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I spent a lot of hours of my mid-teenage years, in a darkened room, listening to the first David Ackles record. It is sometimes called The Road To Cairo but initially simply carried his name and blurred photograph taken through a cracked window.
It didn’t matter to me whether these songs were the details of Ackles’ own life or the product of a writer creating character studies, just as I didn’t question the authenticity of Graham Greene, John Steinbeck or Raymond Chandler.
The baritone voice was mature and heavy with declamatory, theatrical note as times. He in no way attempted to beguile with intimations of secret knowledge or spiritual superiority. There was none of the feyness or quality of being too sensitive for daylight that afflicted so many contemporary male singers.
The accompaniment on that first record had some voguish flourishes – gothic organ filigrees and psychedelic guitar codes- but the songs were predominantly based around the changes of gospel and Tin Pan Alley.
“Down River” caught my ear first, a wonderful short story of song, in which a man who has done prison time encounters a former lover. The details of her safe, happier life are revealed as the song unfolds. It is all the more poignant for us only hearing his half of the conversation. “Road To Cairo” suggests a similar scenario; a drifter hitches a ride and, once again, we hear one side of a conversation, in which he struggles with the decision to return to his family.
This theme of the returning exile is found again in “Sonny Come Home,” which might equally be a nightmare or a ghost story. There is a hint of Kurt Weill in the music that is heard much more overtly in “Laissez-Faire.” However, it is not employed as a badge of self-regarding decadence in the manner of another Elektra act’s rendition of “Alabama Song.”
Ackles characters are mostly outsiders with the unresolved desires and beliefs of “Blue Ribbons” and “His Name Is Andrew” but they are not drawn so to be admired or envied; rather they look in on the conventional world, at best, with longing but sometimes with longing but sometimes with distinct malevolence.
There is occasionally the feeling that Ackles could have chosen to write more conventional hits at will. “When Love Is Gone” might have been an ideal choice for those who also embraced Stephen Sondheim’s songs in record and concert repertoire.
In the lonely, disenchanted days ahead, Carole King would write a sincere song proposing simple friendship, without sounding as if it were a parable composed for children’s television. “Be My Friend” might have enjoyed a similar fate with better luck but as with “What A Happy Day,” the audience were not used to sentiments proposing universal love and brotherhood being couched in such sombre and doubting tones.
The arrival of Ackles’ second album, Subway To The Country, was not attended by the hanging out of bunting and wild rejoicing in the streets. I simply spotted it in the window display of my local record shop when passing one day. It was not a disappointment.
The exquisite, detailed arrangements and accompaniments now totally matched the theatrical elements in the compositions. There was a more underlined, portentous quality to the vocal delivery, as if these might actually be excerpts from larger dramatic scenarios.
The characters were less mysterious but vividly depicted; the creepy paedophile of “Candy Man,” the junkies in the “Main Line Saloon” and parable of spiritual doubt and insanity of “Inmates Of The Institution,” with its extreme changes of time and musical form and best of all, another song of the returning prisoner in exile, “Cabin On The Mountain,” a detailed melodrama reminiscent of “Delilah.”
There were still moments of calm and tenderness, the beautiful dissonant horn arrangement of “Woman River” and another standard-in-waiting, “That’s No Reason To Cry,” a song worthy of a voice such as Sinatra.
The masterpiece of the album is the title track. It is a shamelessly sentimental view of fatherhood and the longing for clean air and an uncomplicated idyll. The music contains several movements within it, in the way of some of Jimmy Webb’s more remarkable compositions.
The lyric contains evocative if “incorrect” lines such as:
“Central Park is not a place to watch the sun rise
Or to look for redskin writings in a cave.
Or even find the kind of frauds you like to save.”
Or so I thought. It seems that my ears deceived me during all those solitary hours of listening and for the last 35 years I had imagined Ackles’ protagonist and his sons looking native paintings and settling for “frauds” in a cave. But a glance at the lyric sheets reveals that the line is in fact:
“Or even find the kind of FROGS you like to save.”
It is a little less poetic perhaps, but typical of the short storywriter’s eye for charming detail. If you listen to the line, it really sounds as if he sings “frauds.” I’ll probably always believe that this is what the writer intended and it was erroneously transcribed by the publisher back in 1969, but then popular music is littered with such creative mishearings.
Bob Dylan wrote a mysterious song about the disappointment and heartbreak of parenthood around this time. It is called “Tears Of Rage.” “Subway to the Country” was as equally out of step with the cult of youth and the notion of a counter culture.
Perhaps it is the very specifics of Ackles’ song – the optimism in the midst of the ugliness of the world – that has left it stranded in the back pages, while other equally ambitious songs by Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and even Rod McKuen were brought to the world by the likes of Jack Jones and other mainstream singers.
I waited so long for David Ackles’ third album to appear that something strange and, I suppose inevitable occurred. My own tastes started to shift and American Gothic never really cast the spell over me that the other two albums had held.
Therefore it is a joy to be reacquainted with it now and find all the virtues of his writing still intact. The fine advocacy of Bernie Taupin’s production probably has this rightly regarded as Ackles’ finest achievement – he went on to make a paler record for Columbia – but I always return to those first two albums.
Ackles is not someone whose songs are easy to introduce to the uninitiated. He withdrew from recording and performing after the Columbus release, living in California, writing for the theatre and teaching until his untimely passing at the age of only 62. I wish I had found the opportunity to tell him how much his songs had meant to me.
Elvis Costello
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