You're not likely to find Jack by looking for him. He's nowhere for long and everyone's got different stories along the lines of "When last I saw him..." If he happens to run across you, don't expect to have something to say. Don't expect to talk. Listen as a warm thick ale of a story, which will travel forward only circularly in a jigsaw logic, pours out as easily as breathing through Jack's whiskey voice.

If music is an art, then it is just as timeless so long as people relate to it. Emotionally. Art does not advance as art theories are systematically proven and applied. Prove my feelings. Prove me. Is Whitman irrelevant because America is numb? Have we in our great industrial catacomb made tears more efficient? If so, then yes Jack does play old fashioned music. And music is at best the fashion show it's become.

Jack showed his face in my town last June. From the stage, slowly, he felt us out. Some nights, he may control his very audience with threats against their person. "Please, no flash. It makes me psychotic." Other nights Jack will get lost piecing together some odd recollection, forming a sage out of random wanderings and happenstance influence. And then there's nights he just wants cooperation. "Hey. No flash photography. It makes me psychotic, you know what that means? Wicked weird, I forget all the words to the songs. That's when I start getting difficult. How'd you like to hear this one backwards for three hours?"

This night Jack was at his best, completely infuriating large numbers of gentlemen and ladies who expected a bottled, ready-to-please entertainer. Laser throttle special effects fried kids who'd never heard of subtlety didn't find the escape they sought either. Jack doesn't wear aluminum foil coated eyelids or hire half-naked background singers to divert visual attention. Jack's a rare breed in the performing arts — a human being. There's no money in it and he commands only the life which your grandmother had in the corner of her eye. He'll sing about how difficult it is to shoot the dog you grew up with when he's terminally sick. He'll diminish any performer you ever see afterward, and it's all as natural and impressionable as giving birth. Sometimes it's as painful.

As Jack recalls, "I was born on a 45,000 acre ranch in the middle of Flatbush." Most of us refer to this particular ranch as Brooklyn, New York. He was raised there as Elliot Charles Adnopoz starting August 1, 1931 and remained contented enough until he saw his first rodeo — Gene Autry and the blacklit bulls of Madison Square Garden. Elliot's young heart leaped to a world where big grins replaced his grammatically-inclined mother.

At fourteen, Elliot busted from home and hitched a rig to Washington, DC where he spied a poster advertising Colonel Jim Eskew's Rodeo. Sounded good. The rodeo cowboys there asked him his name. He muttered it sheepishly. "Adnopoz from Brooklyn" was an unlikely mantle for an aspiring cowboy. Seeing his embarrassment, one cowboy told the kid right there, "It ain't where you're from that counts, it's where you're going."² He went with them.

They hired him on as a groom for two dollars a day. The money was spent on keeping him well fed — malted milk and hamburgers. Evenings, he'd sleep under the horses' blankets in their leaking tents. Brahmer Rogers, a rodeo clown, would play five string banjo and recite poetry if all in attendance would toss a quarter. Seeded in Elliot's brain was quite another career option than the Yale-bound respectable his parents had been planning.

"Used to listen to this New York jazz station, boogie-woogie, they said over the radio, 'If you're listening to this show, call your folks. 'But I wasn't there," smiled Jack. "I was out of New York. I was in America."3

Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz were never consulted on young Elliot's self-relocation. By then familiar with what they hoped were his passing interests, they tried to find where he'd gone:

Every rodeo owner in the country then began receiving a "$500 Reward" poster advertising Elliot's likeness. Colonel Jim in DC thereby learned that Elliot (known to the cowboys as 'Pancho') was AWOL, and he made the Adnopozes aware of Jack's whereabouts. Dr. Adnopoz wrote the boy: "We're proud you're working for a reputable outfit and we're glad you're alive. If you want to come home and finish high school, we'd be glad to have you." An old clown named Lost John Carruthers advised, "If you git your high school diploma, you kin do anything you want. But if you don't you'll be a cowboy the rest of your days, whether you like it or not."⁴

Finishing school didn't deromanticize the cowboy image any more than it beautified New York. Two derelict collegiate attempts were interspersed by wandering sidearmed with a six string around New York's Village under various titles and invented origins. Eric Von Schmidt heard tell "of a curly-headed Greek called Xerxes who played one hell of a guitar."⁵

This unfocused energy distilled when Jack heard the Oscar Brand radio program play a number by Woody Guthrie. Woody was the preeminent songwriter, yoking his uncontrollable spurts of imagery with a human feel. Woody's autobiographical accounts of the road sold well and were acclaimed, but his songs would reach to the very fiber of America. Everyone but the rich and the crooked politicians who served them could hear that Woody was singing their words and their song. An old saying goes, "If you want to defeat your enemy, sing his song." Woody's anti-capitalist anthem "This Land is Your Land" got a few potent verses lopped off so's they could sing it in school.

Now Jack wasn't searching for a workingman's reincarnation of Walt Whitman, but he knew damn well when he heard an authentic singer — one who didn't apologize if his throat was worn or his guitar attacked rather than soothed. In February of 1951, a doctor had mistaken some abdominal pains Woody was having for a minor stomach virus. (He'd actually ruptured his appendix.) Whilst lazing about recovering and entertaining visitors, a kid of about twenty strode in under a cowboy hat with guitar in hand.

"Jack Elliott came and he stayed for two years." laughed Woody's wife, Marjorie. Woody's son Arlo elaborated, "He'd come through in a '32 Chevy or on a horse or in the telephone truck he lived in for a while, but he never came through like an ordinary person. When he comes around now, my kids holler and jump up and down, just like I did."6

Jack recollects, "When I first met Woody, my name was 'Buck' Elliott. He wrote a little song: 'All the Buck Elliott's around, eatin' sody crackers, rollin' on the ground.'"⁷ A constant mob of young pickers was always milling about Woody. Still Jack was the one who was toted along to parties and taught everything from storytelling to backing up fiddle with guitar. His uncritical adoration and aptitude for Woody's laid-back, sardonic blues and rampant, unreliable life wedged him a spot at Woody's side. He absorbed Woody's style of playing guitar, the songs he sung, the way he sung them, and eventually the way he walked, talked, and joked — he became protégé bar none.

Jack's pairing with Woody was that of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza. Jack idolized Woody while realizing that he could not be him:

"I used to look over his shoulder as he'd sit there at the typewriter and knock off these songs just as quick as you could blink. And each time they'd be perfect and needed no correcting. So after watching that I realized there was no way I was gonna top that. And I decided it would be better if I just did what I did best and find the songs and interpret them the way they suited me." recalls Jack.⁸

Jack and Woody would wander the country off and on over the next five years, fairly unburdened by their standard luggage — only razors and guitars. Jack learned to travel and through the years developed an impressive roster of friendships scattered everywhere he went. Greenwich Village in 1953 had him involved with Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Helen Parker. Kerouac was eager to read Jack his own account of the traveling lifestyle, On the Road. It took them three days and a lot of wine. Kerouac and Ginsberg both noted Jack's aptitude for stealing their girls (as detailed elsewhere in site interviews).

Jack reflects, "I picked up a lot of good things from [Woody] and one or two bad habits. Ones that my wife left me for. ...She always blamed Woody for me being like I was." ⁹

By Buick, Woody and Jack braved the trail to California in 1954. Their destination was Topanga Canyon, a hideout for the greatest outlaw desperadoes of the 1950's — left wing artists and/or intellectuals waiting out the McCarthyist storm.

Jack notes their approach: "[When we got there, Woody] waved his arm in a big circle through the car roof and pointed out the window and says, 'Thar's the approach to mah land!' and I looked up and there was just nothing there but a 40 foot cliff."¹⁰

"Woody had dropped me off at Will Geer's place in Topanga Canyon where I met Derroll Adams, who was the closest thing to a muleskinner I had ever met at that time. Derroll had been a cowboy and a logger in Oregon and taught himself singing with a five string banjo. They didn't have any five string teachers in Oregon — nobody knew how to play a five string. All they knew how to do was run a skitter, and he was a choker setter and a windfall bucker. But Derroll had something extra. He had a Chinese kinda beard, and he had sorta Japanese calligraphy written on his banjo. It was some kind of a hip statement that Jack Kerouac wished he'd have wrote. Derroll played the five string banjo and lived in a cave. When I first met him, I'd heard about him so much that I didn't need an introduction. I just walked right up to him and said, 'You're Derroll Adams,' and he said, 'Yup,' and I knew we were going to be friends for life, or pretty near."

While Jack was still singing through the night at Will's, Woody crept up the cliff to sleep on his land. By morning, Woody had crept off and away up north. Jack awoke and with Derroll headed south. He swapped songs, drinks, and lies with everyone he came across, from A.P. and Maybelle Carter to Jesse Fuller and James Dean.

Jack remembers, "I played to [James Dean] twice. That was 1955. His ex-girlfriend — who became my wife, my first wife — introduced us. She later became the first traveling road manager for the Rolling Stones, a little-known group in Europe at the time.

"But I played to Dean in the parking lot of Googie's, a nice little restaurant, kind of a hamburger joint. It was next to Schwab's Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard, at the corner of Crescent Heights Boulevard. I know it was Crescent Heights because we were chased down the boulevard by a sheriff's car on night. I wasn't driving; a buddy of mine was. He was trying to get me to a gig on time. Now that was the Ash Grove. I was supposed to play at 11 o'clock, but I called the club at 12:30 from the police station." ¹¹

Swapping admiration with celebrities doesn't provide for grub, however. A typical job hired Jack to wobble on wooden crutches up the aisle of a church — "He would wobble up the aisle," recalled Derroll, "and be saved."¹² Other promising careers included Jack's stint as Judge Roy Bean who would've married you for a dollar.

Jack's actress wife June, no longer seeing Dean, had been planning to see Europe. June said her husband had better go with her. Although Jack wasn't really ready to leave the United States right at that exact time, he had been setting his mind to the task of world travel since even before the cowboy addiction. Jack recollects, "My next door neighbor in Brooklyn was an old whaler out of New Bedford, Mass., and then a New York Harbor pilot. He trained me to be a merchant marine and made me memorize the names of all the standing and running rigging on a clipper ship, the 32 compass points and knots and splicing."¹³

The 1954 British popular music was swarming with skiffle: kids squealing through quirky jazzed-up washboard renditions of American folk compositions. (Lonnie Donegan's cover of Lead Belly's "Rock Island Line" backed with Woody's "Grand Coulee Dam" ignited the craze. It was selling three million copies, a killing figure in those days, and the records were all bought by teenagers.)

While the clean-cut orchestrated crooners which preceded skiffle still bellowed melodically for British parents, it was the skiffle craze that put guitars in the hands of their youth. The simple, insistent, catchy rhythms must've infected their heads because everyone was pasting together homemade instruments and forming bands.

Young pimpled incarnations of the Beatles and every other as-yet-unheard-of band were cutting their fingers to bang out chord changes. Soon the Beatles'd be scripting their singles over those same hard learned folk chord progressions.

American folk singers Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Roger McGuinn and others would one day start snapping their fingers to rock and roll after hearing the Beatles take those familiar chords to international fame. Traditional American songs would be tuned in from overseas, reverse amputation. Jack recalls, "I was sitting in Bob Dylan's blue Ford station wagon, and he had the radio on. All of the sudden they played this new record that had just come out of the English group called the Animals doing 'House of the Rising Sun.' We both pointed at the radio and said, 'That's my version.'"

Back in the mid-fifties, June was relocating Jack to England, and neither had any reason to guess that American rural music had become top-forty in foreign territory. Unbeknownst to the fashionability of his own self, Jack Elliott arrived in an England starving for an authentic singer of songs they'd only heard in British. "Jack was the biggest influence on guitar in this country," notes Alex Campbell.¹⁴ The skiffled youth had been simply brushing the strings, but were entranced by Jack's flat picking. Jack arrived with a songbook of untold stories ready to be passed on. Woody's "Massacre" songs were followed with vivid imaginations. Ewan MacColl (author of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Dirty Old Town, and many many more) confessed, "He is one of the few to bring tears to my eyes."¹⁵ Jack pounded out songs like "San Francisco Bay Blues" every night until they became standards throughout the country. Years later other American singers would cross the Atlantic to find that they were left still to contend with Jack's shadow. Arlo Guthrie relates, "I'd written enough songs for 15 minutes in a set, and then I did my dad's songs for thirty. All the rest were songs that Jack had recorded that had nothing to do with Dad. Everywhere I went, people would say 'Oh, that's great — you know Jack Elliott songs.'"¹⁶

Jack appeared in an Alan Lomax pantomime, yachted to Spain, and toured Germany appended by a skiffle band. After recording a couple records, Jack phoned Derroll for backup. Derroll would soon be recognized in England for a raging temper, smashing guitars and shouting down folk-purists, but mostly for his talent. Together they held London's fashionable Blue Angel club for three months before breaking free to conquer Portofino and Milan. Jack toured Greece by scooter, then Italy with the "Platters." Adams reunited with Jack to tackle the World's Fair. Jack was out singing over Scandanavian t.v. around the time Princess Margaret coaxed him back to England to perform for her. After performing at Margaret's private party, Jack noted "She was very hip."

This in-demand wearied cowboy finally decided to return to America. Back in his home country, he was soundly ignored. Nowadays we've watched America ignore its indigenous culture a thousand times over, accepting stock reinterpretations of it while its source lay untouched. American blues was spread thick through the country of Britain, while American youth didn't consider listening to it ... until it was covered by white British boys The Rolling Stones, The YardBirds, Led Zeppelin, CREAM, and dozens more. Decades after the blues had injected sex into rock and roll, another form of social protest sprang to the streets. The youth of the city spat out what was called punk, and America ignored it until it temporarily went away. When it hit Britain, you couldn't survive as a band playing anything else. Like Jack Elliott, T.S. Eliot had steeped himself in the traditional to create work of lasting contemporary impact. When T.S. Eliot trucked off to England, however, he never did return.

Jack Elliott came back in 1958, stayed long enough to play with Cisco Houston, and was back in England by 1959. He performed there alongside the Weavers and accompanied Pete Seeger, whose college tours around America had encouraged an upcoming generation of American youth to pick up guitar and pen rather than accept whatever the radio threw at them. Jack reunited with one-man-band and blues master Jesse Fuller on his tour, then lit out toward Israel with author Herb Greer in what became a European conquest by motor-scooter.

It was during this barrage that Jack wore out the Guthrie mold he himself had fashioned. Stu Jamieson recalled, "Jack was aware that he'd didn't quite sound like Woody and was concerned about continuing to try, but probably not too displeased to discover a difference. He was upset only by the fact that others knew his goal and condemned him for it. Once in England, he was isolated from odious comparisons and could be less introspective."¹⁷

The blues he'd learned straight from Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy began to show up, as did the high eternal yodel of Jimmie Rodgers which impressed even the gypsy singers. In-between numbers he'd draw an audience into his life with tales stitched indivisibly of fantasy and recollection.

Eric Von Schmidt recognized an evolution in Jack back in 1955. "'The word had gone around for some time that he had actually become Woody.' ...But when Eric heard Jack sing Blind Lemon Jefferson's 'Black Snake Moan,' — 'it was magnificent, perfect, and Jack Elliott...Jesse Fuller had something to do with it, and God knows what all else, but the Guthrie imitator was dead and Jack was born."¹⁸

Of his developing talent for spoken word, Sam Shepard proffered, "He's not selfish in that way of nailing your attention down with insane raps. His pleasure is wandering casually in the imagination and just bringing someone else along for the ride."

Tom Russell added, "I used to see Ramblin' Jack in the early 1960's at the Ash Grove in L.A. He'd roll into the lot in a big Land Rover. Sometimes he'd come out on stage and never sing a song. He'd rap for forty minutes. He must have been the first cowboy-folk rap artist. He plays that Martin D-28 with a beat-jazz attitude. A true American original." ¹⁹

Meanwhile back at the ranch, 1960's America was warming up to what it called the "folk boom." Gimmicks aside, this "folk music" tended to shoo off the battered disgruntled miner who would've confronted the distanced admiration of academics. With a backward appreciation of the people from which the music sprang, the buffed harmonic smiles of such as the Kingston Trio were what became popular more than anything. Jack shrugged as he watched clean-cut kids smooth those rough songs for a Middle American audience. They could call it what they wanted, he went the unmarketable route — true to oneself. As they say, "Sea shanties should not be sung well."

Elliott again returned to New York City, with a strong jaw and uncanny likeness to Gene Kelly. This time he couldn't be ignored, and both Newsweek and the New York Times' Robert Shelton ran his praises — "one of the few authentic voices in American folk music."²⁰

The American scene had changed markedly. With the urban popularization of folk songs came a deification of Woody Guthrie. Jack already knew the repertoire, and he'd already been doing the hard traveling lifestyle that Woody romanticized.

Jack's incorporation of Woody's style was especially essential, as Woody was no longer able to sing his songs himself. Huntington's chorea is a hereditary disease which for centuries was misdiagnosed as either drunken disorder, insanity, or an inability to leash one's libido. It has the eventual effect of losing control over one's body while an alert mind is trapped inside. By the time of Jack's American return, Woody was hospitalized with the stuff.

"The day I returned, I went to visit him in the hospital in New Jersey and there I met Bob Dylan." says Jack.²¹ Dylan had adopted Woody as his hero and songwriting model back home in Minnesota. He'd dropped his Minnesota accent and a smoother singing style in order to adopt the rasp speak-talking of the Oklahoma dust bowl survivor. Dylan's old girlfriend remembered, "When he'd had too much to drink you'd have to call him Woody to get a response."²²

Woody, however, was in no shape to show the ropes to any more devotees. The kid Jack just happened upon at the hospital soon became Jack's eager apprentice. Dylan'd learned what he could of Woody's style from records, but the actual performance was gotten through Jack.

Bob watched Jack slam the lyrics of story songs into the ear of an audience, incorporate blues and folk into a singular style, and fashion a quirky humor which would endear you to a crowd. More perhaps than any single other trait, habit, or inflection, the process of self discovery was bred completely into Dylan.

"Then came Dylan, doing the Guthrie-Elliott thing, and being laughed at and called a poor man's Elliott (Jack, in turn, had been called a poor man's Guthrie)."²³

Jack remembered, "There were a lot of people who tried to make me angry about that. 'He's stealing the wind out of your sails,' they'd tell me, but I still had plenty of wind left.

"And besides, I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, 'If you want to learn something, just steal it — that's the way I learned from Lead Belly.'"²⁴ No collector of folk music believes in the definitive version of anything. All things exist in their moment. Some pass forward.

Most people still thought Jack of authentic American cowhand origins. He sure played the part. Eventually Dylan learned that Jack's real background mirrored his own, which Bob had been concealing: middle-class Jewish kids Elliot Adnopoz and Robert Zimmerman escaped academia to follow the image of Woody Guthrie. "It ain't where you're from that counts, it's where you're going."²⁵

Dave Van Ronk recalls the following insightful cry amidst Jack's self-evolution: "I was at Gerde's for Jack Elliott's New York debut. He had just put out an album on Vanguard for which he wrote the notes. In the notes, he admitted his real name was Elliot Adnopoz and that he was from Brooklyn. Consequently, this brought him back into favor with his mother and father.

"They were very prominent people in Brooklyn. His father was chief of surgeons in a hospital, and the family had been in medicine for several generations — and that Jack had turned into such a bum and, furthermore, changed his name, was a great source of grief.

"So when he wrote this thing and more or less acknowledged his background, a great reconciliation was struck, and Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz came down to see the kid.

"I was sitting at the table with the artist Harry Jackson, Bobby Dylan, and Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz. Jack was on stage having some trouble tuning his guitar and the audience was utterly hushed, a very rare occurrence in that room. Mrs. Adnopoz, sitting about two chairs from me, was just staring at him, raptly, and she lets out with a stage whisper, 'Look at those fingers — such a surgeon he could have been!'" ²⁶

Dylan's progress as a performer would be suddenly shocked into the limelight from out beneath Jack. Ex-girlfriend Suzan Rotolo states unabashedly, "Robert Shelton's review, without a doubt, made Dylan's career, because that brought the establishment." ²⁷

An eyewitness account to Dylan's discovery recalls the incident in light of humorous coincidence, notable as such happenstance belies the source of humor and insight in Jack's own life:

"One night at Gerde's, Dave Van Ronk, Robert Shelton, and a number of other musician friends and I were sitting around the bar. I think it might have been a hoot night. Shelton asked David who he thought was the spokesperson for the new generation. David, who by this time was tired of having Bobby sleeping on his couch and mooching off everyone, slyly looked up in that way that he has, and lifted an inebriated finger at a sloppy little kid on stage and said, 'Him!' Everyone laughed because it was Bobby Dylan, who none of us took seriously. Everyone thought that David's joke was quite funny, except Shelton, who took it seriously and made him a star." ²⁸

The events of that liquored evening are contested, perhaps exaggerated, tumbling toward the only truly accurate depiction in reply by Dave himself who chuckles, "Maybe it did happen. We were probably all drunk." ²⁹

These years, Dylan was still introduced as "the son of Jack Elliott," and Bob Neuwirth still remembered "That was when Dylan used to get on stage and talk a lot. He'd do more talking than playing." 30

It took Dylan a couple more reviews to make Jack's style more popular than Jack. Before too long, they'd both been honing their adaptations of Woody's influence for so long that they'd hammered out distinct individuals. Only Johnny Cash has asked Bob Dylan to attempt yodeling, and nobody's asked Jack Elliott to take a shot at Dylan's Grammy for best male gospel vocal.

Pete Seeger applauded this process in Jack, though it goes for either of them: "When we see Jack on the stage now he is Jack and no longer an imitation of Woody. He's proven that it's possible to learn an idiom and a style one was not born to, but came to love later in life, and he's proven also that you can emerge from this period of imitation into being genuinely creative on you own; something that needs proving in this modern world when there's so much confusion among young people as to the value of imitating between the value of just being yourself."³¹

For the first half of the sixties, Jack spat out more LP's than years passed. His tenor rang out at almost every major festival. Jack laid out the foundation of America before budding songwriters who would always return to their worn Jack Elliott LP's for inspiration. Rod Stewart, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Elton John honored Jack Elliott for his British servitude, now Americans including Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, The Grateful Dead and The Band would hear in him their America.

Any defeats in these years were less than ignominious. Gentle, elfen, seventy-year-old Mississippi John Hurt beat Jack at arm wresting. Hurt then beat the hefty Dave Van Ronk and former college football star Sam Hood. Hurt went on to beat them all a second time.

The train of Ramblin' Jack's recording career came to a magnificent impact in 1967 which both brought attention and derailed the train. He hired onto a big label, two record deal with Warner Brothers, who were determined to make him into a mainstream star rather than the icon of the underground. Jack was recorded in slam bam electric rockabilly bands, overdubbed with Indian tabla, and his rambling spoken tales were tape spliced into submission. Somewhere in the midst of this confusion Jack's first composition broke through.

"912 Greens" was as original and random as Jack had grown to become through the enormity of coincidence which he'd shaped into his life. Casting aside songwriting conventions, Jack talked his way through a tale which had no true end or logic. It wound out while wondering childlike at a coherently disarrayed and deadpan world, and what little we understand of what it could all add up to. It rewrote more than a few opinions as to what songwriting consists of and dropped a lot of jaws.

What Henry Miller said on the state of theatre certainly applies to the state of songwriting: "The best of our theater is standing tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet has said, is always through."³²

On Jack's second Warner LP late-night drunken tomfoolery, console board sound effects and song fragments were increasingly included alongside the usual legendary fare. Jack was never consulted as to his opinion on any of this. Disgusted with the control he'd lost over what had become Jack the product, he ceased contact with the recording industry. This sore only festered as Jack to this day receives no money for all the Warner sides he still finds himself autographing for fans.

In 1964 Jack had been in the studio when Bob stayed up all night to record his "Another Side of Bob Dylan" LP, and Bob in turn had played on Jack's first album for Vanguard. Nowadays Jack rarely ran into Dylan and recalls Dylan saying he was giving up the music business and going to Woodstock to become a painter.

Rather than be controlled or duped, rather than continuing to prod the dream of commercial success — which had by now sagged, drooped, and deflated — Jack spent the following years reaping the instant buck of live gigs for dwindling non-electric, non-psychedelic audiences. Old friends like Dylan had since become rock stars, with little time in their stormy schedules to maintain old friendships.

Elliott worked the clubs, appeared in a film short titled "Ramblin," and performed on television, including the popular Johnny Cash Show. He played and sang in the original WBAI radio version of what must've been the first, if not the only, 18 minute hit single: Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant." Jack also hired on a new road manager named Caesar, part Husky and part Australian Shepard. "He was a good road manager, but I never should've taught him how to drive." reflected Jack.

By 1975 space music had flown away. People's drugged states fell off and their feet were found to be in the same dirt they were in before the drugs disguised it. A reaction was brewing against the supposed high-minded progressive genre which tended to ignore the human condition in favor of self-indulgent whimsy stamped "art." A return from classical arrangements to the simple drive of folk chord progressions ensued.

Patti Smith described its beginnings: "People just started turning up in the Village. It happened very fast. Jack Elliott was around — everybody was around. Then one night, Bob [Dylan] started going up on stage, jamming with these people."³³ Dylan, who had just come off the largest tour in music history, was hungry for the intimacy of smaller venues. He wanted to create lyrically and musically, rather than prop up any more of his greatest hits. Jack hadn't seen Dylan in years when Bob ambled up and asked if Jack would again join him, to "play for the people." Jack immediately yelped, "Let's go!"³⁴

"It's gonna be a new living room every night. This is the first existential tour...it's a movie...a closed set...it's rock 'n' roll heaven and it's historical...It's been Ramblin' Jack's dream for a long time...he's the one who taught us all, and the dream's coming true..." proclaimed Bobby Neuwirth.³⁵

Dylan led this ramshackle assemblage of colleagues dubbed "The Rolling Thunder Review." Jack alternated with or played alongside Bob Neuwirth, Rob Stoner, Mick Ronson, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler, Allen Ginsberg, Gordon Lightfoot, T-Bone Burnett, Arlo Guthrie, and Robbie Robertson. The performers themselves rarely knew where the tour bus would stop next, and their small venue shows would be announced to the fans without more than a day's warning. The Rolling Thunder Review became Dylan's second most praised tour, and Jack for the first time conceded to traveling first class. He even let them tune his guitar for him.

When Rolling Thunder roared into Plymouth, Jack mounted the great mizzenmast on the Mayflower replica, a ship he'd helped build. Hailing down to the poets agape but still grounded, he shouted "Ahoy!" From the soil Allen Ginsberg realized, "We have, once again, embarked on a voyage to reclaim America."³⁶

Following the tour Bob shot out an acclaimed album he called "Desire," which broadsided his most aggressive new material in a decade as well as numbers such as "One More Cup of Coffee," which Rolling Stone noted "is apparently based on a story Ramblin' Jack Elliott used to tell." "Hard Rain," a wearied release of the often raucous material from the tour, would be described by Mick Ronson as vital to pre-punk.

The popular music medium had lost its ability to speak urgently, directly. The folk revival (aka urban folk scare) brought back the voices of a recorded rural boom then thirty years old. American punks sought the simple, fun rhythms from the slightly less ancient 50s rock boom.

Patti Smith remembered her mother thinking the swing bands would live forever. Smith saw rock dying amid camp, supergroups, and stadium shows -- controlled from behind a desk with a tie. Music makes millionaires. Millionaires don't sing tunes about injustice. Poor, confused punk kids forged visions. Some were bubble gum. Some were art. None made it out of New York without compromise.

In New Orleans, McGuinn, Baez, and Kinky Friedman commandeered a stage which had been scheduled for a Tom Waits set. It was the breaking point for Waits, piled upon a litany of maddening hostile audiences and the all-consumable bottle, and it sent him headlong flailing into Europe.

The Rolling Thunder Review went on a second tour in the spring of 1976, this time to arenas seating tens of thousands, and lost a lot of momentum in the process. The mainstreamed Thunder excluded not only its original spontaneity but also Ramblin' Jack. A five hour movie of the tours and the at-best imaginative skits of its personnel was produced and directed by Dylan, then released and panned. Thereupon Dylan was slammed with alimony and became a Las Vegas-style lounge act. Mainstream America welcomed disco as an escapist alternative to that blunt "punk" music they'd heard was trying to break out of New York. Jack's spotlight flickered off somewhere in the process, and he was back on the road.

"He's self destructive. If you want to compare him to anybody, try T.E. Lawrence."³⁷

"Acting out, on a 24-hour-a day basis, the role of Last American Cowboy isn't easy: all that two-fisted drinking and the endless days on the road and the nights sleeping in the back of pick-up trucks or on borrowed floors."³⁸

"Well, it isn't always easy being known as an inspiration to the rich and famous when you're neither yourself. 'Jack went though a time when people expected such simplistic things of him, ' says Arlo Guthrie, 'that for a while he almost believed that's who he should be.'"³⁹

"I have been a big failure at times and I will be again if I don't keep my act together." groaned Jack. "I saw Phil [Ochs] drinking. I saw him on stage one night so drunk that everyone felt embarrassed and sorry for him and shocked with his behavior. I know that I too probably shocked with my own behavior when I was drunk, and probably did not know what happened afterwards. I never even thought I was an alcoholic. I drank to get loosened up. It was a very dangerous threat to my career. I had to deal with it as the enemy." ⁴⁰

Two hours late, he'd stagger in unshaven with a bottle in his hand — and the audience could take what they got, abandoned to alcohol, cocaine, and the road. Lifelong fans would finally meet Jack and walk away supporting the old axiom that you should never meet your heroes. A youngster who'd just started out to be a picker got up the nerve to ask the legendary Jack Elliott for advice and heard, "Be a truck driver, get a job on a ranch. I don't know. I don't know how you do it. I just do it by habit. You dig, like when this thing is over, you're gonna look for me, but you won't find me. I'm gonna be gone. I'm gonna be in my truck driving over the hill to some quiet place where I can lay my head down."⁴¹

Jack's since been following a better set of his own advice: "Success means having a new hat for Christmas." Self destruction gave way to self enlightenment, and Jack Elliott reignited his reinvention mechanism. He made a stab at becoming a born-again Christian, prophetically reasoning: "I didn't want to die a neurotic wreck."⁴²

In 1954 Jack had enthusiastically signed into resurrecting the Balclutha, an 1886 Glasgow-built cargo ship docked up in San Francisco Bay. His interests and aptitude later overlapped when in 1969, with Don McLean and others, Jack hired onto Pete Seeger's Sloop Clearwater for a full sailed tour of the Hudson River Valley. Pulling broadsailed into the press at each port, audiences were reminded of times when the river didn't just carry toxic waste. In 1980 Jack dug his heels into an old dream and took to restoring great old sailing ships as a trade.

Outside the American music monotony, motley musicians were in Germany ganging up to produce a sampler called Folk Friends. After those sessions, Jack stuck around to record a full album — Kerouac's Last Dream — his first after 13 years on the road and sea.

His guitar playing was masterful, layered with a subtle dynamic. It roamed and punctuated behind his relaxed voice, which amplified its own quirky uniqueness. Among soulful reworkings of the boasts of many a songwriter lay the first available recording of Jack singing "Cup of Coffee." Jack had written the number in the backseat of Johnny Cash's car decades ago. It reached some success through Cash's resonant baritone on a 1966 Cash album entitled "Everybody Loves a Nut." As the first "truckin' song" recorded in Nashville it conveyed Jack's understanding of the difficult and absurd lifestyle truckers live. Jack's said that after he wrote that song about truckers, they began to write a lot of good ones.

We may never see Jack shimmying on MTV, but he was freed as a musician to continue endlessly forward, even if his road of choice includes all the detours.

Self deprecation aside, Jack had become a demonstration in the value of completely ignoring the pop market. By sidetracking the music industry's penchant for consumption, he had avoided becoming another youth whose talent was burnt out almost as soon as he was discovered. MTV births what are called "recording artists," leaving singers and musicians to memoirs.

"No studio recording, though, can capture the impact of Elliott performing on a good night. He improvises on melodies and twists them around, singing free of commonplace phrase structure and of his own guitar rhythms. Taking great, crazy risks and usually succeeding, he generates a tremendous excitement of which his recordings offer a small glimpse."⁴³

Jack laughed, "I don't plan it. I just get my fingers rollin' on the guitar, and the strings are rollin'. It usually happens when I'm not paying attention to it. Just when I think I'm gettin' lost.

"It just depends. Sometimes when I get an uptight audience, one that's bugging me, I can't really relax and get into myself so I just'do the traditional showbiz set. Then the only way I can get loose enough to create in a loose way is to try to relax. But other times it gets outrageously improvisational."⁴⁴

This personal interaction with music was part of daily life for everyone, up until it could be played without musicians. Very recently in the evolution of human society, we stopped creating. We handed our art over to other people, called them professionals. You could make a bigger buck selling recorded music.

Music moved. It had been part of the metaphoric and spiritual life of a community. It had been informative. It had been other things. For an increasingly pervasive Western World, music is solely entertainment. Entertainment is an industry. Music is now used to escape life. Others use movies or drugs. Music is an other — it is not created by those who use it. Art is no longer for everyone.

Alan Lomax forcasted, "When the whole world is bored with automated, mass-distributed video music, our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture."

Bands are so concerned with being new, being different. The most different thing they could do would be to play good songs. I want in on the next big thing as much as I want to be the first one on my block to represent the least common denominator.

Instead of using a wallet, Stephen Foster carried his cash as gold nuggets hidden in his mouth. Foster was America's most popular songwriter 150 years ago — worth noting. You'll hear things in Rolling Stone like, "Oh, the Beatles' songs will still be around in a hundred years." Taking note of how quickly things are forgotten nowadays needs to be part and parcel of estimating whether anything is going to last.

In 1985 the last and most resilient vestiges of the Old West banded together in the dead of winter to cement their heritage — the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Working cowhands from all over the West now hit the trail to Elko annually, where Jack and others tell the stories and songs which root their community.

Organizer Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center explains the appeal, "The stories, songs and poems of the new cowboy movement honestly recognize loss. They protest the modern world and offer advice to a society that risks being overtaken by less than human values." ⁴⁵

For the next decade Jack would refine everything it is that he does, spreading his reputation and refining wrinkles. There were relapses into unpredictability, moments when he'd still rather be a shipbuilder, and reconciliation with his father.

By 1995 Jack'd long abandoned soundproofed rooms for the highway, which was where the proud driver of a Land Rover probably belonged anyway. Then somebody came out swinging, determined to drag the great Jack Elliott kicking and screaming back into the studio.

Jack rode on into town to accept the Grammy in a tuxedo which had been custom made for Bing Crosby. He'd only worn a tuxedo once before — long ago Dylan had called him up and invited him down to the screening of that five hour Rolling Thunder tour movie, Renaldo and Clara, adding that Jack should wear a tuxedo. As it turned out, everyone else was dressed normally and Dylan had just laughed at him for being so foolish.

Jack almost lost his britches running up the aisle and used his acceptance speech to admit he'd never even watched the Grammys. He thanked Woody "for convincing me to play a guitar and not drive a truck."48

In this tuxedo Jack was the one laughing, at his unexpected success. They handed him a bright, shiny Grammy award but confused poor Jack when they took it right back to use for the next winner. They later handed him another one and took his picture, then took it away again. Later in the evening someone handed him a third one, which they said he could keep. "I was going to use it as a hood ornament for my motor home until I saw how nice it was." mentioned Jack.⁴⁹

The Bay Area Music Awards of San Francisco Bay followed up the Grammies with more Jack Elliott awarding, and he continued accepting, perhaps wondering what exactly he'd suddenly done. At some point during the hoopla, the town he was living in realized they had a celebrity in their midst and threw him another party. "That was probably the first time I'd met the whole town," Jack joked. "All 49 of them were there."⁵⁰

"Been there three years — longer than I've lived any one place in my life" figured Jack. Holly Heinzmann, who works behind the counter of the town store said, "We started paying attention to him once he got the Grammy. Before that, we didn't pay any attention at all."⁵¹

When things had finally stopped spinning, Jack noticed annoying side effects to the otherwise positive recognition experience: "I used to do only 60 concerts a year. That may double 'cause of that damn Grammy."⁵² Touring has inversely affected Jack's love of the road, but audiences and peers increasingly herald witness to his gravity.

Improvisatory stuntmanship surrounded by a well of tradition, Jack grapples amazingly without the saddle of familiarity. Jack's peers and admirers began to peel from the surrounding woodwork and sang alongside him on his following Grammy nominated releases. After having been ignored for decades, he again began a heavy touring and interviewing agenda, questioned regarding anything from the state of the country to his intentions as a singer:

"I'm trying to tell the story the way the story hits me without blowing you away. It's not an opera."⁵³

Vaquero songwriter and sometime touring partner of Jack's, Mike Beck, sat down on the edge of the stage after a show in Montana to watch the fans line up for autographs. Chelsea Clinton trotted along and told him he was "simply enchanting." Mike chuckled and drawled, "You know, a good friend of mine was just at your folks' place for dinner the other night."

He wasn't kidding. One longtime fan of Jack's had printed out an earlier copy of this here biography, wrapped it with a letter, and posted it to an arts chairman in DC. No one was more surprised than Jack when he was invited to receive the National Medal of Arts Award from the President of the United States of America.

Jack says it was worth going just to see the President get nervous when fellow recipient Gregory Peck started walking up. Jack later passed Peck while ambling on their bus and he hollered, "Regards from Alan Villiers!" (Villiers was an old sailing cohort of Jack's and had been Peck's boat captain in the 1956 movie Moby Dick. Villers had died 15 years earlier.)

After the ceremonial meal Clinton began walking along the wall to the back of the hall where he'd be entertaining. The guests stood up to let him pass and Jack realized this was his once chance to have a private talk with Bill out of earshot of the G-Men. When Clinton's shoulder brushed past, Jack leaned in and muttered, " I heard a rumor that Bob Dylan is in town. I thought we could dress you up in a little disguise and sneak over there and see him." Clinton beamed, "Oh, that'd be wonderful!" before he remembered his role and escaped away up the aisle.

The road is an unpredictable terrain and ornery, and Jack's never done anything the same way twice. Some still bother to try and guess where Jack's headed. "A lot of people expect that someday he'll grow up and be normal, but he's never been normal. He's always been interesting, though."⁵⁴

"When I left the J.E. Ranch, they told me I could come back as soon as I found a string of Palomino mules. I'm still looking." reflects Jack. "I was going to be a truck driver. In fact I could've had a good, steady job driving a garbage truck, but guitar has always been my ruin." During a brief intermission in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ramblin' Jack went for an ice cream run. He called back to the show saying that the spot he'd imagined was farther away than he thought. He was in Detroit.

Jack's mother had always assumed that her son would "become a great humanitarian like his father." It took her many, many years before she accepted that "instead of ministering to people's bodies, he found it more congenial to commune with their souls." ⁵⁵

For years people looked at just Jack's wily intelligence or just his musical talent and expected him to become a major player. That's not his nature. A jester dances about the scene, making wise cracks we only later realize are brimming with insight. A jester points the leaders assembled about him in various directions then sits back idly in the corner when doom or victory claim the king. Ever innocent and unsuspected, the jester is the kingpin which keeps a kingdom from rotating on swords. The jester is also the wizard who realizes not to take himself seriously, who wields not fear, but assembles all the players without lifting a finger. The problem with a Jack Elliott biography is that of making a lead character out of the jester.

Jack partially explained how he's shaped by the influences inside him: "I have always created my own sources, but I still sing Woody's songs. While a lot of people don't think I'm imitating Woody, I still feel I am in a way, you know, like he's looking over my shoulder."⁵⁶ Jack's the kid with an angel on his shoulder or a wise old rodeo clown or maybe we don't realize yet that he stands before us "as the representative of the man that made the country what it is today — the working man." He's what you'd call the real thing, and he won't be watered down for anybody.

"I was just getting ready to go on a national tour of 'Woody Guthrie's American Song' by Peter Glazer. Gene Parsons, some unidentified (to me) blonde woman and Jack are walking down by the coast and we run into each other. Gene says, 'Jack, this is Lawrence Bullock. He's gonna play Woody Guthrie in a play.' Jack kinda sizes me up and down, grins and says, 'You kinda look like Woody...' then turns to the blonde and says, '...and you kinda look like Woody, too...'"⁵⁷

¹ Jan Currie. Interview with Evins Beitiks. "Jack of Hearts" San Francisco Examiner, 4 Aug. 1996.

² Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. "On the Trail of Ramblin' Jack Elliott" Esquire, April 1984: 80-85.

³ Jack Elliott. Interview with Evins Beitiks. op. cit.

⁴ Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁵ Eric Von Schmidt. Interview by Bill Yaryan. "Ramblin' Jack Elliott" Sing Out, Nov. 1965: 25-28.

⁶ Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁷ Jack Elliott. Interview with Evins Beitiks. op. cit.

⁸ Jack Elliott. Interview with Chris Flisher. "Living Legend, Ramblin' Jack Elliott keeps folk standards high" The Worcester Phoenix, 2 May 1997.

⁹ Jack Elliott. Interview with Bruce Sylvester. "Ramblin' Jack Elliott" Goldmine. 30 July 1997.

¹⁰ Jack Elliott. Interview. Coffee Break Concert Series. WMMS FM. Cleveland, OH. 1977.

¹¹ Jack Elliott. Interview with Roger Bull. "Ramblin' Jack Elliott wandering this way" The Times-Union, 18 May 2004.

¹² Derroll Adams. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

¹³ Jack Elliott. Interview with Tim Ryan. "Ramblin' Through Town" Star-Bulletin, 6 June 1996.

¹⁴ Alex Campbell. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

¹⁵ Ewan MaColl. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

¹⁶ Arlo Guthrie. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

¹⁷ Stu Jamieson. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

¹⁸ Eric Von Schmidt. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

¹⁹ Tom Russell. Liner notes to "South Coast" (Red House Records) 1995.

²⁰ "Real Hung Up," op. cit.

²¹ Jack Elliott. Interview with Bruce Sylvester. op. cit.

²² Jaharana Romney. Interview with Markus Wittmann. "The Girl From the North Country." Wanted Man. Ed. John Bauldie. (New York: Citadel Press, Carol Publishing Group, 1991) 20.

²³ Unidentifiable publication received from Hank Reineke of New Jersey.

²⁴ Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Dave Van Ronk. Robbie Woliver. Bringing It All Back Home : 25 Years of American Music at Folk City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) 51.

²⁷ Susan Rotelo. Ibid. 80.

²⁸ Unnamed "bitter contemporary." Ibid. 81.

²⁹ Dave Van Ronk. Robbie Woliver. Ibid. 80.

³⁰ Bob Neuwirth. Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down : The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1994) 86.

³¹ Pete Seeger. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

³² Miller, Arthur. "The Shadows of the Gods." as reprinted in Pulitzer Prize Reader. Ed. Hamalian, Leo and Volpe, Edmond. (New York: Popular Library, 1961) 472.

³³ Patti Smith. Interview with Miles. Wanted Man. op. cit. 92.

³⁴ Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987) 522.

³⁵ Ibid. 521-2.

³⁶ Ibid. 523-4.

³⁷ David Elliott. Interview by Bill Yaryan. op. cit.

³⁸ Michael Goldberg "Ramblin' Jack Elliott Sings The Same Old 25 Songs" San Francisco Examiner, 15 July 1979.

³⁹ Arlo Guthrie. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁴⁰ Jack Elliott. Robbie Woliver. op. cit. 161.

⁴¹ Jack Elliott. Interview with Michael Goldberg. op. cit.

⁴² Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁴³ Larry Sandberg and Dick Weissman The Folk Music Sourcebook. (Knopf, Inc. 1976).

⁴⁴ Jack Elliott. Interview. Guitar Player, Oct. 1974.

⁴⁵ Hal Cannon. Buckaroo: Visions and Voices of the American Cowboy. Ed. Hal Cannon and Thomas West. (New York: Callaway Editions Inc., Simon & Schuster, 1993) 9.

⁴⁶ Jack Elliott. Interview with Cindy McGlynn. "Ramblin' Jack Elliott" Eye Weekly, Toronto's Arts Newspaper, 25 April 1996.

⁴⁷ Jack Elliott. Interview with Chris Flisher. op. cit.

⁴⁸ Jack Elliott. Interview with David Rolland. "Ramblin' Jack Elliott of Marshall wins Grammy" Point Reyes Light Weekly, 7 Mar. 1995.

⁴⁹ Jack Elliott. Interview with Tim Ryan. op. cit.

⁵⁰ Jack Elliott. Interview with David Rolland. op. cit.

⁵¹ Jack Elliott and Holly Heinzmann. Interview with Evins Beitiks. op. cit.

⁵² Jack Elliott. Interview with Tim Ryan. op. cit.

⁵³ Jack Elliott. Interview. "Just the Two of Us" People Weekly, 30 Mar. 1998 v49 n12: 28 (1).

⁵⁴ Arlo Guthrie. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁵⁵ Jack Elliott. Interview with Randy Sue Coburn. op. cit.

⁵⁶ Jack Elliott. Interview. Guitar Player, Oct. 1974.

⁵⁷ Lawrence Bullock. "Re: Ramblin' Jack Elliot" Online posting. 14 Apr. 1996. rec.music.folk.