James Darby

Jacks Blues James Darby

"So you dig the sounds...dat's cool," said Louie Thibodeaux, a Cajun record producer and rock and roll legend. "I been needin' fo' somebody like you to show up, and here you is."Those words sounded great to Jack Clifford, a young, aspiring photographer He had been working the Houston music scene in 1970, when this windfall blew in from the swamps of Louisiana. He soon wrapped his career around the Louie's recording studio. These were exciting days for Jack; working amid the talent-rich Texas music world, and striving to become the foremost photographer for Texas recording studios, bands, artists and agents. It was a slippery trip for him, hustling through the latter days of psychedelic rock, and emerging soul and R& B music; when the times were indeed changing. As the studio recording tapes rolled, stories spun out of the desperate mix of dreamers, schemers, winners and losers. Outside of his musical microcosm, a social caldron was boiling as the Vietnam War dragged on, students protested for freedom, and Americans first walked on moon. Just a year after Woodstock, Jack and his contemporaries awakened to a new decade and looked to redefine their goals as well. His life and loves were soon all about the "sounds" of the studios, but he quickly found himself fated to be drawn into a seamy, corrupt world of stars, producers and agents. It led Jack to make hard decisions about his life and loves that he never anticipated, within a rock and roll cosmos he never imagined. A novel of the early 1970's.