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Joe Ben Clark — a native Austinite who's been making music since the age of nine, and hasn't stopped looking for the next project since.
The Story
It started at nine years old in the UT String Project, where music students taught kids the fundamentals — Joe Ben came out of it playing cello. An unexpected move to Houston as a teenager put an electric guitar in his hands, and a monthly ritual of learning every song in Guitar Magazine. His first band, Redhouse, cut its teeth at Zelda's, downstairs at Fitzgerald's.
Seeing Ian Moore play Fitzgerald's was the push he needed. Days later he'd packed his bags for home. Back in Austin he traded slide riffs with roommate Dude Edwards, played grunge for a few years with Tiny Spider, then — after his first daughter was born and a stretch spent learning computers and digital audio — teamed up with Johnny Molinari for covers and originals that grew into Treachery of Others, with the odd side project like Wild Bill and the Lost Knobs along the way.
Today it's three projects at once: the Joe Ben eXperiment, Joe Ben Plays Beck, and solo — plus whatever the next one turns out to be.
Instruments
Guitar · lap steel · pedal steel · theremin · drums · synth · vocals. Weapon of choice: a Gibson 335.
Influences
Beck first and foremost — then Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Winter, Mance Lipscomb, Lightning Hopkins, Queens of the Stone Age, Black Sabbath, and Bowie.
In the Studio
When he's not on a stage, Joe Ben is usually in his South Austin home studio. Two-plus decades in tech feed a fast, stable digital workflow, and he still mixes and records the occasional project for other artists. It's the quiet engine behind everything above.