by Colin Harper
DAZZLING STRANGER
Colin Harper
For Karl Dallas
Contents
Foreword by Johnny Marr
Prologue
1 Birthday Blues
2. London: The First Days
3. Edinburgh: The First Days
4. Three Dreamers
5. Peregrinations
6. Nineteen Sixty-Five
7. Pentangling
8. Rosemary Lane
9. After the Goldrush
10. Heartbreak
11. Renaissance
Epilogue
Afterword
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Discography
A Note on the Author
Foreword
I first heard Bert Jansch as a fourteen-year-old in Manchester, when a friend of mine said he’d discovered an amazing folk group. I thought this friend had gone mad until he put on Pentangle’s ‘Train Song’ and I was immediately converted. It didn’t sound like what I thought folk to be, more like a mix of blues, jazz, some folk and a bit of some strange magic too. Anyone who saw Pentangle will tell you that while the rock bands of the day were blasting everybody to pieces with Marshall stacks and committing atrocities on Hammond organs, Pentangle, with their intensity and complexity, just quietly blew everybody away.
From that first hearing Bert gave me new goals as a guitar player, and he has been a massive influence on me – he is rightly regarded as one of the most influential and intriguing musicians to have come out of the British music scene. With the release of his first album in 1965 he completely reinvented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequalled today. He influenced Nick Drake, Neil Young, Donovan (who then passed on his discovery to The Beatles), Jimmy Page, Bernard Butler and countless other guitar players, some of whom don’t even realise they’ve been influenced by him one step removed. Without Bert Jansch, rock music as it developed in the sixties and seventies would have been very different.
Over the last few years Bert and I have struck up a musical and personal friendship and I’ve been privileged to have played with him in the studio, on stage, and in a couple of kitchens too. We’ve had some real moments – he’s still a mystery, and he’s still great.
Johnny Marr
March 2006
Prologue
Being in America for the first time was proving an awesome experience, very different from London or Glasgow or Edinburgh. There had been the trips to France in 1961 and ’62; Morocco in ’63 – getting married on the way, splitting up on the way back; Denmark in ’65 – for the first time, a recording artist on tour. The world had opened up to Bert Jansch by virtue of the songs which that same world, in its wonder, had inspired in him. But there had been nothing to forewarn him of the nature of America. The world was indeed a bigger place in 1969.
From a post-war slum kid who had marvelled at the primitive sounds of black America – the records that Big Bill Broonzy had made in Europe, hearing Brownie McGhee at close range in an Edinburgh folk club – Bert had finally arrived in the place where his path had begun. Yet all he was finding were the soul-less sheds of the new ‘underground’, other Britons on the road and the endless interiors of hotels. In New York his band, the Pentangle, had played the Fillmore East, tuning up backstage from memory alone as the building shook to the volume of Canned Heat. Snowed-in at the Algonquin for a week, already the drinking had started: running a hotel bar dry of champagne – what else was a whole tour’s promotional budget for? Those five individuals who had drifted together in the ‘summer of love’ for Sunday night sessions in a Soho pub were now locked together on some insane treadmill that had apparently nothing to do with real life. But what was real life anyway for a twenty-six-year-old who had already spent the previous ten years on the edge of conventional society with only music as a goal?
At least now he had a band, a band with a startlingly fresh, delicate sound and a very real chance of ‘making it’. Was that not what musicians and songwriters were meant to do? John, the esoteric medievalist, was a brilliant technician on guitar; Jacqui’s crystalline voice and serene demeanour embodied, for wide-eyed Americans, a wholly English mystique; Danny, on double bass, was larger than life, a raver to match anyone the rock underground would care to put up; Terry, on drums and glockenspiel and things to be tapped, was the solid pro, calm and reliable and clearly enjoying the trappings of pop after a decade in jazz clubs and polo-necks; and then there was Bert. Bert was the loner, inscrutable and otherworldly at times but quite clearly a man with a gift – a man with very little to say in conversation but whose job it was, by default, to make the introductions onstage, to do the interviews, to write the songs. And in songs he could always find something to say and a way of doing so that would help to explain some universal truth or simple emotion to a generation. And his music was almost completely without precedent.
In Boston they played five nights at the Unicorn and met up with Jethro Tull. Tull mainman Ian Anderson, who had grown up with Bert’s records as a totem of discernment and a doorway to musical adventure beyond the confines of conventional chording and a backbeat in 4/4, was under instructions to write a hit single. Later that day, he would deliver a mischievous little melody in 5/4 called ‘Living In The Past’. It would find its way into the British Top 5 – and so too, brimming as it was with unlikely rhythms, plainsong and traditional themes, would the next Pentangle album. It was no longer possible to judge what musical convention was. Everything was changing – pop words had become poetry, pop music was rubbing shoulders with jazz in its complexity, and the folk revival had now bled into rock. Produced by Shel Talmy, the man responsible for The Who’s explosive beginnings back in ’65, a Pentangle single had come out on US Reprise in time for the tour. It was an old English folk song, ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’. The issue of ‘stealing’ had often reared its head on the folk scene back home – from the curious case of the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group and Elizabeth Cotten’s ‘Freight Train’ in 1958 to the can of worms opened up in the wake of Bob Dylan, traditional melodies a-plenty and the chancers who claimed them as their own. Paul Simon had had the foresight or the gall to copyright Martin Carthy’s arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’ in 1965: one of them had since enjoyed a great deal of success with it.
Then to Los Angeles, for a week at the Troubadour. Paul Simon came along to see his old friend’s new band. Bert, in truth, had never really cared for the man, but they had been fellow-travellers for a time – stars in the making on the weird, bohemian folk scene that had blossomed in Soho during 1965 and had ever since been a magnet for every non-electric guitar hero and bedsit philosopher-in-waiting. For Bert, the days of being king in that particular castle were over: the new band meant playing your songs on TV, radio sessions on the BBC, open-air stages with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Royal Albert Hall, the Festival Hall, Coventry Cathedral for goodness’ sake. The onset of fame was a whole new ball game.
Finally it was San Francisco: four nights with the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West, doing your best to avoid the water spiked with acid. Failing to do so. Somewhere in the middle of it all somebody plays you a record of a hot new band from England. It’s just come out and, listen to this, they say, isn’t there something familiar about that tune?
Led Zeppelin was the name of the album, and of the band. They were loud and exciting and destined for great things – that album alone would spend seventy-five weeks in the British charts. The tune that was causing eyebrows to rise among the cognoscenti, here credited to guitarist Jimmy Page, was a guitar instrumental of exotic, modal flavour entitled ‘Black Mountain Side’. Three years earlier, on an album called
Jack Orion that had all but defined a new strand of music – British fingerstyle, folk-baroque, or whatever it may be called – Bert had taken a series of traditional tunes and had woven around them sensual, dextrous and vaguely eastern-ised guitar backings – some delicate, others fiery – using altered tunings and ideas adapted from the folk scene’s guitar godfather, Davy Graham. What Bert had played on that album was singularly and identifiably his playing. For ‘Blackwater Side’ he had only detuned the low E string to D: any magic was still mostly in the fingers.
Page had probably bought Jack Orion as soon as it appeared in September 1966 and marvelled, as he had with Bert’s two other albums before it. This was a period, he later recalled, of being ‘obsessed’ with Bert Jansch. At that time one of the London record industry’s top session players, Page could certainly have worked out the rudiments of any Jansch song or instrumental – nothing that Bert did was ever intended to be complex for the sake of it – but as luck would have it, with one of Jack Orion’s most beautiful arrangements he did not need to do so. He already knew it.
Earlier that year another devotee, Al Stewart, who had been struck by Bert’s playing of ‘Blackwater Side’ around the folk clubs, was making his own recording debut with a single entitled ‘The Elf’. ‘The B-side was called ‘Turn Into Earth’,’ says Al, ‘and Jimmy turned up to play a rhythmic “chunk” on it. While we were doodling around between takes I showed him what I thought was Bert Jansch’s version of “Blackwater Side”. He seemed to like it. But not being a particularly good guitar player, I hadn’t really taught Jimmy Bert’s rendition of the tune anyway – I’d taught him what I thought it was. Maybe some Zeppelin royalties should be owed to me!’
Al had presumed Bert’s guitar tuning to have been DADGAD, an invention of Davy Graham’s, designed for the playing of Moroccan music but serendipitously convenient for the accompaniment of modal Irish tunes. One of these, an extemporisation on ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, had been Graham’s first recorded foray with the new tuning back in 1963. A year after learning the tuning from Al, Page would revamp Graham’s old chestnut as ‘White Summer’ on a US-only LP that marked his temporary involvement with the Yardbirds, a once popular British R&B group in the process of dissolving. By the end of 1968 Page had remodelled the remnants of that group into something wholly new: Led Zeppelin, the loudest folk group in the world.
The Pentangle returned to England in March ’69. Strangely, the group’s manager, Jo Lustig, a brash New Yorker with a hard-hitting reputation, did not get involved. Instead, the matter was deferred to Bert’s publishers, Heathside Music, effectively a branch of his record label, Transatlantic. Bert Jansch as a solo artist and the Pentangle as a group were the biggest acts on the label, one of Britain’s pioneer independents but still a small-beer operation next to the colossus of Led Zeppelin’s Atlantic Records. Nat Joseph, the founder of the company, was nonetheless a tenacious individual. After taking legal advice, consulting two eminent musicologists and instructing John Mummery QC – one of the most prominent copyright barristers in England at that time – a letter was sent to the Led Zeppelin management stating the cause for concern. Any conscious plagiarism was denied, and Nat was faced with a difficult choice: ‘It had been reasonably established that there was every chance that Jimmy Page had heard Bert play the piece at a club or a concert or on a personal basis, or that he’d heard Bert’s recording. However, what could not be proved was that Bert’s recording in itself constituted Bert’s own copyright, because the basic melody, of course, was traditional.’
Bert had learned the tune, and adapted his own peculiar settings to it, from Anne Briggs, a young woman who had herself learned that song and many others from a characterful old folklorist by the name of Bert Lloyd. There weren’t many folklorists around in the sixties. Bert Lloyd, as a preeminent source for the young revivalists, was in a position of great influence. What was not widely appreciated at the time was that Lloyd’s fascination with the modes and rhythms of Eastern Europe was feeding into his ‘reconstructions’ of fragmentary traditional songs from the British Isles. As Oscar Brand, Lloyd’s counterpart in America, was wont to say, ‘re-composition is better than decomposition’. It was becoming hard to see the joins. Back in 1952 Peter Kennedy, a similarly controversial collector, had made two field-recordings of ‘Blackwater Side’ for the BBC, from women in rural Ireland. They were available for consultation on 78 rpm discs at the BBC and at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance & Song Society. But woe betide anyone who dared to record their own versions.
‘It was like a bad joke on the folk scene,’ says Dave Arthur, subsequently a luminary of the Society himself. ‘Every time one of us did an album, Peter Kennedy would jump in and say, “I collected that song!” And “Blackwater Side” was obviously one of them. As soon as you brought a record out, Peter Kennedy would be suing the company or writing you letters demanding his copyright.’
Hot air amongst the big and small fish of a tiny pond was all very well, but trying to take a corporate giant to the cleaners on an untried principle of law was another matter entirely. Al Stewart, aware of the bully-boy reputation of Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant, was becoming a little hot under the collar: ‘I was getting messages from various people umming and ahhing,’ he says, ‘thinking about the possibility of going to court, but it never really reached that point.’
‘For some reason Transatlantic ran out of steam,’ says Bert, who was certainly annoyed but not obsessive on the matter. ‘You’ve got to keep these things up or they just fizzle out. It didn’t bother me. It still doesn’t really bother me. There’s the effort of doing these things – you’d get diverted from your normal course of events. You’d be as well to give up music and start suing people! If you want to make your living that way, it’s what beckons you. It’s okay if you’ve got a million pounds in the first place – you can go and sue somebody. If you haven’t, it’s a very difficult process.’
It was, indeed, all down to money: ‘What Mr Mummery advised,’ says Nat, ‘was that whereas there was a distinct possibility that Bert might win an action against Page, there was also the possibility that all sorts of other people might then say, “Ah, but Bert heard it from me.” Given the enormous costs involved in pursuing an action, and the thought that one could be litigating, or being litigated against, for the next twenty years on the basis that everybody and his dog would claim “Blackwater Side” or “Mountain Side” or any other kind of side, we left it at that. As the “writer”, Bert would have had to share the costs with us fifty/fifty – and they were not the sort of costs that we could afford, let alone Bert. But in many ways it was a very interesting case. If you think about it, almost any “traditional” song that somebody does an arrangement of, somebody will have done something vaguely similar before. The difficulty appears to be one of really establishing, amongst hundreds of arrangers, who it was that made the arrangement “original”.’
‘When people sang for pleasure and nobody got any money there were none of these problems,’ says Anne Briggs, a beacon of non-materialist wisdom. ‘All this borrowing and influencing: it’s been done throughout history. It’s how music develops. It only becomes a very large philosophical question when money enters into it – which is why this bloody old chestnut is still clonking around the universe.’
Bert and Jimmy and the case of the un-called bluff at the end of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ has become a well-worn tale. The Pentangle era was a short, self-contained part of Bert’s life – five years of international touring and some level of fame. Once the band had reached its natural conclusion, he simply resumed the role of solo artist, returning to the semi-obscurity / semi-celebrity of cultdom that he had previously enjoyed. Led Zeppelin became the biggest band of the seventies, and it was an open secret that one of their signature tunes had perhaps come from a little guy still playing in folk clubs and bars.
In 1987, one of the last of the great bluesmen, Willie Dixon, settled out of court w
ith Led Zeppelin his own claim to the copyright of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Page’s colleague Robert Plant was reported to have said at the time: ‘You only get caught when you’re successful. That’s the game.’ Almost at the very start of his recording career, on the sleeve of his second album, the presciently titled It Don’t Bother Me, Bert Jansch had explained his philosophy in its essence: ‘To sell your music is to sell your soul. To give your music is to buy your freedom.’ His song, to this day, remains the same.
1
Birthday Blues
At some point in the Victorian era, Carl William Henry Jansch and his parents Johann-Christian Wilhelm and Wilhelmina arrived in Britain from Hamburg, where Carl had been born circa 1863. Berwick-upon-Tweed, near the border between England and Scotland, is believed to have been their new home for a period, although there is no trace of anyone named Jansch in the 1881 census of Scotland. In 1888 Carl, by now calling himself Charles, married Jane Ann Trott, known as Jeannie, in Edinburgh ‘after Banns according to the forms of the Church of Scotland’. Charles’s address is given as the Red Lion Hotel in Berwick, where he worked as a waiter. His father is described on the marriage certificate as a sea captain and on a subsequent certificate as a ‘master mariner’. Jeannie lived and worked as a domestic servant at 22 Princes Street in Edinburgh.
Ten months later, in 1889, and at lodgings in Braemar, Jeannie Dorothea Jansch, thereafter known as Daisy, was born. Six further children followed at fairly regular intervals up to the end of the century. The first of these was born in 1891 in Aberdeen, but by the end of that year the family were firmly settled in Edinburgh. Jeannie died in 1901; in 1921, with no record of a remarriage, a further son named William Henry was born to Charles and Mary Fell. Charles, who was variously described as a hotel waiter or billiard salon attendant in the birth certificates, died eleven years later in 1932.