Leng Pleng

This Friday sees the last performance – at least for a while – of Cambodia Country Band, the Monday night resident band at Oscar’s on the Corner that has over the years built a dedicated following.  Lead singer, Canadian Clay George, sat down with Leng Pleng this week to discuss his past and his present, and where to next.

On prompting for all the David Copperfield kind of crap, he begins slowly.  “On a cold, stormy night I was born to a sailor and his young wife in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  My father built a house in Porters Lake, we lived there for a year and then moved to Brantford, Ontario, where he could get work.  Lived there for four years.”

Yes, but the music, Clay.  Tell us about the music.  “I started playing piano when I was very young, and then decided to quit piano because I liked playing baseball better. Actually, I loved piano, but my parents – and they were great – but they bought me a Wurlitzer electric piano, 200A I think it’s called, the same as Ray Charles.  Which is great if you’re playing Ray Charles, but for practicing Mozart it doesn’t really work.”

So shift gears and the singer emerges.  “I started singing in heavy metal bands when I was about 13 or 14, then moved into more classic rock in my later teens. When I was 21 I moved from Burlington, Ontario out to Vancouver, heading west in search of shamans and myths – I was right into Joseph Campbell at the time.  I found my way to Victoria on Vancouver Island and wound up staying there way too long.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not finding suitable bandmates, he developed an interest in finger-style acoustic guitar to accompany himself, and went off to college.  “I was in the writing programme and I was also taking Mandarin – I wanted to learn how to read Chinese and get into comparative religious studies.  I was really interested in all the isms – Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism.  I did really well at the Chinese until I started getting really into guitar – I was learning Robert Johnson at the same time that I was learning my characters, and Robert Johnson won.  I have regretted the decision ever since; I should have stayed in school.”

Instead he turned to busking, and then to traveling.  “I had a very good guitar teacher, Ron Forbes-Roberts, who wrote a book about Lenny Breau.  I only took lessons with him for a short time, but he taught me the basics of alternating thumb picking and stuff like that, and turned me on to early Bob Dylan. And also I started writing a lot, and put together an EP with a fiddle player.

“Around this time I spent about six months touring through the US with my friend Jason Donaldson, traveling down the west coast, across to New Orleans and up to St Louis.  We learned very quickly that the best thing to do when you got into town was just go straight to the university and busk.  We looked like we were out of the 1930s, with three piece brown suits and fedoras.  Jason was a fantastic story teller and a master of improvisation,  he’d be telling these hilarious stories, go way out and bring it back, people just loved it.  I would just play harmonica and sing harmonies.  After 20 minutes of playing somewhere people would start asking where we were from, what were we doing here?   And then: you’re coming to stay at our place while you’re in town.  It was an exciting time.  Jason was a big part of my music education as well, he turned me on to Mississippi John Hurt, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Dave Van Ronk, Spider John Koerner.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once back in Victoria, Clay started to write the songs that showed up on his first album, Clay George, in 2002.  “I was writing a lot, gigging a lot, four nights a week.  And then I moved to Austin, Texas in 2004, and there I wrote most of the second album, Cherry Bank Hotel.  Surviving as a working musician was tough – I had a lot of side jobs, mostly working in bars, doing sound or bartending, or guitar stores.”

In 2009 an American label, 2:59 Records, put out a US release that took songs from the first two albums, and out of that Clay managed to get a placement for his song This Old Town on the TV series Justified, and later three songs in a movie called The Virtuoso.

“I recorded an album called Nightcap which I sat on for quite a while, didn’t release it until 2017, after I moved to Cambodia, just myself and Rick Van Krugel on mandolin and Daniel Lapp on fiddle.  I’d previously been in the studio with some Victoria musicians to record a full album called Deluxe, put a lot of time into it – including writing lots of horn parts – but I didn’t end up using most of it.  The Musician, Light, and Texas are now on Bandcamp, but I don’t know if the rest will ever see the light of day.

“I talked to a couple of labels, but particularly the smaller ones have folded in recent years because there’s no way to make it work economically.  I got really frustrated with the whole thing – I was never really good at the industry parties and stuff like that.  I had the opportunity to go and do a couple of showcases, one in New York and one in Los Angeles, but I just didn’t have the funds to do it – I had supporters but no one was going to put up the money for me.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of that frustration came his move to Phnom Penh.  “I arrived here seven years ago.  It dawned on me that here I could just be a working musician – do solo gigs, jazz singer gigs, whatever.”  Which brings us to the Cambodia Country Band. “Country Band has been great.  In Victoria I was in the Grand Ole Country Band – just a side thing, but lots of fun; a great band, crack musicians.  My father wasn’t fully into country, but he had a lot of country and folk records that I listened to growing up – Tom T Hall, Jim Croce, Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings.  When I got here and we started talking about putting together a band for Oscar’s on the Corner a lot of the Grand Ole Country Band material was reused.

“I don’t imagine this Friday will be the real last CCB show. It’s not like I’m never coming back, I just need to take off for a while.  Not being at the bar anymore I can take some time off and do stuff, go places.  Aside from the couple of CCB gigs in Malaysia I’ve not traveled in the region – never been to Vietnam, never been to Thailand.  So it’s an opportunity for me to go hang out, see some places, visit my family in Canada.  After that I’m not sure.  There are a lot of options – the options are kind of overwhelming actually.

For the fans of Clay’s own songs there’s a blush of optimism in our conversation.  “I’m hoping to get back to doing some more writing.  I think I’ve written only one and a half songs since I’ve been here.  Maybe hole myself up somewhere cheap and do a whole lot of writing.”  We can only hope.

You can find Clay’s music at Bandcamp, and catch the Friday night blast off of Cambodia Country Band at Oscar’s on the Corner.