Fans of The Clarks ‘know what you get’ at Fayette County Fair
Photo courtesy of Erica Dilcer
Scott Blasey, center, Rob James, Greg Joseph and David Minarik formed The Clarks in the fall of 1986, and while they’ve performed on David Letterman and their music featured on “The Simpsons,” the band returns year after year to the Fayette County Fair to play, among other songs, “Cigarette.” This year, The Clarks are touring with Gary Jacob, Skip Sanders and Noah Minarik.
Courtesy Erica Dilcer
Scott Blasey, third from left, grew up in Connellsville and his hometown serves as inspiration for some of The Clarks’ songs, including 1994’s “Cigarette.” The band will again take the stage at the Fayette County Fair on July 29.
When The Clarks take the stage Saturday at the Fayette County Fair, you can bet they’ll be playing fan favorite “Penny on the Floor” and a song that has special meaning to the local audience: 1994’s “Cigarette.”
“We have to play it at the fair. We pretty much play it at every show. If we don’t play it, people get mad,” laughed Scott Blasey, lead singer and songwriter. “There’s no way we’d get out alive without playing it at the fair.”
“Cigarette” pairs lyrics bordering on the surreal to a tune born from drummer Rob James’s imagination, culminating in an uptempo ’90s rock track that gives Bob Dylan vibes. When Blasey sings, “…it houses circus freaks, temptation and the Fayette County Fair,” fair crowds go wild; it isn’t often this small corner of the world gets namedropped in music.
That lyric is what landed the band a gig at the Fayette County Fair, which kicks off today and runs through Aug. 5, nearly three decades ago.
“This is crazy, it’s almost 30 (years). The song came out in 1994, with the line about the Fayette County Fair. ‘Cigarette’ got popular on the radio. The Fayette County Fair approached us,” Blasey said, adding the fair figured The Clarks would be a good entertainment fit. “We started playing there right after that. I don’t think we’ve missed a year the entire time. It’s our longest-running show. It’s been a lot of fun, we have great crowds. They just keep inviting us back, we keep saying yes.”
The Clarks didn’t set out to include the Fayette County Fair in their lyrics. Many a songwriter has said that sometimes lyrics just come to you. Dylan famously told “60 Minutes” in 2004 that some of his early songs are “magically written,” and Blasey experienced a similar magic when penning “Cigarette.”
In the early 90s, The Clarks’s “Penny on the Floor” got a lot of airtime on WDVE. The station invited the local band, which formed in 1986, to play live on air.
“We performed on their morning show live from a bar in Pittsburgh. We did ‘Penny on the Floor,'” Blasey recalled. “They wanted to hear another song. We sort of had been rehearsing ‘Cigarette;’ we had most of it completed.”
But when the band reached the musical interlude after the second chorus, Blasey ran out of words. The Clarks hadn’t yet solidified the lyrics for that final verse.
“Honestly, I just made up those lyrics right on the spot. They were made up on the spot at the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern,” Blasey said. “I don’t know why I was thinking about it (the Fayette County Fair) or what made me come up with those lines, but it was very much improvisation. I thought, this is awful, but people loved it.”
When it was time to record “Cigarette” in the studio, The Clarks kept the line about circus freaks and the Fayette County Fair in the song.
Perhaps the fair popped into Blasey’s mind during that on air performance because the song centers so heavily on his hometown of Connellsville.
In the second verse, Blasey sings, “On a dark and lonely road in my hometown stands a house that long ago should’ve been torn down.”
The house was real.
“There used to be a market called Pechin Market in Dunbar, not far from where the fairgrounds are. There was an old house behind there,” said Blasey, adding the homeowner let he and his friends use the space. “He would let us have parties there. It was kind of debaucherous. That’s where that line comes from.”
Other songs, like “Mercury,” also include references to Blasey’s hometown, he said.
“I had a really wonderful childhood. I had wonderful parents, I had great friends and neighbors. Growing up there in the 70s, it was just a great community to be a part of,” Blasey said. “You write about what you know. Certainly in my early days of songwriting, that was a big part of what I knew about.”
Blasey grew up in a musically-inclined household. His father was a “frustrated drummer,” he said, and his mother played the organ in the family’s living room from time to time. Music always filled the house, and Blasey drew early inspiration from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Prince.
When he was 18, Blasey picked up a guitar. Shortly thereafter, he tried his hand at songwriting.
“I jumped into the deep end of the pool pretty quickly. I was still very green and didn’t know what I was doing. The best way to learn is by doing,” he said.
Blasey had a one track mind for music, and his parents were supportive of his musical aspirations.
Those aspirations became dreams come true. To date, The Clarks have released 11 studio albums, they headlined the Surge Festival at Star Lake in the mid-90s, they’ve appeared on David Letterman and their music has been featured on “The Simpsons.”
But every year The Clarks return to the Fayette County Fair to play before Blasey’s hometown crowd.
“That was the place to go in the summer as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s,” Blasey said. “I loved going to the fair. A bunch of buddies would go, we would just eat good food, play games, look for girls, just all the stuff that teenagers do. Lots of fond memories of going to the fair.”
Now, Blasey and his family arrive early on the day of The Clarks’ performance because his kids enjoy the Fayette County Fair, too.
“They’re teenagers now but they still enjoy it. They love the animals, they love the food, the rides and the people watching,” he said.
Times have changed, but the fair retains the charm about which Blasey waxes nostalgic. The demolition derby is still just as thrilling, still just as big a draw, as it was in the ’70s and ’80s, and for almost 30 years The Clarks have been a crowd favorite.
The Clarks take the stage at 7:30 p.m. July 29. They’ll most certainly be singing “Cigarette” in the county that inspired more than one great song by a nationally-acclaimed local band.
“I still have a lot of connections, people, family and friends, in Connellsville,” Blasey said. “It’s still very much a part of who I am.”