Album Rescue Series: The Beastie Boys ‘License To Ill’

It’s 1986 and I am a fresh-faced skinny 23 year old. I’m working for Roadstar PA Systems of Sheffield who are located in the Socialist republic of South Yorkshire (sic) in the UK. Roadstar are the new upstart audio hire company supplying large concert PA systems to international rock ‘n roll bands like The Eurythmics, The Alarm, Runrig and a host of other bands that have long since disappeared into obscurity. I’d only worked for this company for 18 months when I’m told my next tour will be a Def Jam Record’s package ‘Raising Hell Tour’ of Europe featuring; Run DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys. Back in 1986 very few people, me included, had heard of Def Jam Records and I remember being very disappointed that my boss at Roadstar had assigned me to this tour. I was bottom of the heap on the audio crew, my job was to set up and pack down the audio equipment and I didn’t even get to touch a mixing console, never mind mix a band. On paper this wasn’t a very appealing gig, in fact it sucked big time. The ‘bands’ weren’t actual bands but one bloke playing some records, with one or two, or in the case of The Beastie Boys’, three blokes shouting over the top of these beats. The first show was two nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on Friday 12^th and Saturday 13^th September 1986. Because I’d left school at the age of 16 my education was extremely limited and I didn’t know that the name Odeon was the name used to describe ancient Greek and Roman buildings built specifically for music; singing exercises, musical shows and poetry competitions. With 39 years of hindsight, and lots of expensive education behind me, the name seems very apt. In Europe, back in the mid 80s, Hip Hop music was a relatively new phenomenon, and as with anything new, it was largely misunderstood and mistreated by the media.

Original backstage access all areas pass from the Raising Hell European tour. This was the first time I met the Beastie Boys.

Rap music’s antecedents lie in various story-telling forms of popular music such as talking blues, spoken passages in gospel music, and the call and response of field music. Its more direct formative influences came from the 1960s, with reggae DJs toasting over strong bass beats, and stripped down styles of funk music, most notably James Brown’s use of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ raps over elemental funk beats. Initially this was part of New York’s dance scene where it had morphed out of block parties at which DJs played percussive breaks of popular songs using two turntables to extend the breaks. Black and Hispanic kids would competitively ‘rap’ over these breaks to gain kudos in their neighbourhoods. You can see the appeal of this music in Thatcher’s unfair, unjust urban locations. Zeitgeist; there’s that word again; it appears in almost every Album Rescue Series entry. Two sold out nights at London’s 3,500 capacity rock venue; the Hammersmith Odeon, was pretty impressive by four new unheard of New York ‘bands’ signed to an unknown obscure niche record label. Due to trouble outside the venue before and after these shows, Hammersmith Odeon refused to host any more rap groups for several years afterwards. This is a pattern of events would follow us around the world for the next few years.

At the production rehearsal, held early afternoon before the first show, we had a pretty big problem. Last band on the bill, The Beastie Boys, had taken an instant dislike to Roger ‘the Hippy’ who was supposed to be mixing their front of house sound. Roger came with the PA system and had a pretty impressive track record of mixing bands like Nils Lofgren and Katrina and The Waves. This palmares did not impress the Beastie Boys and it was obvious that Roger’s unfamiliarity of this new genre was problematic. Just before doors, the Beastie Boys hit the stage for their sound check. It was like a gigantic chaotic atom bomb going off. DJ Mix Master Mike was dropping some huge phat beats at a ridiculous high volume while the already sloppy drunk MCA, Ad Rock and Mike D start running around the stage screaming, “turn this shit up”. It was powerful, chaotic, and primeval, it was also kind of scary in an aggressive way and as a punk rocker I relished every single second of it. In complete opposition sound engineer Roger was not enjoying a single second of it and he tried to control this chaotic shambles by asking, “Could the lad in the red cap please give some level on the radio mic and the rest of you please shut up”?

I was stood at the side of the stage like a punk rock Aristotle watching this epic Greek tragedy unfold when Mike D (the lad in the red cap) grabs hold of me and screams “Yo homie, you know how to mix mutha-fucking sound right?” Indeed I mutha-fucking did and on the spot they tumultuously fire Roger and promote me to front of house engineer. Result! I’m only 23 and I’m now the front of house engineer for the most exciting band on the planet. A few months later, in 1987, I’m re-united with the Beastie Boys when we embark on their headline world tour to support the newly released debut album License To Ill. I guess these guys liked my attitude. I spent the next few years of my life touring the world as live sound engineer for The Beastie Boys and that made me very happy indeed. My personal mantra has always been “do what you love and love what you do”. It started that day and I’ve stuck to it.

So why this album rescue; everybody loves this album and has fond memories of it? With over 10 million albums sold, it’s an undeniable retail success. Granted it took 30 years for the album to achieve its Diamond status, but that’s a considerable number of albums to shift by anyone’s standards. Not only did the punters buy it by the truckload, but the music press loved it too as did lots of radio stations. Licenced to Ill was the first rap album to reach number one on the USA’s billboard charts and it’s the eighth best selling [1] rap album of all time. This pattern repeated all over the world although huge sales do not constitute a great album alone.

Surely all of these metrics prove that this album is not in need of an album rescue? OK, I’m pushing the boundaries here. This is not so much an album rescue, as a critical reappraisal, which is a rescue of sorts. With this album Mike D, Ad Rock, the late MCA and their record company, Def Jam, pulled off the greatest post-modern Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle of all time. Licensed To Ill remains the most creative and intelligent post modern parody ever created in any creative medium. There I’ve said it. When the Beasties Boys rap about drinking, robbing, rhyming, partying, fighting, pillaging and brass monkeys, we should really contextualise this subject matter through the lens of situational ethics. The father of situational ethics, Joseph Fletcher (1966) stated, “all laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms, are only contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love”. This album was definitely born out of love and I believe that it’s almost impossible to be critical of anything created out of love. In situation ethics, right and wrong depend upon the situation. There are no universal moral rules or rights, each case is unique and deserves a unique solution. As with other great parodies e.g. David Bowie’s (1967) The Laughing Gnome, a parody of Anthony Newley, the artist needs to fully understand and love the material that they are engaging with.

Maybe the correct way to rescue this album is to re-imagine, re-evaluate and re-contextualise it? Through this process we can construct an alternative discourse to the commonly misheld one. The buffoonery and cartoon controversy normally associated with this album can be dispelled and instead I’d like to reposition this album, as a deeply intelligent work of art, created by artists not fools. Granted the creators don’t do themselves any favours with their post-modern slapstick shtick parody. As with all post modern texts it’s all about surface, hedonism and fun devoid of any substantial meaning, which is why most people don’t fully appreciate this album. Licensed To Ill is a remarkable ironic marriage of heavy metal guitars, funk beats and edgy poetic rap lyrics. Hand crafted under the tutelage of producer and Def Jam founder Rick Rubin, this album is a substantial ground breaking piece of historical work.

Rap music was not supposed to be made by rich privileged upper class Jewish kids. Had they played by the rules then they would have become the stereotypical doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants or even presidential candidates. But their privilege and education provided the cultural capital fuel that ignites this album. Having an acute understanding and passion for different subcultures, pop culture, jokes, music, fashion and art all provided the foundational material on which this album was built. The traditional elements of rap, such as guns, ghettos, money, hoes, sex and drugs are largely eschewed or at least re-appropriated via intoxicating creative wordplay. Their parody was so impenetrable and utterly convincing that it wasn’t immediately apparent that their obnoxious, misogynistic, hedonistic patter was a consciously constructed part of their persona. Luckily for us the passing years have clarified that this album was a huge postmodern joke made all the funnier by those taken in by the joke or completely unaware of the joke.

This album is a classic example of what French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed “bricolage”. This album is the sound of the Beastie Boys acting as classic bricoleurs. They are taking some very specific symbolic objects such as music, language, clothing, appearance and forming a unified signifying system in which these ‘borrowed’ materials take on a new and more powerful significance. Not only is the notion of bricolage at play in their music, but it’s also at play (literally) in items such as VW car badges, clothing and even their language e.g. the use of the word “homie” as a shortened version of “home boy”. Criticism about the Beastie Boy’s lack of conviction and authenticity abounded at the time. They were unfairly compared to the punk rockers that a decade before them had taken to the streets to hurl bricks at the riot police. They consciously understood that punk rock had achieved zero and that the youth of the mid 1980s was not prepared to face the tear gas and baton charges. Instead the Beastie Boys instigated a much more effective covert semiotic guerrilla war and it was all expertly delivered under the cloaking device of extreme parody. Their work on this album and every other album they have made is intellectual, inter-textual, is constantly in dialogue with other forms of cultural expression and it can only be fully appreciated when it is located in its original context, which is in the mid 1980s.

Listening to the cajoling rhymes of this album in 2015, filled with clear parodies and absurdities, it’s difficult to imagine the offense that many people took back in the 1980s. This is one of the funniest and most infectious albums ever made and it’s all articulated via the gonzo literation of some posh bratty Jewish kids from New York who in all probability are much cleverer then we are. The parody of this album is not offensive to the traditional black rappers; instead it points its undercover barb at frat college jocks and lager louts; the people who bought the album. Their hedonistic beer soaked version of life was intoxicatingly aspirational, in an alternative way, and made to look very appealing via their gleeful delivery. The subject matter of this album is completely contradictory to the dominant mid 1980’s monetarist aspirations because it celebrates the very conditions of its enforced leisure; namely boredom, meaninglessness, dehumanisation, commodity fetishism, repetition, fragmentation and superficiality. Track seven, the huge worldwide mega hit of Fight For Your Right (To Party), is the personification of their new worldview.

The mid 1980s were a time of money, MTV, excess and spring break in warm sunny nirvanas such as Panama City and Daytona Beach. The interesting thing about Fight For Your Right To Party is that it was originally intended to be a parody of popular party rock songs of the time like Twisted Sister’s I Wanna Rock, although that intent was seemingly lost on the audience. It’s as if The Beastie Boys where insider dealers (something that was also popular in the mid 1980’s) and were poking fun at their own kind. Just sampling and scratching Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin to hip-hop beats does not make for an automatically good record, though there is definitely a visceral thrill to hearing those muscular riffs put into super serious overdrive. Their artistry wasn’t just confined to the writing and recording of the album but also in their exceptional understanding of the media as a conduit or delivery system for their powerful message.

I vaguely remember visiting Scotland on the License to Ill world tour.

This debut album, and its subsequent tour, provoked moral panic and media outrage resulting in tabloid headlines across the world. The Beastie Boys instantaneously became the latest folk devils, the band that the media loved to hate. Popular myth would be fuelled by stories of the band’s controversial behaviour. The media and popular tabloid press amplified and greatly exaggerated events on this tour out of all proportion, which greatly increased album sales. In part this was due to the exuberant stage show that was purposefully designed to mimic the album. As a member of that tour, I saw none of this behaviour, what I saw was lots and lots of identical looking hotel rooms, airport lounges, venues and the inside of tour buses. I remember helping a very home sick MCA backstage in Germany make a collect call to his mum and dad back in New York. Album Rescue Series is no place for these antidotes but you will be able to read them in my forthcoming book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before. The Beastie Boys and their producer Rick Rubin had read Stephen Davis’ version of Led Zeppelin’s hotel destroying tour exploits, Hammer of the Gods (1985), and it had made a big impression on them all. Not only is the album’s lyrical content heavily influence by this book and lifestyle, but the album cover’s artwork is also highly inter-textual.

Just like a centre page fold out cartoon from a Mad comic, the fun is in the detail.

The smouldering aeroplane crashed into the side of a mountain cover illustration is a deceptively complex piece of work both artistically and semiotically. The image is darkly humorous, but not out of step with the times or the sonic content of the album. Artist David Gambale (aka World B. Omes) created a pre-Photoshop collage of various airplane parts then illustrated over it using water-soluble crayons. I’m not an artist but I’m guessing the process must have taken significant hours and the dramatic results are worth it. The plane on the album cover is an inter-textual reference to the legendary Starship, a Boeing 720 airliner owned by Bobby Shering and converted into a kitsch rock-star flying tour bus. Led Zeppelin were the Starship’s most famous occupants and even wrote the song Stairway To Heaven about their on board experience. The Starship would transport any rock band that could afford the exorbitant hire fee e.g. The Rolling Stones, Bad Company, Allman Brothers. Stripped of it’s reference, an aeroplane is not glamorous, its merely an ecologically unsound, inefficient and very expensive form of transport. Ever since “the day the music died” (McLean D. 1972) back in 1959, when a chartered flight claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, plane crashes have ended the careers of some of music’s biggest names. Patsy Cline’s plane went down in 1963, silencing one of the greatest voices to ever crossover from country music to popular music. We lost the great Otis Redding to an airplane accident in 1967, and just a few years later, singer-songwriter Jim Croce’s career was terminated just as it was starting to take off. Perhaps none of the above was as startling as Lynyrd Skynyrd‘s horrific 1977 plane crash, which killed three members of the band, the assistant road manager, co-pilot and pilot. Airplanes are symbols of both extravagant rock star excess and sombre tragedy. What better way to announce a new young band to the world than to crash their jet into the side of a mountain before their career had even taken off? Just like a centre page fold out cartoon from the Mad comic, the fun is in the details. The plane’s tail number “3MTA3” spells “Eat Me” backwards. The Beastie Boys logo on the vertical stabilizer was intentionally designed to evoke the Harley-Davidson logo. Many people have commented about the connotations of how the smouldering plane resembles a stubbed out spliff. Via this album, the Beastie Boys are displaying an advanced understanding of semiotics that Roland or Ferdinand would be immensely proud of here.

Sitting in the cockpit of the Lisa Marie at Graceland.

I am quite prepared to stick my neck out here and argue that the Beastie Boys have never made a bad record: Paul’s Boutique (1989), Check Your Head (1992), Ill Communication (1994), Hello Nasty (1998), To The 5 Boroughs (2004), The Mix-up (2007) and Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (2011) are all masterpieces in their own right. Even their other parody record, The In Sound From Way Back (1998), which precisely parodies Perrey and Kingsley’s 1966 album of the same name, is another masterpiece. If we ignore the 10 million copies sold of License To Ill and listen to it minus the filter of parody then we are getting very close to rescuing this album. It isn’t only the music or the rhymes that translate beyond the parody crime scene. License To Ill clearly shows the Beastie Boys didn’t give a fuck at exactly the time when the world desperately needed to be shown how not to give a fuck. Flying in the face of rampant yuppie materialistic capitalism they demonstrated that you could be ground-breaking, cutting edge, important, creative and relevant all at the same time yet still have no goals beyond getting drunk and partying hard.

Licensed To Ill marks the turning point in cultural history when the slacker generation (the three members of band are born 1964, 65 & 66) start making music for the millennial generation. This album proved that you could live life as one giant inside joke, speaking in tongues and making hilarious obscure references to Chef Boyardee or Olde English 800 and no one outside your circle of jerks would be any the wiser. Oh how we laughed. License To Ill accurately predicted the future to the Millennials upon its release in 1986. The mantra bestowed on them was “follow your dreams” and because they were constantly being told they were special, this cohort tends to be over confident. While largely a positive trait, the Millennial’s confidence has been known to spill over into the realms of entitlement and narcissism. They are the first generation since the Second World War that is expected to be less economically successful than their parents. The Millennial’s optimism is founded in unrealistic expectations, which often leads to disillusionment. Most Millennials went through post-secondary education only to find themselves employed in low paid dead end jobs in unrelated fields to the ones they studied or underemployed and job-hopping more frequently than any previous generation. License To Ill soothsaid this bleak scenario but then also gave us a not too cryptic optimistic answer, which was “Fight for your right to party”. I rest my case.

[1] http://www.musictimes.com accessed 11^th August 2015

The Album Rescue Series (ARS) book will be launched on November 16th 2015 during Melbourne Music Week. The ARS book will feature 35 albums that the press and general public considered to be far from exemplary of a particular artist. This book rights those wrongs. The ARS book is a contributive piece of work by music academics and scholars, each of whom take a unique approach to rescuing an album. This week’s Album Rescue is by Tim Dalton. (Follow Tim on Twitter: @touringtim)

Album Rescue Series: Jim Ford ‘Harlan County’

Discovering new music is always great fun and one of life’s greatest pleasures. It gets even better when you are pointed towards or discover an album totally unexpectedly. This is how I found out about Jim Ford’s wonderful, but largely ignored album, Harlan County. I received an out of the blue email from my good friend and professional cycling team manager John Herety who directed me towards this record with the explicit instructions that “you must listen to this album, it will kick your ass and blow your mind”. Thanks John for pointing me towards this superb, but largely forgotten, gem of Southern funky rumpus. Music is similar to a giant wilderness, it’s there for us to explore. Intentionally limiting yourself to one, two, or three genres is akin to self-enforced segregation at its very worst. This expansive musical wilderness is a gigantic history lesson. If you are a true music fan or a musician, you should explore as much of it as humanly possible. In these times, it’s never been so easy to source and purchase seriously cool music cheaply. This is a phenomenon that should be extensively exploited and I do.

Almost twenty years ago I worked for a small Nashville record company and on our payroll we had a couple of part time workers listed as “rack monkeys”. It turned out this role was filled by two young women who went out to the local record stores to make sure our CDs and vinyl records where in the right genre racks e.g. ‘Rock’, ‘Country’ or ‘Soul’. But more importantly they made sure that our releases sat right at the front of these racks. People will only buy what they can see and we made sure, via our rack monkeys, that our artists where the first ones a potential buyer would spot in the store. Occasionally we had a new release that didn’t neatly fit into a single genre, this would result in one of the rack monkeys calling the office and asking which genre rack to place it in. Normally this would be resolved fairly quickly but occasionally it would require extensive dialogue to define and classify the exact genre of the release. To quote Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard from the book Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness Unto Death) (1849), “what labels me, negates me”. Kierkegaard’s position was that once you label someone or something, it cancels out its individuality and places it within the confines of the applied label. This is definitely one of the biggest problems with Jim Ford’s 1969 release Harlan County; it does not fit neatly into one, two or even three specific genres; in fact it never adopts a label, and that’s a big problem for some people. The other major issue facing this album was the year it was released.

1969 was an exceptional year, if not the best ever, for album releases; The Beatles Revolver, Led Zeppelin II, King Crimson In The Court of King Crimson, The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Who Who’s Next, Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica, The Band, Nick Drake Pink Moon, Sly and the Family Stone Stand and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, the list goes on. Harlan County was arguably the strangest but most compelling album of 1969 and was Jim Ford’s first and only album. How on earth could Jim Ford, an un-heard of artist from the back hills of Kentucky, with this unique blend of country, funk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll ever get noticed in the company of these esteemed artists? At his best, Jim Ford was a clever songwriter, capable of reworking rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, soul and country clichés into fresh, funny, funky southern swamp rock. At his worst Ford was cutesy and unfocused, pulling great songs into awkward, contorted inaccessible genre defying shapes. In part this was due to his overuse of mind-altering drugs and excessive alcohol abuse; well it was 1969. Harlan County captures Ford at both of these extremes.

The laid-back, rootsy, gleeful sound of Harlan County comprising equal parts country-rock, soul, funk and rock ‘n’ roll, is an unlikely catalyst for igniting the 1970’s British pub rock scene. Early pioneers Brinsley Schwarz recorded excellent cover versions of Ford’s JuJu Man and Niki Hoeke Speedway. Brinsley Schwarz’s chief songwriter, vocalist and bass player, Nick Lowe, later recorded Ford’s 36 Inches High. These three songs don’t appear on the Harlan County album; they’re from an aborted 1971 UK recording session that featured Brinsley Schwarz as Ford’s backing band. These three songs would deservedly become classic pub rock staples, which can be still heard belting out of UK pubs to this day.

Harlan County sounds fantastically dynamic with its crazy energetic full-on performances by Ford and his associated ‘A list’ session musicians (including James Burton on guitar, Dr John on keys, Gerry McGee on bass and drum ace Jim Kiltner). Ford produced the record himself; his production techniques are crude but effective and wholly appropriate. The ten songs captured on this album are superbly written paeans to the Deep South of America. These are songs of dirt roads, love, corn bread, truck driving, extended family, honest hard manual work and leaving the Deep South for a better life out west. If this album were a classic American novel, it would be John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath (1939). This album’s music occupies a landscape where R&B meets country, Kentucky meets Tennessee and the Mississippi Delta meets Appalachia. It’s a geographical album of songs as much rooted in its landscape, as it is in the author’s journey through life.

Zeitgeist, a frequently employed word in Album Rescue Series, can also be applied here as this album unequivocally catches the spirit of the times. Forty years later all of the above themes would be adopted by the genre that we now call Americana. The lyrical keynote of this album, hitting the road and leaving home behind for a brighter better place, is well traversed territory by artists such Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams and Guy Clark. Ford’s versions of these narratives are grim but they do give a unique, if somewhat raw, account of his experience. Maybe Ford was a southern soothsayer whose cathartic music was simply forty years ahead of its time?

The masterpiece of this album is the opening title track and album theme setter, Harlan Country. This track in particular is a semi-autobiographical story of leaving Kentucky and seeking out a better life out west in California. This song could easily be considered the signature tune of Ford’s entire career, if you could classify it as a ‘career’? The moment this track kicks in with its stunning but unconventional arrangement of rib breaking fat beats, snaky guitar riffs, swampy piano lines, honking funky horns and all topped off with Ford’s Hillbilly soul vocals you know what’s in store from the rest of the album. The wonderful off-kilter second track I’m Gonna Make Her Love Me (Till The Cows Come Home) is a song of sharp humor and hooks pointy enough to catch a Southern catfish. Ford bears his soul for all to see against a greasy rock ‘n’ roll beat that’s high as a kite and as tasty as fried chicken.

Up next is Changing Colors, which is a soulful ballad where we can clearly hear Ford’s voice nearly quivering with naked sincerity and self-awareness against a gentle rhythm and slow building beautiful orchestral arrangement. In hindsight the lyrics are hauntingly prophetic “What makes you think that I won’t ever make it, when the chips are down?” It’s well over 3,000 arduous miles from Kentucky to California but track six; Long Road Ahead makes it sound like the archetypal great American road trip and something to embrace. As Jack Kerouac quite rightly noted in On The Road (1957:p.183) “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”. If you didn’t know better then this track could easily be mistaken for a Rolling Stones track from their 1971 Sticky Fingers album, with its parping Bobby Keys Texan styled horns, southern funky guitar riff, gospel driven piano and loud three part soul backing vocals.

The central theme of travelling and finding oneself is heavily reinforced on track eight’s Working My Way To LA. This is a song full of optimism, heading for California, and in equal part regret in leaving the beloved family home in Harlan County, Kentucky. One can only guess at the mixed emotions Ford was feeling during the writing and recording of this song. One of only two songs not authored by Ford on this album is track nine’s blues standard Spoonful. This is stark and haunting tune penned by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Howlin Wolf in 1960. Unlike the 1966 insipid and uninspired dirge recorded by overrated UK ‘blues’ merchants Cream, Ford’s version is a proud and blatant reaffirmation of his Southern roots. Ford takes complete ownership of this song and confidently de-constructs it before he re-constructs it in a new(ish) form. It breathes, it sweats, its bumps drunkenly into honkytonk walls and yet like every other song on this album it’s wonderfully chaotic and loose, yet it never unravels. This version of the song knows where it’s going, it’s aspirational, and the place it’s heading is out west to the drug friendly, free loving haze and sunshine of 1969 southern Californian Nirvana. The closing tearjerker ballad is a cover of Thomas ‘Alex’ Harvey’s 1959 song, To Make My Life Beautiful. Ford, and studio band, treat this song with the respect it deserves and deliver a subtle, a word not normally associated with this album, and respectful rendition. It’s an appropriate choice and serves as a calming influence, like a cold beer, to herald the end of the journey. The words of John Steinbeck’s travelogue Travels With Charley (1962:p.4) ring very true here, “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us”.

There are a couple of possible factors that contributed to this album almost disappearing into complete obscurity. One of those was Ford’s difficult artistic personality and lifestyle choices; the other was because he signed to the wrong record company. Sundown Records was a small-underfunded southern Californian outfit, which was formed in partnership with White Whale Records specifically to release this album. White Whale Records was home to The Turtles, a few coveted psych rock records, but not much else, and it wasn’t really fit for purpose to market Harlan County. Legend has it that if Jim Ford had waited a day or two before signing this record deal, he would have been on Ahmet Ertegün’s Atlantic Records and produced by Jerry Wexler. That might not have guaranteed him success, but it would have put him somewhere a little more secure and loaded the cards heavily in his favor. Atlantic Records would have definitely provided the financial and marketing clout to ensure this album had the best possible chance of mass sales instead of the Viking funeral that it actually awaited. With Atlantic, there was also the possible opportunity of Ford becoming a pop, soul, or country singer or carving out a career as an often-recorded songwriter. Ford had a good track record as a writer having contributed songs to Motown Records for The Temptations and solo artists such as PJ Proby, Bobbie Gentry and most famously the 1973 hit Harry The Hippie for Bobby Womack. In the 2011 re-issue liner notes there’s an enlightening quote from Bobby Womack “Jimmy was a beautiful cat, one of the most creative people that I’ve ever met”. Those royalties would have certainly made Ford’s life a lot more comfortable in later life. By the early 1980s, Ford had completely disappeared into a haze of drug abuse and erratic behavior.

Jim Ford definitely walked it like he talked it, a singer-songwriter who found his inner talents through the hardships of abject poverty and economically conscripted labor. If he hadn’t escaped this kind of life his future would have being one of hard toil and possible pneumoconiosis like his former coal miner colleagues. His early life bears a striking resemblance to Loretta Lynn’s, as portrayed in the 2003 film Coal Miner’s Daughter. Ford’s roots are in the coal mining villages in the hills of Harlan County, Kentucky, and those early years of poverty and hardship definitely shaped his worldview as expressed through his music. When you expect that life will hand you absolutely nothing and your favor turns around, even if it is only temporary, then intuitively you grab the opportunity like it’s never coming back.

Jim Ford didn’t lead a very glamorous life, he saw out his days until his lonely death on 18^th November 2007 in a Californian trailer park in Mendocino County. At least he did fulfil his ultimate dream and make it out of Harlan County. As an album, Harlan Country is evidence that Jim Ford had no equal in his day, he sat on his own cloud in the great American wilderness, cross-legged, wild-eyed and wiry, a figure too dangerous to approach but much too alluring to be ignored. Jack Kerouac captured his type of spirit in On The Road (1957:p.5) when he wrote “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”.