QUECHEE — Dave Clark had a theory about time, and its passage. Time didn’t contract because you had too many things to do during the course of a day, a week, a month. It expanded. The more you did, the more time you had.
Clark lived by that philosophy, even when he was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2018. A lifelong musician, he sang, composed, performed, and organized musical events throughout the Upper Valley. He spent time with his wife Helen and his two children from his first marriage, sailed on Lake Champlain, and played with other musicians as often as he could, until he was no longer able to muster the stamina to do so.
“We had a long goodbye, we knew it was terminal,” said his wife Helen Clark. “The only hope for a cure was if he could get a liver transplant – until we found out (the cancer) had metastasized and then it wasn’t an option anymore.”
The cancer ended Dave Clark’s life, but it was “not what his life was all about,” Clark said.
Her husband was an ambassador for music throughout the Upper Valley. “He sat on his porch and would play his guitar and people would honk their horns and wave and stop.
He loved playing music and you knew it. He loved the audience,” said Rob Oxford, who for nine years played with Clark throughout New England as part of the duo Oxford & Clark, with Oxford on the guitar and Clark on the bass.
Clark was born in 1953 in Fairbanks, Alaska, to Harold and Charlayne (McCurry) Clark. He was the second of five children, and the first boy. Because his father was in the military, they moved relatively frequently: from Alaska to upstate New York to Norman, Okla. Clark graduated with a fine arts degree from the University of Oklahoma (Sooners football was the only sport he followed with any great interest), and ended up moving east to New York City, where he “had a loft in Brooklyn when it was not cool,” said Helen Clark.
Clark made a living as a graphic designer and art director in the city before moving again to Pennsylvania and Maryland. In Maryland he started his own ad agency, and in 1988 founded Clark Communications Group, an advertising agency, now based in Quechee, that works primarily with lighting and appliance retailers throughout the United States and Canada.
He moved to the Upper Valley in the mid-1990s with his first wife and two children. He was separated from his first wife and living in Quechee when he met Helen Maurer in 1999. The occasion was a birthday party at Maurer’s sister’s house in Lebanon. Maurer’s niece was the honoree, and Clark was there with his daughter, who was a classmate of Maurer’s niece.
“I was never a believer in love at first sight,” Helen Clark said. But Dave Clark changed her mind. His eyes sparkled and they were a striking hazel. Further, he had the ability to look anyone in the eye with a sincere, direct, friendly gaze.
The party was in April, and by August, Maurer split her time between Quechee, where Clark lived, and her home in Nashua. They married in August, 2001 and bought a big yellow house in Quechee, at the junction of Main Street and the Old Quechee Road. Clark named his website and mailing list Big Yellow House Media after the home he shared with Helen. She began working for Clark Communications Group in 2002, and is now the sole owner.
Clark had picked up a guitar when he was around 10, Helen Clark said. By the time he met Oxford, he was fluent on the electric and acoustic guitars and on the upright bass. His talent lay not only in his playing but also in his ability to project to the audience.
“He drew people in,” Oxford said. “To have that engaging a stage presence–you can’t teach that.”
Wherever he played and performed, he brought other musicians into the fold with him, regardless of their experience. Some band leaders, said Thom Healey, can be dictatorial. Not Clark.
“He was open to the creativity (musicians) brought to him, he reveled in it,” said Healey, who met Clark when Healey joined the Handel Society of Dartmouth College. Clark was a bass in the chorus.
“He allowed other people to flourish in his presence,” said Oxford.
That spirit was characteristic of Clark, said his friend and fellow musician Jed Dickinson, who played with him in Clark’s band JukeJoynt, which performed both covers and Clark’s original compositions. “He was very, very generous with his time. … Whenever anyone showed an interest in what Dave was doing, he reciprocated.”
Clark had a breadth of musical interests and styles. Apart from singing with the Handel Society and singing and playing with JukeJoynt, he also performed with Wrensong, a 10-person a capella Renaissance choir, Revels North and the choir at St. James Episcopal Church in Woodstock. He released two albums, Shine! and Imaginary World. His interest extended beyond playing music to ensuring that other musicians had the chance to play at venues throughout the Upper Valley.
David Briggs, owner of the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, worked with Clark closely.
“We tend to be a little provincial, if you haven’t lived here 100 years you’re a newcomer. But he worked on all of his passions. It was almost like it was too good to be true. All of a sudden he was bringing all the musicians together but he was doing it in a way that was fabulous for the White River scenario,” Briggs said.
Clark dived into the large pool of Upper Valley talent and Upper Valley venues, and began pairing them. He worked on White River’s First Friday program, and before long, Briggs said, Clark had “quintupled its impact, and he did it with music.”
Rather than court one, two or three musicians, Clark would contact between 10 and 15 musicians to play. The idea was that on a First Friday, no matter where you went in town, you would hear live music.
“It was so good for the area because White River is dense and somewhat urban,” Briggs said. The two men also worked on the idea of making the Briggs Opera House a community arts center which people could drop in and out of, rather like a gym.
As part of Yellow House Media, Clark also developed an enormous mailing list that kept audiences and musicians up to date on musical happenings in the area, a list that grew to include 3,000 names, said Helen Clark.
“He was the person who would come up with creative solutions … not only within his business, but any prospect that came along that he wanted to solve,” Dickinson said.
Clark’s last gig was with JukeJoynt at the Kedron Valley Inn in South Woodstock, a few weeks before he died. Clark knew it was the last time he would perform before an audience, Dickinson said. “We were supposed to play for two hours but ended up playing for three. He was exhausted at the end of it,” Dickinson said.
Nonetheless, Clark had, Dickinson said, “played it out,” Clark’s term for going all in, playing his heart out, not letting others down.
“He never whined, he was never bitter, he never said why did this happen to me?” Helen Clark said. “He did what he could do, for as long as he could do it, until he couldn’t do it anymore.”
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.