Hard Travelin’ with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

Originally published Discoveries magazine, July, 2006

“I love Maine, I used to live up here. I got to visit my brother last night. He’s got a little house in the woods about a hundred miles south of here.” Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has traveled everywhere and met everybody, from cowboys to presidents. And right now, from a hotel room just an hour before he hits the stage in Maine, he’s mostly interested in talking about the place where he is and the person he just saw. I’ve learned quickly that trying to harness Jack Elliott is like trying tame a bucking brahma bull (which, incidentally, is something he knows how to do), so I figure my best bet as his interviewer, is to let him say what he wants to say. It’s all interesting.

“He was gonna be a doctor like our father,” he says of brother, David. “But he decided he was more interested in drama so he became an actor. He kinda lost interest in that, too, so he decided to be a writer instead. He was a writer most of his life.” We’ve got plenty else to talk about, but Jack is proud of his brother, and he’s quite enthusiastic about having just seen him. When he tells me that his brother was a screenwriter, I want to know what films he might have written.

“I wouldn’t know because my brother and I have been almost like total strangers since I was fifteen and he was ten. He’s going on seventy now and I’m going on seventy-five. We’ve been trying to reconnect and get to know one another for quite a few years now. We’re still workin’ on it.”

What happened sixty years ago was that fifteen-year-old Elliott Adnopoz of Brooklyn, New York, son of a prominent physician, ran away from home. To be a cowboy.

It sounds like the stuff of legend, but it’s true. Elliott had grown up with fantastic dreams of the Wild West and the cowboys who tamed it. Listening to the Grand Ol’ Opry on the radio, broadcast from the distant land of Nashville, Tennessee, only heightened the romanticism for the imaginative teen. His first real encounter with horses, steers, and singing cowboys was, logically enough, at a rodeo. And illogically enough, he saw that rodeo in the heart of Manhattan, at Madison Square Garden.

That one taste was all it took. He soon hitched a ride to Washington, DC, where he saw a poster advertising Colonel Jim Eskew’s Rodeo. The traveling outfit of rodeo cowboys let the teen join up as a groomer. When the Missing Persons poster with a five hundred dollar reward first appeared, it included his picture, a physical description, and a clue as to his likely whereabouts: “Probable destination a ranch. (Parents not opposed to his staying on ranch).”

Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz didn’t know what to make of their child’s fascination with a culture so far away, literally and figuratively, from the one that they had raised him in. In fact, they had other plans. “I knew that they had a great big strong desire for me to grow up in a more civilized manner and be a doctor like my dad, and I never really wanted to be a doctor. I admired him, I was proud of him. I used to go on house calls with him when I was a kid, and it didn’t make me ever wanna become one, although I became sort of interested in the healing arts. And I like to think that what I do with the guitar is of a healing nature.”

A rodeo clown named Brahmer Rogers had played hillbilly songs on the guitar and banjo for the rodeo hands while they worked, feeding the horses. When Elliott returned home, he got a guitar so he could do what Rogers did. He had gone back to his normal life to finish school and finish growing up, and the guitar provided a powerful connection to that other world that had captured his imagination. His aunt had given him some piano lessons earlier on, but they never took hold, not even enough to read music (he still doesn’t), but a musician he would be, going his own way and learning by ear and experiences. Lots of experiences.

He disposed of his cumbersome last name and created a new persona, placing his small yet sturdy frame in western boots and a giant cowboy hat. This was no costume. Elliott really was a cowboy, a singing one like Gene Autry, but his was a voice that owed more to the real cowboys than the ones from the movies. His casual, conversational phrasing and unadorned, informal singing revealed a rugged honesty, already world-weary by the age of twenty.

And that’s when he met Woody Guthrie. Guthrie had been the voice of the American underdog and laborer for many years, already recognized as one of the most significant songwriters of his time. In Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (going by Buck Elliott at the time they first met), he found a kindred spirit and a perfect match.

Guthrie wrote songs of immigrants, migrant workers, and despots, the folks from life’s other side. He also wrote and sang about the majestic beauty of the country in which they toiled. When Guthrie first heard Jack sing, he said, “He sounds more like me than I do.” Spiritually speaking, it was true. Ramblin’ Jack could sing the songs with an empathetic understanding, breathing life into the characters and giving color to the places.

Together, they played and sang their way across the land that was made for you and me. It’s called busking, playing for donations to get by; it comes from the Spanish word buscar (“to seek”). Elliott even lived with the Guthrie family for several years. But Woody was to grow old at a very young age, as a neurological disease, Huntington’s chorea, took over the last years of his life. Guthrie’s mind never stopped creating, but as the disease progressed, Elliott would become the voice of Guthrie’s songs.

From that point, Elliott’s life became that of a traveling musician, ramblin’ ‘round from town to town, singing and playing and leaving a mark at the Forrest Gump level. A young Bob Dylan became Elliott’s protégé in the clubs of Greenwich Village, just as Elliott had been Guthrie’s. He spent years building an audience in England, where a British teen name Mick Jagger would hear him busking on a London railroad platform (Jagger went and bought a guitar right after). His rhythmic playing helped to spark Britain’s American folk craze of the fifties (Jack’s version of “San Francisco Bay Blues” was one of the first songs that Paul McCartney ever learned to play). He hung out with other countercultural creative minds, like Jack Kerouac who read aloud to him his new novel, On the Road, which would become the mind-opening catalyst for a generation. In the seventies, he traveled with Dylan on the historic Rolling Thunder Revue tour. He sang and played on television when his friend Johnny Cash had the opportunity to showcase his favorite musicians for the viewing public.

Throughout it all, he continued to be a collector and singer of songs, living out of a suitcase and a guitar case. He’s written only a handful of songs himself, but the ownership he takes of every song he sings shines through, revealing the authenticity of his interpretive ability. He made a lot of records, but he took a few decades off from recording, after much disenchantment with the record business.

For the past decade, Elliott has enjoyed a renewed life as a prolific recording artist, as the recipient of the National Medal of Arts Award from President Clinton, and as the subject of an award-winning 2000 documentary film, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, directed by his filmmaker daughter, Aiyana Elliott.

The countless performances of songs like “Pastures of Plenty,” “Deportee,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” (which he recorded before Janis Joplin) have taken him down every road in North America and the world, ultimately landing him in a hotel room in Maine, just an hour before getting back on stage, alone with his guitar, sixty years on.

Ramblin’ Jack comes by the name honest. He doesn’t just ramble from town to town, he rambles on in one giant run-on sentence, weaving in and out of conversational subjects with tangential enthusiasm, intertwining stories in a way that makes sense when you’re in it. But you gotta keep up with him. Lost luggage in a London hotel and meeting Cisco Houston get equal billing in his stream-of-consciousness soliloquy (Houston, by the way, was another founding father of American folk music; “He was Woody Guthrie’s pal before me. I was trying to fill his shoes, which was impossible, of course,” says Jack).

He’s happy to talk about how his new album came about, the aptly title, I Stand Alone, a project conceived and instigated by daughter Aiyana. I could write all about it, how good it is and how it includes so many songs he’s never recorded. But Jack tells it better than me, in his uniquely ramblin’ way. “One day she said, ‘Daddy, do you have some songs that you do that you don’t do very much, or that you do ‘em in the show and I’ve never heard ‘em, some old songs perhaps?’ Yeah, I suppose I do. She said, ‘Well sing me one of them. So I remembered something of that nature and I sang it to her. I think it was ‘Call Me a Dog When I’m Gone, Gone, Gone,’ I love that thing. Then I did a couple more, and she said, ‘Why don’t you do those songs, Daddy?’ I said, ‘They’re not for the tourists,’ and she said ‘That’s a good title for the record.’ I said, ‘What record?’ I didn’t know she was sincerely plotting and planning to make a record, she was gonna produce a record for me and with me, we went in the studio and started recording, she needed a producer who was familiar with the music because she’s in the film business and never the twain shall meet. Film people and music people are very basically different and they don’t even seem to understand each other. She’s got me booked on a tour in England right after this grueling tour that I’m just playing the last concert of the tour tonight, concert number six, spread out over a two week period, I like to do it that way because every day that we’re off between gigs, we are driving two or three hundred miles. One day we drive, the next day we sing. In England, she’s got me booked four consecutive nights work. I’m gonna fly over there tomorrow with her to England. We’ve got eight shows in about eight or nine days. Last year, Aiyana and I did the same thing in England in the dead of winter. We did nine shows in ten days, so that’s why she thinks I can do it, but I’m a year older now. She’s traveled with daddy before in various travel modes. When she was a little girl, we traveled together in my land rover. That was my motor home of choice at the time.”

In our precious time together on the phone, I get snatches of stories randomly sprinkled throughout, like how he still loves to ride horses (“I was roping calves on a ranch just three weeks ago up in Idaho”), how he quit riding bulls when he was forty-seven, how he taught a song called “Mr. Garfield” to Johnny Cash who had the song published in Elliott’s name, even though Elliott hadn’t written it (“John said, ‘I learned it from you and all I know is you wrote it,’ [so] I’m the author of that, legally. Not truly, but legally”). Throughout the whirlwind conversation, Jack prepares for his show, bathing and dressing, and more than happy to talk about the songs he didn’t write and the bulls he no longer rides.

I try to get philosophical and talk about the symmetry and zen of the appearance of a great song on I Stand Alone about a dog, “Old Blue,” some fifty years after he first recorded it (recently released on one of the two outstanding Lost Topic Tapes discs, from Hightone Records). My earnest attempt to go deep in this telephone conversation is met with classic Ramblin’ Jack. “Keep talkin’, I’m about to get in the bathtub, I may get electrocuted, if I do I’ll probably say something. Okay, one second, gettin’ in the tub, yessiree. What song is that? ‘Old Blue’?” He tells me how he learned it, how he feels about it now, how his audiences enjoy that song more than he does these days.

The high-brow analysis I was going for is for pointy-headed music journalist nerds to figure out. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s job is to go sing about Old Blue for the people. And that’s what he needs to do right now.

I let him know that I don’t want to make him late for his own concert, but I do want to share one quick funny moment from the first time we met several years ago. Standing ahead of me in the line for an autographed CD was a teenager with boots and a buckle and big musical aspirations, a fan of Jack’s, and maybe, just maybe, the kind of kid who would run away from home to work in a rodeo. I watched the elder cowboy stare deeply into the young man’s eyes, and with great sincerity, impart his only words of wisdom. “Drive a truck, don’t go into the music business, and don’t smoke cigarettes.”

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott laughs big. He doesn’t remember saying it, but he knows it was him. It sounds just like him, three things he feels strongly about. “Can I quote you on stage?” he asks. “If I can remember what it is that I allegedly said? It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Great talking with you! Good luck with the story. I may not have an opportunity to purchase a copy of the magazine. Could you mail me a copy?” Sure, Jack. Just give me the address of your next hotel.