David Ackles - American Gothic

Always one more record or artist to unearth and probably from there one more album to buy.  Eventually in life I've managed to work my way down the list of singer/ songwriters you're 'supposed' to like: Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Gram Parsons, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Karen Dalton. Now to David Ackles who released three albums on Elektra in the late sixties and early seventies on Elektra, one more on Columbia and who has been eulogised by Elton John and Elvis Costello amongst others while he was alive and since he died in 1999.

This album is to my ears clearly a masterpiece. There's a touch of Scott Walker there, sometimes his voice is slightly reminiscent of Neil Diamond, Jacques Brel and also Brecht and Weill but it's also deeply original, spiritually driven and resonant. I listened to it at work today as I was wrapping up and it took me somewhere else entirely. Listen to it and see what you think. The way the poster of the clip makes such a deeply eccentric song and dance  about unsealing the record and the ritual of playing it seems utterly appropriate for this blog. Nothing wrong with a bit of vinyl fetishisation. He clearly loves it very deeply.

Also find below two reviews of the record which put it in it's context. On to the next...

 

David Ackles

American Gothic

Elektra/Collector

1972 A-

 

 

 

hen I was younger, the oft-discussed trail to my grandparents’ house led me through the Northern reaches of the Mississippi River (and yes, over plenty of hills and though a few woods,) an area that never failed to emanate a distinct and mysterious allure. What I saw for those few dozen miles was a ghostly past skewered through the cracked wire frames of modernity. The lawn ornaments that outlined dilapidated riverside homes weren’t like the ones back home; they beckoned you with a frightened sorrow. I often pondered whether or not drifters roamed the woods. Sure, it sounds a bit more grand that it really was-- time has shown me that plenty of this could simply be attributed to abject poverty-- but what my imagination showed me were the landscapes of Twain and the characters of Dock Boggs sold through convenience stores, and the vision has never really left me. Although it was recorded years before this, these notions are the basis of David Ackles’ stunning American Gothic, a record born of rusty fences and rainy backroads that leads deep into a twisted Americana that is rarely documented in our lifetime. 

 A former Vaudeville performer, Illinois-born Ackles was hired by Elektra Records in the mid-1960s as a paid songwriter, a job that ultimately landed him a five-record deal that would yield this Bernie Taupin produced album, among three others. It was this unlikely clash of anachronistic show business and modern-day lyricism that so deeply informs his recorded output. Alternately calling to mind Hoagy Charmichael, Irving Berlin, Robbie Robertson, Tim Hardin, and Scott Walker, Ackles forged an utterly unique sound out of stray parts that comprise a whole that is as uncompromising as it is unrivaled. Nearly entirely eschewing the singer-songwriter staple of guitar, Ackles favors an elliptical piano that weaves itself around the moaning “high school” horns that were so memorably employed by the Band on their self-titled record. It’s a fascinating move that only adds to the wheezy candor of his songs, and gives Ackles room to dig deeper into the subjects at hand.

The disorienting swirl of the opening title track sets the template for much of the rest of the album, with Ackles’ sweeping delivery and rich lyricism taking center stage. “As he snuggles down to his reading in a half-filled married bed/he’s so ashamed of what he’s reading that he gets blind drunk instead” Ackles intones with a theatrical trill on the last syllable. His voice is that of a person who looks at his subjects from afar with unusual compassion. The jazz-hall sway of “Blues For Billy Whitecloud” is the most direct portrait here, detailing the plight of a young Native American’s descent into alcoholism. Whereas others at the time would furnish the song with little more than a lilting acoustic guitar and somber voice (a la Don McLean’s “Vincent”), Ackles plays his blues with a devilish swagger, employing a sly clarinet to augment his rambling barroom piano. This Vaudevillian influence rears its head with even more hubris on “Oh, California!”, an imaginary centerpiece in the most joyously warped musical that never was. 

 Even on more conventional fare like the touching “Love’s Enough”, “Another Friday Night” and “Waiting For The Moving Van”, Ackles exhibits a commanding presence that still stands to be reckoned with. Yet, nevertheless, it is his more explorative work that highlights American Gothic. The eerie “Midnight Carousel”, with its repetitive piano and seemingly possessed vocals, descends into the aforementioned woods, where a creaky violin opens an old fence, exposing the heady surrealism that the record so often hints at. As the ten-minute “Montana Song” brings the proceedings to a satisfyingly cinematic close, the breadth of Ackles’ singular vision is truly felt. Despite the occasional drags and lulls where he appears to be pleasing himself more than his listeners, the overall success of the album is palpable long after the last notes are heard, a hallmark of any fine LP.

And yet, this vision is one that is so seldom rewarded with praise. Although Elton John (and later Elvis Costello) was an outspoken proponent of Ackles’ work, it charted poorly and he was unceremoniously dropped from Elektra following American Gothic. After another failed attempt under Columbia (1973’s Five & Dime), Ackles permanently halted his recording career in favor of jobs in film and theater; after a lengthy bout with lung cancer, he died on March 2, 1999, still the cult artist that many wished he wouldn’t terminally remain. Hopefully, today’s revisionist listening culture will be kind to him, something that Collector’s Choice is hoping to catalyze with a recent reissuing of all five of his studio outings. As of right now, there’s no telling whether or not Ackles will become as standardized as his forebears and post-cursors, but what does mass acceptance mean, anyway? It’s the music that matters, and God knows that’s not going anywhere.

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LINER NOTES FOR DAVID ACKLES'S SUBWAY TO THE COUNTRY

By Richie Unterberger

David Ackles's 1968 self-titled Elektra debut (also reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music) had unveiled one of the most unusual singer-songwriters of the late 1960s. Brooding and intense, if leavened by a certain proud resilience and touches of mordant whimsy, it also merged the late-1960s Elektra house rock sound with elements of Ackles's background in musical theater. His 1969 follow-up Subway to the Country was still, just about, a rock singer-songwriter record. Yet it amplified the theatrical facet of his work, while expanding from a rock base into more involved and orchestrated arrangements.

    Ackles had cut his first album with rock musicians (most of whom would later play in Rhinoceros) who had played with Iron Butterfly, the Electric Flag, and Buffalo Springfield. Only one of those session men, guitarist Doug Hastings, would reappear in the credits to Subway to the Country. More than 20 musicians, in fact, would contribute to the record, produced by Russ Miller (who had co-produced David Ackles with David Anderle), among them such A-team L.A. session cats as drummer Jim Gordon and bassist Larry Knechtel. For all that traffic, the arrangements were sharply honed, with Fredric Myrow adding the most orchestral colors with his arranging and conducting.

    "Because they'd been friends in school, my guess would be that David brought in Fred Myrow," remembers Janice Vogel Ackles, the singer-songwriter's widow, who was in the studio for part of the recording. "My thought would be using more musicians was probably David's concept, because I can't imagine Russ initially coming up with that idea. It seems more complicated than something he might want to do upfront. David always had very, very definite ideas about what he wanted to do, perhaps sometimes to his detriment -- I say that lovingly. He would never take the easy road."

    Like Ackles, Myrow had no background to speak of in rock music, but somehow got drawn into the unpredictable net of Elektra's rock roster in the late 1960s, when borders of all kinds were falling right and left. He'd been a composer-in-residence under Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, but by the late 1960s was scoring an experimental movie for former UCLA film student-turned-rock-star Jim Morrison, Highway. Myrow would go on to discuss a creating a musical with Morrison, with Myrow doing the music and Morrison the text and lyrics, although those plans were scrapped after the Doors' singer's death in 1971. Fred subsequently scored several movies, most famously Phantasm, before dying in 1999, only about six weeks before Ackles passed away. "Fred Myrow was certainly from a very classical background and discipline," notes Janice Vogel Ackles. "He added some really interesting things, tonally, to the album. I know that David was extremely pleased about that."

    The focus, though, was still very much on Ackles's songs, which were leaning further toward the Brecht-Weillian bent that would become even more pronounced on his next two albums. "Main Line Saloon" and "Inmates of the Institution" in particular were populated by a gallery of disjointed funhouse characters and permeated by a gallows humor. Yet there was also the almost tender and lush balladry of "That's No Reason to Cry," in which Ackles sounds rather like a cross between Randy Newman and Scott Walker; the character study of the grotesque child abuser in "Candy Man," a lyrical field rarely explored in pop music; the hymnal feel of "Out on the Road"; the nearly-country-rock of "Cabin on the Mountain"; and the languorous, yet ominous, lounge jazz of "Woman River." "Subway to the Country" itself was a neat encapsulation of Ackles's penchant for unexpected lyrical juxtapositions, with its anthemic longing for escape from the Big Apple to country bliss set alongside the grim realities of urban squalor and poverty.

    Subway to the Country was not an easy sell, falling between theatrical pop and the rock underground. Like David Ackles, it was a much bigger hit among critics than consumers. Promoting the records onstage wasn't easy either. Although he did some live work, sometimes with up-and-coming stars like Joni Mitchell and Elton John, his only stage accompaniment was his own piano, and Janice Vogel Ackles acknowledges that her husband wasn't the most comfortable of solo performers.

    "He enjoyed singing, but I don't think he enjoyed performing live," she reflects. "Some of that came through in his performances. It was very difficult for him. He was just a bundle of anxiety. He would always get sick, literally, right before he would perform. It was sort of amazing to me because of the amount of stage experience that he'd had in his life. I just don't think he was comfortable being up there as David Ackles. If he was asked to go on and sing and play as Oscar Levant, it might have been easier for him. Any theater piece would have been fine. But to be out there just kind of exposing your soul, I think, was extremely difficult."

    Yet he was winning over important fans such as Elton John, for whom Ackles opened at the Troubadour club in L.A. in 1970, and John's lyricist, Bernie Taupin. The pair were already aware of his first two Elektra albums as avid young British collectors scouring the import bins, and according to Taupin, "There was nothing quite like it. It's been said so many times, but his stuff was sort of [like] Brecht and Weill, and theatrical. It was very different than what the other singer-songwriters of the time were doing. There was also a darkness to it, which I really, really loved, because that was the kind of material that I was drawn to."

    By the time of the Troubadour gig, he adds, "Those albums were firm favorites of both mine and Elton's. We found that David was our opening act, which we were sort of staggered by. The fact that we felt we were usurping his sort of territory was kind of embarrassing to us. But David, being David, was such a gentleman. We became very good friends, and he decided he wanted to come and spend some time in England." That friendship would blossom into a professional relationship when Taupin produced Ackles's third and final Elektra album, a story which is continued on Collectors' Choice Music's reissue of that record, American Gothic. -- Richie Unterberger