wooHen director Tamara Saviano decided to make a film about American songwriter Guy Clark, knowing she couldn’t tell her story without covering the lives of two other creative souls – his wife, songwriter and painter Susannah Clarke, and his best friend, fellow Americana star, Towns van Zandt. “They influenced him a lot, and he influenced them too,” Saviano told the Guardian. “You can’t separate them.”
At the same time, his complicated life suffered deep fractures and brutal pain. Named after the song from one of Clark’s most famous songs, the LA freeway, the story Saviano tells in the new documentary Without Getting Killed or Caught, tracing a wide arc of personal trauma and creative triumph. This includes a violent suicide, multiple addictions, and devastating depression. But, in spite of all this, the central figures followed a three-sided love that, unconventional, enriched them all. To reveal the story’s intimacy, Saviano made a true coup – the audio and written diaries left by Susannah Clarke after she died of cancer in 2012. Throughout the film, diaries are read by Oscar-winner Sissy Spacek. “They’re a goldmine,” Saviano said of the tapes.
That the director was able to protect her from Guy Clark shows her trust in him. Music journalist Saviano got to know the lyricist, who died of lymphoma in 2016, a decade ago when he wrote his memoir, which shared the name of his film. Amazingly, Clark never heard, or read, his wife’s diaries when she bequeathed them to Saviano. “The cow said, ‘Whatever it is it’s Susanna’s truth and you’re welcome in it,'” the director said. “He wasn’t afraid of it. I thought he was really brave of that.”
Again, Clarke’s openness matches the songs he wrote. Like John Prine, Clark used simple language in his lyrics to achieve literary achievement. Likewise, the music he composed incorporated Native American styles, such as folk, blues, and country, with fresh melodies, which he delivered in a voice that conveyed both a dry humor and a ready empathy. Was. Throughout the film, Guy’s friends, including fellow Americana stars Rodney Crowell, Steve Earl and Vince Gill, talk about the craft in his songs, as well as his indifference to commercial concerns. They talk openly about the complexities of her major relationships.
Guy’s relationship with Susannah began in tragedy. When they met, he was dating his sister, Bunny, who had become pregnant. Soon after, he killed himself. “There was no singular reason that anyone could point to,” Saviano said. “There was a news article that said she was suffering from depression but no one really knows.”
Guy writes touching song for Bunny, she’s not going anywhere. The loss of her sister hit Susanna hard. In the diary she wrote, “I was desperate to hold my sister and the cow was the closest thing. Upon our grief for Bunny, we fell in love.”
At the time, in his late 60s, Guy had a day job as an art director for PBS Television, but wanted to devote himself entirely to songwriting. He drew inspiration from his friend Towns van Zandt, who had already started a stellar career. After Susanna met Towns, she formed an equally deep bond with her husband. “The boy and I were married, but Towns and I were soul mates,” she wrote in her diary.
The relationship between Susannah and Townes was not only emotional, but also sexual at times. Oddly, the latter aspect is not included in the film. “To me, it didn’t matter,” Saviano said of the omission. “It was really about love and friendship between them. The boy knew it was sexual and it was just accepted. We have to keep in mind that they were all young adults in the free love era of the ’60s. And It’s not like Guy was the perfect husband by any means. They were all individual actors and they just wanted to do what they wanted to do. They didn’t grow up on convention in any part of their lives.”
As Steve Earl says in the film, “No one talked about the relationship between Susannah and Townes because sometimes being in the same room was a little too intimate. And nobody raised questions that nobody answered.” Wanted to have.”
Saviano believes that Towns gave Susanna something that Guy couldn’t. “He had this spiritual, vulnerable side and the cow didn’t share that,” she said. “The guy was a very stubborn, no-nonsense kind of person. I think he liked that Towns took some of the pressure off him so he didn’t have to be the attractive husband all the time.”
Beyond their friendship, the trio’s bond focused on the art of songwriting. To celebrate this, Guy, Susannah and Towns created an informal salon of fellow songwriters. Susanna used to tape some of their conversations, many of which are featured in the film. Some catch them drunk, which is a prominent feature of their nights. Although Susannah often expressed her creativity as a painter – her work is evidenced by album covers by Guy, Emmilo Harris, Willie Nelson and others – she also wrote songs. Hers had more commercial appeal than Guy or Towns, which caused some envy. Two pieces they co-wrote became #1 country hits: I’ll Be Your San Anton Rose for singer Dotsi, and Come From the Heart, sung by Kathy Mattia. While some of Guy’s songs did well through cover versions by artists such as Jerry Jeff Walker, Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill, his own albums bombed in the mid-70s. Worse, he fought fiercely with his record company over his emphasis on perfect arrangements and production. He was even annoyed by the use of drums in his recordings, believing it to have distracted from the heart of the song. Van Zandt went ahead, going out of his way to isolate even the Nashville officers who tried to help him.
Guy Clark released five albums on major labels and hated them all, although they included classic pieces written by him, such as Desperados Waiting for a Train or The Randall Knife. In the early 80s, he left the business for five years. By the end of the decade, he was back to recording for the kind of indie label that allowed him to perform extensively with an acoustic guitar, as he preferred. His work ended in anticipation of the Americana movement, for which he was later awarded several prizes in that field. “The boy has legendary status there,” Saviano said.
At the same time, his marriage to Susanna went through a terrible phase, which led to their separation for several years. Guy said in the film, “She had a lot of my crap, while in Susanna’s diaries, she expresses her need to act on her own. Over time, however, the depth of their relationship brought them back together.” And Townes remained a tumultuous part of his life. But by then Towns had begun a deadly spiral downward with addictions to both alcohol and heroin. “Nowadays, Towns would have been diagnosed as bipolar,” Saviano speculated. “When he was young, they did shock therapy on him and he lost all his memory. So, who knows what he did in his mind. “
When Towns died, in 1997 at the age of 52, Susanna went to bed and never left him. She also became addicted to the opioid Percocet. The director believes that “Town’s death only added to the grief he felt from the death of his sister. But” because she had been bedridden for 15 years, people in Nashville wrote of her as insane, Saviano said. “I wanted them to know that Susanna wasn’t crazy. She was sad and never recovered from it.”
The director said that one of the reasons he made the film was to restore Susanna’s reputation, as well as to burn down Cow and Town’s work. Susannah died before she could give any opinion about Saviano’s use of her diaries in the film. But, the director said she “feels quite confident that she has her seal of approval. Clearly, I think Susanna is guiding this whole process from the great beyond.”
As evidence, she points to a somewhat strange relationship between Susannah, Guy, and the narrator of the diaries, Sissy Spacek, which she only discovered while filming. In the ’70s, Spacek learned to play the guitar from Guy’s first wife, Susan Spaa, and the actor recorded a song written by Susannah on his one and only album in 1983. The director believes that both Guy and Susanna would have appreciated it. The fact is that his film doesn’t get over his complicated story. “The boy was not afraid of the truth,” she said. “There was none of them. He’d say, “Yeah, that’s life. That was it.”