Down River: In Search of David Ackles, Mark Brend, Jawbone Press, 2025
Mark Brend first encountered the music of David Ackles when he bought a second-hand copy of Ackles’ self-titled debut album in 1985, 17 years after its release. He had never heard of Ackles previously and was attracted to the album by its sleeve, its release date and label, as Elektra in the late ‘60’s was a good home for singer-songwriters and progressive music. When he got to his home, Brend listened to it all the way through, loving it then, as he still does.
Ackles recorded four albums over a five-year period, garnering critical acclaim without achieving consequent sales, before losing his contract and choosing (pragmatically, though perhaps reluctantly) to use his creativity in fields other than popular music. The critics who hailed his work were undoubtedly right, as were those such as Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Phil Collins, and Elvis Costello, who continue to rate his music highly. Under-appreciated commercially in his day, he has yet to benefit from the reissue programme or return to recording that has seen some of his peers, such as Judee Sill and Bill Fay, come to greater prominence.
Ackles was always a relatively humble and self-effacing man, meaning that his story was not as fully in the public domain as some. When combined with his disappearance from the music industry after the loss of his CBS contract, this meant that Brend has had to work hard to discover and understand as much as he has had about this unusual singer-songwriter. Interestingly, Brend also supplements the story with his process of discovery and with reflection on the reasons why Ackles’ career was not one that went stratospheric either at the time or subsequently.
Ackles’ music drew heavily on musical theatre and dealt with subjects such as prostitution, religious doubts, racism, and divorce. In an earlier book, American Troubadours, Brend succinctly summarised the problems with Ackles from the point of view of commercial success: ‘Ackles the man proves to be as hard to categorise as his music. He signed his first recording contract when he had turned 30, was always reluctant to tour, and never embraced the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. He was a happily married man. He retained throughout his life the Christian faith passed to him by his parents. He was successful in many other fields of endeavour, and as far as the music business was concerned he was always an outsider. His story is one of an uncomfortable shifting between the hope of mainstream success and cult status – and ultimately of not fitting into either category.’
Ackles ‘lived a good life and made some great records’, yet they were records that overwhelmingly dealt with what is dark and difficult in life. This is the great dilemma about Ackles as the combination of these two makes him both very unusual and relatively uncommercial, however strong his songs. Brend tackles this issue as he tells the story of Ackles’ career and then ends with helpful analysis, including critique of the ‘lost genius’ narrative. In doing so, Brend looks particularly and helpfully at artists like Nick Drake, Sill, and Fay, whose records have benefitted from that narrative either posthumously or through a return to recording. He concludes that because of his lifestyle choices Ackles could not be packaged as a rock star and that the ‘musical unfamiliarity and lyrical particularity of the songs, which read like mini film treatments or short stories’, has never found a sufficient niche in popular music to sustain success.
This, however, leaves unanswered the question as to why ‘an optimistic man’ ‘made often dark, intense music’. The book provides the substance of an answer but never quite brings the clues scattered throughout together in a sustained answer. Two quotes from Ackles’ wife, Janice Vogel Ackles, are key: ‘David was a very spiritual person … thinking of things spiritually, and having a close relationship with God …’ and ‘He was saddened by the many vagaries and woeful conditions with life that we all have to encounter … it was hard for him to just kind of put them away and go on’. Ackles said that his Christian faith resulted in ‘a lot of questioning of the whole area of values’.
Ackles was a storyteller who fulfilled the ambition that Lou Reed expressed of bringing ‘the sensitivities of the novel to rock music’. While Reed sought to write à la William Burroughs and Hubert Selby, Ackles’ story-songs are closer to the work of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor. In this sense, his own work is closer to that of ‘Nebraska’-era Bruce Springsteen, songs also strongly influenced by O’Connor. The key to such songs and stories is that they are constructed and structured as epiphanies, as moments of revelation in and of depravity thereby holding out the possibility of change.
While the point of this approach is that the epiphany is inherent to the story, there are moments in Ackles songs when this is explicitly stated. In ‘Blue Ribbons’, the central character laments:
The world is full of lovers
Loving hate and only loving
Others of their kind.
Then, at the end, the same character holds out the possibility that:
maybe they are learning now,
Maybe just a few are learning.
This, I would argue, is the effect that Ackles intends for his song-stories. This is also made explicit in a first-person song ‘Out on the Road’ which, I suggest, is for Ackles, a manifesto song, as ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was for Bob Dylan. In this song, the central character meets a series of characters in desperate circumstances; ‘a sad old boy, in a waterfront bar’, ‘a poor old lady, in a hotel room’, and ‘a fine young man, in a broken down jail’. His response to their fears is to remain praying and to stay out on the road meeting those that are hurting and offering a helping hand:
Well, if everybody knows
If everybody sees that fear is a heavy load
Then they ought to know
I got to stay out on the road
And if they do not understand how we got to, we got to lend a helping hand
All I can do is pray
Lord let me stay out on the road
One of Ackles’ best-known songs is ‘His Name is Andrew’, which documents the void in the life of a believer who loses his faith. As with ‘Inmates of the Institution’ which also deals with loss of faith, Ackles intent is an epiphanic realisation of what has been lost.
Within this approach, as Michael Baker has noted, Ackles and his vignettes of dispossessed personae: ‘set the stage for blurred epiphanies, an ironic fusion of baseless ritual and superficial decorum. These pockets of darkness contain paralysis, vagueness, and thwarted ambitions … Although … the characters are inarticulate carnage of that universe, Ackles retains dignity for himself, his characters, and their landscapes, by renouncing censure. We are all flawed; we have all fallen.’
As a result, Ackles is, in his work, most like the French Roman Catholic artist Georges Rouault whose religious vision, as William Dyrness has explained, was an ‘anguished view of the human situation’ from within which he was able to ‘discover the hope of salvation.’ Rouault’s Miserere series, for example, shows that ‘Deep down inside the most unfriendly, unpleasant, and impure creature, Jesus dwells.’ Similarly, Ackles’ storytelling songs demonstrate an incarnational ‘being with’ approach to his characters (‘We are all flawed; we have all fallen’), while the cumulative picture painted is of the bleakness of a world which has, as with the stunning ‘His Name is Andrew’, lost its connection with God.
As an aside, with the success of many rock-based musicals, it may be that a show of that type might provide a possible route to wider exposure and rediscovery for Ackles’ songs inspired by musical theatre; perhaps a show set in the ‘Main Line Saloon’ and exploring the way ‘Everybody has a Story’.
In Down River Mark Brend tells the story of David Ackles more fully than it has ever been told before. In the book, he identifies why that story and Ackles’ four albums remain worthy of such focused attention. As Bernie Taupin once said, ‘It’s not just that his music was different; he was different’. Through his search for David Ackles, Brend identifies the ways in he and his music were different from all around him and makes a strong argument for a greater appreciation of the value of difference.
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Jonathan Evens
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