Nathan Clay: Breaking the Mold

me blue snipThe Goddess of Groove
By Mad Royal

Born in the middle of the last century, Nathan Clay grew up in a small shack in a pecan grove near Cullman, Alabama, which is about forty miles from both Mussel Shoals, Alabama, and Tupelo, Mississippi. He grew up with his parents and his sister, singing in church.
“I started singing when I was two. I thought everybody sang,” he says now. He picked cotton, corn, and potatoes to earn money for school clothes, and hunted deer and rabbit from the age of nine, to help feed his family on the farm his great-grandfather homesteaded after GOG nathan clay 1the Civil War. When Nathan was 11, in the early fifties, the family started moving back and forth between Alabama and Detroit, a move that was not finalized until Nathan was in his early teens.
When Nathan turned 13, he took guitar lessons, a series of ten lessons that didn’t move fast enough for the young boy, so he started teaching himself. He started playing in clubs in Detroit when he was just 15. He joined his first band, called “Shylow”, and started writing music. He was in a band called “Just Purple Haze” which was offered a recording contract by Motown. Like many people that age, they thought they knew everything, and turned down the offer. “We told them they just wanted us as tax deductions,” a statement that did not go over well with Motown. This was only the second all-white group who had been offered a recording contract with the label; the first was the “Underdogs,” who have passed into obscurity. “Still, it would have looked good on our resumes.”
From the age of about 20, and for the next 20 years or so, Nathan toured with acts such as B.B. King, with whom he had the pleasure of being on stage, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, and the Drifters, either in the opening band or as the backup band. He was in a group called “Tish”, so named because one of the other band members, who was quite stoned at the time, thought it spelled “sh*t” backwards. They did offbeat covers of popular music. Another band was called “White Mud”, composed of about fifteen players, which Nathan says was formed mostly to play jokes on people, although many of the members of that band later did quite well in the mainstream music industry. Once the called up Notre Dame and offered to play a show for free “as we were going to be there form England and were promoting our fifth album” (sic). “We didn’t make it through the first set,” (one of the instruments was a tuba).“I think the most we ever made was $4 for a gig.” In 1985, he started touring the Midwest as a solo artist, working six nights a week. “One day, I found myself playing in a club in Detroit, where one block down the road a man got shot, and two blocks in the other direction, another man got knifed, and I was sure that one day, someone would come into the club and shoot me while I was on stage because his girlfriend liked the band too much.” After that, he started working as a composer, and doing studio work, which he still currently does.
Ten years ago, after a bad family situation which led to his house being broken into, and half of his guitars being stolen, Nathan turned to a new friend on the Central Coast who rented him an apartment. He lives now in Santa Maria, with his childhood sweetheart, Sharon, who went to school with him when they were thirteen. “For about forty years, she thought I was dead.” They were re-connected through a friend in South Carolina at a class reunion, who had kept in touch with both of them. Nathan promptly drove to Michigan, loaded up Sharon and her things in his pickup truck, and brought her back to Santa Maria, with a stop in Las Vegas to get married.  Their five year anniversary is next month.
On March 7, Nathan re-launches his solo career at Creative Juices Lounge in Guadalupe. This is a free show, open to the public. Nathan likes to connect with his audience. He says that when he performs, it comes from a spiritual place. “I like to take people on a journey. When I am able to connect with someone, somebody who just likes music, then we go on a voyage together.” His music is laid back, with influences such as Tim Buckley, the Moody Blues, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Gordon Lightfoot, Three Dog Night, and especially Jimi Hendrix, who he likes to play acoustically. He says he plays the acoustic guitar “like a piano, not just strumming, but playing all the notes.”  His set list will be a mix of originals and covers played in an original format. Check Nathan Clay out on his website, www.nathanclay.net, and come on out to The Lounge, have some Mexican food, some beer or wine, and take a little journey.