. He asks where Frank is; the lead desperado says Frank didn&#8217;t come; Bronson notes that they only brought three horses; the leader smiles and says, &#8220;Looks like we&#8217;re shy one horse&#8221;; Bronson shakes his head and says, &#8220;You brought two too many,&#8221; and after another long pause they go for their guns&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if Guy was thinking of that scene; there are plenty of Westerns with desperados and trains and waiting; but that&#8217;s the one I picture him imagining, thinking back to his childhood, before his family moved to the Gulf Coast, and he settled in Houston, and then L.A., and Nashville. And it&#8217;s a bit odd to me that he frames his childhood as a scene out of a classic Western. As an easterner, it&#8217;s natural for me to think of John Ford or Sergio Leone when I&#8217;m in that territory, but I&#8217;d think he&#8217;d think of it as home rather than a movie. (Harvard Yard has figured in a lot of movies, but they&#8217;re not what I think of when I recall Harvard Yard; it&#8217;s where I grew up.)<\/p>\n<p>Honestly, I have mixed feelings about Clark. I loved that first album, and learned a half-dozen of his songs, but when I saw him onstage he seemed like a self-consciously literary figure, the &#8220;Southern writer&#8221; posing for his statue in a <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5795 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Guy-Clark-great-man-scaled-e1748878979134.jpg?resize=250%2C309&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"309\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Guy-Clark-great-man-scaled-e1748878979134.jpg?w=250&amp;ssl=1 250w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Guy-Clark-great-man-scaled-e1748878979134.jpg?resize=243%2C300&amp;ssl=1 243w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/>regional pantheon, which was not at all how I&#8217;d thought of his music, and made me have second thoughts about it and him. I still like a lot of his songs &#8212; I&#8217;ve done posts about &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/anyhow-i-love-you\/\">Anyhow, I Love You<\/a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/watermelon-dream-guy-clark\/\">Watermelon Dream<\/a>,&#8221; and there will be a couple of others up here in the near future &#8212; but a lot of his work is tinged with a kind of distanced romanticism, like he was displaying his fine craftsmanship rather than communicating as one person to another. I recently watched Tamara Saviano&#8217;s terrific documentary about him, <em>Without Getting Killed or Caught<\/em>, and it reinforced that impression: to me, the movie is really more about his wife Susanna, a fine artist who did the painting of a shirt on his debut album cover and wrote a bunch of songs herself&#8211;including some that were major hits&#8211;and Guy comes off as a brilliant but somewhat stiff and guarded character, never entirely comfortable in his own skin and always measuring himself against other people and trying to establish his greatness.<\/p>\n<p>Which said&#8230; I don&#8217;t hear any of that in this song. This is just a small, personal vignette, and the cinematic romanticism of the desperado image underlines the simplicity of the genuine memories, the genuine relationship, and the genuine tenderness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, I don&#8217;t remember where I first heard this one or when I learned it &#8212; I would have said I first heard Guy Clark&#8217;s own version, from his brilliant debut album, Old No. 1, but I just checked and found that it had already been recorded before that by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/desperados-waiting\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Desperados Waiting for a Train (Guy Clark)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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I'd probably heard a few of Guy's recordings, maybe \"Homegrown Tomatoes\" on the radio, but I was more of a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Kerrville LP","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Kerrville-LP.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4441,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/watermelon-dream-guy-clark\/","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":1},"title":"Watermelon Dream (Guy Clark)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 16, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"This is probably my all-time favorite summer song -- partly because of the lyrics and the way they fit with the melody, and partly because the guitar arrangement fell together so comfortably. It may have taken an hour or so, just playing and seeing what felt right, and that was\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Guy-Clark-old-no1-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1611,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/aint-she-sweet\/","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":2},"title":"Ain&#8217;t She Sweet\/ Five Foot Two (Guy Van Duser)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The only lick I ever copped from the astonishing Guy Van Duser, with reminiscences of Guy and the Nameless Coffeehouse, and, yet again, Dave Van Ronk.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Nameless LP","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Nameless-LP-297x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1531,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/miss-brown-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":3},"title":"Miss Brown to You (Judy Roderick)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When I began delving into old-time pop material, I was particularly attracted by musicians who had found ways to play that stuff using normal folk-blues guitar techniques. I was blown away by Guy Van Duser, who was playing guitar like a cross between Chet Atkins and a swing pianist, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Judy-Roderick3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1103,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/money-honey\/","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":4},"title":"Money Honey (Tom Rush\/The Drifters)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A classic early R&B hit from Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, though I originally heard it from Tom Rush, to whom I am forever grateful.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Tom Rush take a little walk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Tom-Rush-take-a-little-walk.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4455,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bloody-mary-morning\/","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":5},"title":"Bloody Mary Morning (Willie Nelson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 23, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've always liked Willie Nelson's singing and guitar playing, and wish his records had more guitar solos. Until I saw him live I had no idea how quirky and inventive his playing could be. I've only had that pleasure once, at a great old club called Lupo's in Providence, Rhode\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/willie-nelson-300x169.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5793"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5845,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793\/revisions\/5845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}