Watch Gary Clark Jr. Rip Through ‘Travis County’ Live
Gary Clark Jr.‘s 2012 LP Blak and Blu was a genre-crossing enigma, drawing from soul, hip-hop and rock & roll and becoming the first album ever to contain tracks nominated for Grammys in both Best Rock Song (“Ain’t Messin ‘Round”) and Best Traditional R&B Performance (“Please Come Home”). A Blak and Blu remix mixtape followed this past April, and come September 23rd, the guitarist will be releasing his first concert LP, Gary Clark Jr. Live.
Live will contain a handful of covers – Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues,” Jimi Hendrix‘s “Third Stone From the the Sun” and Albert Collins’ “If Trouble Was Money,” for instance – but the record focuses primarily on Clark’s original tracks. Above, watch him and his band roar through one of them, the lively “Travis County,” during an afternoon set at an outdoor event.
Around the time of Blak and Blu‘s release, Clark talked to Rolling Stone about the pressure he feels as a young blues guitarist attempting to balance old and new. “If it were up to everybody else, I would do Hendrix covers all the time,” he said at the time. “I saw this comment from somebody online the other day, saying, ‘We need you to play more Chicago or Louisiana blues – we want the raw shit.’ Well, I’m not from Chicago or from Louisiana. I’m not from that time period. There was segregation. That music was the popular music at the time. People were doing what they did in that moment in time to express themselves. It’s a different time. So why am I going to pretend?”
Gary Clark Jr. Live will be released on Warner Bros. Records and can be preordered here (digital) or here (material).