What a relief to come home to Eric von Schmidt. One of the interlaced folk crowd of the early 60s that included Geoff and Maria Muldaur (already covered), Dave Van Ronk, Richard Fariña, Joan Baez and at least a dozen others, von Schmidt is a major talent who has inexplicably fallen into a black hole.
Part of it, I guess, is his own fault. He sees himself primarily as a visual artist–a painter–and so never kept music in the forefront. An illustrator of countless record covers and dust jackets, he’s also done children’s books. His art is striking, detailed, loopy–a prime example is his Eric von Schmidt and the Cruel Family cover, a rocky landscape parody of Bosch featuring a flying fish skeleton and von Schmidt playing a frying pan as banjo.
Another problem is the dreaded "major influence on Bob Dylan." In an attempt to give them legitimacy, music historians have diminished a whole generation of superb singer/songwriters to Dylan satellites. With von Schmidt especially, this is a travesty.
He began his musical career as a disciple of Leadbelly–the rock-solid granddaddy of the "folk" tradition. I first picked up a jacketless copy of a 1961 Folkways record, Rolf Cahn and Eric von Schmidt, which gives no song credits. Though I was initially taken more with Cahn’s rolling baritone, the higher keening of von Schmidt’s "Grizzly Bear" and the sweet nostalgia of his "Buddy Bolden Blues" are what stick with me today.
His first album of all original work, Eric Sings von Schmidt, is a beauty. "Light Rain" and "Kay Is the Month of May" are the kind of gentle love song that make you believe it could last. The islands’ lilt of "Joshua Gone Barbados" (popularized by Tom Rush) makes an understated contrast to a tale of brutalized Caribbean canefield workers. "Cold Gray Dawn" is a frightening, lyrical tale of love’s intolerance and attempted suicide. But my hands-down favorite is "Rattlesnake Preacher," the story of slick Diamond Joe who can "make the men folk weave and moan, make them women shout."
As is too often the case, the album I treasure most is the one most forgotten. On …the Cruel Family, von Schmidt adopted a gruffer voice and took his songwriting to the highest level. A genuinely strange collection, it’s full of imagery that burns into your mind and stays there.
From "You Get Old, You Get Wise": "Now, don’t you eat chop-suey with a knife, knife and fork./Well, the knife’s too long, honey, and the fork’s too short!" (I can’t believe it took me several years to realize he was talking about using them as chopsticks.) "Debt I Owe," about a womanizing reprobate, includes some of his best, uniquely sprung lyrics: "I say, the Judge said ‘Young man, what may be your crime?/Is it something you do habitually, or is it for the first sweet time?’"
"Sudden Garden" uses Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to tell you that if you’ll "let a hundred chances bloom, you’ll be surprised, at what you’ll find, yeah/In the sudden garden of your mind."
Most of the songs, though, are just too intricately structured to pick apart. You need to listen to the whole thing. So just one more example, from "Icarus," a shattering (to this father) take on the Greek myth of the boy who flies to the sun–and his death–on wings his father constructed: "Don’t mourn for the one/Who touched the sun/Weep for the carpenter/Weep for the carpenter/Who made the wings."
What’s Out There: Eric Sings… is sometimes available as an outrageously priced import; …the Cruel Family seems to have disappeared. Rolf Cahn and Eric von Schmidt is still on Folkways.
