(Image from the cover of the One Night in Denver CD)
[Art by John Stewart]
Years of Long Letters from a Good Friend
(1980-1990)

Some folks wonder if John Stewart doesn't have periods of prescience. Some of the songs on Dream Babies Go Hollywood seemed to imply that he sensed a shift coming, "Lady of Fame" in particular.

We have heard that after that album, while Stewart was at the pinnacle of success, eleven years after California Bloodlines, RSO records went bankrupt under him. What followed was unlike anything we would see for a lot of years.

There was a story in the papers a few years ago about Tiger Woods. If we recall it correctly, it went to some lengths to point out that Tiger was doing something unprecedented. After a season or three when he basically rewrote the record books in professional golf, he stepped back at the end of the season and found himself unsatisfied with his game. He had come farther, faster, bigger and stronger than any other person in his profession's history—and he wasn't satisfied with the tools that had gotten him there! So he totally dismantled his game. He broke the sleek, supercharged rocket of his craft down into its component parts and started over—grip, stance, stroke, equipment, approach—from basics, and tinkered with everything before rebuilding—somehow improving on near-perfection.

We don't know what happened with John Stewart after the 1980 release of Dream Babies Go Hollywood. We can only look from the outside and come to our own conclusions. From here, then, it looks like he beat Tiger Woods to the punch by almost 20 years. And the amazing thing is that he put a huge piece of the process out in public view so his fans could share in his pursuit of an even-higher standard. Honesty, trust and total lack of false pride rarely come any bigger than what was about to occur.

He went back to his roots—and put out a 7-song LP with his old partner from the Kingston Trio— Nick Reynolds—and blended in a bunch of friends shown standing around an old shack on the back of the LP, like Lindsey Buckingham, Linda Ronstadt and others.

He went back to the musical foundations of his sound—and put out a purely instrumental album, on which he played every note on every instrument. And it wasn't just any instrumental album. He crossed his guitar with Aaron Copland, and put in his vision of history and America, and wrote a suite that we'd love to hear sometime by a really fine chamber orchestra. Not because it needs it, but because it would be fun, and might go a small way toward giving him his due.

He rebuilt his accompanying sound, playing sessions and sitting in with others—and put out Blondes with Chuck McDermott. As time went by, he added players to his "backing band," bringing them into and flexing his music to their skills. More than twenty years later, Dave Batti and Dennis Kenmore and others are still there with him.

One must assume that times cannot be financially easy for an artist without a major label—but he reached all the way back to Signals Through the Glass (and into what must have been an unbelievable first-hand tragedy), recast almost 15 songs for The Last Campaign—and donated royalties to the RFK Memorial Fund.

He returned to the songs and memories from his time with the Kingston Trio (and his friendship with Nick Reynolds)—and put out The Trio Years, a collection of the songs he had written and recorded 20 years earlier, re-arranged and done up fresh, informed by the skills and perspective hard-won in the interim, and featuring the full-grown sound of the band that was building behind him.

He recorded and published an album of new material (Trancas) on a small label—almost as if he was making sure that his lyrical skills stayed sharp. Some of his fans wouldn't find this record until many years later. It contains some of his most beautiful and haunting songs ever, and marked a new direction in his craft that couldn't really be appreciated by outsiders without the benefit of hindsight.

And the most amazing thing of all—he showed his fans his creative process. He took the biggest risk we can imagine for a creative artist. He issued "albums" on cassette tape only, that he had built in his home, on an 8-track, quarter-inch tape recorder. (They are breathtaking and beautiful and superior to the vast majority of the recording work that was being issued by the major labels.) It is as if he said, "Here's some ideas I'm looking at, and some directions I'm considering—some rough drafts and sketches, if you will. I'm going to let you look at these in their unpolished state, and judge me and my art, even though it hasn't been pushed through a full production process—and trust you enough to take any lumps and build in the feedback, because both you and my craft are that important to me."

After seven years of this, he went into the studio and came out with an album that marked one of the most neglected high-water marks in the history of American music—Punch the Big Guy. And, apparently never slackened at all for the next three years—continuing to share new material with his fans through cassettes of his home-made recordings—he built an even higher peak that resulted in the live recording Neon Beach. There is more to say, in the comments to that record, but, by any standard, Neon Beach is a modern classic in every sense of the word. And once again, he gave it to us just when we needed it.

Please come share this process...

Wires From the Bunker
Unreleased recordings from (roughly) 1981-1983
2000 release on Appleseed (US) and Wrasse (UK) Records CD
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the CD insert)
  Cover art painted by Gillian Walker 

This album has one of the most delightful "back stories" in the history of modern music. Only Tom De Lisle, a friend of John Stewart for over 25 years, and the premier writer on all-things-Stewart, can properly tell it. (The following is excerpted from the liner notes in the CD insert. For the whole story, order the album, ok?)

"...(John) called me in December of 1991... 'Hey,' said he, 'I found an old box of tapes that I've had around for years. I was gonna throw them out, but then I thought you might want them. If you don't, I'll just toss them, I'd just as soon get rid of 'em.' Don't throw them away! I carefully repeated my address here in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, outside Detroit, to John over the phone. He promised to send them on the cheap via a UPS truck within the next few days. 'Are you sure...?'

Don't throw them away. Knowing John, and his disregard for his work, I figured there was a 50-50 chance I'd ever see those recordings. About two weeks later, on an icy, blowing, and frigid day here in Mt. Clemens, came a knock on my door. I beheld a UPS man on my front porch, straining under the load of a huge and dilapidated cardboard box, bound together around the top and bottom by the cheapest of masking tape. The binding wasn't working—cassette tapes were protruding from the bottom, and the guy was trying to keep them in with his knee. I could only see his hat. 'Do you want this?' he asked sarcastically from behind the overflowing two by three foot monstrosity. Did I ever.

Get this, it's the stuff of Freudian analysis: my street address has five digits. The address scribbled on the side of the box has SIX digits, two of them out of left field. And the damn zip code was incorrect... And how the hey the box, which was now The Box That Ate Mt. Clemens, ever got here is testimony to the work of music-loving guardian angels..."

Provident angels... John Stewart himself has called Tom De Lisle "the keeper of the flame." Thanks to his curatorship of "TBTAMC," a steady trickle of releases has issued from the famous box. One can argue that this collection is the most significant to date. There are stories that included in these cuts is an unreleased album from about 1980, that would have been called ____________________ . There are appearances on some of the songs by Dave and Katherine Guard and Nick Reynolds from the Kingston Trio days, Henry Diltz, Michael Stewart, Lindsey Buckingham and others.

The disk itself is amazingly insidious. Once it got slotted into the right place in our mental hardware, the songs kept sneaking into our consciousness without warning. If you have decided at some point that you have become a fan of this man, you absolutely have to own this!

With that said, it must be admitted that the slotting process took a little while, so some hints are offered. The first playing of this album was out of any context and we didn't "get it." So it sat for a while, and then was played in its time context, after the RSO issues—same thing. Then one day it came up, at random, after Sunstorm in the CD changer. KAZZOTTT!!! Nailed! Now it won't go away.

The songs: 
1.   American Way
2.   Under Heavy Fire
3.   Same Old Heart
4.   When the Night Was Ours
5.   Hot on the Trail

(Image is from the back of the CD insert)   

6.   Molly and the Tenbrooks
7.   The Escape of Old John Webb
8.   Molly Dee
9.   Liddy Buck
10. Cheyenne
11. It Might as Well Be Love
12. Wide Eyed in Babylon
13. High Flying Eagle
14. Tears of the Sun
15. All the Desperate Men
16. Diamonds in the Coal
17. One Shining Day
18. Rockin' as the Night Rolls On

(The image is from the backplate of the CD )

Blondes
1982 Allegiance Records release on LP
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the LP)
  Photography by Kim Harwood

Newly re-issued with the additional cuts from the Swedish LP release.

And the world had gone nuts.

In the two or three years since the Dream Babies albums, we had gone through 444 days of embassy hostages in Iran, and a war between Iran and Iraq that featured defenseless children being marched through minefields to clear lanes for the assault troops behind them. There were assassination attempts on the President and the Pope, the killing of John Lennon, double-digit inflation, gas shortages and the loss of John Belushi. Somewhere in there, if memory serves, the National Museum of American History even managed to lose George Washington's dentures.

Robert Palmer was "looking for clues" (along with the rest of us) and working on things that would lead to "Simply Irresistible" a few years later and a video archetype of the '80s, with John Stewart's mannequin multiplied and made over in black instead of blonde.

The IBM PC was one year old.

How in the world could a man who would later describe himself as sometimes being as much "reporter" as "songwriter"—an artist who works in tone and nuance, harmony and rhythm—hope to deal with the discordance and atonalities that were coming at us from all sides? And he is so clearly a citizen of the world there wouldn't have been any way to avoid it.

All these years later, we know a little part of the answer, thanks to Tom DeLisle and TBTAMC, and songs like "Under Heavy Fire" and "Tears of the Sun" from Wires from the Bunker, recorded during this period and lost in the cardboard for nearly twenty years. Part of the answer would appear on Centennial, part on Trancas, and huge piece called "Dreamers on the Rise" on Revenge of the Budgie. Part of the answer is, undoubtedly, here.

Some of us aren't sure we have ever gotten this album properly into perspective. It was as if Stewart did nearly an entire album of the "woman at the window/woman by the road" songs that had been threaded through all his previous albums. We had learned to look to the album art for some of the answers to our questions, but this one has always been hard to figure out. The music was great, and there were at least two songs that would have to be included on any "Greatest Hits" package (actually three others would be included on the 1999 Wrasse compilation, but they left out "The Eyes of Sweet Virginia" and "Blonde Star"). Still, it was as if we were missing something...

America's land holds the braided wisdom from many cultures. One of the quieter strands, taught to some of us near the buttes and coulees on the Northern Plains, holds that all babies are perfect gifts from the creator. Women carry that perfection into adulthood but can fall to mistakes. Men are destined to grow into the flaws they have been given, and it is their job to figure it out and try to fix it during their time. Ordinary mortals are not given to understand the mysteries and puzzles that surround them until their time is up, and the old woman who sits at the southern end of the path of souls we call the Milky Way looks back at their ways.

There have been a lot of mornings around here when these whispers from the land and water ring very true. We don't know if they have spoken to John Stewart, but one can tell from his songs that he hears some very old voices, and he did dedicate "Spirit" to John G. Neihardt in 1973...

All of which makes it a little less than surprising that an artist this sensitive to things in the wind would devote most of an album to looking for wisdom in the ways of women and the patterns in the windows and along the roads, as the world around us made less and less sense.

Listen to "The Eyes of Sweet Virginia" and tell us how wrong we are.

(Image is from the back of the original album)   

The songs: 
Side One
1.   Tall Blondes
2.   The Queen of Hollywood High
3.   Girl Down the River
4.   The Eyes of Sweet Virginia
5.   Judy in G Major

Side Two
6.   You Won't Be Going Home
7.   Jenny Was a Dream Girl
8.   Blonde Star
9.   Golden Gate
10. Angeles (The City of the Angels)

(Image is from the cover of the 2003 Neon Dreams CD combined re-release.)

Additional cuts on the new reissue from the Swedish LP release in 1982
11. All the Desperate Men
12. Same Old Heart
13. When the Night Was Ours

The original LP issue of Blondes is out-of-print in both the US and Swedish release formats. The US release was re-issued as an import, but has been very  hard to find. Neon Dreamsre-released all the tracks from both versions, in the version long requested by fans and this has also gone out-of-print.  

Reveng of the Budgie
1983 Takoma Records release on LP
Produced by The Puppy Brothers

 (Cover image is from the LP)
  Photography by Henry Diltz 

It may be folk music on steroids, but that's what it is. It had been (according to Lindsey Buckingham's liner notes) 16 years since John Stewart and Nick Reynolds had collaborated. All the way back to the "second" Kingston Trio... We've heard that at about this time, Brother Stewart had put together something called "The World's Loudest Folk Band" and was playing clubs up and down the California coast. Some of that has to be reflected here. The opening cut has a huge sound, for instance.

But the reason that a lot of us love this album of just seven tracks is that it is unapologetically folk—not "post-folk" or "modern" folk or "neo-" folk. Folk music!

So how do we know this? It is joyful. There was a time (for those among you who are younger than dirt) when a lot of people would drive for hours to sit in an auditorium full of strangers and actually listen to two or three or four people play acoustic instruments and sing in pure and creative harmony. (All right—Peter, Paul and Mary kinda sang in the cracks between the piano keys, but that's another story.) Yes, there were delicate and nuanced voices and melodies. But you knew you were at the real thing when everybody said to heck with decorum and delicacy and reached down and grabbed their voice from the bottom and let it all out... Part of the essence of the folk music experience was realizing that people had cut loose all that vocal restraint drilled into them in choirs, gone all the way out to shout-mode, and then pulled it back just enough to have a little control.

And it wasn't just the performers on stage. Sure, you went to listen. But you also knew that you were going to sing along part of the time, and you were going to let your own vocal instrument out, however rusty and ill-tuned, and let it play—joyfully. You'd drive— sometimes through blizzards for Pete's sake, when sensible people were home digging out extra blankets and putting some of them in the dog's house—through hours of anticipation. And you'd drive home in glee and people interrupting each other...

In between the going there and the coming back, something bigger than the assembled parts would have happened. There were moments that were electrifying. There were moments when the hair stood up on the back of your neck and you could feel something huge and invisible had come into the place. Without meaning any disrespect to any side of the comparison, it can be said that the only comparable experiences for some of us have happened as visitors to Pentecostal churches and high, quiet places...

And the instruments were given their own place and voice. Guitars and basses and banjoes weren't there to be a backdrop to the vocals. They were an integral part of a seamless and sometimes seamy whole that pulled energy out of the air and the audience and fed it back and multiplied it and pulled you in and made you feel loved, by Godfrey. You didn't just listen to this music, even on a record player. You participated. Joyfully.

So that's how we know that this album is folk music. These people are having FUN! We'll swear that if you listen closely you'll hear an involuntary "wow" and a sort of proto-"yahoo" hidden back in there somewhere, that tell you that the big invisible something had come into the studio through the fire door and kicked somebody in the pants.

Nowadays, in some circles, it is very cool to say that some folk folks were just too effete about things in general. To heck with cool! The real stuff was hot. And it didn't matter if it was the Limelighters, or the Chad Mitchell Trio, or Odetta, or the Journeymen, or the Kingston Trio, or too many other groups and individuals to possibly name here—those auditoriums were no place for snobs. Real community magic isn't for snobs.

Sometimes it has to be silly. Face it. Too much serious is a drag. You want a little fun? Listen to the last cut. Although we don't know, and can't tell from the credits, we're pretty sure that's John doing a Johnny Cash vocal tribute and it might just be him singing above his normal range at the same time, through the wonders of studio magic. You want serious? Listen to the words. Do you sometimes need permission to put your thumb out, by life's freeway? Spend some time with "Hiding in the Shadows."

And if you're looking for an anthem for the half-generation that came right before the "Baby Boomers"—the people who have been characterized as being identifiable by their constant use of the phrase "on the other hand"—play "Dreamers on the Rise..." Repeatedly. And if the light is right, and the news is off, and you've left the heavy parts of your world out in the yard, then that great unseen something may just sneak into the room and hug you so hard that tears come to your eyes...and tell you that you are never alone.

Now that's music. This album brings it back in a whole new, old way. Voices ringing...strings singing...and that great invisible something that loves us keeping time and humming along... You will find yourself coming back to this album years later. And you'll always find something new...and very old.

A friend of ours in Wisconsin says that this big sound is the "yin" of folk music, and points ahead a few years to An American Folk Song Anthology as the more traditional, quieter "yang." Works for us...

The songs: 
Side One
1.   Buddy Won't You Roll Down the Line

2.   Dreamers on the Rise

3.   Cheyenne

(Image is from the back of the original album)   

Side Two
4.   Living on Easy

5.   Hiding in the Shadows

6.   Angel on the Road Shoulder

7.   Same Old Heart

(The image is from the cover of the CD re-issue)

The original issue of Revenge of the Budgie is out-of-print. It was re-issued as the last seven songs on the Neon Dreams CD Chilly Winds, which has now gone out-of-print. 

The Gathering
1984 Homecoming Records release on LP
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the LP)
Design by Tommy Steele/Steele Works 

After Blondes was issued, John Stewart formed his own publishing company—Homecoming Records. This was the first issue. It included instrumental work that would make up part of a separate recording in the "American Journey" series called Centennial. It also included selections from the Heriza and Ford album Hearts Together and the Bruce Abrams E. P., Delancey Street.

Once again, he surprised us. While we had been thinking of him as a vocalist, he was recording every instrumental part for a non-vocal album. While we had been thinking of him as a poet who wove a little country, folk and plain old rock and roll into his songs, he was listening to Aaron Copland and thinking so far out ahead of us that he was in a different landscape altogether. While we had been listening to him on Top-40, and waiting for the next combination with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and Linda Ronstadt, he had made a leap forward of incredible dimensions.

The songs: 
[Titles in blue type are by John Stewart. Titles in dark red are by others, including Buffy Ford Stewart.]

Side One
1.   Behind the Wheel
    [The Plains]
2.   Distant Wagons
3.   Wichita Cross Winds

4.   East of Eden (Cathy Heriza and Buffy Ford Stewart)
5.   Call it a Day (Cathy Heriza and Buffy Ford Stewart)

(Image is from the back of the original album)   

Side Two
    [The Wilderness]
6.   Indian Summer
7.   The Hooliann
8.   Montana Crossing

9.   The Blarney Pilgrim (Bruce Abrams)
10. Morgan Megan (Bruce Abrams)
11. Shibig Shimore (Bruce Abrams)

12. The Pirates of Stone County Road

(The image is from the cover of the CD re-issue)

The John Stewart selections were re-issued on CD as a portion of American Sketches, which has now gone out of print. 

Trancas
1984 Affordable Dreams release on LP
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the cover of the original LP) 

When the rest of us found it, later, we flipped the jacket over to see who was playing on it. It was an extremely short list. John Stewart. That's it. "Performed by John Stewart." Nobody else... Since it was a habit by then to have the album on for the first time while we read the liner notes and album credits, and we were listening to a fully-realized instrumental backing, that gave us a little pause. We didn't know what was to follow...we had no idea just how much was going to be quietly shared by this artist in the next few years. Our order for The Secret Tapes still hadn't come in, for one thing.

It would have been understandable if the first solo album after the good ship RSO slid under had had a little bit of bitter here and there. Not our friend. The subject was addressed, all right. It had been five years since Bombs Away Dream Babies, and the "popular" culture now knew him as, "oh, yeh—the guy who sang Gold, right?" Listen to the first cut, "It ain't the gold, that keeps you on the highway in the cold. It ain't the gold, that keeps your wheels a-turning when you're old. It's not the end, it's the beginning..." Wow!

And then he proceeded to lay down track after track that not only showed that he still had all his chops, he was getting better! The good part about the whole thing was that when a lot of us finally stumbled on it later, it was like finding something priceless (and timeless) in an old trunk in the attic. Over the years since, this has been a favorite for taking a friend who had just been introduced to Mr. Stewart to the next step in fandom. Because this neglected treasure has some of the finest songs written during the decade that it was released, and at least one that is among the very best he has ever written, in at least a few not-very-humble opinions.

There are so few truly class acts in this world...

The songs: 
Side One
1.   It Ain't the Gold
2.   Reasons to Rise
3.   Pilots in Blue
4.   Chasing Down the Rain
5.   'Till the Lights Come Home

Side Two
6.   Bringing Down the Moon
7.   All the Lights
8.   Rocky Top
9.   The American Way
10. The Chosen

(Added on the CD reissue edition)
11. The Heart of a Kid
12. Irresistible Targets

(The image is from the cover of the CD re-issue)

The original issue of Trancas is out-of-print. It was re-issued in CD format, but has now gone out-of-print.

Centennial
1984 Homecoming Records release on LP
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the LP) 

By the time it was re-issued as American Sketches, he had even done the art on the CD insert. As the artist himself said, in the liner notes he also wrote, "Playing all the instruments on an album is its own kind of madness. It's like doing a painting though, all the ideas are mine. Doing an album with a band is like doing a movie. If you ever get a chance to drive through the American West, may I suggest American Sketches as the sound track."

Those of us who have done just that agree with this one as a soundtrack. It also works very well as a background when you are really concentrating on something tough and complicated. 

And one sharp morning it was the perfect background to some of the prettiest country God ever made, heading west through the mountains of West Virginia, somewhere between the sea and the bluegrass waves. It works pretty good in the American East, too.

The songs: 
[The Plains]

1.   Distant Wagons
2.   Wichita Cross Winds
3.   Betsy from Pike
4.   Indian Springs

[The Wilderness]

5.   Grand Canyon Summer
6.   The Hoolian
7.   Montana Crossing
8.   After the Rain
9.   The Launch of Apollo 11

10. Behind the Wheel

11. The Gold Rush

(The image is from the cover of the CD re-issue)

The original issue of Centennial is out-of-print. It was re-issued in CD format as American Sketches,  which has now gone out of print. 

The Last Campaign
1985 Homecoming Records release on LP
Produced by John Stewart

 (Cover image is from the LP)
  Photography by John Stewart 

"I first met Robert Kennedy when he was Attorney General and I was a member of the Kingston Trio. We stayed in contact over the years and I was proud to be one of those who campaigned with him when he ran for President in 1968. Buffy and I traveled with the campaign and sang on the backs of trains, flat-bed trucks, town squares and high school auditoriums. I wrote songs as we went and the images of the people who loved him and believed in what he told them has been the inspiration for other songs, years after it was over..." 

Second, it is the brave act of a selfless person. A royalty from every album was, and is, paid to the RFK memorial fund.

Next, this is not repackaged material. The songs were thought about and recast and redone, with new people in the band and new voices aboard. It features Linda Ronstadt and Lindsey Buckingham and others. But one of the things that we love best about it is that this is the first recording of which we are aware that has Dave Batti and Dennis Kenmore credited. These were the guys (along with Chuck McDermott) that John Stewart began sitting in with, and inviting over to his house to play, during the strange interregnum after RSO imploded. They were still there five years after this album, on a September night when the pool game of life gave them all a 9 off the break. And they are still there now, almost twenty years after this album. Talk about quality calling to quality...

John Stewart's fans know these songs. There are two new ones out of the ten. But even fans who have passed it by, because of that, might just be surprised. It is entirely possible that you will find that the definitive version of one you know well was pressed into this vinyl. There is at least one where we're pretty darn sure of it. And we're real sure that we are going to hear about those remarks...

The songs: 
Side One
1.   Clack Clack / Oldest Living Son
2.   You Can't Go Back to Kansas
3.   The Pirates of Stone County Road
4.   Dreamers on the Rise

(Image is from the back of the CD re-release.)   

Side Two
6.   Cody
7.   Spirit / Survivors Medley
8.   Hearts and Dreams on the Line
9.   Crying in the Storm
10. Last Campaign (Reprise)

(The image is from the cover of the CD re-issue)

The songs: 
1.   Ticket to the Stars
2.   Daydream Believer
3.   New Frontier Intro
4.   The New Frontier
5.   Always Young Intro 
6.   Always Young
7.   July You're a Woman
8.   Botswana
9.   Midnight Intro
10. Midnight of the World
11. Pirates of Stone County Road
12. Midnight Wind
13. Gold Intro
14. Gold
15. Mother Country
16. Solsbury Hill