The Tangle of it All

RW in Albion, CA 1993

pic by DNL

Robin Williamson ruined my life.

Eleven years my senior, I first heard his music when I was 14. After that I was never able to take any normal, acceptable path in life. I wanted only to respond to that voice of strange innocence. Curiously, though I was not at that slim age able to apprehend the great scope of his lyric gift, it was inherent in the voice.

Robin Williamson is the finest song poet to have emerged since the 1960s.

The hardest thing for me artistically was to break free of his influence. What worked was to become a New Wave Power Pop rocker. This did the trick. When I took to acoustic traditional-based music, I did so as my own man with a bleating though unique album called DARK AGES (currently out of print). "A bit too Byronic for me," said the kindest critic.

In the 1990s I became Robin's West Coast Tour Manager. Simply this meant that whenever he was touring the West Coast of America, I was his driver, sidekick and batman to his Robin. Robin's East Coast Tour Manager was harper and fiddle player Jay Ansill. Jay is, I understand, engaged in transcribing many of Robin's recordings into accurate written notation.

The western tours always meandered from Los Angeles north to Mendocino and once to Seattle. Somewhere upon the freeways of Northern California, when the new jokes had been exhausted, a long-running conversation held over from the previous year's tour would resume. To say it was a long rambling discourse on songwriting, on poetry, his own work, my work, the traditional muse, on music, the role of the artist etc. would put a far too serious cast to it. But it was something of that ilk and probably, I instigated it. I already knew his songs and their darkling meaning. Now I got to know his performing method — very different from mine, aside from the obvious disparity in experience — and I got to know his mind.

There I found great affinity and this invites the question. Was the affinity created in me by the influence of the work? Or did the affinity bring me to the work in the first place? Either way, that's where and how I found his work. And his work is what matters.

I wrote, "Robin Williamson is the finest song poet to have emerged since the 1960s." On this site I wish to show how that's so and, in the process, sharpen what seems now to be a very dulled and narrow understanding of what makes a good song.

RW with Bob and Doi DeWitt of Finegold Concerts

pic by DNL

go to Robin and Bina Williamson's offcial site

click here for beGlad fanzine site for ISB and RW

visit Jay Ansill's fascinating site

Further Reading:

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