PIONEERING SPIRIT ELEKTRAFYING


Author MICK HOUGHTON hears how DAVID STOUGHTON moved from bluegrass to writing comic patriotic songs for legendary cartoonist Al Capp before impressing Jac Holzman with his experimental recordings. And, nope, he really didn’t take acid!


avid Stoughton’s Transformer was released by Elektra in 1968, it was his only album for that or any other label. At the time, Elektra was knee deep in singer-


songwriters and you’d have been safe to


assume Stoughton was the next cab off the rank. Closer examination reveals that Elektra released a number of one-off experimental albums that year, such as Nico’s The Marble Index or The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders,but in terms of sheer unclassifiable weirdness, Transformer wins the prize.


The opening ‘The Sun Comes Up Each Day’ (also released as a single) isn’t a million miles away from Tim Buckley and, one of two tracks sung by Devi Klate, ‘Evening Song’ would now pass for acid-folk but the unsettling sound collage and electronic chaos of ‘The Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’ or the more free form ‘I Don’t Know If It’s You’ with its aleatoric percussion deterred most listeners. Forty years later, Transformer still hasn’t found its audience beyond the odd internet sighting among what Stoughton describes as “a small but dogged core of music lovers who are interested in the extreme music of the ’60s.”


In the early ’60s Stoughton was an 14


undergraduate (a mathematics major) at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became caught up in the folk boom and learned to play all kinds of folk guitar (bluegrass, blues, fingerpicking and flatpicking styles). He was a regular at the local Club 47 on Mr. Auburn Street, where Joan Baez, The Charles River Valley Boys, Keith and Rooney, Tom Rush, Doc Watson, Clarence White and many great folk artists played. After college (Class of ’65), he then spent a year in Europe before returning to the States, and Cambridge, where he found a job teaching guitar at The Newton School Of Music. Like so many others The Beatles changed his view of music. Less popularly, so did the avant-garde music of John Cage.


I first encountered David Stoughton in 2006 when helping to compile and produce the Forever Changing box set for Rhino. In response to my request for some background he provided this most eloquent account of his life and times and the story behind the Transformer album. It begins in ’66.


“I attended an event where artist Robert Rauchenberg, dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage performed improvisations together. I never liked Cage’s actual musical product, but I loved the


freedom and spirit he brought to sound. Being an electronics nut as well, I started composing musique concrète works. I wrote a couple of 30 minute pieces that I brought to the attention of John Cage – major works – and he admired them. I had a life-long correspondence with him. Through him, my musique concrète tapes started being circulated among the avant-garde composer community.


“Meanwhile, one thing that was clear to me was that I didn’t want to be a mathematician. I didn’t want to be a folk guitarist either. I’d written a lot of bluegrass tunes in the early days, but Lennon’s work inspired me to dive into a different pool. I bought a Stratocaster and an amp, and started to write Beatle-ish songs. Me and about a million other ex- folkies!


“Strangely, I got to know and became very friendly with Al Capp who lived a few blocks away from me in Cambridge. (Capp wrote and drew the ultra-conservative L’il Abner cartoon strip about a fictional clan of hillbillies, it was read by millions for over 40 years). I was a liberal. Long hair. Had the look of a hippie pot smoker and acid-head (I never took acid, even though Transformer is often characterised as acid-psych). Al Capp and I crossed swords in


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