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)

Live Review of ABBA by Andrew Darlington

 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 .

‘THERE WAS SOMETHING 

IN THE AIR THAT NIGHT…’

Live Review Of:

ABBA: VOYAGE

at the ABBA Arena, 

Pudding Mill Lane, London E15

Wham! is playing in the toilets, which seems to be not actually catching the spirit of the event.

But there’s birdsong in the Swedish snowfall forest as the audience file in. And a glowing figure half-glimpsed moving between the tree’s relentless verticals… a girl? A stag?... someone suggests an ostrich!

Back in 1976 we were drunk on fighting the Punk wars, as intense and as ground-zero serious as breathing, as sharp as a Stanley-knife cut. ABBA were the despised mainstream Radio Two fluff, they were Mom & Dad fodder. Later, when style-bible NME was defining the ‘perfect Pop’ of ABC or Haircut 100 they neglect to mention that ABBA have already been juggling those equations for quite some time. Except they have global hits too.

Kraftwerk, with immaculate credibility, had nudged transhumanism through robotics and cyber-extensions, but here in the ABBA Arena, they’ve gone way beyond that. While the real group members are somewhere back in Sweden listening to the sweet sound of profits piling up, their avatars – ABBAtars, are performing to a full house – the audience that Benny calls ‘the fifth part of ABBA’, the dance-zone crammed too tight to gyrate little more than a sway and wave their arms. Some dressed in Xmas-tree suits of glitterlights.

This is Bjorn Again, recreated just as they were in 1979, through the good graces of Industrial Light & Magic. Playing sold-out concerts in this purpose-built arena since 27 May 2022. Opening with ‘The Visitors’, title-track of from their 1981 eighth studio album, which also turned out to be their final album of the twentieth century

‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ stays intact despite the Madonna sample, and the gender-bending TV sit-com.

‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ rises above Alan Partridge, and touchingly, despite the pain and bitterness of divorce and separation, their images are embracing here.

You wonder what you’re actually applauding. They’re not here! You applaud the memories, the spectacle… and there is a ten-piece live band to add authenticity, the band who do ‘Does Your Mother Know’ without ABBA’s participation, with Cleopatra Rey, Carlene Graham and Kara-Ami McCreanor sharing vocals.

There are two numbers from the 2021 Voyage come-back studio album, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ and ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, in which they became their own tribute band, bookended by the ‘Rora’ video animation that Anime’s Roger Dean’s cosmic Tolkienesque choreography between ‘Eagle’ and ‘Voulez-Vous’, which solidifies into four godlike ABBA statue-faces. While each ABBA member steps out to deliver a humanising to-camera solo conversational interlude. Even though, of course, they’re not really here.

‘Chiquitita’ features a slow eclipse effect behind the four group-images, and Anni-Frid sings against the galactic swirl of stars for ‘Fernando’. They wear their piped Avatar motion-capture suits for ‘Lay All Your Love For Me’ which segues into ‘Summer Night City’. ‘Waterloo’ uses genuine old video clips, with Benny pointing out that the UK Eurovision judges awarded it nul-points! And the audience erupts for the clumsily-phrased ‘Dancing Queen’ which became the group’s only American no.1 hit. You can’t go wrong with a Dance-track in the USA.

As someone points out, if Benny & Bjorn had been called Sid & Dick, the group would have been called ASDA.

The apparent lyrical naivety of ‘Thank You For The Music’ – ‘I’ve often wondered, how did it all start? who found out that nothing can capture a heart like a melody can?’ is rescued by the throwaway quip ‘well, whoever it was, I’m a fan.’ Featured on their fifth studio The Album and the flawed 1977 ABBA: The Movie, there are now suspected traces of AI fabrication in Agnetha’s facial close-ups. Or maybe I’m being too scrupulous? We all had a secret crush on the blonde one from ABBA, even during the Punk wars! While if the pain of divorce lies behind ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – saved as the encore, it might just take their lyrics, ‘the gods may throw a dice, their minds as cold as ice, and someone way down here, loses someone dear’ into a kind of universality. Yes, that surely touches even the coldest hearts.

The four group members appear as they are today in a final cameo, although you suspect there’s been a little digital massaging even here. As Bjorn points out, it’s a time-travelling Tardis event, pleasingly mangling credibility and temporal continuity into a nonsense.

GAS Featured Poet: Andrew Darlington

 

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 .

THE TIME HEELS/ INSANE NO MORE

the phases of the moon in 1907
the algorithms of butterflies,
a dialogue with the dead,
through an ambiance of bells
and birdsong in immaculate taste,
the faucet that drips and
the clocks that won’t tick,
where words are pictures in smoke,
and to say there is no choice is
a failure of the imagination,
for the moon is howling in the copse
and oblivion is calling my name

TO MOCK A KILLINGBIRD

it has presence
the soul of timber,
these trees contain
aspiration to be forest
to eclipse all other life
beyond the human flicker
untroubled by mind
not so much indifferent
as enduring in proliferation,
if I stand here long enough
they rise around and through me
if I don’t move they entwine
and suffocate me in leaves
rooting me hard into soil
ripping the grain of flesh,
replacing bone and sinew
to live a thousand years
in the migration of spores
in the slow soul of timber

INFINITE

it began on that first beach
it will end on that final beach
this continuity of frozen space
where time whispers echo in
every shiver and ripple of tide,
the grit of sand is lost lands from
imperceptible erosions counted
by the slow shift of constellations,
I stand beneath this storming sky
bare toes sandy and wave washed 
and I feel it tremble into my soul,
this is the nexus where eternity
curves in upon itself, and stills
into a single endless now

Small Press History 8: Andrew Darlington/LUDD'S MILL (England-1970s)

 

BE:  When did you begin being the chief editor at Ludd’s Mill?  Did you distribute to several countries? I caught wind of it in Germany and it seems you had U.S connections with Rick Peabody and others.

AD: Indie publishing was the internet of its time, geography was seldom an issue. As a counterculture it always seemed to me to be a single nation of like-minded beings, and there was a driving kinship with activists wherever they happened to be, California, Australia, Germany or India. The way I was first drawn in, I was a socially dysfunctional messed-up kid with high but unfocused creative aspirations, when I discovered a copy of a magazine called Sad Traffic in what we quaintly referred to as a ‘Head Shop’ in the Leeds Hyde Park area, it turned my head around. I sent them a poem, my first and only poem, and they published it! From there I was able to link into the entire interconnected web of DIY publishing. As a result, my motivation was always to act as that same catalyst for some other socially dysfunctional messed-up kid, to shove Ludd’s Mill in unlikely news agents, gigs and festivals, places where it could be picked up by people outside the same self-referential arty bubble. And also to reach out to other similar projects wherever they happened to be. It was a great and wonderful time. As a result we had a regular influx of American and Australian poets calling off, crashing overnight with us, as well as British poets hitchhiking up and down Britain to gigs and readings.

BE: Was it mainly a poetry publication? What else did it publish?  What was the main goal for the publication?

AD: Ludd’s Mill started out as a local ‘collective’ venture in Huddersfield around the tail-end of 1970. Steve Sneyd had some previous experience of Indie-publishing with a magazine called Riding West, so he maybe had a more hands-on attitude than most. I was not involved with the first issue. By then Sad Traffic had evolved into a tabloid underground newspaper called Styng, and I’d go around there to help out, and take advantage of the opportunity to read my way through the vast mound of trade-exchange and review magazines that were sent in from around the world. It was there I discovered Ludd’s Mill, made contact, and joined the group, which also promoted a series of live poetry-cabaret events called ‘The Inner Circle’ in Huddersfield which is where I got to do my first readings. As is the way with such co-operative ventures, what begins with wild participatory enthusiasm, swiftly loses cohesion, people drop off. There’s an incredibly shrinking collective! For one editorial meeting in Steve’s kitchen it was down to three of us. Then it was Steve and me, and we shoved through to around issue no.12 (January 1977) together. I was doing a lot of artwork and lay-out, he sorted out the more tedious tasks of dealing with printers and balancing finances. He’d give me a poem to illustrate and I’d go crazy and splurge over the entire A4 page, which he then had to integrate into the magazine and also into the tight budgetary restrictions. It was odd the way it subsequently shifted. I swear this is my memory of it. 

Andy Robson (of Krax magazine) said to me ‘Steve tells me you’re taking over Ludd’s Mill. I said, ‘no, I’m not taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ Then George Cairncross (of Bogg) said to me ‘Steve tells me you’re taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ And I said, ‘no, I’m not taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ And this continued. Steve never asked, or even told me direct. But the truth of it just kind-of seeped in that yes, this was actually going to happen. I simply accepted the inevitability of it. Ludd’s Mill no.14 (January 1978) was my first solo issue. From the start I loved the trashy energy of Punk fanzines, the visual psychedelic opulence of the Hippie press, all the way back to the deliberate iconoclasm of Dada and surrealist publications, and I wanted that. I got stuff from Anarcho-Punk group Poison Girls. I got new work from Mike Butterworth and Barrington J Bayley of New Wave SF magazine New Worlds. I ran stuff about Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, MJ Harrison. I reasoned there was a certain recognition factor to putting Patti Smith or Allen Ginsberg there, as well as John Cooper Clarke. I adopted slogans ‘The Eloquent Argument For Dayglo Living’ or ‘The Danceable Solution To Teenage Revolution’ – ‘Buy Now: While Shops Last’ as playful taglines. I also expanded the review section to include the phenomena of Indie records, which in some ways was incidental in the magazine’s demise. An electronic trio from Sheffield not only sent me their self-produced records but took out a full-page ad. I met them, saw them play live, interviewed them… and shortly afterwards they were no.1 in the album chart as ABC with Lexicon Of Love. As a result, my music journalism and my fiction sales were taking off. I never intended Ludd’s Mill to end. The final issues had print-runs of 1,000. Everyone exaggerates. I sent out freebies for trade, I gave a bunch of issues away. But the print-run was 1,000. I was always planning the ‘next issue’. It just never happened.

BE:  Why was the name Ludd’s Mill chosen?  Was it a physical location or something metaphorical? 

AD: To declare an interest, I never much liked the name Ludd’s Mill. The way Steve told the story to me, they were sitting around the pub table brainstorming ideas for the proposed magazine’s title, while Steve, as note-taker was scribbling them down on a confused beermat. Someone suggested Thud, someone else said The Mill, which got misinterpreted and fused, when he was translating his notes into Ludd’s Mill. The area around Huddersfield had seen many incidents of Luddite insurrection and targeted outrage against industrialisation, and whereas I quite enjoy the idea of proletarian direct action against dehumanizing capitalism, I’m also quite open and accepting of new technology. So when I was later invited to explain the title, I suggested a barrage of playful alternatives such as Ludicrous Millinery.

BE: Who were some of the well-known poets you published in Great Britain and the U.S.?  What do you feel were your greatest accomplishments with Ludd’s Mill?

AD: If I saw a poem that excited me in another magazine, I wanted it, and used it – sending a copy of the issue to the writer concerned. I craved things that excited me, alongside a regular roster of my favourite poets that I wanted to promote and I felt deserved wider recognition, Dave Ward in Liverpool, the lovely Tina Fulker, Pete Faulkner, Dave Cunliffe. I got poems from Mike Scott before he was in the Waterboys. I solicited and got original work from Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. I published the first piece by Simon Clark who went on to become a popular writer of Horror fiction. We did a special Kerouac issue. But I always felt that things worked most effectively not as individual titles, but as part of a ‘scene’. What I was doing was synchronized to what Dave Cunliffe was doing with Global Tapestry, to what you were doing with Gypsy or Richard Peabody was with Gargoyle, with Krax, Bogg, Smoke, Tears In The Fence and all the rest. It was a coordinated fightback against the grinding dullness and tedium of all those social conventions and repression. I was happy and grateful to be a part of that great churning amorphous creativity.

BE:  Seems like many of us who edited/published in the 80s are still committed to and doing the same thing now but via the internet. Tell us about 8 Miles higher, when you started it, why, and does it continue to this day?

AD: A musician has got to play music. An artist has got to paint artwork. If you’re some kind of writer, you write. It’s just what you do. So some pieces on Eight Miles Higher are new. But most of the stuff I put there is the final revision of old magazine pieces that got butchered for one reason or another in the first place. Editors have frustrating word-limits and tend to chop out text to create space for adverts. I like the immediacy and direct access of the internet. I used to work on the theory that some of those 1970s poetry/arts magazines only printed up 250-copies, many of them less than that. Half the people who got copies only read their own poems, or those by their friends. Only half of the others would eventually get around to reading your poem, and half of those that got to read it wouldn’t like it. So now, when I stick something on a Blog post and it hits 1,000 visits, I guess that’s a pretty strong ratio. We are still a continuity united by a diversity of the same aspirations, we simply use and abuse different technologies. These ideas persist.

Andrew Darlington and Steve Sneyd