Today’s birthday boy, Bert Jansch, the Scottish guitarist, was
a late discovery for me. My daughter Kajsa brought some of his music around
after the release of his career-long, double-CD retrospective, Dazzling
Stranger, in 2000. His music goes back to those fabled mid-Sixties when he
influenced the likes of Jimmy Page and Neil Young and played with Pentangle and
was part of that Brit-folk movement that included Richard Thompson of Fairport
Convention.
I did all I could to make sure Kajsa heard plenty of that
stuff, growing up, and she repaid me with Jansch’s stuff. We finally saw him
play, around 2007, in Brooklyn, on the tour for The Black Swan (2006), and the dude checked out in 2011, at 67.
That night we saw him, he played today’s song, which was
already my favorite track on Dazzling
Stranger. It was written by Jackson C. Frank, an American guitarist with a
sad career who wrote songs Simon & Garfunkel and Nick Drake and others
recorded. I like Jansch’s version of the song, as it appears on Stranger,
better than Frank’s; Jansch's version is lifted from Live at the 12 Bar Club in 1995. Jansch slurs his way through the
lyrics at points but that just helps to give credence to the fact that “me and
room service are living a life of sin.” Can’t find that version online, so here he
is performing the song on TV around the time I saw him live.
Frank certainly hit hard times and the song is a wary blues
number by someone who knows that the rough life is the source of the songs he
sings. Jansch makes it sound rueful and sadder, wiser, but at the same time
there’s a gruff “fuck off” in his tone too. This is not someone asking for
pity, or, as the Bard might say, “here is one who neither begs nor fears your
favors nor your hate.” The blues run the game, “wherever I’ve been and gone.”
It’s the same everywhere. Maybe when I’m
older, baby, some place down the line / I’ll wake up older, and stop all my
trying.
More than the lyrics of course, the quality that makes me
sit up and take notice is the guitar figure that supports the song—Jansch plays it without vocals, around 3:27-47 on the video—and which sounds sweet and wistful, like passages you’ve heard in Brit folk acoustic numbers everywhere. Somewhat
seasoned, somewhat cryptic, somewhat resigned, somewhat hopeful. What can I
say? Though I’ve never plucked an instrument with anything like skill, this
kind of music runs my game.
That said, I’m not as steeped in everything Jansch gets up
to as I might be. I have to be in a certain mood and, sure, that mood does come
upon me when we get back to EST here in the northeast and it’s November with
Halloween gone and Thanksgiving looming. There’s a spirit to such days that
makes songs like Jansch sings, many of them ye olde traditional tunes, quite
welcome. Which reminds me that, if all goes well, I’ll see Scotland next
summer, England too, though I won’t be catching “a boat to England,” rather
catching a boat in Denmark to take me to those places, eventually. I’ll have to
make sure I’ve got this song on my iPod for the trip.
Living is a gamble,
baby
Loving’s much the same
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