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I met Jonathan Stevens at Woody Guthrie's candlelit table one summer evening some years ago. It was in a round house set among
the dusty oaks and dry ratllesnaked foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
In the 1990s I would perform from time to time for the Finegold Trust in the Mariposa area of the Central Sierras: Gold Country.
I would find myself performing on the back stoop of a church, in a library and on a balcony above a saloon. If you chose to
accept the home-stay that went along with the gig, then you stayed with the trustees themselves, Doi and Bob DeWitt.
The DeWitts lived on a sprawling old ranch where the barns and out-buildings were filled with Bob's sculptures: wild Pre-Columbian
like figures made of red clay found around the ranch. The figures were everywhere, as a matter of fact. On fence posts and
gates and all through the round house in which Bob and Doi lived. Here you could also find Bob's fine drawings of Minatours,
nymphs and other characters of myth and folklore, many in fertile embrace or obvious contemplation thereof.
If you needed a contract from the Finegold Trust, it would often be returned adorned with such creatures and duly signed and
dated.
The central feature of the DeWitt's round home was a large dark wooden table where after performances we would have a meal,
nearly all of which consisted of food Doi would have grown and made herself. Their self-reliance and creative abundance never
failed to impress. Neither did the fact that they were both (back then) octogenarians. Or for that matter, the fact that the
table had once belonged to Woody Guthrie. "Woody wrote his novel BOUND FOR GLORY at that table," Bob casually explained.*
In the 1950s, the DeWitts lived in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles. There, as legend has it, Bob, the actor Will Geer and
Woody Guthrie were the resident bad boys.
"Woody Guthrie," Bob told me on one of my visits, "was a GREAT folk singer and a LOUSY human being."
He was very curious to know what Jonathan Stevens thought about Guthrie. Stevens wasn't personally at the table that night,
but his words were. Bob, Doi and I took turns reading Jonathan's essay, which he had just sent, on Guthrie, the Depression
and on metaphor. It concluded with words to Jonathan's song about Franklin Roosevelt sung to the tune of the "Buffalo Skinners."
At last, I realized, I had met someone with the same approach to traditional material I had. On the strength of this essay,
I invited him to perform in the concert series I ran for and out of my daughter's elementary school in the Southern Sierras.
As it turned out, Jonathan was planning a West Coast tour. Without hearing a note of his music, I booked him. As a precautionary
afterthought —now there's an oxymoron for you— I asked him to send me a copy of his latest musical work.
Shortly, his marvelous CD entitled MISSING IN AMERICA arrived. It's cover artwork was a striking detail from a piece of fabric
art by Nancy Simon. She and Stevens have collaborated creatively elsewhere: they have two children together. The songs were
better even than I had hoped they would be. One song especially struck me. A very simple and elegantly pretty song, "Luna"
was a meditation on the Moon in all her aspects. From the attitudes we adopted from the Greeks about her to the devotion of
Houston Space Center, Stevens deftly incorporated the whole of her meaning to us.
I met him in the flesh, though not in the Biblical sense, in Portland Oregon at the Folk Alliance Conference. His CD album
promo pic showed a man of alluring countenance. The photograph however was not deceiving. Here was a stunningly beautiful
human being: long hair braided into two pig tails; an Errol Flynn-like goatee; flashing teeth, piercing eyes, hands that seemed
to dance. We attended one of the event's showcase performances together. Right from the start he seemed to tremble like a
kettle about to scream. He dismissed the light-hearted pop/folk of the Five Chinese Brothers out of hand. But when Marely's
Ghost launched into their bluegrass versions of Bob Marley songs, he literally leaped disgusted to his feet and vaulted over
his seat and over some empty seats behind till he found a clear aisle by which he could exit the theater. After the conference
ended we met at the Amtrak station where Dave Soyars and I were heading home and Jonathan was headed to his next gig in Eugene.
The train was delayed by a mudslide so we pulled out our guitars to entertain each other. I asked him to sing his FDR/Buffalo
Skinners song. He obliged along with several others. His voice was a fine powerful and (again!) sexy baritone. He had been
a street singer in his home town of Montreal and I knew there would be no need for a PA system when he performed for us in
California Hot Springs in a week's time.
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| California Hot Springs audience anxiosly awaits Jonathan Stevens |
| Jonathan Stevens performance flyer |
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| February 25, 1995 |
| Here's Johnny! |
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| at Hot Springs Elementary School |
Due to the fact that Jonathan's Hot Springs School concert was the only entertainment for a hundred square miles and partly
due to that alluring promo picture, we had a packed house for his show. In a way, his political and philosophical stance should
have made him the wrong performer for our mostly conservative Christian audience. In "Leper of Love," a song about aids ("you
fear my blood") he uses the focal point of the Stonewall Riot as a starting place and places himself on site: "I raised my
skirts and kicked a pig," he sang, pinning our ears to the wall. Singing about Noah, he criticized the ancient mariner for
abandoning his friends in favor of animals on the mere advice of a delussionary voice. In between he unrolled funny anecdotes
ornamented with pithy political asides. And so it went. And the audience loved him. A few days later my friend Dan said, 'I
detest his politics and philosophy but no question about it, that man knows his Bible." He paused. "It was a good show."
I suspect now that it may have been the high spot of his career. Dave Soyars had reviewed MIA for DIRTY LINEN magazine. Anything
distinctive he had noticed had been excised by the editor. What remained damned by faint praise. Jonathan wrote to me from
home (Massachusetts) that he was outraged. We enjoyed a year or so of correspondence. His letters seemed to be saying: nobody
gets what I'm doing; nobody would care if they did; I can't go on; I'm going to quit. My letters seemed to be saying: your
talent will see you through; hang in there buddy! [All the things Robin Williamson and the piper Jay Salter would say to me
a few years later when my life started to come apart at the seams] And, not long after, Jonathan Stevens did throw in the
towel. Though he still writes poetry, he is living happily ever after as a baker. It is very difficult to lead a professional
life in the arts when your audience doesn't even know what you are doing let alone how to evaluate it. I myself have had to
live happily ever after as an arts administrator for much the same reason.
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| DNL giving driving directions... |
According to a recent e-mail I received from Jonathan Stevens himself, he is even writing songs again. He shared some verses
he had been hanging on the old British Ballad, "John Barleycorn." Here are two:
there's a ghost inside the baker now
hungry for the bread
haunted by the missing words
rising in his head
clad in white, a dance with the peel
buttering your toast
trading loaves for love
and food for the hungry ghost.
Pretty good!
Jonathan Stevens' first album, CREATIONLAND, was released in 1987 on Bruce Kaplan's prestigious Flying Fish label. "It was
a million-seller as they say in Maine," he explained to the California Hot Springs audience. "I have a million in the cellar."
The cover picture inspired Bruce to comment: "You really want to sell this album, don't you." Another picture of Jonathan
looking gorgeous this time on the beach in Nicaragua on the morning of his birthday in 1985. At precisely the same moment,
my daughter Ursula was being born in Hollywood. She also looked gorgeous.
ARROWS OF WORDS was a privately released as a cassette-only in 1989. MIA, his big push to do it right, make it obvious and
have it taste good, he released in 1994.
From his three releases, I assembled a DAT tape sampler of the songs I thought to be his best. I would make cassette copies
for friends. Unfortunately, my DAT machine broke down soon after. The following is an edited version of the essay which I
stuffed into the cassette box along with the tape.
*"Dad was 'pulling your chain' about the table," Bob's son Billy told me on September 29th, 2007. I had gone to Mariposa to
sing at Bob's memorial celebration. He had died on August 22, 2007 at the age of 94. "Woody wrote the book long before Dad
knew him."
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Roaring Metaphorties: The Songs of Jonathan Stevens
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| at our home in Pine Flat, California |
Jonathan Stevens is one of the best song poets I know. He himself has never commented on my term song-poet which is a term
I found once in an essay by T.S. Eliot. I think Pound also used it. To me it means simply that poets are now singing their
words again. But Jonathan — like most song poets — came not up the ladder of print poetry to make a lateral jump
to that of song, as did Leonard Cohen for instance. Instead, he aligns himself with the protest singers and topical song writers
who made their marks in the mid and late 1960s. To my mind, he is better by far than Bob Dylan. I admit a nearly complete
ignorance about Phil Ochs so I can make no comparison there. That Stevens’s work seems completely unknown on all fronts
is a dreary indicator of our current cultural mediocrity; our inability to differentiate between gold and iron pyrite.
He is a diligent craftsman. He understands words and their power and their powerlessness. Like early and mid-period Dylan
there is much that is coded in his songs. But this technique usually boils over into a wordplay that cuts psychologically
the listener and the singer both. He is a practitioner and a firm believer in metaphor. In a genre plagued with sloppy workmanship
these things alone should distinguish him. His songs also pass the acid test of songwriting: Is the song worth singing? Set
aside cleverness, subject matter, the melody the words ride and ask: is the song worth singing?
Prospective listeners have two ways of approaching the songs of Jonathan Stevens. The one is to hear him as a very personal
songwriter. As such, he is honest and self revealing. However, he reveals nothing of himself that is not in itself social
action. The second approach to his songs is perhaps the most obvious. He is a topical songwriter; he writes about social issues
but, as he has said more than once in my presence, he never begins a song till he knows intimately his personal relationship
with what he wishes to sing about. That personal statement should relate to the world at large; that social criticism is meaningless
without knowing the mind set and motivation of the critic — this is old wisdom that new folksingers often forget. But
it is a wisdom which Jonathan obeys perhaps to a fault. He is perhaps a method singer and method itself always threatens to
deaden the talent that employs it. Be that as it may, it doesn’t seem to have happened here. Also, as I said, Jonathan
employs metaphor frequently. And here we refer not to the simile where the ‘as’ or ‘like’ is merely
silent, but to the metaphor that empowers the word with the magic that makes one thing another. Metaphor, as such, is not
often found in the tool box of the protest singer. Invective, didacticism, secret codes — yes. But no primal magic.
Brilliantly produced by Walter Strauss, MISSING IN ACTION, his only CD release, has been roundly ignored by critics everywhere.
Shame on them and shame on us for trusting them!
I like the songs of Jonathan Stevens very much. I like how that which is historical or autobiographical becomes poetry. I
am dazzled by the intuition and clarity of vision in his songs. I like the physical sound of his guitar playing and the richness
of his voice. I like that he plays harmonica backwards with the high reeds on his left, the low on his right.
I like how there seems a palpable Truth in Jonathan Steven’s songs. I believe that good songwriters —I’m
calling the good ones song poets, it seems — have their lives dictated by the Truth of their songs. Mere songwriters
tend to have it the other way round. Jonathan Stevens is no mere songwriter.
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| JS & DNL air jamming |
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