Fred Neil

In the age of fashion, auto-fashion and super-fashion, Fred Neil is a victim of sub-fashion. He's a great artist and everyone in rock knows it. Outside of rock, very few people know that his record label once resorted to a desperate yet inspired slogan: buy a Fred Neil record and if you like it, we'll send you another one for free. They figured, quite rightly, that once you had two Neil records you'd be hopelessly in love. But if he's that good, why isn't he rich too? The answer is that you don't get rich unless you play the game. You have to make records, and make them often. And you have to promote them, pretty much constantly. You have to play clubs, do gigs, tour, and give as many interviews as possible. Fred Neil lives happily in Miami. He has no intention of leaving for some tedious live tour if he can help it

Lillian Roxon is always right, but about Fred Neil she's dead right. In the end it all comes down to this: an idiosyncratic human quirk mirrored, without mediation, in his own artistic conduct, market be damned. And yet we're not talking about a naïf: his initiation is that of someone destined to make a name for himself. Prematurely exposed to musical sunburn thanks to his father, a traveling salesman of Wurlitzer jukeboxes, by the late Fifties he was already clocking in at the golden temple of the Brill Building and writing songs for people who mattered, from Buddy Holly ("Come Back Baby") to Roy Orbison ("Candy Man"). A songwriter for others, in short — the choice of someone determined to skip amateurism altogether and go straight to grips with the industry, the very top of the industry, to be precise.

The obstacle standing in the way of an already smoothly paved career arises not from a flaw, but from a gift. Fred's performing qualities are too extraordinary to be sidelined, starting with the mystery emanating from his vocal cords: a gentle baritone, a lunar crooner's voice, fragrant as a glass of brandy and caressed by a measured vibrato, capable of modulating both white registers (Jimmie Rodgers' yodelin') and Black ones (Muddy Waters' shout). A voice possessed by all the demons of American popular music, conjured by a boy who was never really young. More than his slicked-back countrymen, his true kindred spirit is a young Scotsman just taking his first steps in those very years: Bert Jansch. Even his inseparable 12-string has a voice all its own: seasoned in folk-blues fingerpicking, Fred's strumming takes off from those roots to explore spaces never before stirred by human turbine.

His earliest recordings embrace the fashionable rock'n'roll of the day (after all, he was born in Alan Freed's city), but his true calling would only be fulfilled once he pitched his tent in Greenwich Village. It doesn't take him long to become a living institution of MacDougal Street, whether due to his vague resemblance to Woody Guthrie — although, according to Grace Slick, his real double is Winnie the Pooh: he's the "Pooneil" to whom the Jefferson Airplane would dedicate not one but two songs. He befriends Karen Dalton and Dino Valenti, but above all he takes under his wing every young talent who crosses his path: among others, John Sebastian and Felix Pappalardi would become his frequent collaborators. When Dylan arrives in the neighborhood looking for tips, the answer he keeps getting is always the same: "Ask Fred."

His muse, though, pumps in a direction rarely trodden by the balladeers marching at the head of protest columns: over topical singing, he prefers the timeless laments of the Delta, reincarnated in his own deep wounds. In the Big Apple a purposeful, introspective crowd is already stirring (Eric Andersen, David Blue, Tom Paxton, the early Paul Simon), but Fred goes a step further: together with Tim Hardin he forges the figure of the isolated, melancholy, "free" singer-songwriter, one whose songs let you know from which dock he's setting sail but never on which shore he'll wreck. It's an expressive need that will push him to flirt with jazz's malleability, for the benefit of future artists like John Martyn, Van Morrison, David Crosby and Tim Buckley (the latter two, just to be sure, will take lessons directly from him), as well as our own Claudio Rocchi, Alan Sorrenti and Claudio Fucci. No question about it: Fred is the first navigator of the stars.

Yet the spirit of the times shines brightly through on his debut "Tear Down The Walls" (1964, alongside his friend Vince Martin), and not just because Elektra was trying to launch yet another duo: the title track is a hopeful protest song, while some musical risks foreshadow folk-rock. But the suit fits Fred too tightly: he parts ways with his partner without hard feelings (who in 1969 will record the splendid "If The Jasmine Don't Get You... The Bay Breeze Will", an unsung gem of the folk fringe) and the following year goes solo with "Bleecker & MacDougal", backed by a spirited electric band. The cover portrays him at the titular intersection as just another New York hobo, but among its grooves already lurks the personality about to carve out a cornerstone of the '60s, heralded by his move to Capitol and by another gorgeous cover (courtesy of famed rock photographer Jim Marshall). And if titles always speak volumes, "Fred Neil" speaks loud and clear.

Immortal records fall into two categories: those that lay out democratically memorable songs one after another, and those that prefer to alternate blinding flashes with gentler moments of calm. The album under discussion belongs more to the latter camp, and four tracks alone are enough to secure its place in history: two at the ends, two at the center. Mind you, that's not to say the rest is filler: pure ambrosia drips from the placid harmonica of "That's The Bag I'm In", the country nursery rhyme of "Ba-De-Da", the bittersweet fatalism of "Everything Happens" and the hypnotic delights of "Green Rocky Road", each its own saloon on this acid frontier for languid gentlemen. Little to object to in the covers either, which Fred, ever the dutiful ethnomusicologist, couldn't resist including: the whistling elegy "I've Got A Secret" (from Elizabeth Cotten's repertoire) and the blues standard "Sweet Cocaine". The point is that what comes before, between and after them is so beautiful it makes adjectives feel inadequate.

Have you ever wondered what sound a crumbling cloud might make, without breaking apart into rain? Something very close to the rarefied tremolo of "The Dolphins", a wisp of cotton wool to suck on for its sugary foam. The psychedelic charter hasn't been drafted yet, but Fred signs it and tears it up in one single move, vaulting over the lysergic fog and reaching for a celestial proto-dream pop. It's no coincidence that his natural heir will take hold of this song and later perfect it into that "Song To The Siren" which will become a cornerstone of dreams set to music. Murmured with the gravity of a sage upon a mountain, the words trace an ecological-antimilitarist arc that is also a message to a faceless lover, but above all a heartfelt ode to the most captivating of sea-farers, to whom the author will dedicate far more than a mere song.

Let's move four tracks down. In theory, this is the prehistoric "Dink's Song", a traditional handled by pretty much everyone from Pete Seeger to Dave Van Ronk. Fred, though, plays it sly: he smuggles it through customs under the alternate title "Faretheewell" and, in a rare burst of self-assertion, subtitles it "Fred's Tune". It's a statement of intent: the melody is indeed rebuilt from scratch, and of the lyrics almost only that one word survives, chanted over two guitar chords streaked with the Mediterranean touch of the bouzouki (perhaps an idea from the Greek-born producer Nick Venet). The treatment isn't unlike the one given to "The Water Is Wide" on the previous album, but here the voice embraces the sky and shakes the earth, sublimating into a metaphysical horizon. Perhaps the most poignant farewell ever sung: that of folk music passing into pop music, of the past becoming the future through the present.

What follows, without even pausing for breath, is the dagger to the heart. It's the blink of an eye, from airy forests to dusty roads: "Everybody's Talkin'" is an anthem to wandering impermanence that overturns every cliché of the rambler song. The loner who "hears only the echoes of his mind" becomes a figure more proud than resigned, and if anything it's the world that must adjust to him ("Goin' where the weather suits my clothes"). There's no mention of the usual evocatively-named stops, no endless highways or flea-bitten motels: this is the journey of the everyman, an icon of homegrown American literature that, for once, even those who've never crossed a scorching desert or a frozen lake can identify with. The suspicion that this is an alter ego of an author who has always shunned conventional paths is more than justified. His understated version is preferable to the melodramatic (if still moving) rendition by Harry Nilsson, the driving theme of the multi-award-winning "Midnight Cowboy". Credit is certainly due to John Schlesinger for hitting the mark, adding a further shade of meaning with his effective urban relocation of the song.

Even when he doesn't open his mouth, Fred knows exactly how to make himself understood: the closing instrumental "Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga" projects the curry-spiced wail of "Eight Miles High" toward the minarets of Kaleidoscope and Devil's Anvil, a pan-ethnic ouroboros tameable only by someone with two first names for a name. The call to arms encrypted in the opening track can now sound its trumpets: from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, it's all already there in these eight minutes. Not bad for someone who seemed destined to moulder in the rearguard.

The personality the record gives back to us is that of an eternal loser, one who nonetheless prefers irony to bitterness: like the most self-aware bluesmen, Fred seems haunted by a fate so mocking that laughter is the only response, alternating Zen detachment ("Well I know that the fault was mine/ What else could I do?/ It happens every time/ I guess there's nothing left to say") with devastatingly surreal one-liners ("You know they'll probably drop the atom bomb the day my ship comes in"). A universal echo thunders through the words of this reticent bard, something that goes beyond the all-American myth of the loser: hiding behind the guise of the unfulfilled lover or the ragged man thrown out the door, the author paints a powerful portrait of the human condition.

Aware of having said enough, Fred follows this masterpiece with two albums that foreshadow how his career will unfold. "Sessions" (1968) is exactly what it promises to be: seven semi-improvised tracks, somewhere between bored and distracted, as if by then he were making music only for himself; on the cover of "Other Side Of This Life" (1971), half live, half studio (a classic move that reeks of a premature farewell), he has himself photographed on a boat, wearing the sly smile of a man about to play a prank. From there on, total silence. Rumors have circulated about a 1973 session with John Cipollina and two cover collections recorded in the late '70s, but to this day nothing is known for certain.

In the meantime he had moved to West Saugerties, on the same road where the Band settled into Big Pink, before returning to the Florida where he grew up. It's there that in 1970 he made the decision that would change his life: together with Ric O'Barry he founded the Dolphin Research Project, devoting himself full-time to protecting these wonderful animals. The year before, riding the wave of Schlesinger's film, Capitol had reissued "Fred Neil" retitling it (of all things) "Everybody's Talkin'". It's the peak moment of popularity for his songs, but by then he's no longer around for anyone.

Fred did allow himself the occasional sporadic live appearance: a concert in New York in 1971 with Stephen Stills (who would repeatedly cite him as a guitar influence), an appearance at the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival alongside Sebastian, Harvey Brooks and Peter Childs, and one final cameo in 1981 on Buzzy Linhart's stage, before bidding farewell to the spotlight for good. He would make headlines again twenty years later, when on July 7, 2001 news broke of his death at 65, felled by cancer. Quietly, just as he had always lived, and in his favorite season.

The heaven of musical Salingers, those who retired before their time and without losing their minds, can't be too bad a place — if only because there's plenty of room. I picture him jamming a blues with Captain Beefheart on harmonica, while Mark Hollis watches on, amused. And at night, like the tigers of Hemingway's fisherman or the deserts of Herzog's Kaspar Hauser, he dreams of his beloved dolphins.

He may well be the most important living singer-songwriter

The quotes at the beginning and end are taken from Lillian Roxon, “Rock Encyclopedia e altri scritti”, translated by Tiziana Lo Porto, Minimum Fax 2014.

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20/06/2021