by Colin Harper
Not only did Bert now have the exciting new possibilities opened up by the traditional music he had explored with Anne Briggs, he also had the possibilities of exploring further, with a like-minded instrumentalist every bit his equal if not greater, the ideas first suggested by Charlie Mingus and his contemporaries in modern jazz. In addition to his own powerfully individual songwriting, very broadly in the ‘folk-blues’ vein, here were two more strands to his musical personality which would ferment and rise to the surface to stunning effect within months. By the time his first album appeared it was already out of date as an indicator of where its author was headed next.
Transatlantic was by now operating from offices in Marylebone Lane in the West End. From the first Ian Campbell Group album at TRA 110 the label had progressed by leaps and bounds. Subsequent releases had included a second Campbell Group offering; two albums and an EP from the Dubliners; a second volume of Isla Cameron & Tony Britton’s Songs Of Love, Lust & Loose Living; and the first widely available album from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, Red Hot From Alex. More importantly than any individual release was the advent of a deal with Folkways Records in America, allowing Transatlantic to license their prestigious back catalogue exclusively for Britain.
Folkways had never conceded such a deal with any other label before and would not do so again. Nat Joseph looked to Folkways founder Mo Ashe as a mentor and later a friend, and was proud that vintage recordings by legendary blues and folk artists including Broonzy, Leadbelly and Brownie McGhee, previously either unavailable in Britain or prohibitively expensive as imports, would now be available to the masses at budget price. A new subsidiary label, XTRA, was launched in August 1964 to accommodate such material and to provide a home for contemporary British artists who Nat felt would find an audience more easily at less than full price. Alex Campbell, the most popular live act on the scene and yet a disaster in the record racks, was tailormade for such a wheeze. Alex’s first British release, Folk Session, had only appeared in 1964, on Arco (a small-scale outlet born out of Arco Sound Services, an electrical store in Crawley). Ironically, his first of many albums for XTRA, released in February 1965, had been one of those licensed in from Folkways. But with Bert, there was never any question of undervaluing the product.
‘People saw him as a rival to Bob Dylan,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘When his first album came out it really was a big day. People had been waiting for it like mad.’ The LP Bert Jansch (TRA 125) was released on 16 April 1965 alongside Owen Hand’s Something New (TRA 127). TRA 126, a compilation, featured both artists. Brian Shuel had designed promotional leaflets and adverts, taken out in a number of magazines, which identified Bert and Owen as ‘two vast new talents’. While Owen was described as ‘a warm, sympathetic singer, an interpreter of rare sensitivity’, Nat was now confident enough to push the hyperbole boat out for Bert:
A remarkable, unusual, intriguing new talent with rare magnetism and originality, Jansch is a young writer-singer-guitarist producing some startling contemporary British folk-blues. His songs are mainly autobiographical but always universally relevant. He writes of love, running away from home, drug addiction. He plays the guitar with incredible dexterity. He is probably the most original folk-blues guitarist in Britain (Davy Graham included). Around the folk clubs of Britain, Bert Jansch, his songs and his guitar playing are fast becoming the brightest legend of the more way out fans.
Like Alex Campbell, history has shown Owen Hand to have authored one truly outstanding song. ‘My Donal’, a whaling lament, was destined to ‘enter the tradition’ and outlive its author’s own career as a musician.27 That song was on Something New but reviewers at the time were ungenerous. ‘Here is a competent singer with a not very exciting collection of songs,’ remarked one, for English Dance & Song. ‘But what is new about it?’ They would not be saying the same of Bert Jansch.
Of its fifteen tracks, there was Davy Graham’s ‘Angi’, taken at reckless speed and adding Nat Adderley’s ‘Worksong’ as a middle-eight,28 and fourteen others bearing Bert’s name as author. Some tracks wore an influence on their sleeve: ‘Smokey River’ was essentially Jimmy Giuffre’s ‘Train And The River’, while ‘Veronica’ (miscredited as ‘Casbah’) had started life as Mingus’s ‘Better Get It In Your Soul’. Mingus was echoed again in the title of a new and beautiful instrumental ‘Alice’s Wonderland’, but if this had once been the Mingus tune of that name, it had long since evolved. Mostly, though, it was a record of very personal songs reflecting the lifestyle and world views of its author, from his earliest composition ‘Courting Blues’ through the swaggering imagery of ‘Strolling Down The Highway’ to the more recent, more poignant reflections contained in ‘Needle Of Death’ and ‘Running From Home’. The sleeve notes, by Keith De Groot, and the moody, intense cover shot of Bert hunched over a guitar in a bare flat, staring straight at Brian Shuel’s lens, completed the message that here was not only music to absorb but a way of life to acquire.
‘That sleeve photo has so much character and atmosphere about it,’ says Ralph McTell. ‘And it wasn’t an affectation. He really was this person who lived in student-type squalor, and didn’t have a guitar, and could sometimes be drunk, and the girls would just fall over themselves for him. He had all that mystique and I guess everybody wanted to be like that.’
‘His image was a non-image, an anti-image,’ says Nat Joseph. ‘It doesn’t work for many but for him it worked. Audiences can spot phoneys, and the one thing Bert never was in his life was a phoney. He was incredibly intense. He felt everything too deeply, and I guess in the end that was the most damaging thing.’
Melody Maker carried a review that was largely descriptive in content, identifying Bert’s influences and cautiously predicting a wider audience. Other publications – English Dance & Song, Folk Music, Sing and Folk Scene — were more clearly astounded: Sing marvelled at the listener-involving qualities of both songs and instrumentals, concluding that ‘Bert Jansch is going to be a major figure among new writers’. Folk Scene went further: ‘His work will touch youth with a force unknown to our present British artists.’ But the most penetrating critique appeared anonymously in Folk Music:
In person Bert Jansch is not an impressive performer – unless one is a guitarist watching points. But on the basis of this record he may well be the sort of original talent one has been looking for out of the British revival. It might be objected that this is not folk music, and of course it’s not. But until our categories expand to allow for this chansonnier, Bert must be included within folk in its broadest sense. Comparisons with Dylan are natural, but the similarities are mainly in theme – Bert’s commentaries on the contemporary scene are quite individual in style and content. The guitar work invites immediate comparison with Davy Graham. But Davy’s obsession with the exotic has passed Bert by, and if Bert is less adventurous his music is more of a piece. The delicate simplicity of his accompaniments is a nice contrast to the leaping about on Davy’s recent two [and] the bite of Bert might be just what Davy’s sometimes cloying music needs to make it more palatable.
By the spring and summer of 1965, word would be getting around back in the States that ‘Swinging London’ was the place to be. April saw the arrival of Tom Paxton, a recording artist for Elektra and, like Dorris Henderson, an immediate sensation in the clubs. Around the same time Jackson C. Frank appeared – an unknown quantity, but an inspiration of his time. Others would come too. They were all following in the footsteps of Paul Simon.
Simon had been all over the clubs since June 1964, and found himself on numerous bills with Bert Jansch: ‘He was always telling me he was going to make it one day,’ says Bert, ‘and I didn’t really take too much notice of him. He’d actually bore me. I’d been listening to “The Sounds Of Silence” for so long I got really quite sick of it. He was forever saying, “Ah, I’ll make it some day, and when I do I’ll come over from the States and I’ll see you all right” – that kind of talk! I don’t have a very high esteem for America as
a nation so I always take Americans with a pinch of salt and with him I had exactly that attitude.’
‘Simon was an arrogant, cocky, privileged little kid who could afford the air fares to come over here and groove about,’ says Pete Frame. ‘He was an amazing songwriter – but didn’t he know it. He was also a magpie. The folk scene was all give and take, like a big family, and only the rogues didn’t give credit where it was due.’
Simon’s faith in ‘The Sounds Of Silence’ was nonetheless justified: as Bert’s album was being released, the song was at No. 1 in the US charts. Returning to London for the summer with his recording partner Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon would continue to be a periodic presence on the English scene right up to 1968, when he would host a memorable party at the London Hilton for all his guitar-playing peers before disappearing off to stardom and America for good.29 ‘I remember the first time he walked into Collet’s with Art and the single of “The Sounds Of Silence” in his hand,’ says Bert, ‘and Gill’s bemused face on the other side of the counter. Paul stood just higher than the counter and Art was up on the ceiling! He was introducing Art and saying, “We’ve just got it back from America and they’ve put drums on it.” I was always amazed at how that could actually be done.’
Though his was commercially the most enduring success story to have emerged from the British folk scene of the mid-sixties, Simon’s reputation among his peers remains unenviable: a tendency to glean ideas, licks and arrangements from other artists and a perceived pushiness in his character have burned bridges with many of those he would once have shared a tiny stage with. ‘Scarborough Fair’ was Martin Carthy’s ‘big song’ of the time, included on his first album, Martin Carthy, released on Fontana shortly after Bert’s debut. Around the same time Tom Paxton was invited to the Carthys’ for dinner and Simon arrived in tow. The song’s words and arrangement were noted down over dinner and swiftly copyrighted to Paul Simon. Some years later Carthy, more than mildly aggrieved, did receive a one-off payment: ‘The way I got it was comical,’ he says. ‘After splitting with my first wife, I rang Paul asking if the money had come through. I told him I wanted to buy a house for £1800. “That’s amazing,” he said. “The payout is exactly £1800.” I thought it was great but I left with big donkey ears.’30
‘Scarborough Fair’ would not become a burning issue until its appearance on a Simon & Garfunkel EP in 1968. The following year Bert would be faced with something remarkably similar to his arrangement of ‘Blackwater Side’ on an album by a new ‘underground’ rock group called Led Zeppelin. But the question of plagiarism within the supposedly public domain world of traditional song was nothing new. As early as July ’62 Eric Winter, reviewing American folklorist Oscar Brand’s book Folk Songs For Fun, observed its ‘ludicrous sounding claims as to who wrote or arranged what’. Brand’s response was simple: ‘Recomposition is better than decomposition.’ The issue was brought firmly into the arena of public debate in March ’65 when Dominic Behan let it be known, via the letters pages of MM, that the tune to ‘With God On Our Side’, a track on Dylan’s third album, was not traditional but registered with the Performing Rights Society to himself. A fortnight later, in the same letters pages, Gordon McCulloch pointed out that a remarkably similar tune had been collected and published decades previously by Cecil Sharp, the godfather of English folklorists. Clearly Mr Sharp, he concluded, had been guilty of ‘ante-natal plagiarism’. The phrase stuck, and though Behan (according to one bemused newcomer to the scene, Roy Harper) ‘spent the next eighteen months trying to enlist people to help him take the guy to court and have it out’, it was an idea without legs. Dylan, as far as Carthy was concerned, always credited his sources. And once again, from 30 April to 10 May, with a documentary film crew in tow, Bob was back in town.
Dylan’s return to the UK was a big event: publicly lauded by the Beatles, flattered by the ‘imitation’ of Donovan and in his element as a ‘spokesman for a generation’, his every utterance was being viewed with a gravitas unprecedented for any previous product of the pop process. Whether Dylan actually had any message is unimportant: the perception that he held the key to the universe dictated the agenda. Outwitted at every turn, bedazzled with Bob’s relentless irony and gobbledegook, unable to keep up, the world’s media were wholly at the mercy of a mischievous enigma. Bob’s new album, Bringing It All Back Home, would be released in May to coincide with the tour. Kicking off with the meaningless, genius word-association litany of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, it would contain Bob’s free-est, most expansive imagery to date. If the concept of Bob-as-Messiah was a garden path, this one led right past the shed to the fairies at the bottom of it.
The Dylan visit precipitated an intensifying of the folk boom debate. Ray Coleman had written a diligently researched piece for MM back in February headed ‘Can There Ever Be A Boom In Folk?’ For the first time, the folk scenes in the regions of Britain were dissected with facts and figures. For the London region, Roy Guest suggested forty clubs, twenty professional artists and one hundred semi-professionals. No other urban centre was yet quite on that level, but many were thriving and provided the mathematics to confirm it. Coleman estimated three hundred clubs around Britain, denoting a mushrooming grass-roots movement. But he could also conclude by noting what appeared to be an in-built destruct mechanism that could never allow a folk boom on a truly commercial scale: ‘Immediately a folky record reaches the best sellers or gets mass exposure,’ he wrote, ‘purists often insist it is “not real folk music”. Folk in Britain has never had it so good. Ironically, fervent folk fans seem concerned at the prospect of the music being discovered by too many.’ And therein, with snobbery and factionalism, would forever lie the problem.
‘The term “underground” was borrowed later on by other people to talk about Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, stuff like that,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘but there had been an “underground” going on since 1960/61. When this “folk boom” took shape and gained momentum by the mid-sixties you’re talking about millions of people going to clubs. You’re actually talking in millions. It was never, ever reflected in record sales but it has to be true. Every sizeable town in England at that time had a choice of folk clubs, every night of the week. It was huge.’
‘The Times They Are A-Changing’, Dylan’s pertinently titled first British single, was released in March, in tandem with Donovan’s debut, ‘Catch The Wind’. Both went Top 10. Sensing a bandwagon, Nat Joseph had released the Ian Campbell Group’s version of ‘The Times’ three weeks earlier. It was not a hit, but the concept of British folk groups, singles and credibility was firmly established. A couple of weeks later the Spinners released a single of Alex Campbell’s ‘Been On The Road So Long’, declaring it a protest on war. Not to be outdone, Transatlantic issued Alex’s own version of the song on a single. Neither was successful. At the same time, in a piece headed ‘Dylan v. Donovan’, the two artists at the centre of all this activity were asked to comment on each other and the imminence of the ‘boom’. ‘I don’t really know what a boom is,’ said Bob, by telephone from the States. ‘[But] would you please say hello to Martin and Dorothy Carthy.’
Donovan would step confidently into the den of irony that became Don’t Look Back, the ground-breaking documentary of Bob’s 1965 British tour. Renbourn, Dorris Henderson and Alex Campbell would provide their own cameos too, gate-crashing Bob’s hotel suite after a typically boozy Campbell gig. For the next number of months, Dylan, Donovan and the folk boom would be a question for every music writer to bring up with every pop person who crossed their path.
‘When Woody Guthrie’s in the hit parade I’ll admit there’s a folk boom,’ was the no-nonsense view of Chas Chandler, of the Animals. ‘It’s only two people,’ pointed out Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones. ‘There are lots and lots of folk records coming out and not meaning a thing.’ The subject of Donovan was less equivocal: ‘I don’t particularly like Donovan’s records,’ said chief Animal, Eric Burdon. ‘But I like him so much
as a guy. I know he’s genuine, so I’m a Donovan fan.’ ‘Bit of an enigma,’ suggested Spencer Davis. Dylan’s ‘enigma’ was less tolerably endorsed by others: ‘I can’t stand it when people say he’s a genius,’ raged Tom Jones, Welsh beefcake and balladeer. ‘I don’t like him. Don’t like his attitude or his records. I just want to forget about the fellow.’ ‘I look forward to the Graham Bond Folk Four,’ suggested one wag, in the MM letters page. Mick Jagger poured his bile on the whole movement as ‘folk fakers’ and Ian Campbell responded with his view of the Rolling Stones as ‘phoney Americans’. The music papers were having a field day. By the end of the year Beatles manager Brian Epstein, asked for his view on traditional music generally, summed up the pop nation’s mood on the whole debate: ‘On the whole, I find it boring.’31
This was all fluff, surface-controversialism that fed off itself. But Ewan MacColl, the man most widely viewed as having created the monster in the first place, had yet to have his say. He was far from amused: ‘Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He is against everything – the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world. He doesn’t say anything President Johnson could disagree with. He deals in generalisations. His poetry is punk. It’s derivative and terribly old-hat. This boom has been artificially created and it won’t be over until big money has been made by the people who created it. We’re going to get lots and lots of copies of Dylan.’ Dylan and those who followed him, he continued, had ‘missed the point of Woody Guthrie’,32 had no real anger or passion in them. He himself, he wholeheartedly admitted, had taken to railing against even his own audiences of late: ‘I’ve been doing it quite purposely, on the assumption that art which only produces an emotional response is bad art. My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable, to send them out of the bleeding place arguing and talking.’