Farewell to Clark: Like Saying ‘Bye’ to Your First Clunker

Watching Keith Clark end his stewardship of the Pacific Symphony on Thursday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a little more than 10 years after he founded the orchestra, I found myself thinking about, of all things, my first car.

My 1971 Vega gave me my first sense of transportational freedom and pride in ownership; likewise, Clark was Orange County’s first enfant terrible and he gave many music lovers a euphoric feeling of cultural independence from Los Angeles and local pride when he created, however roughshod, our own orchestra.

Like most teen-agers, I couldn’t wait to have my own wheels. Through a summer job painting guardrails and patching potholes with the county road department, I saved up enough to buy a cheap car, and went out shopping one night with my dad.

At 18, my experience with car dealers was nil and my common sense was about the same. When I spotted the shiny lemon-yellow beauty (I should have paid more attention to that warning sign) with the black vinyl roof at the second lot we visited, I fell in auto-erotic love.

What did I know about the Vega’s history, about performance, about reliability? All I cared about was that it looked great and I could afford to drive it home.

I plunked down my hard-earned $1,650, after shrewdly talking the salesman down from the $1,800 it was stickered at. Within a month, I discovered the crack in the engine block.

I held onto that Vega for about 7 years and put about 120,000 miles on it. But in that time it went through four engines, a couple of clutches, a gas tank and nearly everything else.

Back on that glorious night in 1972 when I drove it off the dealer’s lot in Orange, I never suspected that the Vega would turn out to be one of Detroit’s great practical jokes.

Only when I replaced it years later with an astonishingly reliable Subaru did I realize how frustrating its mechanical breakdowns had been and that car ownership needn’t be an endless series of headaches.

Keith Clark has been like that Vega in a lot of ways. For the last decade, he took a young and willing, but relatively inexperienced, classical music audience where it wanted to go.

His conducting wasn’t always the most efficient, the most luxurious, the fastest (well, sometimes he was), the smoothest or the prettiest way to get through a concert.

But he did coach a lot of culturally mobile Orange Countians along their first trip into the world of symphonic music.

The first time I saw Clark conduct was in 1982 at Knott’s Berry Farm, where the Pacific Symphony backed country guitar picker Chet Atkins. I remember Clark waving his hands as a conductor is supposed to do, though I don’t recall what they played that day. But he sure looked great in that white dinner jacket.

I also remember a 1984 Independence Day concert at the Pacific Amphitheatre, featuring pianist Leonard Pennario playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which resulted in a photo finish as conductor and soloist raced toward the final bar.

I remember a night last year at the Performing Arts Center when Clark made Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony sound every bit as thrilling and dramatic as John Williams’ “Star Wars” music.

And this week he lost the reins occasionally during Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, giving us a musical stampede that sounded more like a Corral Symphony.

Considering the spottiness of my Vega’s performance record, I suppose I should have rejoiced the day I sold it to some sap college student for $950. And maybe I should feel like the orchestra members who said, in effect, “Good riddance” to Clark at Wednesday night’s concert by refusing to return the applause he offered them.

As the orchestra moves into its post-Clark era, the board will no doubt be after a more stable, higher-quality replacement when Clark’s tenure draws to a close. And that should help the orchestra shift into a new age of maturity.

But like the day I watched my Vega disappear down the street with some stranger behind the wheel, today there’s a little twinge of sadness in seeing Keith leave.