This John Tobler article was originally printed in Melody Maker in 1973, then later in edition 17 of Hot Wacks in 1979. It deals with the release of the album, Five and Dime. The actual transcribed interview that formed the basis for this article is printed in full in the Interviews section on this website.

Living in this God-forsaken, unfair and unpleasant land, it helps me a great deal to think about California. In Los Angeles, it never seems to get very cold - mind you, the natives reckon that sixty degrees is about as low as they're prepared to go without switching on the central heating. So while I mull over the imminent possibility of a power strike affecting my electric typewriter stone dead, I can also mull over the advantages of perhaps living somewhere close to David Ackles.

He's got a great house in Pacific Palisades, a few miles west of Los Angeles, and thereby close to the ocean, although the imminent sea is somewhat unnecessary because of the private pool. There's no need to reflect on the fortunes of over-fed rock stars and the like, because it's not as simple as that. Sure, there are other advantages, like the avocados and limes that grow in the back garden and the frequent visits from several raccoons, fascinating creatures according to David, not least because instead of run-of-the-mill paws, your raccoon has a thumb, rendering him a fascinating sight as he performs almost-human feats which other animals, lacking the extremity, find quite impossible.

The problem is that the 'coons come from a terrifying abyss about twenty feet behind the house, where the earth has crumbled away, leaving a gaping chasm about a hundred yards across, which creeps nearer whenever there's enough rain to wash some earth away. The intention is to get the walls of the fault shored up, but it hasn't happened yet for various reasons.

Not the place to write the sort of songs that David has become celebrated for, and still less the place that you would expect an album to be recorded. "For the first time in my life, I came in with an album under budget and ahead of schedule, so obviously recording it here is the right thing to do. We did all the basic tracks here, and some of the overdubbing as well, and we had so much time - such a luxury."

You mean actually here? "Oh yes, right here, in this room. There was a string quartet right there in front of the fireplace and, instead of that lamp, we had an umbrella hanging up with some some foam inside it, so the drummer had his own little booth set up under that. We had a concert grand piano, guitar here, bass in the hall, then we closed the door to the bathroom hall and used it as a sort of echo chamber. And the control room is in the office around the corner. We really had a wonderful time."

The album in question is David Ackles' latest masterpiece, Five and Dime, the first from a new contract with Columbia, or CBS as we know it here in the UK. Previously, there had been three albums with Elektra, The Road to Cairo in 1968, Subway to the Country in 1969 and American Gothic in 1972. Fairly obviously, not a man who wanted himself over-recorded, yet each one of these albums had received the sort of reviews that couldn't be bought.

Even more strange was that none of them had made the sort of chart dent that both artist and record company would like, the best placing being for a few weeks in the nineties for American Gothic, which is not what you would expect after not one, but three reviews by respected critics, each comparing the record's quality to Sergeant Pepper or something equally outstanding. Wasn't it rather embarrassing to receive acclaim like that?

"Yes, sickening. How can that be? All it is is an album, one record album of a handful of songs. They can only be so good, right? They can't be any better than that. To have people fall down and say 'This is a whole new direction to music' is embarrassing because I can't support that; my music can't support it; nothing can support it.

"I was thrilled that so many people were that enthusiastic and I appreciate their enthusiasm and their faith and all of that, but at the same time, it caused me no end of grief. I knew what the album was worth, and I still know - it's a good album. I'm not putting it down, but it's only an album, only a group of songs. And it would mean doing another album which would have to try to come up to, or even surpass, what I have done. I figured that there was no way I could surpass what I had done in terms of the reviewers, because they had already committed themselves to it being better than peanut butter, so all I could do was go in a somewhat different direction on my own terms, and in the end, I finally had to ignore completely what had gone before.

"I was literally stymied. Within the first few months after American Gothic came out, I couldn't write a song. I'd sit down and start to write, and I'd get the first eight measures and quit, thinking to myself, 'Oh this isn't nearly as good as what was on the last album - that's not going to impress anyone'. I mean, that's just incredible, it's horrible!"

So David signed a new contract, one of the conditions being that he could record, as he put it, "independent of a label in a sense, which meant I could record it here under circumstances which were more conducive to the making of a rather more personal album than the last one, which I wanted."

Listening to the album, there seems to be little, if any, difference in the quality from the telephone-number budget extravaganzas to which we've become accustomed. Why don't more people make their records this way?

"Because they're told they can't. We did the whole thing on a four track machine, which is unheard of. Obviously, we had to transfer it to sixteen when we went into the studio for some of the larger things, but for the basic tracks, you don't need more than four. Indeed, you shouldn't have more than four, because that's the ideal feeling, and you can respond to one another so easily if there are only four of you.

"Also, you have all the time in the world to do it, because they're here, and they're comfortable, and there's no feeling of it being a sterile place, or having any time pressure. Some of the sessions went on till three in the morning from seven at night, and no-one complained because everyone understood the problems, and mostly they were here for the fun of it"

The list of backing musicians on Five and Dime certainly fails to slip easily off the tongue. Presumably they were friends, rather than regular musicians? "Some of them are friends of mine, some are friends of Douglas [Graham, the producer of the album]. They were all people who knew one another, but most of them were not regular studio musicians. The quartet is the Trojan String Quartet from USC, who played at our wedding, as a matter of fact."

Apart from Bruce Langhorne and Red Rhodes on lead and steel guitar respectively, the one name I did recognise was Dean Torrance, who surfing readers will remember as being one half of Jan and Dean. Checking through the song titles, the one he's most likely to be on is Surf's Down, which turns out to be correct. Was there a reason for this spoof on the surfing scene, which this track undoubtedly is?

"I was a surfer once. I still occasionally actually go out with the board and do it, and I will always have tremendous affection for that period because it was funny. It was magic; there was a kind of mystique attached to it and it was still hysterical. It was the first of the long hair and the first of a lot of things that later became adopted into other lifestyles. I think in a sense it was probably the first viable sub-culture for teens. And now I live here and see the ex-surfers still there, still dressing and talking the same..."

It seems odd that Dean Torrance would allow himself to be got at in a song that he was performing... "Yes, but he understood and he thought it was funny. He's singing the high lines. Bruce Johnston was originally going to be on that track too, but he had a cold that morning. We had a great time - Bruce and I sat at the piano, working out different vocal lines for every song on the album, how he would have done it, a la the Beach Boys - and we fell down. It's got to be one of the funniest sessions we've ever done.

"The sad part was that he called me the day we were scheduled to record - we had to do that one in the studio because of the multiple voices - and he had this cold, so that he could barely speak. The low voice on that track is Douglas, the producer, and the trick was to get him drunk to do it, because there's no way a normal person under normal circumstances could hit that note. So it was worth the investment of whatever it was - a fairly largish bottle of brandy. As the day progressed and he got drunker, his voice got lower, to the point where he could finally sing that 'Surf's down' line, really hit it, although he could barely stand!"

Perhaps the most frequent accusations against David's previous albums, inevitably made by those out of sympathy with the sentiments expressed in his songs, is that an Ackles album is somewhat heavy going. "These songs are intended to be much more easy to get into, and I felt that it was time I lightened up a bit and made the album a little more accessible. Columbia didn't suggest that I made things more commercial, for which I'm most grateful."

In fact, Surf's Down is by far the lightest track, but it's certainly not alone in being the sort of track that produces a reaction other than the feeling of despair that non-fans might expect. A couple of what might be called cautionary tales are included - Everybody Has a Story, which quite correctly states that there's always someone worse off than yourself, and Jenna Saves, the story of a poor little rich girl. "I like parables, little morality plays, and I thought it was moderately amusing in its own way, although it wasn't about anyone specific. It's more a compendium of a lot of attitudes."

You also get five love songs, lyrically beautiful as usual, but with the sort of plaintive tune that has become a trademark of Ackles' work. Postcards, he confirmed, was about his stay in England, where the American Gothic album was made, and House Above the Strand referred specifically to his current abode, the strand being the beach. His explanation of A Photograph of You demonstrates, I think, the sort of object or situation which the man feels sufficiently inspired by to write a memorable song.

"It's looking back, although it's not exactly what the lyrics portray. I was going through some effects after I moved here, trying to figure out what to throw away and what to keep, and I came across an old photograph of someone that I had once thought I was desperately in love with and couldn't live without and had managed to live an extra fifteen years since! But it did bring back a sort of keen feeling, so I wrote the song about that feeling, from that standpoint."

Apart from a faintly evangelical song called Berry Tree, the constructive meat of the album comes, for me, in three very meaningful crusading-type pieces, all of which David spoke about at some length. Aberfan was the first one to strike me forcibly, due, no doubt to the fact that it must have been closer to home for me than for the writer.

"I wasn't in England when it happened, but it really appalled me and I was shocked by it. It was one of those thinks that gave me a very strong feeling at the time, and then I very quietly and neatly put it away in a drawer and never thought about it again. Then the facts about My Lai began to come out. I put them together with Aberfan and came up with the same basic problem, which is that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. And indeed, it's true that in both circumstances the children, who had the least to do with it - the most innocent people - are the ones who are most victimised. The original version of Aberfan introduces the mining disaster and then follows it up with the similar circumstances of My Lai, but I cut the second half because it went on and on into a ten minute polemic and there's no need for that any more. I don't think there's ever a great need for polemics, unless they're disguised - and that was ill-disguised! So I cut the second half and I think that made it a better song."

Mention is made of 116 children and apparently that's exactly the number who died in the disaster. "I had to research it because I wrote it last year, not in 1966 when it happened. There are just so many things you can't use in a song, interesting facts that contribute to your feeling for the place or the period, and I did go there when I was last in Wales."

Run Pony Run at first sight appears to concern the hunting of horses for food. Certainly not a familiar concept to me... Why, particularly, ponies? "It's because of the beef shortage here, when the price of beef went up incredibly beyond the price of gasoline and everyone was turning to horsemeat. People were stealing horses and having them butchered, and horsemeat shops opened up. Within one week, all of this seemed suddenly to come to the surface and there were horsemeat butchers opening up in Oregon and Washington and back East. And the more I saw, the more I got sick by it. I can understand that horses do eventually grow old and die and if you want to then turn them into glue, that's all right, once they're dead. But to slaughter horses for food is appalling. The slaughter of animals for food is appalling anyway, but horses, which are bred for their grace and agility and speed and beauty, to be turned into food - it's a sin. It just got to me, and I wrote the song."

In the song, there's a line about 'cowboys have wings now; they can fly'. Were people actually using these methods? "Yes, because mustangs have been the source of dog food in this country for years and years. They're hunted with helicopters and what have you - it's quite mechanised. They just round them up and slaughter them and make dog food out of them. There are so few wild things left, and you take a wild horse - which to see them in the wild is to understand kinetic beauty, it's incredible, absolutely phenomenal - and then to realise that they're running into dog cans... it's more than I can bear, without writing about it. We did have quite a large mustang population at one time, but it has been steadily depleted and it still goes on."

The final 'message' song on Five and Dime is I've Been Loved, which starts off as a study of old age. "Yes, and it's trying to draw that into the kind of loneliness that we all suffer at one time or another, and the similar reasons that we have for going on and not letting the loneliness destroy us. Also, I do have a grandmother who is not 99, like the person in the song, but 89 and has been in hospital for a year and a half now. It builds up to where you have to write a song about it, because it's a very pitiful situation.

"There's absolutely nothing she can look forward to at all, except more of the same, and that's awfully hard to live with. Every time we go to see her, she's always cheerful and she always has something that she wants to tell you that isn't complaining or anything; it's just what happened. And she always wants to see pictures of whatever you're doing. It's a hurtful situation."

All the explanations you've read may lead you to believe that there's a special need for the artist to explain the meanings behind his songs, but such feelings will be found to be incorrect when you hear the record. Is it harder to write a song that's more easily comprehensible to the listener? "Yes, it's a good deal harder to write simple songs. This is no news to anyone who writes songs, or to the world at large, I think, that the most difficult song to write is that which is simplest in terms of actual words and music - not necessarily in ideas or in depth of emotion or anything else, but that simplifies it to the point of being instantly communicable."

It's obvious to me that Five and Dime has the potential to reach a somewhat wider audience than its predecessors. The only problem as far as England goes is that the famous vinyl shortage may make David Ackles' latest album a borderline case, that is, an album that may not be released here unless a definite demand is established. If that is the case, I feel that many minds will be the poorer.

A Late Flowering: a retrospective review of the first album, David Ackles a.k.a. The Road to Cairo, written by Mark Brend and published in Mojo 57, August 1998.

The basement bar of the Tower of Song. Most of the old regulars - Hardin, Buckley, Blue - are long gone, though Tim Rose makes it in most nights. Everybody lost track of Fred Neil years ago. Cohen, always susceptible to religion, is in a monastery. Should the Tower exist, David Ackles would certainly deserve a residency - though, knowing his luck, it would probably be on a Monday night, when things are a little slow.

Born into a showbusiness family in Ohio in 1937, avid Ackles first performed as a child actor in vaudeville, and echoes of this experience can be heard in his writing and singing. He was a child star in a series of B-movies, attended university in Edinburgh, studied film in California, and worked for a time as a private eye and a security guard. He also found time to compose music for ballet, the theatre and TV. By the late '60s, Ackles was composing highly original songs and signed to Elektra as a contract songwriter on the strength of Blue Ribbons, originally intended for Cher. Elektra boss Jac Holzman encouraged him to make his own records and this, his debut album, was released in 1968, when Ackles was 31.

It's a collection of ten elegant and occasionally complex songs, reminiscent at times of Brecht/Weill and Jimmy Webb. William S Harvey's sleeve, with an out-of-focus Ackles staring out through a cracked window pane, perfectly evokes the mood of the record - nostalgic, lonely and run-down, yet shot through with the dignity of down-at-heel drifters struggling against the odds.

When released, David Ackles proved too rich and too bitter for the collective palate. It was the late '60s, after all, an era dominated by youthful guitar-toting revolutionaries offering a diet of halucinogenically inspired Utopianism: a chap in his thirties, sat at a piano, singing of homelessness and accidie in a ragged, theatrical baritone wasn't exactly what the kids were clammering for. Although out of step with the times, Ackles recalls, "It was pretty well received. I got a lot of [press] attention that I was not expecting at all, having never performed in public."

Elektra organised a promotional tour of radio stations which resulted in some airplay and Julie Driscoll and the Brian Auger Trinity covered The Road to Cairo. Yet despite these promising signs, sales were modest.

With his wife of 25 years, Janice, David Ackles now lives on a farm in California. Despite releasing no records since the mid-70s, he has remained active in music, writing for TV, films and the stage. In the early '80s, he was involved in a near-fatal car crash, and he has been fighting lung cancer for several years. Despite these personal setbacks and the comparative commercial failure of his records, David Ackles retains a positive outlook on his life and his career. A few years ago, he said, "I would hate for people to think I'm getting all twisted up about what happened 20 years ago. I have a wonderful life."

Introduction to the interview with David for the Ptolemaic Terrascope, summer 1999 edition (issue 27) by Mark Brend. This is the last interview David did before his death and it also forms the basis for the chapter on David in Mark's book, American Troubadours. The interview is given in the Interviews page of this website.

When the following interview was completed in February 1999, it was not intended as a posthumous tribute. Sadly, that is what it has become, as David Ackles died on March 2nd of this year, finally  succumbing to the lung cancer that had dogged him for so long. He was 62. We understand that his family and friends intend to pursue options for releasing some of the unheard songs mentioned below.

The story of this article begins  back in September 1985. I chanced upon a tatty album on Elektra (always a good sign) and was intrigued enough by the sleeve, an out-of-focus shot of a man staring through a cracked window pane, to risk a speculative purchase. If ever a gamble paid off, then this was it. The album was the first release by singer-songwriter David Ackles - it immediately captivated me (and most of my friends, who were compelled to listen to it endlessly). So enthralled was I by the record that I quickly tracked down Ackles' other two Elektra releases - Subway to the Country and American Gothic. It was to be another ten years before I found a copy of the elusive fourth album, Five and Dime. My interest in Ackles endured over the years and, pleased as I was to occasionally come across other lonely converts who shared my zeal, I was perpetually bewildered as to why a songwriter so talented, who received much effusive acclaim in his time, could be so forgotten.

I was delighted, of course, to see the final re-emergence of Ackles' first three albums on CD a few years back. This was followed by a few "whatever happened to..." articles in the British music press, but no real signs that the process of beatification enjoyed by the likes of Buckley, Drake, Walker, et al, was underway for Ackles. Determined to do my bit to raise the great man's profile, I approached Jim Irvin at Mojo to talk about the possibility of an article. He was keen, partly because he had, by some strange synchronicity, just ten minutes before my call been talking to someone else about Ackles. It was at this point, Jim told me that one Kenny MacDonald had beaten me to the punch and tracked Ackles down a few years earlier and written a fascinating piece in these very pages. After a few phone calls (to Kenny and Phil) I found myself in possession of Ackles' telephone number and address. After some prevarication, I telephoned David at his home in California and enjoyed a good chat about his life and career. I was, like other writers who have spoken to him in recent years, taken aback that a man whose records were so intense, introspective and grandiose should be so modest, cheerful and downright pleasant. No tortured artist posturing here, I can assure you.

There followed a Buried Treasure feature in the August 1998 issue of Mojo, and a further exchange of emails with David. The interview included here is a spliced-together selection of highlights from both my telephone conversation with David and my later emails. What follows are the bare bones of an account of a varied life and a brief, commercially disappointing but artistically triumphant recording career.

David Ackles was born in Rock Island, Illinois, the very heart of the American Midwest, on 20/2/37. "Not a bad place for an incipient songwriter to get a start," he was to say later. Show business was in his blood, his mother's side of the family involved in theatre and music hall and his father an accomplished amateur musician. As a young child, Ackles formed a vaudeville duet with his sister and he later acted in a series of sub-Lassie B-movies about Rusty the dog. His film career came to a premature end with the onset of facial hair.

 In his late teens, Ackles went to study English Literature at the University of Southern California, and also for a year in Edinburgh. There followed a decade where he supported himself with a number of strange jobs (private detective, security guard), all the while continuing an involvement with theatre and TV. This era was later romanticised for an Elektra press release that accompanied his first album. He also began composing seriously during this period - musicals, ballet scores and choral pieces. These early experiences were to leave a mark on his songwriting, which likewise began in earnest at this time, and also his distinctively theatrical singing style.

In 1967, one of those early songs, Blue Ribbons (which had at some point been considered for Cher), came to the attention of Elektra producer David Anderle, who was impressed. What happened next has been coloured by myth, but it seems likely that Ackles very quickly followed up this initial interest by producing a number of other songs. He was soon signed to Elektra, initially as a songwriter. After a few months, Elektra supremo Jac Holzman decided Ackles should sing his own songs and, after a false start with an orchestral arranger, he found himself in the studio with producers David Anderle and Russ Miller, engineer Bruce Botnick, and a stellar group of experienced musicians.

By this time, Ackles was at the peak of his confidence as a songwriter. In no hurry to record a follow-up to Subway to the Country, he spent a full two years planning the song-cycle that was to become American Gothic. Between September 1971 and July 1972, Ackles lived in the village of Wargrave in Buckinghamshire,  performing live in London and even appearing on The Old Grey Whistle Test. The album, produced by Elton's lyricist Bernie Taupin, was recorded in IBC Sound recording studios in London. It was released in 1972 to ecstatic acclaim.

American Gothic (Elektra EKS 75030) is significant both for the breadth of its musical range, and also as the debut of Ackles as an orchestral arranger of great inventiveness. Incredibly, It was largely recorded and mixed in only two weeks, although preparations were drawn out. Musically, the record defies categorisation. Although traces of soul, rock, folk, gospel, blues and country can be found throughout, the songs go well beyond the normally accepted boundaries of "pop" music. Avant-garde and classical influences pervade the elaborate orchestral arrangements, and many of the songs sound like they were written for some dark Broadway show. Lyrically, the album is Ackles' State of the Union address, a collection of perceptive cultural observations that derive their clarity, as he says on the sleeve notes, from his temporary exile. So we find Ackles' take on prostitution and alcoholism (American Gothic), divorce (Waiting for the Moving Van), Vietnam (Ballad of the Ship of State) and racism (Blues for Billy Whitecloud). Interspersed between the "issue" songs are a few wistful ballads populated by the usual rootless drifters and dreamers, buckling under a burden of regret. The centrepiece of American Gothic though is the epic 10-minute Montana Song. It is a story of a man looking for his roots and the death of the rural Old West, and as such reads like a précis of a Steinbeck-style generation-spanning novel. Taken as a whole, the music and lyrics combine to create an atmosphere thick with anger, loss and mordant humour, yet shot through with moments of beauty, fragility and optimism. Yet for all its eclecticism, the album retains a unity and sense of identity. Many consider it his masterpiece and yet it is also the most inaccessible of his records. The album was to be Ackles' biggest seller, even briefly visiting the lower reaches of the American album charts, but in a sense it marked the beginning of the end of his recording career. If this was Ackles' definitive statement and nobody got it, what could he do next?

Before the release of Five and Dime, Clive Davis left Columbia. Ackles was stranded in an environment where he was either misunderstood or ignored. The contract was honoured and the record released in 1973, but only in the States. It received virtually no promotion and the few copies that did surface were pressed on wafer-thin vinyl. Not surprisingly, Five and Dime sank without trace. Ackles spoke at the time about his frustration at Columbia's attitude - being unwilling to finance a tour because the record wasn't selling, yet failing to acknowledge their responsibility to promote it to make it sell.

Each of David Ackles' four albums has its own identity. Nonetheless, certain themes and types of songs reoccur - the epic gospel-influenced ballad (Out on the Road, Such a Woman); the down home religious country song (Berry Tree, Family Band); the complex stagey story songs (Aberfan, His Name is Andrew, Montana Song). The records stand on their own, therefore and as a complete, coherent body of work.

Five and Dime was David Ackles' final album. He struggled on for a while as a songwriter, but spoke later of wondering whether it wasn't meant to be. By now in his late thirties and recently married to Janice (who appears with him on the cover of American Gothic), he began to feel the need to earn a regular income. By the late '70s he would have looked like yesterday's man. Punk was enjoying its brief moment in the sun and the careers of many of the great singer-songwriters of the '60s - Tim Rose, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, David Blue, even Leonard Cohen, were over or in the doldrums. Although continuing to write songs for his own amusement, he moved into other areas of work - writing for film and TV, teaching, directing.

In 1981, a drunk driver hit Ackles' can. He was badly injured and in a wheelchair for six months. For 18 months, he could not play the piano. He recalls his wife, after the accident, standing outside the operating theatre shouting, "don't cut off his arm, he's a piano player". A few years later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and a part of his left lung was removed. Despite these personal setbacks, he seemed to retain an optimistic outlook. The few writers who have tracked him down in recent years, including Kenny Macdonald for the Terrascope, were struck, as I was, by his enthusiasm, good humour and cheerfulness. There remains a palpable love of music and the creative process. In an interview in 1997 on the subject of directing Brecht's Threepenny Opera, he talks about "the pure joy of creating in this wonderful playpen".

In 1993, Elektra reissued the first three albums on CD. This prompted a brief and modest upsurge of interest in Ackles' work. Articles appeared in Q, Mojo, Folk Roots, the Terrascope of course, and recently even the NME. Elvis Costello began to namecheck Ackles; Phil Collins chose Down River as one of his Desert Island Discs. Sadly, the albums were deleted again after a couple of years and remain unavailable at the time of writing. Five and Dime has, to date, not been reissued and it seems that the only chance of it reappearing would be if some enterprising independent rescued it from Columbia's dusty vaults.

Now in his sixties, and still happily married to Janice, David Ackles lives on a farm north of Los Angeles. sadly, he is again fighting lung cancer. A few years ago, he completed a musical, Sister Aimee, based on the life of '20s evangelist Aimee Macpherson. He is currently working on new recordings and hopes to make another album. So, back to my original question: how could a songwriter of such talent, who received so much acclaim, now be so forgotten? There are, with hindsight, a number of obvious clues.

The list of people who recognise him as a major talent - Elton John, Phil Collins, Jac Holzman, Elvis Costello, the readers of publications such as this - make up a strangely motley and disparate bunch. On the one hand, we have Elto and Phil - major chart acts, showbusiness personalities from the very centre of the music business establishment. On the other hand, we have Costello, a successful talent on the fringes of the mainstream, and Holzman, a successful music mogul, but also slightly left of centre. Then, there are the likes of you and me, the sort of people lost in the nether world of musical experimentation and authenticity, who regard commercial success not as a sin, but maybe an irrelevance. This clearly points to the unclassifiable nature of his music. He could not be neatly packaged. Too intense and eccentric for the mainstream, yet not rock 'n' roll enough for eventual cultdom?

Placing David Ackles in the "singer-songwriter" genre does not really do him justice, nor does it serve as an adequate description of his music. Like that other great Elektra innovator, Tim Buckley, Ackles quickly transcended the usual parameters associated with his métier. More than is usual on "singer-songwriter" records, the arrangements (on the last two albums in particular) are an integral part of the artistic package, and worthy of attention in themselves. The songs themselves are often melodically and structurally complex and challenging.

Over the years, many reviewers have commented on the theatricality of Ackles' music, What they mean by this, I think, is the Brecht and Broadway style that pervades both his singing and writing. This is a tradition that rarely finds its way into the mainstream of pop/rock music (whatever you want to call it). Whilst Ackles incorporated the usual range of accepted influences (soul, gospel, country, folk, blues, etc), it was this other aspect that came to dominate much of his work and it was not widely understood. This meant that his songs, as they became more rooted in this set of influences, became less attractive to other performers. Consequently, he was deprived of the exposure and earning potential of other artists interpreting his songs, at least after the initial flurry of covers from the first album.

Lastly, I am left wondering the extent to which Ackles did or did not want, really want, success. It is clear that he was in no way inclined to compromise artistically. There are also indications that after Five and Dime his enthusiasm for the life was wearing thin. He certainly had plenty of other strings to his bow - he didn't, in one sense, really need to make a career out of it. His recording career started late - he was in his thirties by the time the first album was released and a few years shy of forty when it ended. Maybe, by the end, his heart was elsewhere?

Of all the stories of seminal and elusive talents consigned to obscurity by the vagaries of the "business" and fashion, the story of David Ackles is one of the most frustrating. If anyone, by virtue of talent alone, deserved commercial success, he did. Yet his career as a singer-songwriter was to be short-lived, punctuated by periodic false dawns of critical acclaim but no bright day of success as enjoyed by so many lesser talents. Yet despite the disappointments, there is a sort of triumph in David Ackles' story. He retained a sense of humour, modesty and proportion. His world did not end when the option on his last contract ran out, and he went on to enjoy a varied career that reflected the range of his talents. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was able to find a life beyond rock and roll - he chose not to forever linger on the fringes of an establishment that, for all its embracing of rebellion and innovation, is as conservative as the House of Lords. It is easy to bemoan the fact that he didn't press on - he surely would have found somebody, somewhere, to release his records. But in moving on when he did, he left a recorded legacy of a consistency and depth, largely unsullied by the compromise and tiredness that came to dog so many of his erstwhile colleagues.

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There is a River: The Elektra Recordings - Review of the pulled album by David Cavanagh in Uncut 122, July 2007.

A mysterious character on the fringes of late '60s American folk music, David Ackles (1937-99) attracted some surprisingly famous fans - Elton John and Phil Collins, for instance - without being in any sense a 'safe' or 'mainstream' artist. Dark as a starless night, Ackles' self-titled 1968 debut is among the most haunting albums in any genre. His third, American Gothic (1972) is conceptually pitched somewhere between an Dyke Parks and Thornton Wilder, a tapestry of a nation woven from the microcosmic secrets and fears of a handful of citizens.

In short, Ackles' songs (which he sang in a grave baritone) offer an experience that is both cinematic and emotional, and he should by rights be better known. There is a River: The Elektra Recordings is an exhilarating chronicle of his four-year stint on Jac Holzman's folk-rock label. The two-CD anthology contains complete remasters of David Ackles and American Gothic as well as the album that came in-between (Subway to the Country), and it also includes 11 unreleased tracks and rarities. One of these, an American Gothic out-take reminiscent of a Baptist hymn, gives this anthology its title.

While Ackles is sometimes compared to Randy Newman, and his gloomier elegies (Blue Ribbons, His Name is Andrew) could be likened - at a pinch - to Tim Rose or Leonard Cohen, he was a versatile writer/arranger, and no comparison really does him justice. We first encounter him on the opening track of his '68 debut (The Road to Cairo) hitching a ride from a stranger. Amid sedate, mournfully descending piano chords, a story emerges. The narrator is returning home to find the wife and kids he abandoned years ago. But as electric guitars sizzle, and organist Michael Fonfara surges like Doug Yule on 1969: Velvet Underground Live, the narrator panics with 22 miles to go, and bails out of the car. ("I can't walk down this road to Cairo; they're better thinking I'm dead.")

Other songs tell similar tales of tight-lipped drifters who've done something harrowing and irreversible, and are ever-doomed to wander America like the living dead, or count out time in solitude. The jaw-dropping His Name is Andrew concerns a man who "works in a canning factory" and "chooses to wait alone for his life to end". Down River is about an ex-convict who's overjoyed to bump into an old girlfriend, until three words, "is that right?" inform us that she has married his former school chum, killing hopes of a reconciliation.

Ackles' follow-up, Subway to the Country (1969), pales next to such a dramatic debut. Much less introspective, even politically satirical in places, it also expands the tonal palette to include horns and strings. Main Line Saloon and Inmates of the Institution (which use a grotty bar and a mental asylum as settings for Hogarthian studies of moral degeneracy) boast peculiar, jazz-inflected arrangements that never linger on one tempo for long. Sadly, there's less to recommend in the album's gospel-flavoured middle section (Out on the Road, Cabin On the Mountain), where melodies tend to be frustratingly predictable. Nevertheless, Subway to the Country is an uneasy proposition when it wants to be. Candy Man is about a disabled war veteran who takes revenge on society by distributing pornography to young children. ("I'm not ashamed; I took their minds as payment due, the healthy for the maimed.")

Ackles befriended Elton John in 1970, after supporting him at the Troubadour in LA. Ackles' third album was recorded in England in 1971-72, and produced by Elton's lyricist Bernie Taupin. Ironically, it's as un-English a music as could ever be imagined. Composed of 11 tragicomic scenes from failing lives (a small-town wife deceiving her husband; a musician having a one-night stand; a Native American exploding in a lethal rage), American Gothic is arranged in a spectacular variety of styles, from boater-and-cane 'show tunes' to blissful country rock. The album's peaks are numerous, with narratives both surreal (Ballad of the Ship of State) and poignant (Waiting for the Moving Van). The sheer musical scope (clarinets, trombones, pedal-steel guitar, Appalachian fiddles) implies a union of Sondheim, Nesmith and The Band. the ten-minute climax, Montana Song, in which a troubled urbanite ventures to a remote rural location to research his ancestors is a shattering experience in sounds and words.

In late 1972, Jac Holzman let Ackles depart for another label, Columbia, where he recorded a fourth and final album (Five and Dime, 1973) before quitting the business to write for the theatre. He died of cancer in 1999. Among the unreleased material on this anthology is a snatch of interview where Ackles talks of a grim time living in New York, which inspired the elegant, pro-ecology title track of Subway to the Country. He sounds exactly like you'd expect: intelligent, deep and caring.

Also intriguing are the out-takes I'm Only Passing Through (American Gothic) and Old Shoes (David Ackles) which recall Scott Walker, of all people, in his jazzier moments. Additional curios include The Road to Cairo crooned in decent French (La Route á Chicago), and a proposed theme for the Jane Fonda movie, Klute (Hold Me in Your World), the anthology's sole banal dud. Otherwise Ackles' quality was, and is, consistently high.

Technical note: the first Ackles CDs, in 1993, carelessly reversed the stereo channels on the first and third albums. There is a River: The Elektra Recordings corrects this error, and all three albums now conform to the original vinyl.