Wednesday,
August 21, 2002
©
The Florida Times-Union
Charlie
Patton's column
Scientist's
'60s folk life catches up
(An
article on Tim Clutterbuck)
It was a familiar theme in movies of the 1940s like Out of the Past: A man leaves his old life behind and makes a new one, only to have his past catch up with him. Usually things turned out badly.
Tim Clutterbuck's old life caught up with him a few months ago, when Alan White, a sociology professor at the University of East London, contacted him. But for Clutterbuck, 55, principal scientist for Vistakon, the Jacksonville maker of soft contact lenses, the memories are mostly pleasant.
Clutterbuck, who grew up in a seaside village near Bristol on England's west coast, began his second life in 1973 when he married an American girl and moved to upstate New York. Clutterbuck had apprenticed as a mechanical engineer in England. Bausch & Lomb, which was pioneering the flexible contact lens, hired him as a lens designer. If you've worn flexible contact lenses over the last three decades, chances are that at some point you've worn lenses that Clutterbuck helped design.
It's been a good life, a comfortable life for Clutterbuck, who lives with his second wife, Bonnie, in upscale Queen's Harbor. But it's not a particularly exciting life.
That was the life Clutterbuck left behind when he left England, where for a brief, heady moment, he was part of the vibrant English music scene of the mid-to-late 1960s.
Influenced by Bob Dylan, Clutterbuck began playing folk guitar about 1964. In 1967, he hooked up with another aspiring folkie, Dave Mudge. They began performing regularly as Mudge & Clutterbuck at a club called The Troubadour in Bristol. Among the regulars at The Troubadour was Al Stewart, a British folk rocker whose biggest hit would be the 1976 song Year of the Cat. In 1969, at the urging of Stewart, with whom they often performed, Mudge & Clutterbuck moved to London.
But their moment had passed. Folk music was on the wane and their manager was pushing them to abandon their acoustic guitars and go electric. With professional problems exacerbating personal grievances, Mudge & Clutterbuck split in 1972. "We were six months to a year late," Clutterbuck said.
Over the years, White, a fan of the folk performers who had coalesced around The Troubadour, had collected taped recordings of various concerts, including one with two songs by Mudge & Clutterbuck. Over a pint of beer, he and some friends from the old days decided to compile a couple of charity CDs featuring the music of various British folk groups.
That was why he tracked down Clutterbuck, to get permission to use recordings of Lowly, Low and Rougemont Castle, which will be on a CD to be released in November. In an e-mail, White said he's also trying to find enough material by Mudge & Clutterbuck for their own CD. "I think that the track Lowly, Low, that we plan to include ... is a very strong song: up there with the work of Nick Drake and John Martyn."
For Clutterbuck, all this attention from out of the past has been gratifying but a little bittersweet. It comes with the news that his old partner Mudge committed suicide in 1998, apparently distraught over his career.
"It's the emotionally toughest job I ever had," Clutterbuck said of his days as a performer. "The highs are very high. But when it's four o'clock in the morning and you're driving back into London and the streets are empty, you can get pretty low."