Everybody’s Talkin’ won Nilsson his first Grammy: Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male.
David Ackles
David Ackles
A former toilet-factory security guard taps into the American heartland in a classic debut.
Record label: Elektra
Produced: David Anderle and Russ Miller
Recorded: Location and date unknown
Released: September 3, 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Running time: 37.54
Personnel: David Ackles (p, v); Michael Fonfara (o); Danny Weis (g); Douglas Hastings (g); Jerry Penrod (b); John Keliehor (pc)
Track listing: The Road To Cairo (S); When Love Is Gone; Sonny Come Home; Blue Ribbons; What A Happy Day; Down River (S); Laissez-Faire (S); Lotus Man; His Name Is Andrew; Be My Friend
Current CD: Elektra 7559615952
Further listening: American Gothic (1972)
Further reading: www.mathie.demon.co.uk/da/
Download: HMV Digital
Born into a showbiz family, at the age of four David Ackles was half of a song-and-dance act with his sister, and in his early teens was a Hollywood B-movie child actor. Contracted to Elektra purely as a songwriter in the late ’60s, label boss Jac Holzman soon realised that compositions as idiosyncratic as The Road To Cairo, about a man immobilised by fear, or His Name Is Andrew, detailing the pain of lost faith, would best be served if Ackles sang them himself. Partnered with his old school-friend David Anderle as producer, he set to work recording and orchestrating his poignant story-songs.
‘We had to make that album twice to get what I wanted,’ explained Ackles later. The second attempt came when Ackles was introduced to Rhinoceros, another recent Elektra signing. ‘We sat around and I played the songs and they filled in, and we just had such a good time. We knew that was the right thing to do.’
The album offered the intelligence and imagery of Leonard Cohen without the self-pity, as it stumbled along on Ackles’s curious piano rhythms, augmented by Michael Fonfara’s whistling organ and Doug Hastings’s empathetic guitar filigrees. These collaborative arrangements tended towards stagey structures, as if written for some half-realised off-Broadway musical, ideal for tracks like Down River, an ingeniously plotted, semi-autobiographical, one-sided conversation with a sting in its tail. Ackles later recalled the sessions as ‘an easy-going, friendly affair’, but the atmosphere was shot through with the singer’s world-weary aching and loneliness. On release, Rolling Stone complimented his voice but reckoned his melodies were ‘almost no melodies at all’, while the nearest Record Mirror got to a positive comment was ‘a plaintive sort of collection’. After four unsuccessful albums, Ackles became variously a lecturer, TV scriptwriter and scorer of ballets. As if he was becoming a character in one of his own songs, various accidents left him with an all but crippled arm and a steel hip before he had his first encounter with cancer. Tracked down in 1994, Ackles said, ‘I’m really enjoying my life, which will no doubt come as a shock to fans of my first two albums, in whose angst they swim.’ On March 2, 1999, David Ackles died of lung cancer, leaving a legacy of four of the most beautiful but rarely heard albums of his era.
The Byrds
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
The Byrds unintentionally kickstart the country rock boom of the early ’70s.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: Gary Usher
Recorded Nashville; March 9–May 27, 1968
Released: September 27, 1968 (UK) July 29, 1968 (US)
Chart peaks: 27 (UK) 24 (UK)
Personnel: Roger McGuinn (g, v, banjo); Kevin Kelley (d); Chris Hillman (b, v, mandolin); Gram Parsons (g, v); Earl P Ball (p); Jon Corneal (d); Lloyd Green (sg); John Hartford (banjo, g); Roy M Huskey (b); Jaydee Maness (sg); Clarence J White (g); Roy Halee, Charlie Bragg (e)
Track listing: You Ain’t Going Nowhere (S); I Am A Pilgrim (S); The Christian Life; You Don’t Miss Your Water; You’re Still On My Mind; Pretty Boy Floyd; Hickory Wind; One Hundred Years From Now; Blue Canadian Rockies; Life In Prison; Nothing Was Delivered
Running time 32.26
Current CD: Sony 82876891302 adds: Live At Filmore West album
Further listening: Younger Than Yesterday (1967)
Further reading: The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited (Johnny Rogan, 1997); www.thebyrds.com (fan site)
Download: iTunes
Streamlined to a trio at the start of 1968, The Byrds were reduced to playing small club dates and support slots. ‘We really needed somebody,’ Roger McGuinn recalls. Three months later, he was auditioning for a jazz keyboard player and improbably chose Gram Parsons. It rapidly transpired that Parsons knew nothing about jazz but was a promising country singer and songwriter. A Harvard dropout with a southern background that would not have been out of place in the tortured pages of a Tennessee Williams play, Parsons was thrusting and ambitious enough to replace the recently fired David Crosby as The Byrds’ resident troublemaker. After allying himself with fellow country enthusiast Chris Hillman, Parsons successfully deflected McGuinn from pursuing his dream concept of a double album chronicling the history of twentieth century music. McGuinn had intended to tackle traditional country, move on to folk, R&B and rock, then conclude the work with some snatches of jazz and synthesizer experimentation. Once Parsons arrived, they never got beyond the country.
‘Chris, Gram and producer Gary Usher just didn’t want to go along with the electronic music idea, so I was outvoted,’ McGuinn explains. The Byrds certainly played the country angle to perfection. First they cut their hair, then moved to Nashville and even risked their lives playing before a staunch redneck audience at the Grand Ole Opry. The new line-up appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in July and sounded highly accomplished with a neat combination of country-style material and Byrds classics. The future looked bright but on the day they were due to set forth on a controversial tour of South Africa, Parsons quit.
The following month, his four months as a Byrd were validated with the release of this groundbreaking and innovative album. At a time when rock was in danger of suffocation by the overblown excesses of hard rock and stale psychedelia, Sweetheart offered a sense of place and respect for tradition. Like Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Band’s Music From Big Pink, it evoked an America before the fall, articulated most vividly in Parsons’ Hickory Wind and the Woody Guthrie classic Pretty Boy Floyd. The sales were disappointing – hardly surprising considering Gram was now gone – but in challenging their audience, The Byrds had shown a courage that was commendable.
The Jeff Beck Group
Truth
A great band built on shifting sand export the blues back to America.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: Mickie Most and Jeff Beck
Recorded: Abbey Road Studios, London; May 14–16 and May 25, 1968
Released: September 28, 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) 15 (US)
Personnel: