Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta (Extract from In Search of Captain Beefheart)

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Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

1965 was a hell of a year. Ready Stead Go ruled the TV and a non-ending stream of Beat bands took over the charts and the world.

It was the year I turned 16 and got a motorbike which meant I could finally get around and get to gigs.

Donovan appeared as a resident on Ready Steady go complete with his cap and sign on his guitar that said – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS – both of which he nicked from Woody Guthrie. I liked Donovan and I had this girlfriend Viv who had his album which she later gave to me. I used to go round her place and play the Donovan album.

Viv had an older brother who was in to Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie. I’d never heard of Woody Guthrie but I was soon getting in to him more than the Donovan. The albums that Viv’s brother liked were Folkways things where Woody is playing fairly safe songs like ‘Springfield Mountain’ with Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly. There was something about them I liked and I started seeking out other Guthrie stuff and soon found some Guthrie songs that were meatier – ‘The Dustbowl Ballads’

I loved the lyrics they weren’t love songs. Woody Guthrie was writing songs that meant something, that were poetic with an intellectual and political importance. They told stories. They were about people and disasters, organising and putting things right. I loved it. My mind buzzed with them. I soaked them up.

I had discovered someone who I felt sang real songs about real injustice. He was immediately one of my heroes and has never ceased to be.

I bought all his Folkways albums – his ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ and ‘Columbia River Collection’.

Guthrie was the poet that put balls into the Folk movement. He not only inspired people like Seeger in the 1950s but was the whole basis behind the emergence of Dylan and later influenced Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and a host of others.

Billy Bragg was straight out of the Guthrie mould and burst upon the scene with his rousing political anthems such as Leon Rosselson’s (another singer-songwriter I love) ‘World turned upside down’ and Seeger’s ‘Which side are you on?’ lapsed into more Poppy stuff but re-emerged when he’d been asked to put some Woody Guthrie lyrics to music and record them. He and Wilco recorded the memorable Mermaid Avenue.

Fairly recently I went on pilgrimage to Mermaid Ave in Coney Island New York. The house was no longer there but you could still walk around and pick up the feel of it with its Funfair Park and tackiness. I could feel him there and I breathed his air.

 Coney island 2010

Back in 1965 I’d discovered Woody and I’m still investigating to this day. I always go back to Guthrie. He is a legend.

For Rock to come of age it had to grow out of the love songs and teenage focus of early Rock ‘n’ Roll and start dealing with real issues in a sophisticated manner. The music had to become more sophisticated and complex and the lyrics had to expand. That’s where Woody came in. Almost single-handedly he raised the art of song writing and added humour and a social dimension through a poetry that was insufficiently rewarded.

Woody was a genius. I had found him and been moved by him but my quest was not over.

Woody got me into Folk and Folk, post Dylan, was undergoing a resurgence of interest.

There were two ways it could go. There was the contemporary field with singer songwriters like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn or there was the traditional with the Young Tradition.

It seemed to me that traditional Folk was stilted and set in the past while contemporary Folk was of the moment. Inspired from the roots of Guthrie and then Dylan they were creatively writing songs about the world I was living in. They were telling my stories.

Viv had got me into early Donovan and then two other people got me going into contemporary acoustic Singer-songwriters who were largely masquerading as Folk singers just because they played acoustic guitar.

Firstly Robert Ede leant me the wonderful Jack C Frank album. I immediately bought it and played it to death. It is one of those rare albums that are just perfect with beautifully crafted songs.

I loved Jackson he was a lovely gentle man with a great mind and welcoming smile. I got to meet him in 1969 in Ilford High Road at the Angel pub. It was a great little gig although there were only about twenty people there. Jackson stayed back and we sat and talked with him and told him how great he was.

Jackson had a really tough life. He’d been badly burnt when his school caught fire. Many of his friends had been killed. He’d come to England with the compensation looking to buy classic cars. He’d recorded the one fabled album, performed some gigs, got together with Sandy Denny and then was gone. He later ended up on the streets in New York, got his eye shot out and died penniless of pneumonia.

He didn’t deserve that. He was a lovely talented man.

Supposedly Jackson was meant to be performing with Roy Harper as a guest at Roy’s big break-through gig. He never showed up, never did another concert and faded away.

Then Neil Furby introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. I loved Bert’s first and second albums with all the political stuff like ‘Antiapartheid’, ‘Do you hear me now?’ and ‘Needle of Death’. I liked the stuff I could get my teeth into. Folk brought that social bite.

It was the liking of Bert and John that led me to Les Cousins on Greek Street in Soho. Having a motorbike enabled me to get there. It was there that my quest took me to Roy Harper but that’s another story altogether.

Folk changed Rock by adding substance to it. You can see its influence in the Beatles later work. By the end of 1965 I was listening to Beat music that had begun to get more experimental and was getting into Blues and now Folk. The mid 1960s was a nascent period that was about to explode again and I was poised to become more active in my quest. A number of goals were about to be achieved.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

Today’s Music to keep me IiiiNnNnSSssaaaNNnnEEe – Bert Jansch – Do you hear me now?

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Always takes me back to 1965 when I was just discovering these gems – Bert, John Renbourn and Jackson C Frank – then, a little later Roy Harper, Al Stewart, John Martyn, Davy Graham and the rest. Those great days at Les Cousins and Bunjies, The Barge and The Three Horseshoes.

Anecdote – Jackson C Frank at a small club on Ilford High Street in 1969

Posted on by Opher

Anecdote – Jackson C Frank at a small club on Ilford High Street in 1969

 

Jackson C Frank at a small club on Ilford High Street in 1969

Jackson C frank was a major singer-songwriter from the sixties though not too many people would know that. He was a regular at Les Cousin,  partnered Sandy Denny and persuaded her to give up her job and sing full time, was a close friend of Roy Harper (who wrote the song My Friend for him) and was a great influence on all those songwriters of that era. His first album, recorded in 1965, being groundbreaking. A beautiful, melodic album of well-crafted introspective songs that are haunting.

The Contemporary Folk scene had taken off in a big way in England. Donovan had popularised it and Dylan’s success had made acoustic music a viable commercial exercise but the whole scene had blossomed underground with the likes of Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. It had different roots to that of Greenwich Village in America, although there was a lot of overlap.

I stumbled across this folk phenomenon via a number of sources. When I was fourteen I had been introduced to Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy by a girlfriend of mine. Then Donovan had started playing on Ready Steady Go. It seemed to fit together. Donovan at the time put the same sign on his guitar that he’d stolen from Woody – ‘This machine kills fascists’. I liked that.

Then Robert Ede and Neil Furby played a part in my education. They were two school-mates. Neil nicked one of my girlfriends but he introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Rebourn, so I suppose that was a fair exchange. Bob had bought the Jackson album the day it came out (he was way ahead of the game) and lent it to me. I loved it. I was hooked right from that first hearing. It was perfect – the voice, guitar, melodies and lyrics all gelled for me. I immediately went out and bought my own copy.

So contemporary Folk Music became a big part of my life.

The final culmination of that time was to discover Roy Harper in Les Cousins with his first album. That blew them all away. But that’s another story.

Back in those halcyon days of the mid-sixties, 1965-66, prior to the advent of Roy, I spent a lot of time in my room with my old dansette record player, playing those first albums by Bert and John. I just loved the passion, integrity and guitar. But the album I played most was Jackson’s. Those songs were absorbed into my being. I knew them inside out.

For over three years I enjoyed that album. When I went to college I met up with Pete and we roomed together for two years. It was a delight to discover that he not only also adored Jackson but could play all his songs. Pete was an outstanding guitarist.

Most of the time in London I never saw Jackson advertised anywhere though he did play the folk scene and was a regular at Les Cousins where I went quite often. I looked out for him without success. But there was so much going on in the Folk and Rock scene that it was not foremost in my mind.

Then in 1969 Pete and I discovered Jackson billed at the Angel in Ilford High Street. The Angel was a pub with a room above it for small music events.

We arrived early. It was set out with a number of round tables with chairs around them. We purloined a table at the front. There were only about thirty people in the Audience. Jackson was quiet and softly spoken, very laid back. He played his songs faultlessly. They were all the songs from that album with nothing new. We clapped each rendition madly. It was brilliant to see him in the flesh. His playing was faultless. His personality shone and those songs were sparkling diamonds.

I would have loved to have heard some other new songs as well though. We were hungry for more of these extraordinary compositions. It was not to be.

After the concert everybody else left but we stayed behind and chatted.  Jackson was very friendly and appreciative. He told us that there was no fabled second album or live performance. He said he had not written any other songs but that turned out not to be quite true. The song Golden Mirror, which has just been discovered from a TV programme, is from that period. I do not think he had the confidence in his new material.

Jackson left Pete and I with the sense of a really warm and shy character who was very approachable. We both thought he was a genius.

The next week he was supposed to have turned up for a guest appearance (the only guest – an honoured spot) at Roy Harper’s fabled St Pancras Town Hall gig. He never showed up. I asked the guy he had been with in Ilford, who did turn up to the Roy gig. He informed that Jackson would have come but he was unwell.

I never saw him advertised again. He seemed to evaporate into the night.

I spoke to Roy about it much later and he sadly shook his head and told me he had not seen him again either.

It was only long afterwards when the CD, with those later recordings, came out in the 1990s that I became aware of his tragic fate.

I remember Jackson fondly. He was a sweet, pleasant man, full of emotion and compassion. He wrote songs and music that were so touching and beautiful that they still haunt me.

I think he suffered. He was too kind and vulnerable. Fears robbed him of his potential. The terrible memories of that High School fire in which he was burnt and his girlfriend and fourteen others died, haunted him. It created a mental anguish that he never recovered from. Nobody deserved to suffer the way he did. He was a genius who impacted on the music and songwriting of so many others – including Roy, Sandy, Bert, John and the Fairports. He should have been lauded to the rafters. Instead he is largely forgotten.

I’ll never forget that night in Ilford. That might have been his last gig.