Now that I’ve been living here in California for six months, I
want to head up to Mendocino County and see if I can track down
Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.
Now that I’ve been living here in California for six months, I want to head up to Mendocino County and see if I can track down Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.
I don’t really know where he lives, but I figure he leaves big footprints.
If you don’t know, Ramblin’ Jack is a folksinger. He got his nickname as much for his conversational flights of fancy as his geographical ones. He tends to answer questions with long, long stories completely unrelated to what you asked him.
And those stories are without a doubt the best I’ve ever heard.
At age 15, Jack ran away from his upscale Brooklyn Jewish family to join the rodeo. Among the things he left behind were his birth name, Elliot Adnopoz, and his mother’s dream that he become a surgeon.
“I used to roam the streets of Brooklyn looking for longhorn cattle,” he told me once. “I never did find any.”
He learned how to play guitar from a rodeo clown, rambled around the country with his hero, Woody Guthrie, and crisscrossed Europe on a motor scooter, once playing for a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train platform. When he got back in 1961, he became friends with Bob Dylan at the dying Woody’s bedside. Listen to Bob’s first album, and it’s easy to hear Jack’s influence.
Jack sings cowboy songs better than anyone else I know. Heck, no matter what song it is, I’d rather hear Jack sing and play it than just about anyone else.
It was back in November of 2000 that I spent what seemed like a week one night with Jack, his wife Jan, my friend Ned and Jack’s friend Rick Robbins. Rick, if you know Arlo Guthrie’s song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” is the guy who got caught dumping the garbage with Arlo.
It was in Saranac Lake, N.Y., where I was writing for the local daily. Jack was playing a gig at a nearby college, and I got to interview him over the phone from his New York City hotel room. He told me so many tales I could hardly get a word in edgewise. When I asked him if he’d been to our local Adirondack Mountains before, he said no but launched into a 15-minute story about how he once rowed an Adirondack guideboat up the Mystic River in Connecticut, sang to some swans who were blocking his path, raced a riverboat down the river and ended up in a squall at sea before his friends saved him.
“End of story,” he said finally. “That was a great boat.”
By the end of the interview, I was determined to hang out with Jack in person, so I told him I wanted to take a picture of him in Saranac Lake. He agreed, and we arranged to meet in the bar of the Hotel Saranac, where he was staying.
In the hotel lobby was a taxidermied black bear, sitting at a piano bench. When Jack got in, he headed straight for it, sitting down next to the bear to play. That was how I met him.
Ned and I had brought our guitars, Kenny the bartender agreed to stay open, and we ended up drinking and playing and singing and telling tales until 3 a.m. The next night at the college, Jack was fantastic, despite drinking bourbon all through the show from a cup he told the audience contained tea. In the last song – “South Coast,” a haunting epic about a bygone California – he had us on the edge of our folding chairs until he forgot the words at the harrowing climax. Only Jack would push things so close to the edge and not care if they bombed.
His last words to me afterward were, “Keep in touch.”
I want to, but where to begin? I got the Mendocino County tip from Tim Moon, whom I play guitar with. All Jack told me was that he lives on a ranch north of San Francisco – at least he did then.
It fires the imagination, though, so I have to try. I’m holding out for a good front-porch picking session, with good old songs sung full throat into the trees and pastures.
