As we enter the final weekend of 2017, here at State of Nevada we decided to visit, for the hour, with Las Vegas-based singer and songwriter Clint Holmes.
Two songs on Rendezvous, Clint’s most recent album, have received nominations for a Grammy in the “Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals” category. They are “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” which Clint sings with Jane Monheit, and “I Loves You Porgy/There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon For New York,” a duet with Dee Dee Bridgewater.
The Grammy award ceremony is January 28, 2018 at Madison Square Garden in New York. We’ll listen to some music from the album. And, we asked Clint to bring along a favorite tune or two, and to talk about his life in entertainment.
Interview excerpts (edited and condensed)
Clint Holmes on his parents, and the meaning, for him, of the John Mayer song, “Stop This Train.” Clint sings it on Rendezvous.
(Host Carrie Kaufman) When did you first come across this song? And do you remember the first time you heard it?
I sure do. My daughter, Brittany, came to me. And this was a while ago. Maybe eight years ago. She came to me and said, “Daddy, John Mayer wrote a song about our family." I said, “Okay.” She said, really, you have to hear it. She played it for me. And it blew me away and I understand what she meant. It’s about the passage of time and families and realizing at some point – and maybe at some POINTS in your life – that time is passing. It’s not a maudlin song at all. But it’s just such a special lyric. It IS about our family. You know, my mom was white and my dad was black. The opening lyric is “I am not color-blind. I know the world is black and white. I try to keep an open-mind, but I can’t sleep on this tonight. Stop this train." Stop this life moving so quickly. So, I related to the song as I think most people who listen to it do.
(Host Carrie Kaufman) This lyric “I don’t want my parents to go” Are your parents still alive?
My dad died in 1998 right before I moved to Las Vegas. My mom got to spend a decade here. She was almost 95 when she passed. When they go you really feel in some sense: I’m them now. I’m that generation. And I don’t have them anymore. That’s part of it. I don’t want to see my parents go - leaving me one generation’s length away from living life out on my own.
(Host Carrie Kaufman) So, how did you find your way home once your parents were gone?
Because mom lived so long I got to be, and my sister, got to be the parents at some point. Dad was a very heathy man until he passed. He got a rare disease. But my dad had a 32-inch waist, he worked-out three times a week, and if you called him old.... My dad was not a professional. He just worked at the steel plant, he drove the snow plow in Buffalo, he was the janitor at our church. But my dad dyed his hair to stay looking young, worked out to stay looking young. He wanted to look and be and act and feel young, which has always been my thing. So, I think that’s one of the things they both gave me – this potential to stay youthful through growing older, which is important career-wise to me, but it’s also important life-wise to me. So, they gave me my home. They gave me my home musically. They gave me my home in terms of how I looked at my life.
(Host Carrie Kaufman) This title cut, “At the Rendezvous.” You wrote the lyrics.
I did. It’s about my dad and I, and the best times we had. I orginally wrote it for a play, in 1996, called, “Comfortable Shoes,” which is about the journey of a family in the 50s and 60s – a biracial family, an interracial family - I guess I was the biracial family, growing up in a small town of 500 people where we were the only ones, you know.
Music was the refuge. My dad used to go into Buffalo, which was 25 miles north. And he would go in on Friday and Saturday nights. And he would just say, “I’m going out. I’m going out.” And he’s go.
When I was about 12, I found out where he was going, which was to this jazz club in Buffalo, New York called “The Colored Musician’s Club” – which is still there. It’s now a national monument.
And when I was 12, they started to do Sunday afternoon jam sessions. So, he could take me. And my world changed for a couple of reasons. My dad worked three jobs and was always either tired or angry when he came home. And that was the dad I knew most of the time. But when dad walked into The Colored Musician’s Club, it was high-fives and “Hey, cool, how you doing, baby? What’s up?”
And I’m thinking: who is this guy? All the musicians knew him. So, we’d sit there, and once in a while he’d get up and sing, “How High the Moon?” or something, with the band. And I’m like – so, this is another world.
And I remember from 12 years old until 16 years old trying to learn one song and actually get up with the band and say, “Hey, how about I sing?"
I learned “Satin Doll” and I learned what key. And when I was about 16, I went in and said to the guys, who I knew by then, and said, “Can I sing?” And they said, “Sure.” And I got up.
And the thrill of being scared to death and yet doing it – and so I call it in my song The Rendezvous because it was called The Colored Musician’s Club, but it was hard to rhyme that.
But The Rendezvous made sense because it was, for my dad, a rendezvous with the dream he always had of being a singer. It was a rendezvous with the cats that he knew. And he could be himself. And for me it was a rendezvous with learning about my dad.
Clint Holmes, Las Vegas-based singer and songwriter
