“IF WE DON’T GET OUT OF LOS ANGELES, I’M GOING TO GO CRAZY,” SUSANNA CLARK TOLD GUY. THEY LEFT FOR NASHVILLE — AND HE TURNED THE WARNING INTO “L.A. FREEWAY.”
Guy Clark went to Los Angeles hoping the city might open a door.
Around 1970, he and Susanna moved there while he tried to turn songwriting into something more than a private calling. On paper, Los Angeles looked like a place where music careers could begin. In real life, it never fit him.
Clark found work at the Dopyera brothers’ Dobro factory and spent his off-hours trying publishers.
But the city wore on him.
He later remembered the yellow air, the traffic, the concrete, and the feeling that Los Angeles was something to endure rather than a place to belong.
Susanna said what both of them already knew.
If they did not get out, she was going to go crazy.
The Escape Became The Song
In 1971, Guy and Susanna left California for Nashville.
Clark had been offered a staff-writing job there, and the move gave them a way out of the city that had never felt like home. Los Angeles had not given him the career he had imagined. It had given him frustration, restlessness, and enough discomfort to turn leaving into memory almost immediately.
Not long after the move, Clark wrote “L.A. Freeway.”
The song did not treat escape like a grand western exit.
It found drama in the mess left behind.
Dishes.
Newspapers.
A landlord.
Old food.
Concrete.
Those details mattered because that is how leaving often feels in real life. Not cinematic. Not heroic. Just a room being emptied, a life being packed, and a place becoming past tense before the door has fully closed.
Jerry Jeff Walker Carried It First
Clark did not record “L.A. Freeway” first.
Jerry Jeff Walker put it on his self-titled 1972 album, and his version reached the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973. That recording helped carry Guy Clark’s name into the Texas progressive-country world before Clark had released an album of his own.
That was important.
Before Clark became known as one of the great Texas songwriters, other voices had to carry his songs into the rooms where listeners were gathering. Jerry Jeff understood the restless feeling in “L.A. Freeway” because it belonged to the same world of writers, drifters, bars, roads, and half-made plans.
The song sounded like motion.
But underneath it was a decision.
A man and a woman leaving a place before it swallowed too much of them.
Clark’s Version Brought It Back To The Room
Guy Clark finally recorded “L.A. Freeway” for his 1975 debut, Old No. 1.
By then, the song had already started becoming part of the vocabulary around the restless Texas writers moving between Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, and the road. It was not just about one freeway anymore. It was about any place a person had to leave in order to become himself again.
Clark’s version pulled the song closer to its source.
Voice.
Guitar.
Details.
No unnecessary decoration.
He sang it like a man still seeing the apartment, still feeling the grit of the city, still hearing Susanna’s warning somewhere behind the lines.
That restraint made the escape believable.
The song did not need to outrun Los Angeles.
It only needed to get clear of it.
The City Failed Him In The Right Way
Los Angeles did not make Guy Clark a star.
It did not hand him the career he had gone there looking for.
But failure can be useful when a writer knows how to keep the right pieces. Clark took the irritation, the bad air, the traffic, the factory job, the rejected pitches, the homesickness, and the moment Susanna finally said they had to leave.
He did not turn those things into complaint.
He turned them into a map.
“L.A. Freeway” became one of the first clear signs of what made Guy Clark different. He could make ordinary objects carry emotional weight. He could write about leaving without making it vague. He could put the listener inside a room at the exact moment a life was being dismantled.
That was his gift.
He made the small debris speak.
What “L.A. Freeway” Really Leaves Behind
The deepest part of this story is not only that Guy Clark escaped Los Angeles and wrote a song about it.
It is that the wrong city helped reveal the right writer.
A move west.
A Dobro factory job.
Yellow air.
Traffic.
Publishers who did not open the door.
Then Susanna’s warning, a move to Nashville, Jerry Jeff Walker carrying the song first, and Clark later recording it on Old No. 1 with the details still sharp enough to feel lived-in.
Los Angeles did not give Guy Clark the career he wanted.
Leaving it gave him one of the songs that helped define the career he eventually built.
And somewhere inside those dishes, newspapers, concrete, and last looks around the room, “L.A. Freeway” kept the sound of two people choosing departure before the city could turn them into strangers to themselves.
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