Urban cowboy

Larry Schwartz

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott liked the way the other fellow played and sang when they jammed together before a show in Sydney. He was less impressed with that man’s whims. “We only succeeded in going out into the country about four times,” Elliott says of his 1973 tour with singer-songwriter Cat Stevens. “We went horseback riding. (He) always needed to be on a white horse because he was wearing his black outfit … It didn’t matter if the horse was stupid. It just had to be white.” The roving cowboy folksinger, Elliott, 67, is back in town this month, touring with Doug Ashdown. Though the term is used too liberally these days, he’s a legendary figure whose anecdotes are an oral history of his times and ours. He put in some hard travellin’ with Woody Guthrie, hung out with Beat writer Jack Kerouac, serenaded James Dean, introduced Bob Dylan onstage as his son, was nicknamed Uncle Jack by his friends in the Band. Though he rarely writes original material, Elliott is a great interpreter of a tradition that extends right through to contemporaries such as Billy Bragg, who recorded versions of unrecorded Guthrie songs on last year’s acclaimed Mermaid Avenue. “When some people find that Jack Elliott was born in Brooklyn,” Pete Seeger once wrote, “he with his cowboy hat and boots, rough lingo and expert guitar playing, their first reaction is, ‘Oh, he’s a fake.’ They’re dead wrong … He didn’t just learn some new songs, he changed his whole way of living.” He was born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn, New York, in 1931. His father had been raised on a farm in Connecticut. “I went to visit my grandpa up there. I remember when I was four being chased by a bull.” From an early age, Elliott was entranced with films featuring cowboy singers. How did the good Dr and Mrs Adnopoz respond when he told them of his plans to become one? “Well, I didn’t have the courage to do that. I just disappeared one day. I ran away from home. I was 15. I was missing for three months. Terrible thing to do to your parents at that age.” Just don’t call him The Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys, as he is often tagged, though Arlo Guthrie borrowed the nickname for an album title. “It’s a bulls… title that was made up not by myself. I don’t like it. It embarrasses me … somehow it got into a newspaper story and it got into my press kit that my agent mails out. And that doggone thing has been haunting me all over the place. I’m not the Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys. I’m not the first. I was born in Brooklyn, regrettably. I wanted to be born on a ranch.” He’s hoping “to get out in the desert”, catch up with Australians he met at an international gathering of cowboy poets in Nevada, and track down the birthplace in Melbourne of a long-time hero, Alan Villiers, author of a book on sailing that his trade-publisher uncle gave him when he was 10 years old. Ramblin’ Jack’s real mentor was Woody Guthrie – who once said of him, “Jack sounds more like me than I do” – and he remains proud heir to the Guthrie tradition. They first met in 1951 when he was 19; Guthrie had not yet been diagnosed with the Huntington’s Chorea that would claim his life more than a decade on. “I tried to imitate Woody as perfectly as I could, which angered a lot of people,” he says. “They didn’t like to see anybody coming off as an exact imitation of Woody Guthrie. It made them quite mad. Friends of Woody’s … were trying to give me a lot of advice. I was a youngster and they were saying, You can’t be imitating. Find out who you are. Sing you. Let’s hear Jack Elliott.” It was not until he left America to spend six years in Europe in the 1950s that he was able to find his own style “by virtue of the fact that I wasn’t hanging around with Woody so much”. The influence was still obvious. “But I don’t try to get every vocal intonation, trying to imitate the sound of his voice and his physical, bodily gestures and all that which were merely symptoms of the disease that he was suffering from. I didn’t know that it was a disease that he had. I just thought it was part of his own personality.” Elliott prizes his old Martin D28 steel string guitar to the point where he’ll leave it at home rather than have airlines stow it. Ramblin’ Jack is a great storyteller who holds forth at such length his partner, Jan Currie, who’ll accompany him to Australia, has said, “They don’t call him Ramblin’ Jack because he travels.” The proud owner of Bing Crosby’s denim tuxedo also remembers the times he serenaded James Dean in a Hollywood parking lot. “The first was about an hour long. It was just James Dean and his girlfriend and me and my girlfriend and two or three friends of (his) just standing around. See, James Dean was unknown at the time. So he was very free to hang out.” He took a swig of Southern Comfort from Janis Joplin’s bottle at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival, and Jack Kerouac read him On The Road in his Greenwich Village apartment. “I loved it. I thought it was marvellous. It was like a modern Woody Guthrie experience.” Ramblin’ Jack left the East Coast in the mid-’60s, putting as much distance between himself and Brooklyn as he could. He now lives in Tomales Bay, San Francisco, where he’s been recording a new album that will include a song by his friend and neighbor Tom Waits, and backing vocals by Tom Russell and Maria Muldaur. He rarely writes his own material. “I do need a lot of encouragement in the writing department, I’m afraid. I’m very, very slow.” He has misgivings about Bleeker Street Blues, a wonderful spoken song of his on his last album, addressed to Dylan, with whom he’d hung out in Greenwich Village in the ’60s and accompanied on the Rolling Thunder Review a decade later. He’d penned it after reports that Dylan was seriously ill. Had Dylan responded? “No, I haven’t been in touch with him at all. And he doesn’t call me either. I just don’t know what his real thoughts are on the matter of our friendship. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed. I’m sorry I put it on the album. It was a little too like name-dropping or something. Like boasting that I know him or some bullshit like that. “I was proud that I finally did sit down and write about something.” The Sunday Age, 07-Mar-1999