John Renbourn: the man beyond the music

Speaking of acoustic guitar and fingerstyle, John Renbourn is undoubtedly one of the most eminent and prolific personalities in the entire - relatively young - panorama. His is a name that resonates strongly in us, too young to have known him live, but not to remain bewitched by his works beyond all time and definition. Just in these days it was the tenth anniversary of his death and for the occasion the Six Bars Jail in Florence organized an open mic event in his memory. Obviously we couldn't miss this opportunity and so we asked to participate: we were welcomed with extreme kindness and warmth in what we didn't know was the Italian temple of folk and fingerstyle guitar. In addition to a wonderful evening spent listening to and playing Renbourn, we had the opportunity to make friends with many enthusiasts like us; they, however, unlike us, had known Renbourn in person and even invited him twice to play on that stage (in 2009 and 2014). It was precious to listen to their stories about him, a gentle soul, exceedingly simple and humble: all qualities that can often fade in such recognized and appreciated personalities. We were struck by an anecdote told to us by Sergio: the last time John came there to play he had very recently suffered a severe family bereavement, because of which he could not put on a performance up to his usual standards. A few months later Sergio simply wrote to him to wish him a Merry Christmas and he replied (at three in the morning) like this: “Hey Sergio, I am really very happy to hear from you. I felt bad not having played well for you last time, I thought I had disappointed you. I was having some family problems at the time. I was afraid I had ruined our friendship. It is a great relief to hear from you and of course I hope to still be your friend. Best wishes as always”. It moved us to read it: his main concern was friendship; not his image or his business. This was the human caliber of John.

He spoke little of himself, even less in his music. Also because, when he worked on sung tracks they were always ballads or arrangements of other people's songs (or he set texts to music, like Go and Catch a Falling Star by the metaphysical poet John Donne or the Traveller’s Prayer from the Carmina Gadelica by Alexander Carmichael). But surprisingly the only song in his entire official discography with lyrics written by him is autobiographical: it is titled National Seven and is about Route Nationale 7, the road that leads from Paris to the French Riviera. Or rather, it talks about his misadventures trying to hitchhike to Saint Tropez from the opposite end of the country "standing in the rain all day" (side note: Guccini's song Statale 17 seems tailor-made to be an Italian equivalent of this song and is probably a complete coincidence). The very young John was in fact an unstoppable hitchhiker: born in 1944, he left home in 1960 driven by his family's intolerance towards his desire to live playing music, as well as his unorthodox approach to music since childhood (his first guitar was an all-pink Wonder that he wanted to "play like the cowboys in American movies"). He therefore found himself wandering by hitchhiking looking for places to play: initially he headed to Scotland and there, penniless, he found himself forced for some time to peel potatoes and wash dishes; then he tried his luck on the French Riviera and in Spain with his fellow guitarist Mac MacLeod, only to end up, in his words, "practically starving to death". Certainly in the very early 60s English folk clubs were extremely conservative and almost not at all open to guitarists, in particular to someone like him who leaned towards overseas sounds. He therefore ended these restless wanderings and in 1962 enrolled at the Kingston College of Arts in London, from which "at that time more musicians came out than artists: the Yardbirds went there, as did Eric Clapton and Sandy Denny". It happened in those years that a certain Davy Graham, a guitarist from the "highly vituperated niche" of innovative folk guitarists, found himself recording an album with none other than Shirley Collins on vocals: a highly respected figure even in the most conservative folk circles. This was one of the events that led to timidly opening the doors of some folk clubs to guitarists too. Not to mention the impact that Davy's music had on John, who recalled: "Davy was beyond anyone else at that time. On the cover of his LP 'The Guitar Player' he had a Gibson; word reached me that an American serviceman at a nearby airbase had a Gibson J-50 for sale and I absolutely had to have it. Musical considerations swept away by blind fanaticism. I later discovered that Davy didn't play it by choice: he had a beautiful Martin but went to a party and came home with a Gibson, probably without noticing". For John it was a turning point: in addition to the fact that now more environments tolerated this new folk, Davy's sounds dictated the direction he should head towards. This convergence of factors allowed him in 1965 to be noticed by a small independent label open to experimentation, Transatlantic Records, with which he recorded his first, homonymous, LP "spending a little more than the total length of the album in the studio". At that point the college of arts was already a memory (he said about it, with a touch of irony, that he had attended it "quite frequently").

An event destined to change the course of his life happened in the same year: walking by, he came across a poster advertising an evening as "the best blues in town"; he went with his friend and colleague Wizz Jones. They found themselves in front of a Scottish boy who had picked potatoes to afford the trip and his very first sustenance in London (where he arrived by bus together with Robin Williamson, future frontman of the Incredible String Band): his name was Bert Jansch. "When I first heard him I absolutely couldn't understand what on earth he was doing... I didn't recognize the chords or the shapes he made with his fingers. It was different from anything I had seen until then. I had never heard anyone play so well". Almost the same age, the two soon became friends, later sharing their musical paths and eventually even a house. There they spent a lot of time playing together, reaching the point in 1966 of having enough material for an LP. And this was recorded, in perfect coherence with its genesis, right in their London apartment in St. Edmund's Terrace: "the producer set up the equipment in the kitchen, put the cables in the hallway and covered the windows with blankets. We invited the upstairs neighbors to come down so they wouldn't make noise and had them sit in the kitchen with some beers", Bert recounted; "Some tracks were literally invented on the spot and never redone". They performed almost daily at Les Cousins, a Soho club in the basement of a Greek restaurant called Dionysus, at 49 Greek Street: that place soon became a meeting point for the new folk scene, so much so that today it is considered one of the cornerstones of British music. Right there John and Bert began to play informally with the two musicians who accompanied Alexis Korner (considered the founder of British blues): double bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox, both with a strong jazz imprint and very passionate about Mingus. Added to this line-up was the singer Jacqui McShee, who had already collaborated with John on his second LP. And so, as if by play, the Pentangle were born: it was 1967 and for the next five years they would tour Europe and America together, entering the charts and influencing generations to come. The name itself was John's idea, who, as a fan of Arthurian cycle tales, proposed the pentangle as the group's symbol: a star pentagon symbolizing the equal importance of all five vertices (in this case, them). With a perfect astral alignment watching over him, in those years he also married his "Judy", Blanche Hills, whom he met at college. But as sometimes happens with such positive and immediate great events, both the marriage and the adventure with Pentangle ended soon in 1972. The world of the big spotlight was not cut out for them: "we were exhausted" and so they opted to return to their solo projects, which they had never abandoned in the meantime.

Among John's works from that period is a completely sui generis album (which remained at an early stage of production) that sees him this time as a songwriter: composed entirely of songs that had lyrics written by him, mostly autobiographical. Probably, in such a turbulent moment of his life, writing was cathartic for him. For example, there is the self-ironic Sleepy John: "Sleepy John never did anyone any harm, he just stood and watched the world go by... Sometimes he paid the rent. Sleepy John lived in the middle of town, in a wooden house with a ramshackle and somewhat collapsed porch... And when the wind blew, he heard it whispering to him: 'Now get up John and fix the fence, don't throw yourself back into bed!'". In the final part of the song, however, he recalls when he then met "a friend, asleep among the flowers; at the end of the pine forest, on the bend of the river... and they didn't say a single word to each other", speaking of Judy, with whom he had recently concluded a marriage with two children and a lot of suffering. "Now time passes for sleepy John, with tears in his eyes... because the sweetest thing he ever saw was his smiling woman". Another song too, Just Like Me, is a cry of love and loneliness: "Where are you now, when I'd want you near the most: are you whistling in the wind? Are you smiling or crying, just like me?". Not only here: restlessness and loss mixed sometimes with a vein of British humor (and this pairing will often return in him) are a recurring theme in these tracks. "I heard of a traveler with a soul full of sorrow who wandered through the southern lands, so dry without rain", from Seven Sleepers. But at the same time, in these texts one can also read about a turning point in his life: the desire to change with a new maturity: "Sweet joy is born from suffering, like flowers from the desert sand", from Green Willow. The most emblematic song in this sense is Riverboat Song, in which he narrates the great change: in those years in London he lived on a barge on the Thames and loved the river as much as he could barely tolerate the city. Then he met a girl and fell in love with her: "the two of us together keep each other company, the two of us know how to be as one: on this green river road we go chasing the sun" and continues quoting Dylan "Oh, sad-eyed lady, take me by the hand: let me be your river man". And the very conclusion of this song is the beginning of his new life: "Hello green river, I have found a new home. So far from the city lights, so lonely; with no one around to share my sad songs with: only the wind on the water and the white swans. Oh, sad-eyed lady, take me by the hand: let me be your country man". The rush to leave London for the woods was such that he did not bother to continue this project which remained in oblivion for almost thirty years, when it was found and published as Lost Sessions: "The tapes from these sessions really got lost or at least got separated from their ever-so-responsible-guardian, me" he recalled. The lineup of musicians he played with was later the core of the John Renbourn Group.

And so it was that in 1974 he moved to the woods on the south coast of Cornwall, to Kingswear in Devon: there he married Jo Watson and had two more children. At this point his sounds also became more bucolic and serenely solitary: "So now I have to act like a composer!" he said. There masterpieces like The Hermit, The Black Baloon and The Nine Maidens were born. In 1982 he enrolled as a student in the three-year course of composition and orchestration at Dartington College, not far from his home, choosing as instruments (besides the guitar) the sitar and the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute. "I needed a special exemption to reschedule my second year exams, when I found out they happened on the same day as a concert with Doc Watson at Carnegie Hall". From 1988 he then became a tenured teacher and held the first academic course in acoustic guitar in all of England. In those years he still managed to always play and tour in Europe, America and Japan, forming groups like the aforementioned John Renbourn Group, the Ship of Fools and the famous collaborations with Stefan Grossman. "Trying to give up life on the road to stop and live in rural bliss is much harder than you think. Or at least it was much harder for me than I thought. Musicians, in general, tend to be dreamers. They get a call right when their head is buzzing with demisemiquavers and they say yes to everything, just so as not to stop the flow of things. The next thing they know is that it's time again to grab tin cans and a toothbrush," he recounted. Among the many nations he often visited, John had a special relationship with Italy since the 70s "it's difficult to explain the exact reason": he remembered the Folkstudio in Rome which "was like Les Cousins, but more bizarre. I would stay there for about a week and stay in a little room on an alley leading to Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere. Cheered by good company and Sacrofano wine, they were very productive times". Reno Brandoni, who for a long time accompanied John and Stefan Grossman on tour after Duck Baker, recounted in an article of his (*1) - among other things - life on the road: "in the car for ten, twelve thousand kilometers a month, discussing with my new friends, listening to music, talking about personal problems... Sometimes, rarely, we were sober. Luckily the breathalyzer didn't exist yet... Three people in a car was tight with guitars and luggage. So we had a competition to see who would leave for the tour with the smallest luggage. John won, showing up with a small backpack: only one pair of socks, underwear and a shirt, which he had to wash every night to have ready the next morning. It was a hallucinatory tour, with damp laundry hanging in the car".

And for about twenty years, that's how John's life went. Until 1994, another difficult turning point year for him: he divorced again and even decided to change continents. He moved to the Oakland ghetto in San Francisco: "I was the only white guy in the area. It was tough, the kids talked to me in an exaggerated version of what they thought was a nineteenth-century English accent". The following year he returned to Europe to play at the Edinburgh festival and decided not to go back to the USA. He stayed there and found a house in the Scottish Borders near Roberton, in Hawick. Or rather, he found a deconsecrated nineteenth-century Presbyterian church, isolated among the fields and reachable via a narrow little stone bridge called The Snoot. Clive Carroll recounted that he had no heating, he took water directly from the adjacent stream (often the pump got jammed and he had to go out and fix it) and that for the land registry it was considered a "dwelling for livestock". He lived there alone, even more determined to seek silence. Journalist Pete Paphides went to visit him and described the house this way (*2): "It was incredible how many things there were in there: 20 guitars or so; the bed in the corner of a large hall; four or five record players scattered here and there; thousands of records in the kitchen; there were hundreds and hundreds of dusty sauces and cans, some of which could be decades old... In the small anteroom there must have been about fifty decks of cards one on top of the other". As he got older, he became increasingly tired of playing live and, whenever humanly possible, always returned home to sleep (even at the cost of driving from the opposite end of Great Britain). He traveled exclusively by car, putting down the seats and sleeping in the back of his red minivan, a Toyota Previa: even to go as far as Crete to do his workshops (from Scotland!). Around 2010 he bought an old ambulance converted into a green van and, given his advancing age, on longer trips his son accompanied him driving. He never shied away from commitments and never stopped traveling, although his greatest desire always remained to go back home and do what he liked best: write music and fish for salmon with his little boat. Alone; in silence. Unfortunately, two unfortunate events marked those years: while fishing, his boat capsized and rescue workers had to rush him to intensive care; luckily he then recovered completely. And the bereavement, which he hinted at in the message at the beginning. But music and Scotland were for him the cure for the scourges of the world (undoubtedly accompanied by a few beers and a bit of humor). Then one strange day in March 2015, he left this earth without warning, from a heart attack. Another passage of his existence that tended to go further and further away from cities, from travels, from the world. In his performances, his version of a song by Joseph Spence titled Great Dreams From Heaven was almost never missing. And how many times he sang: "I had a great dream from heaven last night: the angels in heaven were calling me home. Thank God I can sing the song of His love, I know one day I’ll be singing above".

Francesco Moncalvo