I first saw Jack Blake last spring on the Southern Oregon Coast right after the covid quarantine hit. I was teaching high school English in Portland and then the Governor shut down all classroom instruction and I had to teach via Zoom and I lasted all of one week and quit, borrowed my parents’ pickup camper and lit out for the territory to write about the Pandemic. I’d always wanted to be a writer but hadn’t written a word for publication so naturally I became a teacher who taught writing but didn’t write himself. I had no voice, no subject. Just the passion to try.

Highway 101 and the beach beckoned and I figured I would crash along roadsides since all the county, state and federal campgrounds were closed. But as soon as I started rolling, I found private RV parks with campsites were all open and that’s where I started staying and that’s where I met Jack Blake.

There he was in the Rainbow Rock RV Park, a young man, sitting outside his weathered 80s RV named The Diplomat, playing his guitar around a fire, singing a song into a microphone, with his mutt singing a sort of backup.

I parked my camper next to his rig, and waved hello as I walked past him to the park office to pay my fee. I didn’t recognize the song he was singing but caught a few lyrics about the ravages of clearcutting. He was really snarling them out and playing a small guitar that was amplified and distorted with fuzz.

A few minutes later I walked up from behind the rear of the driver’s side of his rig. As I came closer it appeared that black lettering, about 30 point in size, had been arranged in some sort of poetic pattern on the RV. It was spray painted black, using a crude stencil, on the fading, flecked white paint job.

I moved closer, still listening to the clearcut song emanating from on the other side of the vehicle. He was rocking the holy hell out of it and the dog was wailing. I read the words on the RV:

Always took candy from strangers/didn’t wanna get me no trade

Never wanna be like poppa/workin’ for the boss every night and day

They were the lyrics of a 1972 Rolling Stones’ song Happy, sung by Keith Richards, off their 1972 landmark double album Exile on Main Street.

Being a Stones fanatic, I knew the words by heart and was dumbfounded to find myself reading them on the side of a RV in a campground on the Oregon Coast in the midst of the corona virus.

My awe was immediately shattered when the clearcut song faded into “The Bottle Let Me Down,” an old country and western tune. The fuzz was gone and so was the snarl in his voice. I stood out of sight for a few minutes and let him finish the song.

I had to meet this guy, so I went up to him, but not before he launched into a new tune, revved up with super distortion and reverb. I recognized it instantly—”Strychnine” by the Sonics, a legendary mid 60s garage band out of Seattle that practically invented American punk rock.

Some folks like water / some folks like wine

but I like the taste / of sweet strychnine

Wearing a short sleeve, brown and orange Pendleton wool shirt, tan oversized cords and sitting in a rusted lawn chair that verged on collapse, a clean shaven man with shoulder length brown hair played the song on what appeared to be a child’s cheap acoustic guitar. A 16 oz. can of Hamm’s rested on the grass near his bare feet. The guitar had a portable pick-up which ran to an ancient Fender tube amp. A line from the amp ran to a small four track recorder, which also connected to a lead microphone that he had rigged up to a boom. The whole apparatus was patched into a power strip that plugged into an extension cord that ran into his rig.

All the while the fire spit and crackled and must have been picked up by the mic.

Jack continued rocking. Rain seemed imminent as if he was calling it down from the gray skies.

Wine is red / poison is blue
Strychnine is good / for what’s ailin you

I looked around. It was the three of us in the camping area. Three squirrels darted in front of the amps. A drizzle started. Gulls flew overhead. Jack knocked the Hamm’s can over and it spilled under his feet. The dog came over behind him and stood up on his hind legs and positioned his muzzle near the mic. He started barking and howling. Jack yelled, “Do it Mr Figgs! Do it you devil dog!”

Jack started winding the song down by strumming faster and running around to the length of his 50 foot cord. Finally he jumped on the lawn chair and started windmilling the guitar like Pete Townsend. I feared for his safety but didn’t say anything. He leaped off the chair and landed in the splits. Mr. Figgs kept crooning into the mic.

I had never seen anything like it and I’d seen a thousand rock shows. I applauded. I heard a few other distant claps from inside RVs around the park.

Jack leaned over and stopped the recorder. Mr. Figgs retired to the RV looking rather bored like a session vocalist after singing for a union wage.

He came up to me with the guitar slung over his shoulder. He reached out a sweaty hand and said, “Hi…my name’s Jack Blake.”

We shook hands. I introduced myself.

(This is a major rewrite of a story from 15 years ago.) I can remember the day rock and roll died for me. It was years ago when I heard “Layla” in a Goodwill and the once magisterial guitar solo by Clapton played at a screeching level drove me out of the store. I renounced rock forever right there. It was deader than a door nail for me, and, I, suspect for many others. It simply had no purpose except to make money and sell shit. I didn’t even hold a little ceremony for it. There was nothing left to say.

Then Trump came along and rock was powerless to respond, quite unlike the 60s and 70s and even NWA in the 80s. In fact, right wing rockers helped elect him. Who ever heard of a right wing rockers decades ago?

Then the Pandemic raged (still raging as a write this) and rock even as a nostalgic commodity, was dead, deader, the undead. You couldn’t even see the 45^th iteration of the Doobie Brothers at an Indian casino.

But then, a few months ago, as the nation locked down (well, some of us) I met the savior of rock and roll and his name is Jack Blake. Everything is different for me now.

Jack Blake’s not his real name. I know who he really is.

After you read his story don’t ask me to reveal his true identity. I’m no Judas ready to kiss Jack on the cheek for 30 pieces of silver. No, I’m more like John the Baptist in this tale, out in a wet wilderness proclaiming the coming of the messiah, preparing the way, baptizing Jack in the waters. I’m only a prophet with a message and that message is that Rock and Roll lives and one man has resurrected it. He’s no carpenter but can handle a guitar and practically every other instrument, too.

If you want to find Jack and put the spear in his side, you’ll have to head for the Pacific Northwest Coast (once the virus coast is clear, of course, or not). He’s out there, masked up, living like Jeremiah Johnson, in a massive, battered motor home with his crazy mutt, making music so astonishing, that if heard by a mass audience, might have the same sort of explosive cultural impact of Elvis, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, sweet soul music, even nihilistic punk rock. He is all of these things merged into one super being and much more.

I have several aims for this story. I want people to understand Jack’s music. I want it to document how he lived on the road in the pre-fame days. And I want it to describe the extraordinary creative process he used to make records that might single-handedly reinvigorate American popular music and lay waste to every convention of musical artistry and the process of distributing music.

For the record, I’m the first reporter on this story, the dude who saw the Beatles in Hamburg or Elvis at a state fair or Aretha sing gospel in her father’s church. No media has ever profiled Jack until you’ve read this. He doesn’t issue press releases. He doesn’t know what a press release is. He has no social media platform. He owns a flip phone. He doesn’t do the internet, although someone does it for him and that’s how you can find his music if you can’t see him live playing in a campground or the parking lot of a fast food restaurant.

I do have qualms. Suppose Jack’s story takes off? I worry about him. He seems dangerously naive about his fate if his story hits. A reality show about him, and I can imagine him agreeing to participate in such a depraved venture because he’s never seen one, might kill him in the end.

But hey, Jesus had to die, and he suffered, too.