On the Road

Ramblin' Jack lives up to his nickname—except when the conversation turns to music

by Mike Perry

To ask Ramblin’ Jack Elliott a question is to tug at a snag in a sweater, only to see the yarn unfurl of its own volition, dropping in aimless loops, curling and snaking itself into a variegated fable. Every answer is a folk tale. Conversation is an exercise in free association, switchbacks, good-humored evasion, meanders, and box canyons. Jack Elliott does his talking without aid of a compass.

I have him on the phone. “We’re gettin’ ready to go to Oregon in the Mercedes,” he says. He’s at his home in rural California. The Mercedes is a ’75. He bought it very used and has had trouble with it. “…and I left the window open overnight on my side, because I was bein’ the passenger, and I was kind of tired of the rain, and it stopped rainin’, and I was enjoyin’ the fresh air, while Jan was drivin’ us home from our town, and so the sheepskin seat cover got totally soaked. So now I got the electric heater out of my motor home, with an extension cord from the house that runs into one of the back windows on the lee side of the car, it’s open about two inches to let the wire come in, and I’ve got this heater on the floor on an upside down aluminum pot so as to prevent any heat from gettin’ in the carpet and settin’ fire to the car, and it’s aimed up at the seat, from about oh, a foot away from it, from underneath the dashboard on the passenger side, ‘cause I couldn’t get the damned sheepskin off, it’s locked on by the [he adopts a Colonel Klink accent, and begins to yell] Mercedes-Benz headrest, vitch iss heldt in place by two vertical chrome-plated, nine millimeter shtalks!”

I haven’t asked him a question yet. Already the yarn is coming loose.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Cliffs Notes version: Bob Dylan is Jack Elliott is Woody Guthrie. “He sounds more like me than I do,” goes the Woody Guthrie quote. They busked around the country. When Woody’s rambles ended in a decade-long terminal hospital stop, Jack took Woody’s walk, talk and music back to the road. Returning to Woody’s hospital room one day, Jack met a boy named Bob Dylan bedside. Taught him some things. Soon, Dylan was getting more gigs. Sometimes the marquee read, “Son of Jack Elliott.”

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Who’s Who version: Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Johnny Cash, Waylon and Willie, Sam Shepard, Jack Nicholson, Rod Stewart, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Greg Brown, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Ian Tyson, Robert Duvall, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Doc Watson. All listed as fans or registered acolytes. Mick Jagger left a Ramblin’ Jack show in England and bought his first guitar.

But I’m setting him up like a historical figure. He is very much alive. Very much contemporary. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, recent history version: South Coast, Grammy, 1995, Best Traditional Folk Album. Kerouac’s Last Dream, reissued 1997. And now, Friends Of Mine, partnering Jack with a telling array: Arlo Guthrie, Peter Rowan, Rosalie Sorrels, Tom Waits, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Bob Weir. On songs written by Joe Ely, Gene Autry, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Garcia, Merle Travis. And Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

I’m supposed to find out what Jack’s got to say about Friends Of Mine. It’s not going to be easy.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, calling from a hotel in Minneapolis. His voice is tired, all stooped over. He’s in the midst of a racking cold. It’s late autumn, chill and raining. He wants some fresh air. “But there’s this musician-proof window, a suicide-proof window,” he grieves. “If you want air you push a button. They charge you for air.”

He’s in his 60s now. A good age, I suppose, for a folk singer. He’s been through the ’60s before, hitch-hiking, singing, riding around Woodstock on motorcycles with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But tonight he feels old. His hip is acting up. His guitar didn’t make the trip. His companion Jan had to stay behind. Tonight he’ll play the Cedar Cultural Center.

I mention Peterbilts. He brightens.

He crosses the wooden floor of the Cedar Cultural Center with a slanted amble that bespeaks old injuries, helping himself along with a subtle hike of the elbows. When he stands backstage, it’s usually with his hat in hand, his hips hitched, his wiry legs planted in a stance amenable to forking a bronc or straddling the roll of a ship’s deck.

At 15, Elliott Charles Adnopoz took the subway out of Brooklyn and joined the rodeo. Tonight, in a ribbed and bibbed shirt, his neck nestled in a bandanna you could nap under, he looks every inch the seasoned hand. Young Master Adnopoz is lost to legend. In his place, a troubadour.

The word is too grand, too affected, to suit the man, but the definition is spot-on. From Brooklyn to Britain, from Woody to Waylon, by horse, by ship, by truck, from the ’50s to the millennium, he has never stopped covering ground. Singing and moving.

And so now there he is, on the stage of the Cedar Cultural Center, sound-checking a borrowed guitar, playing to the folding chairs on a wet night in the state where Bob Dylan (the former Robert Allen Zimmerman) was born.

An assignment landed me on Marty Stuart’s tour bus in Petaluma, California, last year. Someone knocked on the door with a note. Ramblin’ Jack is here, wonders if he can come back. Name meant nothing to me. I got up to leave. “Oh man, no,” said Marty Stuart. “You don’t know who Ramblin’ Jack is? You’ve got to talk to him. He was Woody’s cat!”

Ramblin’ Jack boarded the bus, hat in hand. “Man, I got something to show you!” said Marty. He disappeared into the back of the bus. In a little bit, he returned with a videotape. An old dub of “The Johnny Cash Show”. He popped it in, and there was Ramblin’ Jack, twenty-some years younger, different glasses, different hat. Elliott scoffed at the hat, but you could see he was delighted.

Back when Stuart was playing in Cash’s band, Elliott joined them for a brief California tour. In addition to singing and playing, he traded off at the wheel of a Peterbilt with a curly-haired guy he remembers only as Wirehead. They were hauling Cash’s sound equipment. “We got on I-5 after our coffee, and I started drivin’. And he says to me as I was goin’ through the gears, ‘Hey Jack, you ever get one of these long wheel-base trucks off the road?’ And I said, ‘Why gee, no, I haven’t. How come you say that? Are they kind of squirrelly?’ And he said, ‘Just keep it on the road,’ and he went in the sleeper.”

Marty has to leave for meet-and-greets. He introduces me to Jack first. Talk to this man, he says. For the next two hours, I am educated by way of parable and digression. Kindly and attentively, as though he were the one lucky to be there, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott talked of 13-speed split shifts, good horses, the trim of a schooner, and the feel of a stiff guitar pick. He told me about “Muleskinner Blues”, and later he joined Marty onstage and sang it. “What key do you do it in?” asked Marty, back on the bus, prior. “A or E, I can’t remember,” said Jack. “Don’t worry, we’ll find ya,” says Marty.

Then Jack says he called Guy Clark to say hello late last year, and Townes was on the phone. At this the talk turns softer. The road manager checks in, asks about Jack sitting in for two songs. “We ain’t fer sure of the key yet,” says Jack. “Don’t worry,” says Marty. “You pick one. We’ll blunder in behind ya. Always wanted to be in your band.”

Anyway, Marty Stuart and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: You’ve heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? With Ramblin’ Jack, two degrees is rara avis.

Back on the phone to California. Still not getting to the point, but having a good time avoiding it. Jack reins in a story, tries to do the proper interview thing.

“Y’wanna talk about guitar chords? Or picks? Tricks? Cases? Airlines?” You see how it goes.

Jan, in the background. Saying something that ends with “…new album!”

“Album!” Jack snickers like a kid hiding from his mother on his night to do dishes.

I take a shot. “Here’s the trouble: My editor and your producer will at some point probably expect that we mention the new album, huh?”

“What magazine is this for?”

“No Depression magazine.”

“Oh, right, No Depression magazine…that’s cute.”

I press on, none too eloquently. “Which actually, before I ask you about the album stuff, I think, that the magazine is, y’know, it’s a young audience, it’s kinda alternative country is what it is. How d’you…” Jack pulls in without signaling, cuts me off with a whopping non sequitur.

“Yeah, I was surprised, because I always got depressed when I was in Seattle, even when I was truckin’. Oh, I like the boats, I love the water up there. I had a wonderful adventure rowin’ around in a rubber raft on Lake Union one day, and got picked up by a kid in a lifeboat who was sailing with a homemade sail rig, made out of a transparent piece of visqueen plastic sheet, a two-by-four for a mast, and some clothesline for riggin’, and he was steerin’ with an oar, he didn’t even have a rudder, but it was a real old, tiny little ship’s lifeboat off of some ferry boat, and he lived with his parents on some 45-foot yawl that was moored over the yacht anchorage at the opposite side of the bay — the upwind end of this Lake Union, which is full of all kinds of interesting ships. There’s a big four-masted lumber schooner that lives there called the Wawona, there’s the Center for Wooden Boats…”

Which reminds me. All that talk about the stooped-over voice, the colds, the bad hip, I’ve made him sound old. But when he really gets going, when he’s trying to explain to you how that racing schooner he boarded in Guam gathered up the wind and simply disdained the water, he drops the cowhand growl and just plain enthuses. And when he laughs — usually at a respectful distance following his own observations — it’s one of those half-and-half laughs. Half humor, half wonderment at it all. Like, can you believe this life?

I’ll skip ahead. Tell you that Ramblin’ Jack never did get around to commenting on the album. About the time my tape was running out, he announced that Friends Of Mine producer Roy Rogers had just tracked mud into the house. “Let me introduce you to someone,” I heard, and then Rogers was on the phone. I saw this for the opportunity it was and decided to make hay.

We talked about how a man who has written less than five songs in his life has become such a universal touchstone. “He’s the link,” said Rogers. “He was really the last guy to hit the road with Woody, and he had such strong connections in Europe, where the Rod Stewarts and the Mick Jaggers saw him in English folk clubs and he turned them on to American roots music.

“He’s not well-known to the general populace, and they don’t understand how he knows all these people, or why they know him, but that’s the way things have gone in our cultural context. There’s all this division into musical camps. People don’t understand.…Jimmie Rodgers was a pop artist in his day. I asked Howlin’ Wolf once, ‘Where’d you get that yodel?’ ‘I listened to Jimmie Rodgers on the radio comin’ outta Nashville,’ he said.

“Not to get too scholastic, but when we chose the songs for this album, we wanted them to be representative of Jack’s whole context.” The context is there, not only in the songs, and the singers, but in the sound of the album. Listen to Ramblin’ Jack singing Townes Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues”, and you hear Townes. Of course, listen to Townes, and you hear Jack. And while I may be trying too hard, when I heard Jack’s high harmony behind Tom Waits on “Louise”, my first thought was of Sara Carter.

When he joins up with Jerry Jeff Walker on “Hard Travelin’” and “He Was A Friend Of Mine”, you’re hearing music written by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but you’re also hearing how Ramblin’ Jack informed country’s outlaw movement. His take on Joe Ely’s “Me And Billy The Kid” plants him in the midst of the Austin scene. And so on, right through pop rock (for those of us introduced to Tim Hardin’s “Reason To Believe” via Rod Stewart), Nashville, and Deadhead land.

“It’s just him, covering a lot of different territory in American music,” said Rogers. “But we didn’t set out to make a nostalgic record. He’s not a historical guy, he’s right here now.” And for the record, for all its musical cross-references, the album doesn’t come off as a look back. Even “Bleeker Street”, a recent, rare Elliott composition, is set firmly in the present. The history is there, the whole Woody/Jack/Bob thing, but in the end, the song is about context. The here and now, how we got here, how it looks, and what we yet dare wish for.

Landlocked in dark Minneapolis, fitsing-and-startsing through the wet stoplights, Jack is telling the driver sea stories. He’s tiny in the front seat, all hunched shoulders and hat. The salt-spray hiss of the tires plays beneath the narration.

“He went out the yardarm, on the foot-rope. The halyard parted. The yard crushed him. By Way Of Cape Horn, that’s the name of the book,” he says. “You should read it. It’s in the 917.8s.”

He’ll talk about trucks. He’ll talk about ships. He’ll talk about the Dewey Decimal System, for crying out loud. But Jack…what about the music? What’ll I tell people?

“Tell ‘em my teeth are fallin’ out, I can barely walk, and they better hurry up if they wanna see me, ’cuz I may not be around much longer.” He’s chuckling.

“But if I make it through this year, I’m gonna get me that 1947 Peterbilt and put another Cummins 220 in it, it’s got a five and four, a long wheel base, I’m gonna put an old airstream trailer on the back of it, and man, we won’t have to get on no god-damn airports any-more!”

I giggle. It’s right there on the tape. Completely unprofessional. But it gives Jack time to circle back along the yarn and come up with an answer.

“Tell ‘em I’m 19.”

Although Mike Perry once fell out of a bass boat, nothing he has written can be found in the 917.8s.