By Tom Murray
March
11, 2004 – He's a genuine dues-paying folk music icon, and he's coming to the
University of Alberta March 13.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott plays the Myer Horowitz Theatre this Saturday as part of
the U of A Folkways Alive concert series, which celebrates folk music and its
icons. Elliott will be joined by Alberta performer Corb Lund, who opens the
show.
Elliott's been everywhere, from brushes with the Beat Generation to serenading a
pack of English teenagers (including Mick Jagger) on a railway platform, to
playing for James Dean in a Hollywood parking lot. And then there's the famous
sequence in the 1965 Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, where an
inebriated Dylan suddenly assaults Elliott's old touring partner Derrol Adams in
barely concealed excitement, pointing his finger and exclaiming 'that guy plays
like Jack, man! That guy plays like Jack!' Ramblin' Jack Elliott, early hero of
Bob Dylan, protégé to Woody Guthrie, itinerant wanderer and folk singer, has
certainly lived up to his chosen appellation.
"I saw that movie," laughs Elliott over the phone from his California
home. "And then he proceeded to name my first six albums! I went to see Bob
last summer,” the singer continues without any prodding. "He was playing
at a concert near me, about two hundred miles north of where I live in
California. I'd never been there before; it was by a big lake, and you had to go
over top of a big mountain to get there. I don't know how the buses ever made it
over the road! It was a jeep trail; got there and he says" (affects Dylan
rasp) "'there's Ramblin'. And he doesn't call me Ramblin', he always called
me Jack. I was surprised at him calling me Ramblin' and I, uh, well, I noticed
he had a moustache. I didn't want to say anything to him about it because, he
might get uptight or somethin', he's kind of a weird guy," he finishes in a
slightly bemused tone.
In case it's not immediately evident, it's best just to let Elliott take the
conversation and wander. "I really don't know him that well," he
continues. "I don't know him any better than anybody else does, and I don't
think anybody really knows Bob Dylan; I don't think he even knows himself. He's
a Gemini! They're the Twins, and they have the right to be at least two people.
That's why people that try to explain him are barking up the wrong tree; he
isn't one person, he's several."
The same could probably be said for Elliott, once Elliot Charles Adnopoz, the
son of a well-to-do New York couple. Elliott re-tooled himself into someone that
the writers of the day called the 'Brooklyn Cowboy'.
"Well, I don't know about that, but…that Brooklyn Cowboy thing, it
used to embarrass me," Elliott says in a jokingly pained voice. "It's
not well to be known that you ever set foot in New York City if you're a cowboy,
unless it was to go to the Madison Square Garden's rodeo," he explains.
"That's where I first saw cowboys, and started hanging out there. Rode my
first bucking horse in Madison Square Garden. Didn't ride him very long,"
he laughs. "About one second, I think it was. I got on three of them in one
week. The next one I rode two seconds, the one after three seconds."
It sounds like Elliott might have better enjoyed Ian Tyson's upbringing on a
cattle ranch, or maybe a childhood spent in opening act Corb Lund's hometown of
Taber.
"Yeah," he sighs, "I always envied people who grew up in the
country. My dad was born on a farm, and he talked about it all the time. That's
probably where I first started getting my yen to get out of the city. And my
parents were always talkin’ about 'gonna buy a farm, gonna get a house in the
country', they even went to look at some land, I even went and looked with them
a couple of times, never happened though. He was a doctor, and she was a
schoolteacher. They hated cowboys."