Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Ramblin' Jack Elliott Performing A Cover Of Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues".
DV Review
The Ballad Of Ramblin’ Jack, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and various musicians, directed by his daughter Ailaya Elliott, Crawford Productions, 2000
Recently, in a DVD review of the film documentary about 1960’s folk legend Bob Dylan’s mid-career crisis, “Bob Dylan: After the Crash: 1966-78”, I noted, in passing, that folk guitarist Tom Paley (who was prominently featured in that film) and his group, The New Lost City Ramblers, were already waiting at the gates of Greenwich Village when the hordes of young folk revivalists started to arrive. The folk artist under review, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, in this very personal film documentary directed by his daughter, Ailaya Elliott, was also waiting there for them. Or, as the film makes clear, he was at least rumored to be waiting for them. This almost two hour bittersweet valentine to the now grand old man of the folk music revival (in 2000) is the story of why he was waiting for them, and more importantly, why they were searching for him as an agent of “authentic” American roots music.
As has also been mentioned, seemingly endlessly, in this space in many reviews over the past year or so about the male division of the folk revival of the 1960’s I have tried to explore, why or why not, certain talented folk singers never reached the status of Bob Dylan, the acknowledged “king of the hill” of that revival. From the first paragraph we already know that Ramblin’ Jack was already on the scene. Moreover, he had the pedigree that all aspiring folkies craved, including Dylan- physical links to the legendary Woody Guthrie the herald of the previous generation of the folk troubadours from the dust bowl 1930’s. Moreover Jack was a quick study, really wanted to expand the folk universe and, as this film also makes abundantly clear, he just plain liked the life style of the itinerant wanderer. So what gives?
Well, Jack just liked to keep wandering, and wandering in motion and speech and not getting attached, at least for long, to any one place person or thing. That, my friends, is the codified social genetic structure that some people live with as they try to reinvent themselves. In Jack’s case from a nice Jewish city boy (the Brooklyn of the title of this review) to an old cowboy. This is hardly the first time that someone has turned their persona around in the whirlwind of the homeland of personal reinvention, America. However, it took something out of him, as he himself reflects on his life as he travels the roads back to the past (in an RV) with his ambivalent director daughter in tow.
But here is my take on why he was left seemingly behind in the mad whirl of the folk revival and its aftermath. He didn’t move, like Dylan, either with the times or with his own drummer. He started out as a Woody acolyte, as did Dylan, but he wanted to preserve the purity of the Woody canon, intact. As a transmission belt from Woody to Dylan Ramblin’ Jack performed a yeoman’s service. But where is Jack’s equivalent of not just “Song to Woody” but “Desolation Row”, “Tangled Up In Blue”, “Visions of Johanna”, and so on. That said, this film is filled with various close-ups of Ramblin’ Jack doing his unique covers of many songs, the usual rare film footage of the early days of the folk revival, of Jack Elliott and his family life and the usual “talking head” commentary from friends, lovers and folk colleagues that round out these kinds of efforts. This is a daughter’s film, this is a folkie’s film and this is a welcome addition to the growing body of visual tributes to American roots music and its practitioners. Kudos, Ailaya.
DV Review
The Ballad Of Ramblin’ Jack, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and various musicians, directed by his daughter Ailaya Elliott, Crawford Productions, 2000
Recently, in a DVD review of the film documentary about 1960’s folk legend Bob Dylan’s mid-career crisis, “Bob Dylan: After the Crash: 1966-78”, I noted, in passing, that folk guitarist Tom Paley (who was prominently featured in that film) and his group, The New Lost City Ramblers, were already waiting at the gates of Greenwich Village when the hordes of young folk revivalists started to arrive. The folk artist under review, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, in this very personal film documentary directed by his daughter, Ailaya Elliott, was also waiting there for them. Or, as the film makes clear, he was at least rumored to be waiting for them. This almost two hour bittersweet valentine to the now grand old man of the folk music revival (in 2000) is the story of why he was waiting for them, and more importantly, why they were searching for him as an agent of “authentic” American roots music.
As has also been mentioned, seemingly endlessly, in this space in many reviews over the past year or so about the male division of the folk revival of the 1960’s I have tried to explore, why or why not, certain talented folk singers never reached the status of Bob Dylan, the acknowledged “king of the hill” of that revival. From the first paragraph we already know that Ramblin’ Jack was already on the scene. Moreover, he had the pedigree that all aspiring folkies craved, including Dylan- physical links to the legendary Woody Guthrie the herald of the previous generation of the folk troubadours from the dust bowl 1930’s. Moreover Jack was a quick study, really wanted to expand the folk universe and, as this film also makes abundantly clear, he just plain liked the life style of the itinerant wanderer. So what gives?
Well, Jack just liked to keep wandering, and wandering in motion and speech and not getting attached, at least for long, to any one place person or thing. That, my friends, is the codified social genetic structure that some people live with as they try to reinvent themselves. In Jack’s case from a nice Jewish city boy (the Brooklyn of the title of this review) to an old cowboy. This is hardly the first time that someone has turned their persona around in the whirlwind of the homeland of personal reinvention, America. However, it took something out of him, as he himself reflects on his life as he travels the roads back to the past (in an RV) with his ambivalent director daughter in tow.
But here is my take on why he was left seemingly behind in the mad whirl of the folk revival and its aftermath. He didn’t move, like Dylan, either with the times or with his own drummer. He started out as a Woody acolyte, as did Dylan, but he wanted to preserve the purity of the Woody canon, intact. As a transmission belt from Woody to Dylan Ramblin’ Jack performed a yeoman’s service. But where is Jack’s equivalent of not just “Song to Woody” but “Desolation Row”, “Tangled Up In Blue”, “Visions of Johanna”, and so on. That said, this film is filled with various close-ups of Ramblin’ Jack doing his unique covers of many songs, the usual rare film footage of the early days of the folk revival, of Jack Elliott and his family life and the usual “talking head” commentary from friends, lovers and folk colleagues that round out these kinds of efforts. This is a daughter’s film, this is a folkie’s film and this is a welcome addition to the growing body of visual tributes to American roots music and its practitioners. Kudos, Ailaya.
Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon
By Seth Garth
I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.
Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)
In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.
The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.
I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.
For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.
So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.
