- Hey, everybody, it's Edmond Van Der Bijl with
another episode of Once Around the Block.
I'm here with the one, the only--
- Tom Clark.
- Hey, Tom.
How's it going?
- Pretty good.
- Yeah?
- A little early in the morning.
- It's early in the morning for you?
- Well, sometimes, you know, it's--
- I think everything is relative.
Can I tell everybody it's eleven AM?
- Yeah.
- So that's early?
- Well, I wake up early,
but I don't get out of the house this early.
- Oh, okay, cool.
Do you work late?
- Yeah, a lot of times I do.
- Okay, yeah.
- So, general public, who is Tom Clark here?
- Well, I'm the neighbor of
the guy who told you about me, Bradley.
I live in New York.
I'm a musician.
Work in a bar, like every other musician in New York.
- Yeah.
- Lived here 32 years,
and this has been my neighborhood for the last five or six.
- Okay, and New York 32 years, that's been through a lot.
- Absolutely.
(chuckles)
Yeah, it's you know,
twenty years ago you and I wouldn't be
walking around this particular block.
- Totally.
(chuckles)
- We would not be here.
- So has it been like a fun change, a fun growth?
Has it been up and down? - Yeah.
Well, it's a pretty amazing city.
I don't know if you've spent much time here,
but it's pretty great and I do a lot of the good stuff...
people complain about has disappeared but, you know,
there's still a hell of a lot of good stuff in New York City.
- Sure.
Like, I gave myself three years and I'm still here.
- 32 years ago you gave yourself three years?
- Yeah.
- And what did you come to do?
- Musician. -Yeah.
Moved here, I was a musician back home and
in bands and I was twenty years old,
almost 21 when I moved here,
and I wrote one fan letter to a guy named Marshall Crenshaw,
who I really admire...
and he actually wrote me back.
First and only fan letter and he said "go for it".
-He said go for it and--
...was that the sign?
- Yeah.
- Was that the sign you needed?
- Yeah, and you know,
I really thought I'd probably stay in
Illinois my whole life.
I never even saw an ocean until I moved to New York.
- Wow.
- Yeah, pretty land-locked in Illinois.
A place called Dekalb, Illinois.
- All right.
And you've got quite the rich history as a musician.
- Yeah, well, you know, rich in some ways, I guess.
(chuckles)
Poor in many other ways. - I understand.
(chuckles)
You've played with some of the greats.
Did you have any stories you wanna share?
- I don't know.
It's really hard to just come up with one in my head.
- Totally.
- But, you know, it's been a pretty fun time, you know?
Sometimes you kind of get to
live the rockstar life without actually being a rockstar.
- Okay, I guess everything's dependent on
how you see things.
You're kind of a rockstar.
How many guitars do you have?
- How many guitars?
- Yeah.
- It goes up and down...mostly up.
It's around 115 is a guess.
- 115. Wow.
And where do you keep those?
- You gonna rob me?
- No, that's funny.
I didn't even think of that.
- No, I keep them all over the place.
Mostly in a special climate-controlled storage space.
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- I used to have a big place.
which I would actually like to make a documentary about
is building I lived in in Brooklyn for
21 years very close to here.
I had two floors and a backyard and there was a little bar and
like everything in New York, they kicked us all out,
tore it down, and now it's just been
a vacant lot for the last ten years.
But it was a pretty amazing place. I had plenty of room.
- So is that an issue you're seeing a lot of with, like,
space for artists changing?
- Absolutely.
Even this neighborhood when I moved here in 1986,
you could rent any one of these storefronts for,
like, $400 a month.
You could live in it if you wanted.
You could start a store where
you sold nothing but thumbtacks.
If it didn't work, so what, you know?
But now forget about it, you know?
But Jimmy Cagney was born on this block.
- Okay.
- Which I find fascinating.
- Yeah, totally.
- When I moved here, I lived way uptown on
103 street and I was--
You know, the subway, I think it was 90 cents.
I couldn't really swing it,
so I'd walk downtown everyday just for free money.
And I'd always take a different street.
I'm a big New York history buff,
so I'm always reading pla...any plaque I see, I read. - Okay.
And you know it like the back of your hand at this point.
- No, not really.
That's one thing about New York,
there's always some alley or
side street you never saw before, and you know.
The hint to New York is look up.
Because all the best parts of
the buildings are up at the top.
- It's so funny because this
whole time I've been looking down, so you're right.
You're right, just look up. - There you go.
Keep your chin up, right?
(chuckles)
So, when you came, you were hustling to make it.
You were playing while you were on the streets.
- I was playing a lot. I was doing that.
I was playing in the streets,
playing in the subway stations.
My first job in New York City was
I stood in front of Aster Place barbershop,
which, back then, had 120 barbers.
It was like three stories.
And they sort of popularized the whole mohawk thing.
- Really?
- With a little four-chair barbershop and
these two brothers started doing kind of
crazy punk-rock haircuts and stuff.
And it took off and by the time I got here,
it was three floors.
And a girl just made a documentary about it a while back.
I haven't seen it yet,
but I stood outside for nine and a half hours one day and
was singing just to try to get some dough.
- Yup.
- And the owner, Enrico Veza,
came out and hired me for eight hours a day,
seven days a week. - Wow, really?
For twenty dollars a day he paid me.
- Whoa, what was that like back then?
- It was a struggle because, you know,
first of all, you realize people went
there because their haircuts are
cheap because they didn't have any money.
- Right.
- I was basically pestering people as they were--
You know, it was like a hostage situation.
They were getting their hair cut,
so they couldn't run, so
you know, they'd stick dollars in my guitar and
I inhaled a lot of perm solution.
(chuckles)
- Did it get you through the day?
- It did, I did that for almost two years in
that place and then I met a guy from
Ireland named Hank Wedel who's
still one of my best friends....
who turned me on to playing gigs in
Irish bars up in the Bronx and Queens...
and they actually paid a lot of money back then,
so I really made my living that way for a long time.
- Awesome.
- That really is kind of a paying your
dues in a different way.
- Totally.
In terms of the creative type,
the creative passion or whatever,
it takes a lot of work, right?
- Absolutely.
Anybody that goes out there and does that, I mean,
there are so many people that are DJs now because
they have a freakin' iPod, you know?
- Right.
- And, you know, whatever..
if that's your thing and that's what people wanna do, fine,
but I still get a little excited... It used to be every other
person down here had a guitar on their back.
Now, when I see the odd person with a guitar on their back,
I kinda feel good because it's like
there's a guy that's still trying to
do it or there's a girl still doing it.
- Right, right, right.
So there's some nostalgia there.
Times are changing.
- It's nostalgia, but it's also good to
see that people are out there now because, you know,
it's like I said, it's New York.
There's still little pockets of excitement here.
- Yeah, so I think it's changed so much even
since I lived here a couple of years ago.
I mean, a couple years is a little while back,
and even then it changed already.
I knew it would change so much,
but it still retains the magic and a rhythm.
- It really does.
Like I said, I'm still here. - Yeah.
- I really thought I'd do it...
either get wickedly famous or rich or
run the hell home and go back to working in
corn fields or grocery stores,
but something just keeps me here.
- That's awesome.
Listen, Tom, we've done about the block now.
I have this moment at the end called the wow moment,
which is words of wisdom.
- Uh-huh.
- So it's also an opportunity just
to say a shout-out or anything you want to say.
You wanna come here so I can get you in the light?
- Yeah, all right.
- Words of wisdom: just do it, just go out there and do i, you know....
stand out in the street with your guitar.
you know, if you wanna be an artist,
get six people to live with in
a studio apartment and do it because...it's corny,
but those are really some of my favorite moments...
where being creative while you're starving and
finding a way to do it.
Here I am, still here somehow.
- [Edmond] Do you wanna say bye to the folks at home?
- Everybody back in Dekalb,
I'll see you in July for the class reunion.
And I'll be doing a gig there,
so I expect to see you all there.
And to the people at the Tree House at 2A,
a thing I run on Sunday nights.
It's an amazing thing.
Come out to the Tree House, everybody.
Thanks.
- Thanks for watching, everybody.
See you next time.
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