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Down River: In Search Of David Ackles by Mark Brend
In 1972, David Ackles’s third album, American Gothic, was released to a flurry of UK and US press plaudits declaring it to be ‘the Sgt. Pepper of folk’ and one of the greatest records ever made. Yet the album, like its two predecessors, failed to sell, and after one more record, its creator simply vanished. He found work, raised a family, and died a couple of decades later, having never made another record.
Today, Ackles’s music is largely consigned to the streaming netherworld. It has not been properly repackaged, and he remains largely unknown. Yet his admirers range from Black Flag’s Greg Ginn to indie polymath Jim O’Rourke to Genesis drummer turned platinum-selling solo artist Phil Collins. In 2003, when Elvis Costello interviewed Elton John for the first episode of his television show, Spectacle, the two spoke at some length about Ackles’s great talent before performing a duet of his song, ‘Down River’.
Drawing on conversations with Ackles himself, members of his family, collaborators including Bernie Taupin, and archive material, Down River is a search for an artist who got lost. It positions Ackles as one of the great maverick talents of popular music—an equal of Scott Walker and Tom Waits—seeks to understand the disconnect between his obvious gifts and his commercial failure, and wonders about the fickleness of fame and cult status. How does this process of retrospective recognition work, and why does it happen for some but not others? Was Ackles’s music just too strange, or might his time yet come? And what do the answers to these questions say about the mythmaking of the popular music industry—and about us, the audience?