The bluegrass fan at my Friday club was kind enough to clip and save this piece from the Marin Independent Journal.
On his ramblin': Maria Muldaur says "When Jack starts spinning a story, you better have an hour." Joan Baez jokes that every time she sees him the first thing she says is "OK, Jack, you've got five minutes."
Interesting stuff on his estrangement from Dylan, too.
Not sure how long the I-J keeps their articles where they can be accessed, so I'll copy it all here.
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Ramble on: Marin's Rambin' Jack Elliott, a folk legend, turns 75 - and has a new album
Paul Liberatore
Folk legend Ramblin' Jack Elliott just turned 75 and has a new album out, "I Stand Alone." He sits at the bar of the Old Western Saloon, Pt. Reyes Station. IJ photo/Frankie Frost
AS RAMBLIN' JACK ELLIOTT tucked into a short stack of buckwheat pancakes in the Station House Cafe the other morning, it was as if the whole town of Point Reyes Station was sitting there with him.
Elliott, the just-turned-75 American folk music icon, knows everybody, it seems, and everybody knows him. When he mentioned that the local pharmacist had just passed away, he looked down sadly at his breakfast.
"He was just a guy in a white lab coat," he said softly. "But he almost made you feel glad you were sick."
Spying a chicken farmer sitting at a nearby table, Elliott brightened, calling over to him, joking about robbing a bank and making him his accomplice.
The farmer was so surprised and flattered that Jack Elliott remembered his name that he could hardly speak.
Jack just smiled and laughed and made everyone within earshot in the restaurant feel good about being there at that moment and at that time and at that place with a genuine folk music hero, an historical figure who is a direct link to Woody Guthrie. He doesn't brag about it, but he also taught Bob Dylan a thing or two about playing the guitar and singing a song.
Singer Maria Muldaur, a friend of Elliott's and of Dylan's since the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early 1960s, says this of Ramblin' Jack, an early inspiration for her:
"He was following in Woody Guthrie's footsteps and was a friend and disciple of Woody's before young Bob (Dylan) hit the scene. A lot of his presentation he got directly from Woody. He was the natural heir of the Woody Guthrie legacy. But he's quite a unique and interesting character in his own right, and I do mean character, with a capital K."
A legendary raconteur, it's important to note that Elliott didn't get his Ramblin' nickname because he's been on the road all his life.
"He can spin a yarn," Muldaur said. "When Jack starts telling a story, you better have an hour."
Joan Baez, who's known Elliott for just as long, jokes that every time she sees him, the first thing she says is, "OK, Jack, you've got five minutes."
Elliott has rambled around this old country and Europe for as long as he can remember, and he's lived in lots of places, but never as long as he's lived in Marin County.
For the past decade and a half, home has been a little ways up the road in a small stucco house in Marshall, the tiny boatyard town on Tomales Bay in northwest Marin.
"This is the longest I've ever been in one spot," he allowed. "I've been living out there for about 14 years, I think. And before that, I spent two years in Sausalito. It started by living in my motor home in the Arques Shipyard in Sausalito for two years until they kicked me out. They put a note on my windshield wipers that said, 'You are blocking a fire lane.' After two years! They should have had some respect."
Despite that indignity, Jack has stayed on. What is it about Marin that keeps him here?
"I think it's the water," he answered, only half joking. "There's something mystical about it."
Normally attired in boots and cowboy regalia, on this morning he had on running shoes, nylon athletic pants, a black fleece pullover and a jaunty Australian hat.
"The reason I'm dressed this way is that I went for a jog this morning along the road near my house," he explained. "I call it jogging if I'm walking in the same direction for more than five steps.
"I also climbed down some rocks onto a low tide beach, inspected some seaweed, had a conversation with a couple of stranded star fish, waved to a great white shark and a pelican, who waved back. The pelicans were diving and jiving, and I think they were doing it just for me because they hadn't seen me for a few days."
That's the way conversations go with Jack Elliott. Poetic stream of consciousness narratives with numerous digressions pour out of him on such subjects as the intricacies of backing up a semi-truck and trailer, rodeos, cowboys, horses, bull riding, welding, sailing, women (he's been married five times) and any number of arcane and esoteric interests and enthusiasms.
When the topic is Bob Dylan, from whom he has been semi-estranged since the first Rolling Thunder Tour in 1975, Elliott can't hide the hurt he feels that their friendship isn't what it once was.
"The last time we actually spoke face to face was about two years ago," he said, recounting a visit to a Dylan concert at Konocti Harbor Amphitheater in Lake County.
"I went down toward the stage and there was Bob and Maria (Muldaur) chatting, leaning up against something in the back of the stage out in the hot sun," he said. "When it was my turn to talk to him, I stepped in a little closer, but there's no eye contact with Mr. Dylan, and that includes me, too.
"So he looked at my shadow and he said, 'There's Ramblin'. What's in your life, Ramblin'?'
"'What's in my life?,' I said. 'Well, I got a new Ford pickup and I drove from Oklahoma and it took me four days and I fed the cats and I got a little sleep and here I am.'
"And then he says, laughing (Elliott imitates Dylan's distinctive voice) 'Fed the cats, huh? Gotta feed them cats.' And that's all he said. I'm waiting for some Dylanographer to explain it to me. I can never understand what kind of a mood he's in, what makes him behave in the manner that he does. He's a bona fide weirdo."
For his part, Elliott is a bona fide under-rated musician, considering his importance in American culture.
"It's not fair, but, in the end, music historians will record him as an early influence on Dylan or as a sidekick to Woody Guthrie," said music historian Dennis McNally. "But he has his own talent and his own career, and he's carried it on for a long, long time."
He certainly has. At 75, he's still a handsome devil. Asked how he feels, he said, "Really bad, but not as bad as when I'm gonna be 85."
Just has he always has, he performs all over the country and played Saturday at the Sausalito Art Festival. More importantly, he has his first new album in seven years, "I Stand Alone," a 16-song collection with guest appearances by Los Lobos's David Hidalgo, Lucinda Williams and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The production values are spare and stark, with Elliott's rough, gravely baritone and flat-picking guitar work front and center.
In an article on the CD, released on the Anti- label, Vanity Fair says that Elliott "remains a drifter and a desperado at heart - a storyteller in the great frontier tradition."
Elliott's daughter, Aiyana, served as an associate producer on the album. She also wrote and directed the acclaimed 2000 documentary about her dad, "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack."
"My daughter is the one who dreamed up the idea to make this album," he said proudly. "She hasn't got a lot of credit or publicity for that."
The track that closes "I Stand Alone," called "Woody's Last Ride," is a poignant short story that Elliott speaks over a melancholy guitar track. It's about how he and Woody Guthrie earned enough change playing in Manhattan's Washington Square Park to drive across country to California in a Buick, arriving with 50 cents in their pockets.
But it's much more than a tale of the open road. It has everything to do with the last time he saw Woody, who died of a cruel degenerative disorder when he was just 55.
On the track, there's a sadness in Elliott's voice that speaks volumes about love and loss and grief and carrying on, making music and making friends and making people laugh and cry for more than a half-century.
In that respect, Ramblin' Jack Elliott has done old Woody proud.
Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at
liberatore@marinij.com
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