David Ackles, also with Elektra, is another singer/composer. Some of his songs possess incredible beauty (such as Road to Cairo, the title tune from his first LP), some impressive humor (such as Money for Cigarettes) but several of his tunes tend to sound too similar for our taste. Given time to build up a catalogue, Ackles could become important.

The return of David Ackles to the Bitter End is one of the most significant events in 1969. As the year and the decade both draw to a close, the Elektra singer/pianist/composer/poet seems to be a kind of capstone, a comment on all that has gone before him.
David has been called a ‘down’ performer. It has been said that his songs are so depressing that he is no fun. Now David makes jokes about the situation, declaring that his amusing song, Laissez Faire is an ‘upper-downer’. Entering another song, he warned the audience that at the end of the set he would pass out razor blades to them.
If Ackles is depressing, it is only because he makes everyone see himself clearly for the first time, and that’s not supposed to be fun. Lou Christie is supposed to be fun. David does not deal just in entertainment, he deals in revelation through entertainment. If that sounds too strong to you, you haven’t hear David yet.
David has learned to use his deep, subtle voice better than ever and his French interpretations of his own sings, The Road to Cairo and Be My Friend are stunning and effective. As his second LP, Subway to the Country begins to attract attention all around the country, David is as unassuming as he was a year ago. Sitting up there behind his piano, looking both terribly innocent and terribly wise, David is the perfect figure of the poet. He seems to be everything, young and old, cruel and gentle, brilliant and foolish, everything.
David’s new songs carry the focus of the early works a step further. They gradually seem to move in the direction of theatre rather than just song, and make frequent use of internal dialogue. David talks to himself, to the characters in his songs, to us, to the world. In a new masterpiece titled American Gothic, David described the plight of a man who ‘drinks till he drowns in his dreams’, and of his wife who thrives on a wish for new shoes. They suffer, David shows us, but as he concludes ‘They suffer least who suffer what they choose,’ we realize how if we are trapped, we are trapped in ourselves, in a chaos we have constructed for ourselves, and from which we can escape only if we are willing within ourselves to struggle.
David’s music is about struggle, but it is also about the joy of triumph over pain and despair. For David, the struggle itself, win or lose, is worth it.

Ackles has developed into a more effective folk performer than his first set at the Bitter End, Dec. 13, showed. The show opened with Morgen, a heavy group whose strong lyrics helped the unit succeed in a club accustomed to softer sounds.

Ackles was at his communicative best, both in his interpretations of his fine material, and in his comments to the packed audience. The Electra Records artist opened with bitter smiles as he sang Main Line Saloon from his latest album. That’s No Reason to Cry and Subway to the Country were other good selections from the LP, while What a Happy Day was a good song from his first Elektra album.

A bitterness now asserts itself in Ackles as evidenced by a song based on the killing of two citizens by West Coast police and another number patterned after Brecht. Ackles accompanied himself on piano throughout.

Kooper headlined a beautifully balanced concert last weekend at Town Hall. The concert’s balance should be noted because it was not the normal run of pop performance where each act on the bill attempts to blast the audience out of its collective seats. Poet/composer/singer David Ackles opened the evening for Kooper, who was backed by the Eddy Jacobs Exchange.…

The concert’s balance referred to earlier was effected by the unadorned, subtle, moving performance of David Ackles. As of this moment, Ackles is not a widely known talent. That situation is bound to change with a broadening personal appearances such as these and exposure of his excellent compositions.

Contrasted with Kooper’s performance, Ackles just walked to the piano at centre stage, dressed in blue jeans, work shirt, and construction boots, and proceeded to accompany himself on a half dozen of his own works. The word ‘work’ is much more fitting than ‘song’ to describe the music which David Ackles writes.

Ackles’ ‘works’ transmit a feeling of lived experience, of honest emotion and, as their creator, his rendition of them is totally effective. As a singer, Ackles is a sort of hybrid. Essentially he has the vocal character of a cabaret singer; one perfectly suited for intimate clubs where he can deal with the audience on a note to note basis. But there is also a great deal of the minstrel, the open road singer, in him as well.

All in all a marvelously enjoyable evening.

Laments of an Unknown Muse - printed in "The Guardian", 26^th March 1999, written by Jonathan Romney

Last Friday, this paper ran the Obituary of one of those people that you'd have to call a Footnote in pop history - the American singer-songwriter David Ackles, 1937-99. Ackles didn't, as I recall, make the Guardian's alternative poll of great pop records - perhaps he was too shadowy even by the standards of Nick Drake, who was at No 1. Christopher Hawtree's obit told me a lot I didn’t know about Ackles' life (it "resembled a Jim Thompson novel") before and after his recording years. In fact, It made me realise that, although I've owned his first record for over 20 years, 1 actually knew nothing about him at all.

Ackles' third LP, American Gothic (1972), was acclaimed as an ambitious panorama of American imagery, but It hasn't worn well. It's a little too stentorian, the elaborately-orchestrated songs rather heavily wearing their intention to address the state of the nation. But it still resonates, once you realise that Ackles wasn't working remotely in the tradition of American pop, but had more in common with the French chanson tradition. In his disillusioned, caustic lyricism and deep, barbed voice, he was a close cousin of Jacques Brel.

On American Gothic and its predecessor, Subway To The Country, Ackles experimented with styles, from lounge ballads to bluegrass. Subway shows his storytelling capacities at full pitch; in the startling Candy Man, a Vietnam veteran returns to take revenge on his nation by slipping porn booklets into bags of sweets. Ackles plays such stories dead straight, but listen to the scowling richness of his voice, and you hear a direct precursor of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads.

But the great Ackles record is his first, self-titled album on Elektra, from 1968. It has some of that label's trademark morbidity of the period (Elektra also signed the Doors and Nico), but Ackles scrupulously avoided the personality game, writing songs too detached and sardonic to play the wounded-self card. Even on the sleeve he's barely visible, a blur behind a spiderweb of cracked glass.

The opening track, The Road To Cairo, was recorded by Julie Driscoll as a follow-up to her Swinging London anthem, This Wheel's On Fire (imagine a parallel world in which Ackles song, rather than Dylan's, became the theme to Absolutely Fabulous). The title suggests hippie-trail exotica, but the destination is more likely Cairo, Georgia - one of those US locales like Phoenix or Tulsa that the lovelorn in songs are forever trying to reach, but never do. The hero of this solemn blues song hitches a ride from a rich boy, anticipates seeing his folks again, then has second thoughts: "They're better thinking I'm dead."

There's never any safe haven in these songs. The narrator of Sonny Come Home wanders through a nightmare landscape of glass and broken bicycle wheels, keeps hearing the summons to dinner, but expires in a staccato gasp: "I can't come home". Set to the carnival organ that was an atmospheric staple at the time, it's uncannily close to The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster's existential chiller of the same year

His Name Is Andrew is possibly the most desolate song I've ever heard. All we know is that Andrew works in a canning factory, has no friends, is simply passing through life waiting for the day he dies. He's been brought up on hymns, and believes them. But by the end, the songs are telling him God is dead, and he believes them too. We can try to imagine what the story's about - religious crisis, blue collar realism, psychotic dysfunction - but it's the missing details that make the words so telling.

What's even more striking is the sound - the bell-like tolls and swells of organ. Played by Michael Fonfara, who later worked with Lou Reed, the organ, more churchlike than bluesy, gives the album a self-enclosed intensity that Ackles never attempted again. It sounds very much a 1968 record, its after-the-party melancholy suggesting grim sobriety in the wake of the psychedelic boom, although some of flower-power's orientalist hangovers persist to elegant effect - the fluid bass, the feathery guitar lamentations.

The record is an extraordinary one-off achievement - it occupies a universe bordering on Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, and the Band's first album, not to mention latter-day Scott Walker, but with a starkness all its own. Somehow, Ackles never went down in history - although there was a brief flurry of interest in the mid-eighties when Elvis Costello covered one of his songs live. These days, Ackles records can't be readily had (I've never heard or seen his fourth one). His debut was re-released on CD a few years ago, but has since vanished. If you find it, jump on it. The footnotes often have the best stories.

Michael Fonfara (organ), Danny Weis (guitar), Douglas Hastings (guitar), Jerry Penrod (bass) and John Keliehor (percussion) were already veterans from the likes of Iron Butterfly (Weis and Penrod) and Electric Flag (Fonfara), whilst Hastings surfaced briefly in Buffalo Springfield. They later provided the nucleus for Rhinoceros, who made two disappointing albums for Elektra. Fonfara, whose wandering, melodic organ style gave the band's sound much of its distinctive identity, later had the very dubious distinction of playing on Lou Reed's worst album, Growing Up in Public, in 1980.

David Ackles (Elektra EKS 74022) was released to good reviews in early 1968, and Elektra went to work promoting it. From the start, Ackles was viewed as something of an artist's artist, with many of the first songs covered by contemporaries (Down River by Spooky Tooth, Road to Cairo by Julie Driscoll & the Brian Auger Trinity). Elektra pulled two singles from the album for release in the UK, the first of which, Down River had a French-language version of Road to Cairo, re-titled La Route á Chicago, as the b-side. The second single paired the Brechtian Laissez Faire with  Blue Ribbons. Neither release troubled the charts.

David Ackles was reissued in 1971 (and again on CD, albeit briefly, in 1993. There are two sleeves, the first (and best) a classic William S Harvey design, with an out-of-focus Ackles gazing though a cracked window pane - so perfectly evocative of the mood of the record. The second sleeve, used for the 1871 re-release which was re-titled Road to Cairo, featured a more conventional shot. This is the most immediately accessible of Ackles' records, although it must be said that there are songs on here that could only have been written by him (notably His Name is Andrew) The piano/organ led band sound relaxed, even a little under-rehearsed - note the out of time re-entry after the pause at the end of Road to Cairo - and the whole thing is very much live-in-the-studio. Highlights include the opener, Road to Cairo, a slow, blues-based rocker telling the tale of an Ackles archetype, the drifter who yearns for home, but knows he'll never go back there. It was a near hit for Julie Driscoll & the Brian Auger Trinity (their follow-up to This Wheel's on Fire). Blue Ribbons, the song that got him signed to Elektra, is a literate take on the Watts race riots. Down River, strangely beloved of Phil Collins, is another fine narrative ballad. It is distinguished by one of the great fade-outs, when the drums and lead guitar join in for the last 50 seconds to somehow evoke the pained dignity of the central character as he says goodbye to his ex-love, who has married his best friend. The aforementioned His Name is Andrew is a song which has divided Ackles aficionados over the years. A six-minute torrent of swirling organ and profoundly pessimistic lyrics concerning Andrew's loss of faith and stoic endurance, to some it all sounds just too heavy handed. An unusual theme for a "rock" record - only Scott Walker's Seventh Seal springs to mind as an immediate comparison of a song tackling so intensely the themes of faith, doubt and mortality. The album closes with the plaintive Be My Friend. This is a showcase for the album's unsung star, organist Michael Fonfara. Listen to the closing solo and tell me if you have ever heard anyone wring so much emotion from a Hammond organ.

Although the album, and the various cover versions, did not sell well, there was a sense that Elektra had found themselves a major new talent. A slow burner, yes - someone who would establish himself over time - but a significant new voice nonetheless. Many years later, Holzman was to say that Ackles was the Elektra artist who didn't "make it", who most deserved to.

The second David Ackles album, Subway to the Country (Elektra EKS 74060, 1969) was an altogether bigger production. Fred Myrow, an old college friend of Ackles, was drafted in to do arrangements, and Russ Miller alone got the production credits, although Ackles himself remembers that David Anderle was certainly present. Some 22 musicians appeared on the list of credits, although only Hastings survived from the first album. The whole sound of the record was more upmarket - the rawness of the first record's arrangements being replaced by a sophistication and variety that was to become characteristic of Ackles' later work. Although compared to the first album, there are fewer heart-stopping moments, the songwriting is mature, literate, and consistent. Dealing with such unfashionable and difficult themes as mental illness (Inmates of the Institution) and child abuse (Candy Man), much of the album is "difficult" in the manner of the first album's His Name is Andrew. Many of the arrangements contain elements of film soundtrack music - the introduction to Inmates of the Institution, for example, sounds like a Bernard Herrmann score for the Hitchcock movie you've never seen.

Mainline Saloon is a worthy addition to the inglorious canon of addiction songs in popular music. Ackles barks out the twisted poetry over the backing of a shambling bar band, and in doing so provided the prototype that Tom Waits was to develop to such bizarre extremes a decade or so later. Out on the Road, a Gospel-styled epic, is one of Ackles' most conventional songs and features his most unhinged recorded vocal performance. Twenty two musicians were credited on the album (including Lonnie Mack, incidentally), and it sounds like they were all joining in here - Ackles himself roaring to be heard above them with a passion not normally associated with sensitive singer-songwriter types. Finally, the title track was released as a single, and would have sat quite comfortably in the charts next to the orchestral pop compositions of Jimmy Webb.

Again, Elektra put some effort into promoting the record and Ackles went on the road in the States to good reviews. He supported Joni Mitchell, and was himself supported by struggling newcomer Elton John - a huge Ackles fan at the time. A free single was included with the album, which featured Ackles talking about the genesis of the title track and the song itself, which was a lush ballad. Again, the record failed to sell in significant quantities, but Elektra kept faith.

What he did next was leave Elektra by mutual consent. And while this is often taken to be a euphemism for "resign or we'll sack you", in this case it appeared to be genuine. Elektra had funded three significant albums, including what must have been a very costly American Gothic, and their artist, although highly regarded, was still only a modest seller. Ackles was considerably in debt to Elektra, having gone over budget on all three records and there was clearly no way they would, in the circumstances, be able to fund and adequately promote a fourth album. Ackles went to the Elektra office to announce that he thought it was time to move on and he got the sense that they had been thinking the same for some time. There were no hard feelings, with both Ackles and Holzman reminiscing fondly and respectfully in later years.

Clive Davis, head of Columbia at the time, was a long-time Ackles' enthusiast. Ackles signed to Columbia. With a new start at a major label, and riding a wave of critical enthusiasm, it looked as if Ackles' time might come at last.

Although he was grateful for the reviews for American Gothic, they placed Ackles under considerable pressure. He had been credited with discovering a whole new direction in popular music and felt that the burden of sustaining that momentum was more than he could reasonably be expected to bear. He talked in interviews in the mid-seventies of experiencing something like writer's block - every idea he came up with he discarded, thinking, "this is not as good as American Gothic". In the end, he resolved to ignore the pressure and sidestep the issue by going off at a tangent, by scaling down his sound. The record he released as a follow-up to American Gothic was called Five and Dime (Columbia KC 32466, 1973) and it was very different from its predecessor.

Recorded largely at Ackles' home on a four-track, it is, for him, a modest and simple record. As well as writing and arranging it, he this time produced it, gathering together a large group of friends and associates to assist him. The relaxed atmosphere and freedom from time constraints contributed to the warmth of the record. It was the first of his albums to come in on time and under budget. Sadly, this is a completely forgotten record and even many Ackles fans are unaware of its existence. It was never released in the UK and has never been issued anywhere on CD [at the point this article was written]. Obtaining a copy will involve persistence, contacts and patience. There are few standout songs, although the standard of writing and performance is consistently high. One notably unusual song (for Ackles) is the light-hearted, ironic Surf's Down, featuring the inimitable Dean Torrance on falsetto backing vocals. A gentle poke at the surfers of the previous decade - who surprisingly once included Ackles amongst their number - who had grown up but not moved on. The song is musically a plausible pastiche of early Beach Boys/Jan & Dean, with Ackles impressively transforming his seasoned, throaty and theatrical voice into a suitably nasal, adolescent whine. Aberfan, the story of the Welsh mining disaster, when a slag-heap collapsed onto a school, is a complex and challenging piece, more in the American Gothic style and, in a way, sounds out of place here. The lyrical sentiments, although worthy, sound clumsy, but the song is distinguished by a sinister, suspenseful arrangement. The closing track, Postcard, is a typical wistful ballad, apparently inspired by Ackles' stay in England.

“How could one tell where the American dream ended and the Faustian nightmare began?” Leslie Fiedler asks in a famous 1960 essay; in the same essay, he claims that the literature of America is “essentially a gothic one.” It is from this tension between the lofty religious dreams of America’s first settlers, and the deeply conflicted reality of slavery and greed, that the country’s greatest art emerges. Because it is deeply involved with the dark side of the American dream, much of its literature can, according to Fiedler, be described as a great tree of American gothic art – with branches from Hawthorne and Poe to Hubert Selby and David Lynch.

When the unjustly neglected singer-songwriter David Ackles titled his 1972 masterpiece album American Gothic, he was presumably not thinking of Leslie Fiedler’s literary criticism. The cover art includes a clever parody on the iconic painting of the same title (1930) by Grant Wood, with David and his wife Janice posing as Wood’s puritan farmers. Since the title song of the album also clearly references Wood’s painting, with lyrics depicting a farming couple very much like the husband and wife painted by Wood, it is clear that Ackles used his title to hint at the painting.

Yet this does not mean that Fiedler’s discussion of American gothic art is irrelevant to Ackles’s music. In fact, his album, like the famous works of literature discussed by Fiedler, gains its momentum from the hopes and dreams, frustrations and addictions of Americans living in-between religious dreams and an often nightmarish reality. Released at the end of the optimistic Sixties and under the shadow of the Vietnam War, it is a many-faceted and disturbing vision of America – and a worthy chapter in the history of American gothic art.

‘American Gothic’

Beginning with title song ‘American Gothic’, which opens the album, the listener is offered a painfully honest portrait of American dreams gone wrong. While Grant Wood’s painting is sometimes seen as a tribute to the religious pioneer spirit, many view it as an incisive parody of puritan hypocrisy, ridiculing the farming couple with their old-fashioned clothing and ominous pitch-fork. Is it this darker perspective that Ackles’s title song tunes in to.

Musically, ‘American Gothic’ has a strong theatrical feel, built around a repeating piano riff in A minor embellished by brass parts. The combination of piano and horns, shifting rhythms, unexpected harmonic changes, as well as the absence of any sort of instrumental or solo section, all link to 1920s/30s vaudeville or variety music rather than to 1970s pop music, placing the story in a historical setting in keeping with Wood’s painting.

Over this accompaniment, an unnamed narrator dissects the life of farmers Horace and Molly Jenkins, names sufficiently old-fashioned to fit with the backward-looking painting. The singer first describes Molly’s and then Horace’s Saturday night, concluding with a depiction of their Sunday morning and a general summary of their ‘marriage’.

Molly spends her Saturday night ‘snuggling down with strangers’ while dreaming  of ‘shoes’. Her husband Horace reads dirty magazines ‘in a half-filled marriage bed’, but is so ashamed of himself that he ‘gets blind drunk instead’. The parallel structure of the first two sections stresses the Jenkins’ complete separation from each other, but also the similarity of their separate suffering. For both have an obsession, or dream, that relates to significant themes in American history.

Molly is materialistically obsessed with shoes and wealth, both unobtainable as a mere farmer’s wife, and resorts to sex with strangers to afford new shoes. Horace desperately wants to be reborn a pious Christian but is inhibited by his wicked wife, and drowns his dream in masturbation and booze. The line ‘trades the milk for booze’ seems a further indication that the setting is 1920s small-town America, where Prohibition laws (1919-1933) prohibited the sale of liquor.

The final verse brings the Jenkins together at the breakfast table at Sunday morning, and sums up their marriage with wry comments on his Christian dream (‘break the bread and cannot speak’), the ‘rustling of his paper’ reminding of ‘paper legs with paper seams’, and her obsession with ‘shoes’. All in all, the song presents a nightmare marriage brought about by dreams gone wrong, with the repetitive marching band music ironically echoing the Jenkins’ lives stood still.

Like Gatsby’s dream of wealth and love, the Jenkins are possessed by dreams that link to wider issues in American history. Molly’s dream of money and shoes clearly resonates with materialistic tendencies in American culture. Similarly, Horace’ desire for a pious, religious life reminds of the first settlers of America, who yearned to build a ‘city upon a hill’, outshining all the world in their uncompromising religious purity. Ackles’s gothic song clearly depicts a situation where these dreams have ended and the Faustian nightmare of alcoholism and sex-obsession has begun.

‘Montana Song’

In the ten songs that follow this disturbing album opener, Ackles paints a varied picture of American life, ranging from redemptive love (‘Love’s Enough’) and religion (‘Family Band’) to the devastating effects of war  (‘Ballad of the Ship of State’), racism (‘Blues for Billy Whitecloud’), environmental pollution (‘Oh, California!) and divorce (‘Waiting for the Moving Van’). Many of the songs are peopled by loners who are unable to adapt to the pressures of society – but hold on to their dreams in spite of all.

In all this is a dark vision of America past and present, yet the concluding song of the album, one of Ackles’s greatest achievements, turns to the lofty religious idealism of a family of settlers in nineteenth-century Montana. Gone is all the irony of the song ‘American Gothic’ as the narrator searches among the gravestones for his long-forgotten past. To music reminiscent of Aaron Copeland’s hymn to an Appalachian spring, Ackles salvages the great dreams of the past from the uncertain present.

As the singer goes looking for his fathers, ‘Bible on his arm’, he discovers the story of James McKennon (born 1862) who married Leantha ‘with the fragile name’ in 1882. They tame their bit of prairie, make the land obey to their religious aspirations and found a family that will stand the test of time. Or so they hope. As the music rises to a jazzy syncopated beat, their children head off to the newly built cities, and are lost to the ways of tradition and religion, looking for a new world. James is left to watch until the darkness falls, knowing the boys are gone, and he never loves the land so well ‘from that day on’.

There is no irony or ridicule in Ackles’s lament for an American way of life that has passed away. In its respect for the old farming couple, it reminds one William Wordsworth’s great ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’. Like Ackles, Wordsworth uses a farmer couple and their children to depict the painful transition to a different, industrialized way of life. There is a similar poignancy in James McKennon who ‘watched until the darkness fell’ and Wordworth’s old sheep-herd Michael ‘sitting alone’ beside the ruined sheepfold that he once imagined to be his great legacy to pass on to the next generation.

Ackles’s song is a tribute to the religious spirit of those farmers who built the country, whose determination and ideals conquered and civilized the wild fields and mountains. The singer, a city-born child of the 1950s and 1960s, as Ackles was himself, recognizes something of greatness in the spirit of these farmers, the other side of the hypocrisy revealed in the song ‘American Gothic’. We are separated from these distant forefathers by the currents of time and history, he seems to say; and yet, listening to his song, we can feel that, even in our polluted and anonymous cities, something of their blood still runs through our veins.

Conclusion

Between religious dreams and Faustian nightmares Ackles spins his tales of American life. The album opens with a disturbing vision of a 1930s farming couple who drown their religious and materialistic dreams in booze and sex. And yet it ends with a stately tribute to the pioneer spirit, to a couple who tame the land by the sheer power of their religious vision of the future. Squashed in-between, Ackles depicts the possibilities and difficulties of a present fraught with war and pollution, racism and greed.

His ambitious song cycle is a worthy part of the history of American gothic art as described by Leslie Fiedler and others, and one of the rare occasions where popular music rises to the level of great art. And it is by no means outdated: the themes of unsatisfied religious and materialistic longings, cheap pornography, alcoholism, and domestic hypocrisy are closely bound up with the American psyche – but equally so are the high-minded religious ideals and strength of spirit depicted in ‘Montana Song’. Ackles reminds us that the struggle between dreams and nightmares is not only a thing of the past – but also the essential fabric of American life in the present.

References / Further reading

Ackles, David. American Gothic. Elektra, 1972, LP (see Record Listings - link below).

*Baker, Michael. The Golden Horse Is in Hell: David Ackles’ Theatre of Melancholy. Perfect Sound Forever. May 2006.

*Brend, Mark. American Troubadours: Ground-Breaking Singer-Songwriters of the 1960s. London: Backbeat Books, 2001.

Brend, Mark. Down River, In Search of David Ackles Jawbone August 2025

*Fiedler, Lesley. Love and Death in the American Novel. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 1960.

Nijsen, Kasper. There Is a River: David Ackles’ Uncertain Legacy: Perfect Sound Forever. September 2012.

Wood, Grant. American Gothic. Art Institute of Chicago, 1930, online.

Wordworth, William. ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’. 1800, online.