ANDREW DARLINGTON's Review of ‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles' by Mark Brend

DAVID ACKLES: THE OTHER ‘RIVER MAN’

Book Review of:

‘DOWN RIVER: IN SEARCH OF DAVID ACKLES'

by Mark Brend

(2025, Jawbone Press)

http://jawbonepress.com/down-river/

ISBN 978-1-916829-22-0, Softback, 148pp+8 photo plates

To follow their hit single ‘This Wheels On Fire’, Julie Driscoll with the Brian Auger Trinity recorded a superb five-minute take on David Ackles’ ‘Road To Cairo’. It failed to chart. Later, the Hollies – with Mikael Rickfors, covered Ackles touching ‘Down River’. Spooky Tooth also recorded the same song. Born in Rock Island of ‘Rock Island Line’ fame in Illinois (20 February 1937), David Ackles was a songwriter who never wrote a hit. He released four albums, three for prestigious Elektra Records, with fan-man Bernie Taupin producing his brooding, elegant and eclectic masterpiece American Gothic (1972), after which there was a final Five & Dime LP in October 1973, for Columbia. 

He family moved to LA, but he didn’t live a Rock ‘n’ Roll life. He wasn’t cool. While other kids were out rocking around the clock he was listening to clunky old musical The Desert Song. Raised in a Presbyterian religious theatrical family he did Hollywood toddle-on parts in six Rusty movies – a kind of low-budget Rin-Tin-Tin variant billed as ‘Great Kids… A Wonder Dog!’. Out of step with teen-trends he favoured all-round variety to the Twist or the Boogaloo. If Bob Dylan referred to himself ironically as a ‘song-&-dance man’, David Ackles started out as the real thing.

Intending simply to demo his songs for other’s consideration, Ackles accidentally fell into recording his eponymous debut album (1968, EKS-74022). He’d already turned thirty and had yet to play a single solo live date. Jac Holzman’s Elektra was likely the only label with the open foresight to sign him. Producer David Anderle used session players, including former Iron Butterfly and future Rhinoceros musicians. They may simply have overdubbed Ackles existing demos without Ackles even being present, on songs such as the thumb-tripping screenplay ‘The Road To Cairo’; or the warm-voiced conversational piano-led ‘Down River’ – which he performed for a DJ John Peel Radio session. It tells the tale of a freed prisoner who returns to his hometown to find his girl has found someone else, yet he accepts the situation with sad grace. ‘Blue Ribbons’ controversially – at the time, is about a white woman pregnant by a black man. Then there’s the liturgical organ that complements the ‘arms of grace’ lyric of ‘His Name Is Andrew’ (covered by Martin Carthy on his 1971 Landfall album). 

Despite writer Mark Brend’s scrupulous research, which considers unreleased outtakes and lost songs, the session details remain uncertain. Yet Brend perceptively writes, Ackles ‘wrote as a dramatist or an author, creating songs like one-act plays or short stories,’ while under the influence of the Brecht-Weill partnership. It was difficult to place Ackles in context, he was not quite Randy Newman, neither was he a darker Harry Nilsson, he might have been chanson, Jacques Brel, or maybe even his Elektra labelmates Tom Rush or Tim Buckley? To journalist John Bauldie Ackles’ songs are ‘often dark vignettes of the sorrows and inevitable seriousness of experience, poetic sketches of not-so-beautiful losers and unlucky lovers, hopeless vagabonds and embittered misfits, set to tapestries of tune. It’s grown-up stuff’ (‘Q’, February 1994).

After failed sessions with Al Kooper and Don Ellis, the eight tracks that make up Subway To The Country (1969, EKS-74060) use lush widescreen Fred Myrow settings – an arranger who’d worked with Jim Morrison and would score Charlton Heston’s Soylent Green (1973). The title-song has a ‘got to get back to the land’ father-to-son brightness, other tracks such as ‘Mainline Saloon’ – with its dubbed-on ambient lowlife Bar sounds, and ‘Inmates Of The Institution’ with its chilling atmosphere of community derangement, in particular are disquieting and deeply unsettling. While the macabre character-sketch ‘Candy Man’ about maimed war-veteran Oscar, jailed for unapologetic peado offences, is possibly his bravest song, in that it adds psychological depth to a disreputable individual. But where Jim Morrison or Lou Reed were writing from their own life-milieu, good church-going David Ackles appears to be assembling his cast in the way that a playwright creates characters. His songs are story-songs.

He was still playing shoes-optional Folk-dens supporting Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell… such as the ‘Bitter End’ on NY Bleecker Street, until he played a support slot at the ‘Troubadour’ on Santa Monica Boulevard to an audience of the counter-culture glitterati there to witness rising star Elton John. It was 25 August 1970, and although Ackles performance was overshadowed by Elton John’s career left-off, there was rapport between the artists that led to Ackles crossing the Atlantic to live at ‘Farthings’ in Wargrave on the Thames at Berkshire, from where he could commute, scoring his own arrangement charts, to record at the IBC studio at Portland Place with Bernie Taupin producing. 

‘It seems like you get a sharper perspective on your own country when you’re away from it’ Ackles explains on the sleeve-notes of American Gothic (USA Elektra EKS75032). This time there were eleven tracks with a full 43-minute playing time including the 10:05-minute ‘Montana Song’ which is a search for rural ancestry roots taking him to a ‘long abandoned farm,’ all interpreted through diary entries. But there was still what Brend calls not ‘enough of the familiar’ to hit mainstream preconceptions. No chorus. More string quartet, piccolo and cello than Rock guitar. Even Brend concedes that ‘it is also the most inaccessible of his records’ which requires repeated plays and close attention to yield its rewards, ‘it’s not a record for the streaming age.’ For Ackles himself, he’s quoted as saying ‘I like parables, little morality plays.’ 

Critically the album was well-received, from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone to Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times, drawing comparisons as diverse as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Chris Van Ness, writing in the Los Angeles Free Press, announced it as ‘the Sgt Pepper of Folk’. But as Brent admits ‘critical acclaim doesn’t always sell records.’ After it peaked at no.167 on the Billboard album chart, Ackles amicably parted company with Elektra. Only to be picked up by Clive Davis of Columbia, for a more modest low-budget album project.

The newly married Ackles produced Five & Dime (1973, USA Columbia KC32466) on a four-track TEAC machine in his Pacific Palisades home, inviting guest musicians – including Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean (on ‘Surf’s Down’) to visit in various combinations, before the tapes were mixed and mastered. Inevitably, the resulting album got lost within label and management politics. It was what Mark Brend calls ‘a more personal, intimate record – a step back from the big statement of American Gothic.’ Twelve tracks this time, including the black horror of ‘Aberfan’, which records the events of 21 October 1966 when a small Welsh village was engulfed in a landslip of saturated slag with a tragic loss of life. Ackles succeeds in riding a precarious edge between being maudlin or exploitational.

By now, ‘the fissure between talent and sales that was a feature of Ackles’s recording career from the start became a chasm.’ There were no more albums. But he wasn’t in it for stardom. He was in it for music. With the advent of CD there was a mild ripple of approving reappraisal with the reissue of his Elektra albums. A 2CD compilation There Is A River (2007, Rhino 8122-74884-2) included all three Elektra LPs plus ‘unreleased songs & rarities’ with Bernie Taupin and Elvis Costello liner-notes, although the edition was subsequently withdrawn due to legal conflicts with Ackles’ estate. And there were nay-sayers. Some reviewers considered that after such doses of intricate prettification it was necessary to syringe the ears with the Ramones or Motorhead!

A tall dark-haired affable man, David Ackles didn’t die a Rock ‘n’ Roll death. After retiring from Pop he wrote TV scripts, enjoyed a long academic career while writing and producing low-key musicals and ballet scores. His ambitious musical projects ‘Allendor/ Prince Jack’ and ‘Sister Aimee’ remain unstaged, while his collaboratively scripted Word Of Honour was filmed as a TV movie starring Karl Malden and a young John Malkovich. David Ackles survived having part of his cancerous left lung removed, but died of a relapse 2 March 1999 in Tujanga, California, aged sixty-two. Yet his reputation persists. Elton John and Elvis Costello sing his praises. Mark Brent’s book is a personal quest to discover the truth about the man he got to speak to once, on a single phone call.

 Ensorcelled by the September 1955 mystical vinyl codex ‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom’ at age eight, Andrew Darlington embarked on a lifetime quest to decipher the magical incantation’s profundity, traipsing in not entirely straight lines of zigzag wandering across decades of enchantment, yet is still no closer to the true enlightenment revelation must bring. 

As of now, the seeking continues across a proliferation of platforms, including EIGHT MILES HIGHER .

44 Spa Croft Road, Ossett, 

West Yorkshire WF5 0HE

ENGLAND (Tel: 01924 275814

Email: andydarlington@talktalk.net

Twitter: @darlingtonandy

Website: www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com)

GAS Featured Poet: John Yamrus

 

John Yamrus is widely recognized as master of minimalism and the neo-noir in modern poetry. In a career spanning more than 50 years as a working writer, he has had nearly 4,000 poems published in books, magazines and anthologies around the world. His writing is often taught in college and university courses. Three of his more than 40 books have been published in translation.  2025 has seen the release of two new books: the quasi-memoir CAPTAIN BEEFHEART NEVER LICKED MY DECALS OFF, BABY and a book of poems, DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER: JUST GIVE HIM A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE.

his favorite response

 

to almost 

anything she said 

was “well I’ll be dipped in shit!”.   

 

it 

didn’t 

matter what she said, 

 

or 

how, 

 

or 

why,

 

 or 

even if 

the response 

was appropriate, 

 

or fit...

 

it 

was always 

“well, I’ll be dipped in shit.”

 

it 

was so 

awkwardly annoying 

 

that 

she couldn’t wait 

till he’d offer something new. 

 

but, 

two weeks 

after the accident,

 

and 

the light 

that was or wasn’t green, 

 

she’d give 

anything she had 

 

to 

hear him say it 

one more time and smile.

GAS Featured Poet: Michael Lee Johnson

 Michael Lee Johnson lived in Canada for ten years during the Vietnam era. Today, he is a poet in the greater Chicago-land area, IL. He has 354-plus YouTube poetry videos. Michael Lee Johnson is an internationally published poet in 46 countries, a song lyricist with several published poetry books, and a nominee for 7 Pushcart Prize awards and 7 Best of the Net nominations. He has over 653 published poems. He is the editor-in-chief of three poetry anthologies, all of which are available on Amazon, and has authored several poetry books and chapbooks. He has over 653 published poems. Michael has administered and created 6 Facebook Poetry groups. Member of the Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/ and Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/.  His poems have been translated into several foreign languages. Awards/Contests: International Award of Excellence "Citta' Del Galateo-Antonio De Ferrariis" XI Edition 2024 Milan, Italy-Poetry. Poem, Michael Lee Johnson, "If I Were Young Again." 

I Conceal My Craft

 By Michael Lee Johnson

 

I conceal my craft beneath the shell

of an armadillo, snug in its embrace,

nestled near its warmth,

as insects buzz under the midday sun,

where stories collide with struggles,

and words fester like unresolved thoughts,

distant from the critics' needle pen hearts.

Their relentless demands, cold cash, 

and hollow praise layered thick with honey

on pages between verses, where every line

holds a lingering scent or memory.

I gaze up at the vast sky and chuckle.

Speaking in tongues nervously out of mind

shining chimes waiting for the next critic

to declare my thoughts don’t flow,

out of character, my rhythm’s a misstep.

I tally each word, joy, and sorrow.

One poem, one collection of verses for me;

One poem, one collection, a poetry book against me.

Breath shallow, breath hard for the heart with age.

I conceal my craft under the armor of the armadillo.

 

The Older I Get (3)

By Michael Lee Johnson

 

The older I get,

the fewer friends I got.

My teardrops fall on empty ears.

Imagine those soaked pillows.

Friends, some I've had for over 30 years.

Now, they are petrified by their own fears,

confined in jealousy, self-disgust, or gone.

Evaporation takes over the space where leftovers are stored.

They left my world nibbling on little, left behind.

My abysmal room, insane, schizophrenic

smells of pending death. Do my crying, do my praying.

Brian Wilson, “In My Room.”

Prayers seldom go beyond my ceiling,

mystically tucked back inside my brain.

Growing older, wiser, figured out nothing at all;

nothing worth worrying about.

Less tolerance, more self-opened space,

fewer gutless enablers, as time passes, doors close.

Old doors don’t squeak, no need for WD-40.

Key phrase: they die or show their true colors.

The older I get, the fewer friends I got.

I start best when the world awakens, roosters crow.

I fall asleep, like my mother, into slow-wave sleep.

 

Su Zi's Review of Father Tectonic by Robert Frede Kenter

When the Book Itself is Art

While the history of the artist book may have begun, as Wikipedia states, with illustrated manuscripts, and continued into our times with citations that include major art movements, discussions of art books contain two crucial elements: the object is a deliberate artistic creation, and the object is intended to function as a readable entity. Oftentimes, the experience of seeing an artist book might be in a restricted situation such as a museum, where the object itself is displayed but not touchable. Oftentimes, the lack of tactile interaction with the object lessens the experience of engaging with an artist book, as it is possible that the tactile experience is a significant part of experiencing the art. However, historical artifacts are fragile, and our experience of them must allow for respect and reverence to still the fingers’ lust to experience materials perhaps no longer available. Contemporary artist books are also rare, but still available, and any bibliophile with a personal library ought to include such entities in their collection.

Of the artist books available, one consistently delicious producer of artists books is Ethel, which reliably produces poetry chapbooks of extraordinary beauty. Typically, an edition of any book in their series will feature a cover involving physical collage that involves actual stitching, and editions tend to stay under one hundred copies. While it is true that many editions from the press are rightfully held in special collections, it is also possible to own a copy, to have one in hand, to touch the art.

In the case of a book called Father Tectonic, with text by Robert Frede Kenter, the book’s cover itself requires consideration: on a base of mylar, the work’s title and author have been printed, with the book’s cover image physically sewn to the mylar base...one can touch the delicacy of the threads rising above the smooth surface. The cover has additional stitching in varying colors of thread that form a grid column between the cover image and the spine, which is hand sewn—hand sewn in “toji”, a type of traditional Japanese binding where the stitching itself is a part of the aesthetic. Most stunning to this edition is a tiny pocket sewn on top of this collage, that contains a single yellow button. Thus, the book exists as a work of fiber art, as a kind of quilt, in that it is a sewn collage.

Artist books often contain text, and Kenter’s Father Tectonic is a full-length poetry work in and of itself.   The poems are muscular, with a maturity of voice that pleasures the ear. In “Milk River”, the poem opens with: “metal taste     methane/ his military   chest medallion” (16) and continues with irregularly lined stanzas that nonetheless have the fluidity of  speech. Kenter’s ear is impeccable here, with phrases such as “Ambling toward comatose” that are both macabre in semantics and lovely to the ear.

Experienced readers of poetry ought to take especial note of the poem “21 Investigations”, a long poem in sections that is the book’s physical centerpiece(pages21-30). The text here also employs irregular stanzas, numbered sections and the use of both italics and quotation marks, as well as open spacing with the text of the poem itself.  The sections vary in length, but each exists as a poem in itself, making the piece itself a quilt. The sort of quilt that Kenter is constructing contains some lovely fabric:

6

Mother when you came home from work

we went to the library

your black hair falling into your eyes

the light a certain quality of light

between maples and oaks the sidewalk

a vision through dusty glass windows. 

In the car your arthritic hand held the wheel

you read to me quietly as rain

falls between the cedars.  (24)

The emotional tone of love despite pain is a consistent element throughout this work. While the characters are recognizable as both specifics and symbols—a family—Kenter’s language mixes the violent or painful with language sensitivity. In this section above, each stanza functions on an assonant repetition: the o for “mother/home/work”, the  i for “library/eyes, light/ quality light/ sidewalk’ before the slant shift in “vision” to the sound of “arthritic hand”, the poem’s climax. Since this poem exists as an element in a poem series of twenty other sections, it is a poem within a poem, genre-bending in itself.

What we have thus at hand is an artistic consideration of no small weight, despite its  physical ability to fit into a simple mailing envelope. Given the temporal limitations on the availability of the object, it’s a wonder that art of such gravatas can be ordered and held at hand as prosaically as any kitchen subscription. That one can actually subscribe to the press and get such wonderful books for less than a pizza is a wonderment of our times.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: R. Bremner

 A four-time honoree in the Allen Ginsberg Awards, R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s, in nine books/chapbooks, and hundreds of journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Journal of Formal Poetry, Red Wheelbarrow, Oleander Review, seventeen jazz poems in Jerry Jazz Musician, and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. His eBook Mirrors, from Grandview University, is available free of cost from the author. Ron appeared in the legendary first issue of Passaic Review in 1979  along with Ginsberg, Laura Boss, and a plethora of sanguine young poets.

Mega

You have an ego the size of a small planet.

You have to win at everything.

But there is no assurance that you won’t end up in a spittoon.

Perhaps, depending upon your luck and the weather,

       you will even be a footnote to history.

You have a target on your face 

(or what remains of your face after the cosmetic procedures have worn off).

Dorian Grey reminds himself of your life.

Take nothing for granted, my buddy, my pal.

You have been the winner in wars

     in wives, in arguments, in poker, in stocks.

In real life. 

In the olden days it was enough.

“A glimpse of stocking was looked on

       as something shocking.” 

Today, your earnings, your wins, 

     are subject to “legal review”, 

     especially if others who’ve triumphed

     seek to assure their continued triumph.

 

Having a headline featuring your financial ruin

       is no enviable position. 

Those who are featured on the covers of magazines

      which pretend respectability and honor, and

      newspapers which twist and disparage the truth  

      eventually end up recycled or burned.

 When the picture of a disfigured Dorian Grey

        begins to appear familiar when you look in the mirror, 

        it’s time to hire a ghost writer.

Take nothing for granted, old pal,

       after your eyes have been yanked and sold for spare parts. 

Your heart, kidneys, liver, sold to the highest bidder. 

Your conscience, vote, opinion, beliefs — 

       kidnapped, and held for ransom. 

No more “good old days” for you

       unless decency and justice rear their beautiful heads.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for decency and justice.

Not in this time and place.

By the numbers

1. Subcutaneous dreams ensconce sodden memories. Wishes from your secret self perpetuate themselves in a swollen cask, like a fine wine.

2. Push back the cuticles of daily subterfuge to find yourself lurking unawares.

3. The whole shebang wandered in search of freedom’s sarcophagus on the dawn of an era presumed to be darkened by the blood of the lamb, but actually consecrated to heights unimagined.

4. Your mental muscles move cautiously beyond the realm of sequestered innocence.

5. Your giving back the blue jeans you wore in yesteryear's triumphs collided with my memories of unsanctioned, filibustered gallons of hope and bliss.

6. Dubious explanations dominated our desires.

7. Curious endeavors cornered the market on contrived creativity.

her feet echo from wall to wall

her feet echo from wall to wall.

the quick air died at her back.

lost luster blew its whistle

in the whorl of her burdened ear.

all the night gave her was granite shadow.

the guise of the world 

could break her down, but 

with the weight of her grit and

the bulk of her heart

she turned back.

(A found poem. All lines taken from various poems in Sylvia Plath’s Colossus.)