Thoughts on Bert Jansch

There is a favourite story in certain ancient circles in which I wander about a small group of young lads (the youngest – which would be me – having just turned eighteen) going off to Dublin for four or five days to drink to excess, do many other things to similar degrees, and to mark the end of an era in our lives in a memorable way: we were all leaving school and going off to different corners of the country to higher education, to tune in, drop out, and in some cases, never come back. We achieved our goals – most of the trip is now folklore, some fifteen years later. But my greatest memory is of the final night. We were all broke by this point, and severely scarred in uncountable ways, physically, mentally and emotionally, positively, darkly, hilariously. What was going to be spent on one last concentrated blow-out in an attempt to see if any of our party could actually die and thus send the trip into a different league of legend, I discovered word via a blurred reading of a scrappy, fingernail-marked toilet wall poster that Bert Jansch was to be playing Wheelan’s on the last night of our trip. So me and my best friend – who were, at the time, confused by grunge and turned-on by Cream, and who had both been deeply influenced by the 60s British folk and blues movement, had no option but to go and see one of the progenitors of Indie music, filtered down, as his influence had been, through Jimmy Page to Johnny Marr to our paltry garage bands of our late school years. It was the chance to see, as it became known, “Bert Jansch in Dublin!”; like seeing the Pope in Rome, the president in Washington.

My one wish for this night was that he would perform “Black Water Side”. The hammered upturn riff at the end of the song being a musical line that had worked its way into my physical make-up. I had spent one afternoon severely weakening one spot on a cassette as I kept rewinding to the beginning of the English folk standard just so that I could hear the spidery mesh of notes tinker through a soupy air. Jansch played guitar like nobody I had heard at the time – largely educated, as I was, by delta blues and the offshoots at that point. Jansch’s guitar was soil, it was dew, it was the coldness under sunlight: it was not genius – that word is too urbane, too modern and untrustworthy – it was something Yeatsian, his notes folding gyre into gyre, a stretch across time and myth. Jimmy Page, translating the song for the end-of-party swagger of Led Zeppelin, could not really do it justice in the same way that Jansch did, mainly because whereas Page was an excellent student, he was never the Real Deal when it came to the essence of such earthy music.

            He played “Black Water Side” that night, sat on a modest stage about twenty feet from me. My scars from the week had been nurtured, cooled. People were sitting on the floor before him, he told stories, the smoke hung in the air, the floor was veneered with beer and Guinness, dark corners became lighter when he broke into a song, and the small barroom of Whelan’s was both an auditorium and a parlour that night.

A strange addendum to the night – remembered as the gods’ giving us both good grace for being receptive to such atmospheres – was that we hooked up with a night club promoter at the bar of Whelan’s who chucked me and my best mate into the back of his Ford Capri, which he drove at such a pose of recline that I, in the back seat, had the pleasure of his head in my lap. We got entry to his club in Temple Bar and drank for free, danced to all the Indie hits of the moment – Pulp, Oasis etc. and woke up in the morning filled not with the feeling of mission accomplished, but with the feeling that something significant had happened to both me and my friend. We now understood something timeless and something that would separate us from our loved-ones when we got back to Wales, and it would mean that we were better than our soon-to-be as-yet-unmet friends at our waiting universities, because we understood what they could never; we understood something about music and tradition that had been imparted only to us that night in Whelan’s.

            Some say that Bert Jansch was a musician’s musician, but that is just an attempt to explain why he only had a relatively small following. Well, the truth is, most people have no soul for music – that is, on a planet of billions, only millions have record collections, fewer still are obsessives, and then the number shrinks further when you try and pinpoint those who could not live without an infusion of melody into their lives. That is the soul of music, and it is to those whom Jansch played, because that is who he was.

            I did get the chance to see him a few more times. Both, if I remember rightly, in Cardiff, in a place with rugs, with chrome, with smokeless air. And not long after that Dublin trip he released an album featuring collaborations with the likes of Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler; an album that holds its own today in a rough sea of pointless collaborations. This record, The Crimson Moon, was a chance for Jansch to converse with the genius that had come from him, that urbane, untrustworthy genius with sculpted haircuts and perfectly disarranged clothing that the rest of us worship. We must thank him for that, at the very least. News of his death, obviously is very sad, especially to his disciples and apostles alike; but moreover now, even more sadly, all we are left with is genius.