UK-based journalist, author, and musician Mark Brend will be releasing Down River: The Search for David Ackles in August via Jawbone Press, and with it will be introducing Ackles’ work to a generation of people who may have never heard of Ackles or his work in music before. His time in the limelight was brief and patchy, but his story is interesting, inspiring at times, and tragic in many ways as he worked out his artistic goals but clashed with the currents of the music industry and public taste in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Billed as a singer/songwriter, Ackles was steeped in theatrical music and tried to bring those two worlds together after getting a sudden opportunity for a record deal, and he rode that wave until he made his most distinctive album, American Gothic, molded to his personal vision. After being hailed as a genius initially and championed by major artists, he faded from view after only a few years and never made a comeback. Compilations of his work have even failed to materialize. Mark Brend has been passionately interested in Ackles since discovering his work in second-hand shops and tells Ackles’ story in this comprehensively researched book with precision and compassion. I spoke with Mark Brend about this pretty fascinating artist who seemed to defy fashion and categorization.
When I came across a press release about your book, it definitely caught my attention because the subject matter is pretty unusual, even in a time when I think lesser-known music people are getting more written about them.
You’re right. David Ackles is an obscure figure. There’s no doubt about it.
I’m someone who interviews current musicians in really every age group, and in David Ackles’ story, I just found so many things were familiar and still relevant to working in music right now. I know of many bands who are more known outside of their home country and can’t get traction in the USA, for instance.
It’s very strange, isn’t it? David was American, but had quite a lot of press coverage in the UK, and didn’t really have it in America until later on. He didn’t sell many records in the UK, either, but he was known, and his records were covered, but not so much in his homeland.
I saw from your book that you had a hard time even finding his final record to listen to, even though he was more well-received in Britain.
That’s right. His final record, on Columbia, wasn’t actually released in the UK, ever. There was a real sense that Columbia just rushed it out in America as a contractual obligation, I think. It didn’t get much promotion, sank without a trace, and was never released in the UK, where he had a bigger audience.
It makes me think of the artist Donovan, whose record release timing due to contracts caused him problems in the UK versus America, though he was a much bigger name.
Yes, I think that’s a familiar story. I don’t know if it’s something that artists these days are able to manage, but David Ackles wasn’t somebody who very easily negotiated the music business, and he lost his last manager before the last album came out. He was completely adrift, really, and didn’t know what to do or how to promote himself. I sense that a lot of current acts are much more savvy about how they can manage themselves. But I think in those days, artists were often much lower down on the food chain in terms of the power dynamics in the music business.
I agree with you. I think that artists often see themselves as the head of their own small company now. They, therefore, aren’t treated like pawns as much. It doesn’t mean that they don’t face some of the same difficulties, but it means that they are more aware and involved.
That’s absolutely true.
I was really shocked by the story of David’s entry into music because it seems like he had no foundational knowledge of what he was getting into. It’s rare for that to happen in such a distinct way. That explains why it was so dangerous for him.
You’re absolutely right. Particularly in those times, almost everyone who ended up with a recording career came into the business through one of the few tried and tested routes, and David didn’t at all. He was a good songwriter, and obviously his talents got him through the door, but it was pretty much a chance encounter with an old friend. If he hadn’t bumped into David Anderle, a friend who was working in A&R for Elektra, he probably wouldn’t have gotten a record deal, because he wasn’t out there looking for one.
What he was doing was trying to stage musicals. He had no background at all. By 1960s Rock ‘n Roll standards, he was actually quite old, as well. He was in his 30s when he got his first record deal. From the start of his career, he was an oddball, really, in that respect.
It’s like a fairy tale, what happened to him, but it’s essentially a tragic fairy tale. It’s like the saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Because what if you got what you wanted, but you weren’t equipped to handle the very cut-throat environment, what would happen?
That’s right. I think in his case, even though he was happy to be a recording artist, and enjoyed making the records, and thought they were good, the fact that he hadn’t initially been driven toward that career meant that there was a part of him that was always ambivalent about it, I think.
If you read interviews with him at the time, he was never really interested in playing live, and he didn’t want to go out on long tours, and he didn’t really want to make a record every year to keep everyone happy. In those days, when artists didn’t have so much power, unless they were huge, if you struggled with the terms that you were given, I think that worked against him.
He had a kind of self-assurance about what he wanted to do, artistically, that was like a stone in a stream, it seems. He didn’t bend to the music world very easily.
That’s right. When I spoke to Bernie Taupin, who produced American Gothic, David’s third album, one thing that he said really clearly was that David went into those sessions knowing exactly what he wanted. He was really on top of all the detail.
It’s really intriguing to me when I found out that his very first recording session was with all of these really top-notch Wrecking Crew session guys, but he turned it down. He said, “This isn’t good enough.” He went back to Elektra and said, “I want to do this another way.” That does show quite a lot of confidence for a first-time artist!
From what I can gather about David, from talking to people, is that he did have that extreme single-mindedness about his music. But on the personal level, he was very affable and amenable. There wasn’t anything difficult about him. He wasn’t always falling out with people. Everyone I spoke to, without exception, said, “He was a great guy, a really nice guy.” He had this very amenable, soft, generous side to him, but it was combined with this very clear musical vision that he didn’t want to deviate from.
That helps me understand why people championed him so much. Even though his music was great anyway, he seems to have struck a personal chord with several people, like Bernie Taupin, like Elton John. He found allies since he was also likeable.
That’s right.
When I look at his generation, the people who became songwriters were usually people who grew up playing in garage bands for years as young people. They were very worldly-wise by the time they were in their 20s. Where was the turning point for Ackles into music, even before he got that contract?
I think his background was pretty peculiar in the Rock ‘n Roll sense. He was a teenager in the mid-50s when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and everyone like that was breaking through. His best friend at the time said that David wasn’t really interested in that at all. What he was interested in was stage musicals. And that very much came from his mother’s side of the family, since she was English, and she came from a family of musical performers. People who would do song and dance routines, comedy acts, and that sort of thing. If you look at David’s early creative endeavors, he was very much into theater, acting, and writing plays.
At some point, he started to think more about writing songs for the stage and writing musicals. So his long apprenticeship, all through his 20s, was spent writing musicals and occasionally doing ballet scores. That’s where the music came from. He was writing songs, but he definitely wasn’t thinking of them as, “These are the songs for my first album.” He was thinking, “These are the songs that someone else could sing, or they could be in a stage show.”
That explains a lot about the narrative side of his music; that’s always there. Obviously, the very theatrical American Gothic album is the flowering of all of this, but even earlier, in his songs that fit in very well with the singer/songwriter world, there’s a narrative element.
He was very much a storytelling songwriter. He did this thing where he’d quite often write a song from the perspective of a character who is one-half of the conversation. Like in “Down River”, which is one of his most famous songs, it’s two people encountering each other on the street, but you only hear one person speaking. Those dramatic devices very much come from the stage, but also from literature. A lot of these songs are like short stories put to music, I always think.
It seems like his theatrical aspect was unfortunately not timed to the fashion of his day, so he was out of step with the commercial side of things. These days, there is quite a crossover between theater and the music industry, as well as film. It’s very much about what can make a profit.
I think all of that is true. I think a lot of listeners then, and probably even now, didn’t have the broader context to understand what David Ackles was doing. The broader audience at the time tended not to listen to stage musical. He was often described as being influenced by [Bertolt] Brecht, but I doubt that many people listening to his records in 1968 would know much about Brecht and [Kurt] Weill music, apart from “Mack the Knife.”
It’s not a genre that’s widely understood in the popular music world. He was an anomaly, and I think the interesting thing is that he still is. I think when you listen to the album American Gothic, it’s still hard to place. You listen and think, “I really can’t see who has influenced this.” It just seems like something that exists in its own space.
My most natural reaction when I listen to American Gothic is to imagine it as a live show. I think that could work, that an audience could get drawn into that more easily. In terms of accessibility, I found his earlier albums to be more accessible to me based on my knowledge of Rock ‘n Roll and singer/songwriter work.
I felt the same. The first two albums, although they are unusual, can be placed in a context and can be related to other artists who were active at the time. But by the time you get to the third album, he’s in his own world, really. But it’s interesting that you say that you could imagine in it in a live context, because that was his big ambition. He never got to do it, but he wanted to write, direct, and star in a musical. In a sense, American Gothic was that, apart from the fact that he didn’t do it live.
It seems like you’ve been building up to writing this long-form work about David Ackles for a while, having written shorter pieces on him before. Now that you’ve done it, how does that feel to you? Does that feel like you’ve finally done what you set out to do?
I’m very pleased to have done it. For a long time, I didn’t think there would be a publisher who would go near it, because it’s an obscure subject. I’m very grateful to Jawbone Press for the opportunity to do it. In many ways, I would think, “I would really love to be able to write a book about David Ackles, but I really don’t think I’ll be able to.” The funny thing is, I think people can and will be interested in him, but the perception initially is, “Why would he warrant a book?”
I think that sometimes, in people’s stories, you can find truths and themes that apply beyond them. I think, in the world of Rock music, in the broadest sense, it’s so much about fame and celebrity that for somebody who isn’t famous, their story can be overlooked and lost.
I do see people being more interested in off-the-beaten-path stories from music these days. Drummers and bassists are getting their due in books more often. Session men are being appreciated more for their vast contributions. These are the untold stories.
I think that’s right, and I hope that’s true.
Do you have other projects in mind now?
If I do another book about music, I think it’s likely to be another book about somebody who didn’t quite fit into their time. But someone who I think has got worth, and the value of their work has survived.
