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.
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