A few days after the extraordinary revelation in the Coos Bay storage unit, we were hanging out in the campground around a fire and Jack was picking out the chords of an Amy Winehouse song (an artist he loved!). Jack stopped strumming and told me he was pulling out in the morning for the Redwoods. I sort of wanted to accompany him for more material, but he didn’t ask and I knew it was probably time to part company. We talked some more rock and roll and literature and then turned in early.

I got up well before Jack and whipped up a pancake breakfast to fuel us for the road. We ate heartily and then packed up our rigs. Jack was set to pull out first and when he sauntered up to me.

“Thanks for the company. I hope your writing goes well.”

“Thank you Jack. I hope so, too. How will find you if something hits?”

“You’ll know where to find me.”

“I’ll know where to find you.”

We shook hands. Mr. Figgs came up and we shook hands.

A minute later Jack’s rig was lumbering out of the park, and I was standing outside mine, when an ancient megaphone-shaped loudspeaker mounted to the top of the RV crackled like the one in Mash and I heard Jack’s blistering recording of the Stones’ “It’s Only Rock and Roll But I Like It,” at a decibel level that must have been heard for a square mile.

Rock and Roll indeed.

Roll away the stone. Check the palms. Rock does live and its resurrection is Jack Blake. Right now he is in a 27 foot rusting RV, cruising the Pacific Northwest Coast’s back roads with an insane mutt, making music with a little help from his friends, and about ready to change Rock and Roll forever.

I have told the story. The message is delivered. I never really had a choice if I cared about Rock and Roll and I do now. This story is the gospel, the good news. John the Baptist read the prophecies in the Old Testament. He knew what would happen to Jesus if he baptized him by the river that day in the desert.

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Jack Blake. He is yours.

The Salomes are dancing for me now. I hope my head doesn’t end up on a platter.

I want to digress from the narrative a bit here to record my observations of Jack’s music. After watching him work and listening to about a dozen albums I downloaded back in my rig, I got the feel for his creative and technical process. He records all his material with an ancient four track recorder either inside “Pequod” or playing live in a tavern. With an acoustic or electric guitar and vocals (sometimes harmonica) recorded together on one track, Jack then layers in various sounds to the three other tracks and works his Phil Spector magic.

Occasionally he lets the live first track stand alone. But if there is a trademark Jack Blake sound it can be characterized by strange instrumental solos produced by a host of cheap instruments he finds at thrift stores and garage sales. Jack has also made friends with many musical eccentrics up and down the coast and often stops by their homes and plays their organs, amps, and other instruments. Jack even knows of an old Russian man who has a Theremin in his shop near the Canadian border who taught him how to manipulate this freakish machine. Jack records with it every time he’s in the area.

As for vocals, Jack mixes in several background vocals per song. Usually it’s him and Mr. Figgs with various distortions but often the recordings contain voices of friends or complete strangers he meets on the road. He told me he records all sorts of sounds and conversations: logging equipment, beef slaughtering, gas station attendants, drunks, strippers, people in laundromats, prison work crews, Sunday sermons and city council meetings. Jack always asks permission and rarely do people refuse.

He generally has an arrangement for a song worked out in his head and then it’s simply a matter of coordinating the instruments and recording apparatus. From witnessing the process, I would estimate that Jack can complete an album, which vary in length from 25 to 45 minutes, (never lasting longer unless it’s a “double album,” (a phrase Jack loves to say) in about three hours. Most albums are built around a single theme like the narrative of a social or historical event, a description of a natural place, work, ecology, personal loss, injustice, but others are recordings of live shows with a random song selection. Jack said he has never used a set list in his life and never plans an album. Obviously Jack pays no royalties to previously recorded songs but many of his covers are in the public domain. Every cassette has extensive handwritten session information and original artwork (drawings or collage) for the cover. The very last step of the packaging is the recording’s title or “name” as Jack prefers to call it, and he takes this naming very seriously and occasionally riffs a title with lewd or brazen phrasings or a sly nod to the excess of alcohol in literature. For example:

Ivanka Trump Can Eat My Shit

Make Me a Man of God Mr. Devil Rock Fucker

Eyes Like Wet Currants (Quote from Chekhov)

Castrate Mitch McConnell

From the Morbid Compost (Quote from some French poet, possibly Rimbaud)

I Drink a Liquor Never Brewed (Quote from Emily Dickinson)

Escape the Sexual Gulag

To Live like Thoreau, Except for the Women (Quote from Jack Kerouac)

Urge and Urge and Urge (Quote from Walt Whitman)

Rock N’ Roll Pagans with Old Crow Nightmares

Vodka, Love and Glory

A Peasant Back to the Dung Pile ((I think a quote from Russian literature or H.L. Mencken )

Jesus Loves Scotch

Ocean Air and Gin (Quote from Malcom Lowery)

“Got Tight on Absinthe Last Night and Did Knife Tricks” (Quote from Hemingway)

A Drunken Gnat In a Pub Urinal (Quote from a French poet)

As I previously wrote, I sense what Jack has done and is still doing is without precedent in the annals of American rock and roll. Yes, there is the story of a mechanic back East who has recorded hundreds of songs, only a handful that have been commercially released on several incredible albums that rock critics rave about. Then there is Prince, who is said to have 50 albums worth of material stashed in the vaults and will be released by his family over the next 50 years. And of course there are hundreds of young and old musicians with inexpensive multi-track recorders (many turning to digital) who fancy themselves as potential rock stars and record miles of tape or shitloads of gigabytes in total anonymity.

Still, though, Jack seems unique. He is living in a piece of shit RV for chrissakes, parking it in the woods, drawing power from public restrooms and campgrounds and writing and playing songs that nobody writes or plays anymore. I mean the guy writes protest, labor, train and drinking songs and performs electric covers of famous Christian hymns like the “Old Rugged Cross” and “Trust and Obey.” He uses utterly primitive equipment, his dog “sings” background vocals and he includes audio snippets from transients, cops and strippers!

Jack Blake is documenting Americana like no one has with music before or since. Bob Dylan did something similar early in his career but then hit it big and became a rock star, icon, millionaire troubadour, celebrity mystic and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But none that would happened had Dylan not been discovered and recorded hit singles and albums.

What does the future hold for Jack?

By now you may be asking: who is Jack Blake? What is his biography before life on the coast?

This much I can tell:

At some point in our adventure together, guiltily, I memorized the license plate on Jack’s rig. Soon after my trip, I ran it through Oregon DMV and came up with a name and an address in the Portland area. The address turned out to be a mail center.

From what I gleaned in my time with Jack, he had been some sort of educator. He made mysterious allusions to cashing out a teacher’s pension and talked about his “students.” After we parted, the writer in me had to trace more of his biography.

One day I started calling high schools in the Portland metropolitan area. I posed as an administrator from a small school on the Oregon Coast that was checking Jack’s references for an interim teaching position. After 37 calls and a lot of hang-ups, I finally reached a vice-principal at large suburban high school who confirmed Jack taught there two years ago but quit to do “something creative,” a notion which seemed to be an extreme rarity among teachers according to this administrator. Jack had taught American government and English and advised the literary magazine for four years. “He was a fantastic teacher and the students loved him,” the VP said. I asked him for a special anecdote about Jack’s character and it was as if I turned on a spigot. For the nest 10 minutes the VP described story after outrageous story of Jack’s brief but brilliant career. It was plain that Jack was a legend at the school.

“He used to play guitar in a rock band with students at the pep assemblies and it always brought the house down. In fact we had to ask him to tone it down after one got way too loud and the lyrics were questionable. Several teachers complained.”

“Do you remember what songs he played at the assembly, ” I asked.

“It was only one. I don’t know what the name was but it had a chorus of ‘we do it all the time, yeah, yeah.’ something like that.”

I knew the song and had lost my mind to it several times at parties and concerts. It was the Violent Femmes “Kiss Off.”

There was more. Jack once came into a faculty meeting with his acoustic guitar and played a bunch of songs to ease the tension after a very tense, divisive staff vote on revamping the curriculum. He led a poetry slam team that went to national teenage finals and also coached the girls’ tennis team!

Apparently, Jack’s teaching had caused controversy in the community on several occasions. He staged a mock death penalty trial and electrocution taken directly from a real case in Florida that led to many parental complaints. The literary magazine he advised contained a short story about a cheerleader’s first lesbian experience that outraged a local Christian group. They demanded the school board confiscate the copies and fire Jack. (Later I dug out the local paper’s account of the episode and it described Jack bringing 50 students to a board meeting and reading passages from Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, William O. Douglas, Henry Miller, Thomas Paine and Voltaire!)

Finally I helped the VP wind the conversation down and ended by asking if he would employ Jack again knowing what he knew now. “In a minute. He had the highest standards for academics and citizenship in the building and never sent a kid to my office.” I was thanking him for his time when he burst in, “I can’t believe (Jack) moved to the coast. If I were you, I’d hire him immediately.”

The next week I visited Jack’s old school, went to the library and tracked down the yearbooks during his tenure. Each volume had nearly two dozen pictures of Jack. The change in his physical appearance from the first to fourth year was striking. His hair became longer, he frequently didn’t shave and his clothes became looser. On an impulse I told the librarian I was a writing feature story about Jack for a national teaching magazine and she told me more incredible tales. I asked if a computer still had a record of the books and periodicals he checked out. Surprisingly the answer was “yes” and she printed it out. The total ran to over 15 pages and the titles ranged from physics to Spanish language materials to constitutional law to a biography of Duke Ellington. Despite the high volume, it seemed that Jack had failed to return only one book; a Modern Library hard cover edition of Walt Whitman’s entire literary output. “He was the only one who ever checked it out,” said the librarian.

The question I asked myself after the school visit was why Jack gave up such a distinguished and creative teaching career. He could have impacted thousands of other students who needed his enthusiasm and viewpoint. The administration let him do what he wanted and he had a dream schedule teaching subjects he cared about.

But still, a job in the classroom meant a schedule and strictures. It meant being surrounded and enslaved by tech. It meant grading. Over time, Jack simply couldn’t handle it anymore and knew he had to strike out to run down his dream of making music that matters.

There was something else, too, and I didn’t get it until I decided to read Whitman again because something about Jack not returning that book to the school library revealed something about him, if only I could ascertain what it was.

So I picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass and started reading to see if it could provide insight. It had been 20 years since my last encounter with Whitman. I was in high school and, well you know how most teachers drain the blood from poetry. A few lines into “Song of Myself” I came across these two stanzas:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are

crowded with perfumes

I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let

it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the

distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and

naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

That was it. Jack Blake was mad to be in contact with the world, nature, people, ideas, music. That was rock and roll to him.

Jack parked his rig in front of one of the larger units of a huge storage facility. He eased outside with Mr. Figgs bounding behind him. He punched in a code lock and threw open the bay door.

Inside was something straight out of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark when a government lackey rolls the crated ark into a huge warehouse stuffed full of other wooden crates.

Shelves covered the walls from the floor to the top of the 12 foot ceiling. On the floor, palettes were precisely arranged in rows that barely allowed passage. Filling the space on all the shelves and palettes were cassettes, hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands of cassettes—all of them containing music recorded by Jack Blake. I quickly and roughly estimated the room at 1500 sq. feet but couldn’t begin to do the math needed to calculate the total number of tapes.

“I’m almost out of room, but I’m not sure I can afford anything bigger,” Jack said.

“How many?” I asked as I walked slowly into the archive for closer inspection.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they arranged in any particular order?

“No, but I started on the walls first and then down to the floor, so they might be chronological.”

I veered left and moved in. I picked out a tape at random and glanced at artwork, session notes, song titles and then read the cassette’s title aloud: Sniffing Dope While Making War Planes.

“I think that’s from two years ago,” Jack said and he went on to explain that during WW II, planes constructed from Sitka Spruce trees cut and milled on the Oregon Coast were glued together with a mind altering epoxy the workers called “dope.” Jack loved this anecdote and wrote nine folk rock tunes that narrated this little known story through the voice of an “dope” addicted worker.

I walked a few feet away and picked out another tape: French Radicals and German Police Spies. Jack told me it was a feedback drenched rock assault on the ravages of capitalism using only the text from the Communist Manifesto as lyrics. I thought about stealing it.

“Is there a master list of all the tapes and all the tracks?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you make all the copies yourself?”

“What do you mean?” Jack responded.

“The copies of the albums you make,” I said.

“There are no copies. These are all originals. I never give away or sell anything but the master tapes.”

I stood quiet for a moment trying to consider what Jack just told me.

“Give away?”

“Yeah, I keep a lot, as you can see, but most of the tapes I give away to people I meet or donate them to the thrift stores. Not a lot folks have cassette players, but oh well. I just love tape.”

The thought occurred to me that after this encounter with Jack I needed to drive the entire Pacific Northwest Coast and check every thrift store for Jack’s tapes.

“Now that I think of it,” said Jack “there are other copies but not in cassette form.”

Now it was my turn. “What do you mean?”

And just when I thought Jack’s story had no chance of becoming more fantastic and unprecedented, he explained:

“My brother-in-law has taken a special interest in my music. Every month or so he drives down here from Portland, pulls out 15-20 tapes and then returns home to work in his basement studio. He digitizes the music and has created a web site where all the music is available for 99 cents an album. You can only purchase it by the album. These are albums, not singles.”

I was a little stunned and hesitated. “A web site?”

Jack explained that “The Music of Jack Blake” had been live for about a year and was selling a bit here or there but he hadn’t done any promotion outside of mentioning it when he was busking. He didn’t know how to promote nor did he really care.

I cared. I whipped out my phone and found the site while Jack rummaged around the unit. There were hundreds of albums available and Jack’s brother-in-law had also included scans of the cassette’s artwork and session notes. I bought “Rain Isn’t About the Weather,” an entire album of nothing but songs about the rain, recorded during a rainstorm that battered the rig.

As I started listening through an ear bud, it began raining.

Jack spent about an hour changing out gear and sorting cassettes in the unit. When he finished, he came over to me and I took out my ear bud and stashed the phone.

“Jack, you know this might explode once the word gets out, don’t you?” I said.

“If it happens I guess we’ll be ready. I want more people to hear my stuff.”

“You know I’m going to write about this if you say its okay and maybe if you don’t.”

“You can write about it. It’s not going to change the way I make or distribute my music.”

I suddenly flashed on the last pathetic image of Brian Jones, floating dead in his pool loaded on armies of pills. “Death by misadventure,” according to the coroner’s report.

“Jack, if this thing hits, your days of controlling your music and its distribution are over. No one stays small once you hit the charts. Look at Beck. From street singer and sleeping on the floor to video director, super models and bolo ties at awards shows.”

“That’ll never happen to me. Besides, I don’t see think Beck sold out. I saw him at the Salem Armory and he had pierced, tattooed teenagers listening to a white guy playing folk blues. I can dig that.”

Jack paused for a moment. “You assume people are going to listen to, much less buy my music. There’s no market for my message or musical style. That’s why I’m here.”

“Jack,” I said almost desperately, “if you took your music, put a kick ass band behind it, took it on the road and polished up a single, it might change the face of popular music.”

“Ask yourself this,” Jack said. “What would Buddy Holly do? That’s the only direction I need.”

It was getting late and I stood up to leave when Jack said, “Where are you going? It’s time to record.”

I sat back down. As I surveyed the interior, Jack started hauling out his recording equipment and setting up. Finally 30 minutes after plugging in, tuning, testing, Jack was ready to record. I slumped in a bean bag chair with a can of beer and watched Jack perform. Mr. Figgs roused from his snooze and came over and sat in his own bean bag chair to watch the show.

A show? That is a vast, vast, understatement. What I witnessed over the course of the next two hours surely must rank with one of the greatest and bizarre performances in the history of American music.

Jack opened with a Fats Waller tune and then ran through several Negro spirituals. Next a 10-part double fugue. Then it was a sea song called “The Greenland Whale Fishery,” a few examples of skiffle, an early, obscure Bob Marley composition, a Depression era song titled “How Can a Poor Man Such Times and Live?”, a medley of Latin American hits (sung in Spanish), a bootlegging classic called “Good Ole’ Mountain Dew,” a Turkish instrumental, a few lusty Goliardic songs (in Latin) from the 13th century that Jack especially loved because they were often performed by wandering defrocked priests or runaway monks, and finally, two snippets of traditional Javanase mountain music.

Jack typically ripped through the tracks once, singing and playing various guitars, acoustic and electric, then madly overdubbed them with instruments or vocals while listening through a tiny mono speaker. During this session I never once saw him start an overdub and then stop. I asked him about this and told me he never stops during this process. It’s all one take and move on.

After a rowdy cover of a Stevie Wonder song, “Master Blaster,” Jack stopped for a minute, took a swig off his beer, gargled and then launched into five minutes of Tuvan throat singing, a bizarre sounding vocal technique indigenous to a remote area in Central Asia. He accompanied it with a wicked slide guitar and together it formed the most intense, strange and utterly rockin’ music I had ever heard.

Jack wrapped up the recording session, popped out the cassette tape, scribbles some words on the tape and its case with a marker and set it aside.

It was somewhere around this point, well into the early morning, that Jack discovered I worshiped the Stones. He insisted we record a few tunes together and we set to work cutting “Stop Breaking Down,” “Dear Doctor,” and “Rocks Off.” I sang background vocals and bashed the tambourine. Jack put down a wicked, driving banjo solo on “Rocks Off” and then ended our jam on a plaintive waltz pace. When we concluded, he turned off the recorder and marked the tape as he had the previous one and handed it to me.

It was 4:30 in the morning and I took the tape and staggered drunk and awestruck to my rig.

The next morning, we woke up shattered. Jack threw together a scrambled egg and toast breakfast that instantly revived us and we talked about books. He certainly favored the serious literature: Melville, Dos Passos, London, Tolstoy, Yeats, Dickinson, Alice Munro, and many others. I asked if I could peruse his library while he cleaned up after breakfast. He said sure.

All were battered library rejects and I as leafed through several of the volumes, I noticed Jack had heavily annotated them with comments, questions, and lines of verse. Jack also owned many atlases and non-fiction books, almost exclusively about the Northwest: natural history, labor history, politics, outdoor adventure, textbooks, travel guides and so on. As I read a passage from a book about the Wobblies who worked in the Oregon timber industry, Jack broke my concentration by asking me to find the WPA American Guide to Oregon, one of the famous travel/cultural guides to American life produced by the Federal Writers Project during the Depression.

He told me owned all the guides to Western states and used only them for his road maps, camping and cultural/historical information. These guides were written before the federal interstate highway system was constructed in the 50s and the unfortunate idea of national hotel/motel chains.

Breakfast was over and I was about ready to leave when Jack asked me if I wanted to accompany him to his storage unit in Coos Bay. He said he needed to drop off some cassettes and change out some of his musical equipment.

Of course I would go with him.

An hour later, “Pequod” was on the road and Jack had a Dolly Parton 8-track playing. Mr. Figgs was riding shotgun and I sat back in a bean bag wondering how I was going to tell this story. I didn’t know yet because I didn’t know what the story was.

His name surprised me and I figured it must be a pseudonym. I felt ready to launch a thousand questions about what I had just witnessed.

“This is probably the last place in the world I expected to hear a Sonics’ tune,” I said.

Jack smiled. He knew then I knew music and from that point on for the next three days we talked of little else. Even the Pandemic didn’t come up very often, although he was keenly aware of it and had written some songs about it. I did see him wear a mask when he walked to a nearby convenience store, but never around his rig, and of course never when singing.

He asked a few questions about my trip and background but gave no reaction when I told him I was a would-be writer looking for a Pandemic story.

“Are you on some sort of vacation,” I asked, knowing full well he was not. By now it was obvious that Jack had been living out of the RV for a long time. He seemed thoroughly road tested and didn’t exactly have the appearance of someone who held regular job back in an urban area, even pre covid.

“No, I’m traveling up and down the Northwest Coast making music and meeting people.”

“How long have you been on the road?”

“Almost four years now. I call it my first term. It’s slowed down a bit the last month since the virus hit and I’ve sort of hunkered down here and rented a nearby storage unit to store some of my stuff.”

‘Do you mind me asking how you afford to do this?”

“Shit, Jack shrugged. “Why are Americans so reluctant to ask others how much they make or what they paid for something? I’ve never understood this.”

“So you’ll tell me? ” I added.

Jack laughed. “I had a little money saved, I sell some music, occasionally play on street corners or in taverns, and do some seasonal work for some of the government agencies on the coast. Or at least I used to play in taverns, that’s all gone now.”

“What kind of seasonal work?” The reporter in me was starting to show but Jack never flinched at one of my questions.

“I do some salmon spawning counts for the Department of Fish and Wildlife and slug surveys for the Forest Service, stuff like that. It doesn’t take much to live like I do.

Jack handed me a can of beer and I offered to help him stow his musical gear. I coiled a few cords and we finished in a few minutes. A steady rain had started up so Jack invited me inside his rig, which he had christened “Pequod.”

Inside, Jack had groovy lights of white and blue twinkling and incense burning everywhere. Twenty-seven feet is a lot of space and Jack made the most of it. Shelves were crammed with musical gear, books, food, clothes, small statutes, outdoor gear, tools, and paper. On available wall space, Jack had taped old album covers. Beads covered the windows. Beanbag chairs were strewn around on a hideous yellow shag carpet that no company had manufactured in 25 years but appeared to be newly installed. “I got it from a bank,” Jack said.

We cracked open another beer and began a rambling conversation on virtually every aspect of American popular music. I had always prided myself on being an expert on the subject but it was clear that Jack knew more than I knew, and was rethinking the artistry and role of popular music in our culture. It was his contention that rock needed to reclaim its folk/blues roots, whether they be rural or urban, and separate itself from the financial machine that currently produced it. To Jack that meant telling stories about particular people, places, social conditions and political developments in America (in his case the Pacific Northwest Coast) through various narrative forms and voices. Jack strongly believed in a regional identity for popular music and that’s exactly the way Rock and Roll, rhythm and blues and hillbilly record labels once operated.

I got the feeling that Jack had never really explained to anyone what he was doing beyond telling he was “making music.” But for Jack, the essence of what he wanted to do on the road could be found in a story he told me about Hank Williams. Evidently, the hard living country and western singer once often sang his signature hit “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” nine times in a row at a live shows because it was the hit the fans wanted to hear and captured exactly how he felt (the fans, too). It was such an outrageous and pure artistic act that Jack wanted to do something just as cool.

As we talked about music and drank, Jack slowly revealed more details about his last four years in his RV driving along the coast from British Columbia to Northern California. It was clear from “Pequod’s” interior that the rig was outfitted as a crude recording studio. It was also clear that in my exhaustive reading of popular music history and extensive experience with the West Coast music scene, that Jack Blake’s current method of producing music was probably unprecedented.

After multiple beers I was thoroughly buzzed and suddenly very hungry. Jack asked me to join him for dinner. Thirty minutes later Jack and I were eating a delicious vegetarian stew sopped up with beer bread Jack made. Mr. Figgs joined us with a bone and crunched away like a savage.

We cleaned up the dishes together and then Jack broke out some blackberry brandy he had distilled himself. We drank and continued to talk about music. We started listing the best rock love songs of all time and I switched topics almost in mid-sentence and abruptly asked Jack if he had ever been in love and if he was involved with anyone at the time. He looked directly at me with total ease. “Yes to both questions,” he said. Jack seemed ready for my follow-ups. He was the least self-conscious person I have ever met in my life. I knew there must be salacious details from his vagabond RV life. Jack was an amazingly handsome man, intellectual, passionate, sensitive, a listener, and could perform any love song on an acoustic guitar, including You Wear it Well by Rod Stewart and Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding, which he claimed were the best seduction songs he had every played. Think of his life on the road!

Then I remembered a line Joan Didion wrote in her introduction to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a statement she offered as fact that stuck with me in my pursuit of the writing life: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

I never asked Jack another deeply personal question again. The music would have to be enough and it was more than enough.