Craig Clark’s bluesy voice has been called the best in the U.S.in its genre, and that national appeal will be brought to Muddy Waters nightclub in Prescott late Sunday afternoon. They continue to be bringing it, now that the music scene in at least some fronts has reopened, and in the cases of many other clubs is only slowly going forward..
Clark belts out the blues rock – deep and rich and southern — along with a whole big heaping cup of soul that will rival as a play-on-words namesake, The Lovin’ Spoonful, to bring to the table a style all his own.
He started singing Gospel at age five, when most of us were trying to master tying their shoelaces. Since moving to Minneapolis from Pennsylvania in the ‘80s, and being part of a scene that saw some great music of all kinds, Clark added gusto to his self-taught and compelling guitar style, and dynamic vocals. He has performed with Big Brother and The Holding Company, Jimmie Van Zant and Big John Dickerson, and at the Broken Spoke in Sturgis. (See that, Forrest and friend). Clark is influenced by the likes of Sam Cook, Bobbie Bland, Robert Cray and Buddy Guy, his bio says.
He can also play with his full band, and a sidekick has also been around for decades and got going on the bass and vocals at a very early age. The show goes on from 4-8 p.m. on the 22nd.
In a variety of sub-genres within the Gospel and folk music scope, the willingness of Minnesota groups with big musical ties – think along the lines of sharing the stage with a Grammy winner — to travel to get gigs has been amped up. In a number of cases this summer, such acts have trekked down Hwy. 29 as far as central Wisconsin to perform rather high-profile shows that are things a bigger, local church has hung its hat on as a key fundraiser.
Do you believe time is fluid? And so can go backward and forward, and vise versa?
So here I come again, and here I go. I wrote yesterday that there would be more coming on the front of shows that could be no-shows because of stuff like hurricanes. It was posted under Notes From The Beat, saying more was coming of the sort as a lead item, but here it is as the second one down so you guys can read both (I think I needed to give myself that one more plug).
When your rock show goes electric, watch out for the electricity in the air, in the form of thunder and lightning, very, very frightening. Thus was the case way back when, when I saw Styx play just weeks before their first album (yes Old School term), put them on the map in more than the Midwest. So as they toured to support the soon-to-be groundbreaking effort, what was the venue? In their greatest coup ever, the Lincoln County Fair in north-central Wisconsin, in a county where there are more cows then people, not exactly a hotbed of anything artsy.
But not a name act just yet, so the show simply had to go on, come hell or high water. Black Oak Arkansas opened and was able to do their whole set, as a band that again was first popping themselves up on the musical map. But before Styx got too far into theirs, the electric eye in the sky storm was well on its way, then right overhead. This was about the time Styx, although still forming its sound, was starting to riff on the electric guitars and they wouldn’t want the high-amped-up jolt for their fingers to come from a lightning strike .. rather a killer solo. So the show went on to close, and although potentially in harm’s way, the solos were not cut short.
(An aside. The fairgrounds where the show was held had great seating capacity, even though not a venue in demand but for one thing, mainly … thank God for the demolition derbies and any auto racing that could be booked. Still, people such as myself ran to the hills, or actually the midway cul-de-sac thing nearest the stage area, to catch the first-loud-sound-to-be-found show as the skies grew dark, and not from nightfall).