Villager, page 22
I loved Wallflower instantly, but it wasn’t until much later that I developed my deeper relationship with it. I was recovering from a bad time in my life at that point. I had lost my job, been drinking far too much. I picked fights with men who deserved it and men who didn’t. Stood in to defend the honour of women in trouble and women not in trouble, gradually lost my power to perceive which was one and which was the other. Went home with cauliflower ears and a carrot nose. Woke up with a crying liver and a clicking hip. I took off deep into the West Country, an outsider there, just as McKendree had been when he’d first arrived there, more than forty years earlier. I lived above a garage, just as McKendree had. I had no certainty of my future, drifted, just as McKendree had. I learned wildflower names, just as he had. Opened my eyes to their magic and the poetry of the dead, who had dreamt the names of the plants into existence. Greater spearwort. Reedmace. Purple loosestrife. Creeping bugle. Toadflax. Agrimony. Lady’s bedstraw. All the while the record seemed to be growing each time I listened to it, as if someone had snuck in and, in fact, changed it while I had been partially neglecting it. I decided its grooves had actual ghosts within them yet they were not ghosts I wanted to run away from. I played McKendree’s version of the traditional Devon folk ballad ‘Little Meg’ and his choral, semi-chanted ‘Sad Painting of a Dog’ sixteen, seventeen times a day. Then, later, as I explored my new terrain, met people connected – however tangentially – with the McKendree myth, the record stayed with me and waltzed me through the landscape. I found it extremely difficult to find out what happened in McKendree’s life between late 1968 and the late seventies when he made the first of what turned out to be several return trips to Devon. It seemed like the most mysterious of many mysterious periods of his life. I knew his father passed away in 1969, and by 1975 he, his sister and his mum had moved from California to Oklahoma, where he was living in his mum’s annexe and working part time in a used camera store. It appeared to be a time when he had abandoned music altogether. But then my research led me to an unexpected discovery that thrilled me to my marrow: in 1972, McKendree had reconnected with his old co-songwriter from Stoneman’s Cavalry, Frank Bull, and recorded a one-off single, an almost unrecognisable electric version of ‘Little Meg’. But even this turned out to be another rotten rung on the ladder separating McKendree from fame. Bull disowned the result, the pair clashed during its recording, and, following its conclusion, never spoke again. Meanwhile the label who were set to release it, Hemlock Jukebox, folded, yet in a surreal twist, owing to the determination and Eastern European background of one of the label’s evacuees, the single was still pressed, but only for a Hungarian market. After many fruitless eBay searches I managed to track down a copy in Klagenfurt, Austria, for which I was pleased to only pay £35. It’s a truly mind-bending work, three minutes of echoey, raw-as-you-like fuzz where psychedelic furry FX pedal funk meets something frightening and primal, apparently roaring out of the mouth of a cave beyond the edge of time. Yet it is also… a duet. Bull’s vocals have to me never sounded like this on any other recording, resembling, as the defunct Hungarian music magazine Bounce! so accurately put it in one of the single’s few reviews, ‘the voice of a man unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge a locust he’s found stuck between his teeth’.
The more I learned about McKendree, the more I learned he was not merely an eerily, almost celestially gifted musician. He painted, he took uniquely atmospheric photographs. In his later years, he was an ahead-of-the-curve campaigner against climate change and ecological ruination. In some ways, perhaps part of the problem for McKendree, and part of the reason he has still not been reappraised in the way a Nick Drake or even a Judee Sill has, is that his story doesn’t follow a traditional rock tragedy narrative. He did not die in his twenties and was not a suicide. He failed at all points to be a major abuser of drugs. He part-vanished rather than totally vanished, only part gave up making music. There was nothing emphatic about his path. But his story is as laden with tragedy as any other in popular music that I can think of. His music was lost, found, lost again. The one true love he’d ever found, the only woman he’d ever wanted to truly be with, rather than just float noncommittally around, had her life cruelly snatched from her in a freak agricultural accident, just as it seemed feasible the two of them might finally be united. He himself died in a manner that was no less freakish, suffering a fatal stroke while on a bed in his chiropractor’s clinic, on the final morning of the twentieth century.
Full track listing for Wallflower (recorded 1968, released 1976):
Penny Marshwort
Mrs Nicholas
Little Meg
Bog Asphodel
Cow of the Road
Sea Cabbage
Villager
Clapper Bridge
Gods of Mist, and Stone
Sad Portrait of a Dog
Marsh Pennywort
Notes, from 2,300th listen:
Whose is the laughter you can just faintly hear at the end of ‘Marsh Pennywort’?
How much better would this have sounded if it was pressed on heavy late sixties vinyl, rather than this flimsy Ted Heath-era frisbee I hold in my hand?
Let’s say this record actually came out just after it was made, in 1968 and 1969. Let’s say it found an audience, lots of cool people were whispering about it. Let’s say I was my age, or younger, at that time. Would I have listened to this record? Or would I have been suspicious of it for being too popular with cool people, and possibly denied myself the chance to enjoy it until a few years later, when it had become less cool? Ergo: been the same kind of stubborn cultural edgeperson I am now. But, even if it had been given the right of birth in the era it was made, would Wallflower have found any kind of large audience of cool people? Is it not a little bit frail, too much of an elusive whisper, too much of a record – even in its actual sound – that you have to search for, and eventually find?
Question: What are they, the layers that you can put into a piece of music, that makes it improve with age? Are they things you can see and feel? Where do you find them? Are they in the grooves? Grooves of vinyl. The transference of sound to them. People tell me how it works but I still don’t get it. It’s the ultimate modern witchcraft.
Usable transcript from interview with Angus Boon:
‘Equinox were round tae bend, away wi’ tae fairies. Something mental always happened when we played wae them. Which we did a bit, in our very early days, and which might sound tae you like a weird pairing, if ye didn’t properly ken us, but wasn’t, in that stage of Nannie Slagg’s musical evolution. And there’s this one gig in Todmorden, ye listenin’, and we’ve played our last song and we get backstage and Equinox are there, all ready to go on and then Mick says tae the rest of the band, “Hold on, where’s the rug?” They had this Moroccan rug which they all had to sit on while they played and they couldnae play without it and Julian, the wee milksop who played the lute and yae could knock over with a feather, he’d been entrusted with its safety on this occasion, and he’d left it in their hotel room in Halifax. By the time he’d driven there and back they were an hour late going on and a rumour was going round that it was because the band were baked, but it wasn’t; it was because they needed their RUG. There was a second rug, too, after the first one wore out. And there’s a story about Mick getting pished and nailing the first rug down on top of Dick so he was totally trapped underneath, but I don’t know if that’s apocryphal now, laddie.
‘The Exeter solo gig? Aye, I mind it well. Fecking class performance by Dick. As always. He was so obsessive about his craft, the laddie had made himself immune from ever being anything less than brilliant. Not many people there, though. People paint it like it was all about the punks, like outside the venue streets were thronged with laddies and lassies wearing safety pins and gobbing on pedestrians. That’s a load of pish and twaddle. It was just a little lean time, a general lack of interest for what Dick – and I – was doing. I remember McKendree was wandering around, looking like a lost lamb; ye can guarantee nae member of the audience who saw him would have kenned the long streak of piss was one of the star acts of the night. When Dick had finally persuaded him to come over he’d asked specifically if he could stay somewhere on the moor, which meant Dick couldnae get more than a couple of drinks, and had tae drive him to and from the venue, and Dick was ragin’ about that, because if he couldnae get drunk it always ripped his knitting. McKendree looked like he was about tae start bawling and I asked him what was wrong, kenning that maybe the two of them had fallen out. He told me he’d been walking up near Underhill Tor that afternoon and been trying to photograph a pair of these merganser ducks, which were pretty rare, even then, and in trying too hard to get a close-up he’d managed to scare the female, which like all the females looked very fragile and had a right braw shagged crest on the back of her head – kind of like some of the lassies Dick picked up at gigs, come tae think of it, heh – and by doing that he’d sent her flying off 300 yards up the river, and sent the male the same distance in the other direction, and now he couldnae stop thinking about it and said he was feeling like a terrible person. I told him to stop being such a wee nancy.
‘Before Dick moved down here, after when we first decided to leave Glasgow, the two of us were staying in a house in Kensal Green for a while, only a mile or so from all the bohemian stuff going on in Notting Hill Gate. You wouldnae have called it a fashionable place, but we did some of the fashionable stuff of the time. A wee lassie Dick knew back in Kilsyth hitchhiked all the way down after him and turned up on our doorstep one day wae some sugar cubes. Lassies would do crazy stuff like that, where Dick was concerned. I didn’t even ken the stuff was acid. That was how fecking naive I was. Anyway we took it and I ended up in the bath just bawling, “When’s this fecking shite gonnae start working?” Neither of us were really intae it but I do reckon it broke down some walls for Dick; he started getting a bit further taeward the peripheries after that, exploring death more in his songs. And then he bought his first rug, from the market on Portobello. So we were intae it all and weren’t. A lot of the minted hippie laddies didn’t really see eye-to-eye wi’ me. I talked too much, whereas for them it was all about not saying much and just saying stuff like “cool” and “far out” and making yersen look mysterious. But that was another world; we didn’t live there. We were often up late at night and a bunch of car thieves lived next door, and you’d see them in an alley in the back spray-painting a Rover P5 at three in the morning. But anyway, Dick was never much of a lover of yer pop music, but I do remember at the time he would just nae stop listening to this tune “Thirteenth Snake Woman” by Stoneman’s Cavalry, which was just a B-side to this tune called “Right On” that had been a wee hit in the States. So after he got the tapes from Superduck and found out that McKendree actually had been in the band and had a co-writing credit on that song, he flipped right out. I’m sure the laddie would have got the record out anyway but that was the icing on the cake.
‘Aye, Morag! That was the name of the lassie who brought us the acid. I’ve remembered it now. Have yae seen the photo on the back sleeve of the Doubling Cube LP that Mick and Dick did just before they got Equinox together? The one where they’re playing backgammon? You can just see this bored-looking lassie sitting on the couch behind them, staring out the window, looking like death. That’s her. She was aff her fecking heid. Followed Terry Reid everywhere on tour, after she’d had her business with Mick. Wouldn’t leave the poor lad Terry alone. Cut off a big chunk of his hair one time when he was asleep and kept it in a box.’
Sodding hell, is that my problem? Is that what I’ve been doing all these years, interviewing all these fading emperors of sixties and seventies rock, convincing me they’re just my uncle for an hour when actually I’m looking for a full-time father figure? Thank you for the chat, Carlos Santana, and just as an extra could you come back to the flat and do me some overcooked chips in the deep fat fryer and tuck me up under my Spiderman duvet? Also, how are you with papier mâché? Why do I ask? Oh no reason. Just wondered. Actually did once pencil in a casual drink with Rick Wakeman after our Q and A but he never called. Christian. Into his cars. Probably wouldn’t have worked out for the two of us anyway. Another one today, Angus Boon, but nobody’s paying me for that. Nobody does now. Listened to his stuff on the way over. The early work, Nannie Slagg; a folk band, really, once you remove the layers of noise sludge. Actually did some half-decent tunes right at the start. All burrs and incense and runny battery-farm eggs on pappy white bread. Then the well-known stuff. Blacksmith. Three albums, gradually getting more shit and famous with each one. Stadium rock for the hygiene-deficient. A band who looked more like their own roadies than their own roadies did. Not my thing at all. Solo LP after that: weird record, not quite right. Got to give him kudos for the title though: Unmetalled Road. Him standing next to a footpath sign on the cover, in a tight vest, looking sullen. Not quite carrying it off: the vest, or the shift in genre. Traditional Scottish folk songs and synthesisers. An uneasy mix. Still got his mullet now from not long after that. 1984: year of delusional concepts of hair progress in middle-age rock. Imagine he’ll stay committed to it until the end now. Younger wife, Carol. His fifth. One more for the full Henry VIII. Carol kept coming in to the living room and asking if we had enough fudge brownies. We said we were OK. At least thirteen of them on the table at all times. Clues to the epic recent narrative of Angus’s stomach. Buzzing a bit from the stories he told. Liked him a lot. Showed me a photo of him and Dick McKnight of Equinox walking through the docks in Greenock. Double denim. Possible absence of underwear. Couple of useful lads to have on your side in a brawl. Talked on with him. Gave me more leads in my detective story. Kills me that it might never get read. Tried to sell a book a while ago. Nobody was arsed. ‘Thank you for sending us this. We thought it was excellent and really has something special and a unique voice and I particularly like the bit where you wrote your name on the title page in capital letters but we think what would really improve the structure is if you could kindly fuck the fuck off and never contact us again.’ Why would this one be any different? ‘We would actually love to publish this biography of a dead person very few people care about, written by someone who can no longer get work in the national media.’ Not happening. £118.73 left in the bank now. Rent due with Titus in a week. Trying not to worry. Bob will help me out, I reckon. Clearing my head. Walking along the coast. Atlantic. Different to the south. Right big growling bastard. Sharper teeth, more root canals. Almost fell down a hole in the cliff. Salty spume blowing up at me through it. You’d think they’d tell you, put a sign saying ‘HOLE’ in front of it or something. Hut on the cliff edge. ‘I LOVE ANNIE’ scratched into the wood. We all want to be Annie. Wind spun me down some steps. Helicopter above, coast guard, following for a while, probably thinking ‘What’s this cunt doing out here?’ Hair getting a bit long, a bit Angus, at the back. Wind blew it all the way round and it blinded me and I fell over a tough wiry wee shite cunt of shrub. Talking like a Scottish person too now. Happens, if you spend enough time with them. Shrubs have to be hard bastards up here, to survive all the blowing. Looked like one myself. Redhead cliffweed, also known by its Latin name Gingerus Twaticus. Everyone used to rub it when I was young, scruff it up. Always rough enough for it to hurt a bit but you weren’t allowed to complain. What passed for affection, round our way. Last thing the old man did before he left. Rubbed his knuckles into it. Nobody does that round here. They give you a hug, even if you don’t know them, make to shake your hand like they’re about to do origami with it. Do what the hell you want with your fingers, pal, but I’m not game; I’m keeping my palm right here, in the archetypal loading position, like a human man.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
It’s hard to imagine what impact Devon must have made on McKendree as a baby, if any, but one might assume that his decision to head there in 1968 was sparked by some seed of a memory, some kind of peeling back of the layers and searching for the child inside himself. His father was in the US air force, which meant he moved the family around a lot during McKendree’s early childhood, until they settled in the town of Watsonville in California. From that point until the dissolution of Stoneman’s Cavalry in 1967, Richard John McKendree’s story was not markedly different to that of a lot of music-crazed kids growing up in sixties America: he gets into the Beatles, he grows his hair to the disapproval of his parents, he and Frank, his friend from school, begin to write songs in Frank’s mum and dad’s garage. Out with his bandmates, he smokes weed and drinks whiskey, but remains in fear of his father at home, shakes his mother’s and sister’s hands every night before going to bed. Stoneman’s Cavalry get a record deal, have a minor hit, implode. He makes it known that he would henceforth prefer to be known not as Richard or Richie but RJ and drifts around the steep dusty edges of LA, almost gets convinced to become a born-again Christian by Bryan MacLean from Love, is rumoured to be briefly considered as a replacement when David Crosby leaves the Byrds, always seems trapped on the edge of everything, unable to quite reach the centre of any scene and become part of it, as if behind some kind of force field, possibly self-made. He doesn’t appear in any memoir or biography or review of the time, besides very briefly in the cobbled-together, long out of print and somewhat trashy-looking 1970 paperback LA and the Happening Scene. Here, the young full-time dental hygienist and sometime singer Linda Perhacs, whose own lone solo album Parallelograms would also take decades to be recognised for its true mystical brilliance, remembers McKendree attending a gig at the Whiskey a Go Go in the company of his mother, presumably some time in 1969, not long after his return from Devon, and recalls noticing that they ‘have each other’s looming awkwardness and small ears’. It took a long time for me to track down Frank Bull, who never gigged or recorded again after his ill-fated reunion with McKendree to record what became the Hungarian-only ‘Little Meg’ single, and now is an abstract artist living – going on the evidence of his website – in an extremely long one-storey wooden house in Colorado. He told me he was reluctant to talk about that time, having been advised by his guru to place it in a locked box in the past, but after numerous requests from me did reply to a couple of questions in a fashion not a lot less abstract than his art, calling McKendree ‘my original old lady’ and ‘the source of my river’. He claimed to have never heard the Wallflower album and to have no interest in doing so but was sure that ‘my other self, on a parallel plane to this one, really digs it’.
