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John Stewart
and
Ramblin' Jack ElliotLive at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz, California, 4/17/99, produced by Snazzy Productions. Reviewed by John Simmons.
The first chunk of magic at this show happens at the very start, when no one is paying much attention. "I'll just start playin'," Jack Elliott says softly, "and we'll just pretend we never met. We're just sittin' on a street corner, I'm buskin', and it's 1960." And the room settles as the barrier between performer and audience melts away. That's not a world-famous folk musician and historical figure up on a stage, it's just a street singer. Or, better, it's your black-sheep uncle with the beat-up guitar, just passing through, singing songs full of hidden codes to us kids while the parental units look on uncomfortably. Relax, Martha, its only folk music. What harm can he do?
Considerable harm, it turns out. But that's another story.
A Ramblin' Jack Elliott show at this phase of his career is a seamless and unscripted blending of story and song, of history and melody. His propensity to tell stories used to irritate, because the stories seemed to suck energy from the songs, but that was years ago. He now has, through art or pure artlessness, found the balance. Describing the music scene that developed around Gerde's Folk City in the early 60s in New York City (a recurring reference point for Jack as well as for John Stewart, the evening's second performer), he recalled this tidbit:
"I was tellin' how Bob Dylan got disgusted with New York and decided to leave Greenwich Village and move up to Woodstock. He'd been living in this little apartment on 4th Street. It was just big enough for a bed and a little table with a typewriter… One day on 6th Avenue he says to me, 'I'm getting out of town. I'm gonna leave here. I'm going up to Woodstock and I'm gonna be a painter. I'm not gonna be in this music business anymore -- this music business is getting to me. It's too weird. Too many weirdos. I'm gonna be a painter.' And I said, "Good luck, Bob," and that was it. He left and I didn't see him again for about a year." How odd that Jack's Dylan impersonation is so good …
Take my word for it, this was material that the audience was hungry for. Nobody was waiting impatiently for the next song to start. But when the songs came along they were crisp as jewels in the settings made for them by the storytelling. "Freight Train Blues", "Pretty Boy Floyd", a cracked-up version of "Lay Lady Lay", and especially "Don't Think Twice", each one a classic, were delivered not slickly but honestly, among jokes and edgy stories, as befits the time-honored tradition of the black-sheep uncle.
(Speaking of which tradition, I later saw Genuine American Eccentric and noted musicologist Baby Gramps sneak backstage to hang with his old buddy Jack. I'd love to be a blue-tailed fly on that wall.)
In the middle of the final song of his encore, Blind Lemon Jefferson's creepy-beautiful "Black Snake Moan", this Grammy-winning Famous Artist stopped dead, peered into the audience, and said: "Chet? Is that you? Just recognized you." The audience loved it. Just another evening with Mad Uncle Jack.
After a brief intermission John Stewart strode onstage, followed by accompanists Dave Batti and Buffy Ford. And here things took a brief turn for the worst, from my point of view: the very first sound of the very first song by this genuine legend of American folk music was the tinny tick-tock of a Casio-style drum machine, chirping away for several excruciating cycles. Huh? Then, to make matters worse, he turned to his bassist and said, "Goose that thing. Whip that mule." As if to say, "I'm such a rebel I wanna increase the tempo on the drum machine that we carefully pre-set before the show."
Hmm. To the rest of the audience, however, this proved a minor quibble. John Stewart's signature sound -- the deep familiar voice and the 12-string finger-style guitar -- along with his imposing stature on stage, remain intact and undiminished. In particular, this night's version of "Who Stole the Soul of Johnny Dreams" was the real deal for Stewart fans, as were "Aren't We Proud", "Strange Rivers", and "Midnight in Havana", among others.
John Stewart is doing his best to update the tradition he serves by bringing subject matter from the 90s into his songs alongside his other, more nostalgic material. He followed "Always Young" with "Davy on the Internet", a song extolling digital interconnection: "Upload, download, PC on the overload, Davy on the Internet, talking to me."
There was one surreal moment: during a pause in the proceedings, he leaned into the microphone and whispered loudly, "By the way, from now on call me Johnny…" Of course we all flashed on Johnny Cash -- tall, broad-shouldered man, standing ramrod straight, with lionine hair and a guitar slung low. For a dangerous second I thought maybe he thought he was Johnny Cash. But he was joking, demonstrating that he knows how to weave stage patter and song as well as anyone.
And so he does, in his own style. He gave the audience his version of his first meeting with Jack Elliott at Gerde's (Jack had given his own version earlier in the show), as well as his first brush with Dylan, to introduce "Dreamers on the Rise". Very apt and very smoothly done.
For folk purists, this show highlighted two different but successful approaches to long-term survival. I grudgingly concede that there is some art to booking after all.
(Excerpted material recorded at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on 4/17/99. Mix by Julie Rix. Recorded by Dave Nielsen of Technica Gratia Artes.)
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