Closer encounters
The expanding legacy of an LA singer-songwriter: unheard demos and a second Great Lost Album. By John Mulvey.
Jim Sullivan If The Evening Were Dawn ★★★★ Jim Sullivan ★★★★ LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/DL/LP
WHAT IS IT, exactly, that makes a neglected old record so compelling: great music, or a luridly weird backstory? In the sometimes frantic, sometimes forensic reissues game, it seems the latter often takes precedence. An obscure 1969 album about flying saucers, whose maker disappeared from the New Mexico desert in 1975, presumed – by some – to have been abducted? That’s a tale from the margins of rock we can do business with.
The legend of Jim Sullivan is both tragic and seductive. But when Light In The Attic rescued UFO from the archives of the minuscule Monnie label in 2010, it transpired that this forgotten album sounded fantastic, too; a rococo folk odyssey that would’ve found a new audience notwithstanding the singer’s mysterious fate. Sullivan (not to be confused with Big Jim Sullivan, the British session guitarist) was a habitué of Malibu bars who had survived a bit part in Easy Rider, and who boasted a cadre of influential friends. When it came to recording his sturdy, elegiac songs in 1969, Wrecking Crew vets provide backing, Sullivan emerging from the studio sounding like a kind of outlaw David Ackles; a troubadour combating hippy burnout with elaborate chamber pop.
A new collection of previously unheard demos, If The Evening Were Dawn uncovers the roots of UFO, revealing how these burnished songs sounded when Sullivan first played them solo to the Hollywood dropouts at Malibu’s Raft Club. Versions of Sandman and Jerome miss the jazzy clip of drummer Earl Palmer, but Sullivan is a percussive, driving 12-string guitarist, and the lack of a band doesn’t derail the song’s momentum. Indeed, there’s an argument that as exercises in lugubrious male hurt – Fred Neil is the closest booming analogue – they actually benefit from the raw treatments. Six songs that didn’t make UFO mostly sustain the quality: Grandpa’s Trip is a trifle in the rather dated genre of marijuana whimsy, but What To Tell Her is a small masterpiece of rough-hewn vulnerability – “I stood there almost crying,” Sullivan admits, ever the compromised stoic – and Mama has an intensity that suggests his burly charisma could be channelled into fiercer rock music if the mood, or opportunity, took him.
It’s easy to understand, listening to these sessions, why a succession of music biz insiders who stumbled upon one of Sullivan’s
gigs were willing to take a chance on him. UFO might have disappeared without trace, but by 1972 he had fallen in with another auspicious gang centred around bassist/arranger Jim Hughart (soon to do key shifts with Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell) and was ready to make a second fine album. Like its predecessor, Jim Sullivan was a lavish production, with the singer one of a tranche of artists – alongside kindred spirit Tim Rose – signed to Hugh Hefner’s short-lived Playboy Records.
As this first-time reissue shows, the music has moved on. Sandman and Plain As Your Eyes Can See (renamed Plain To See) recur from UFO, the former now augmented with New Orleans horns, the latter accelerating towards a Latin funk breakdown. There’s a groovy 1972 modishness to much here – Biblical Boogie (True He’s Gone) would’ve segued perfectly on the radio with Little Feat; Tom Cat is swampily adjacent to Bobby Charles’s solo debut from the same year – but Sullivan’s voice and songs are surprisingly resilient.
For those who want to indulge the myth of Sullivan as lonesome stargazer, with a direct path from UFO in 1969 to some kind of fatal desert close encounter in 1975, the existence of this second album might be an inconvenient narrative distraction. Jim Sullivan is earthbound rather than other-worldly, however much portent might be attributed to lines like “Yeah, true he’s gone/Gone away to another world.” But as a document of an enterprising singer-songwriter, able to switch genre and absorb fashion while retaining his distinct, rugged personality, it’s an essential record. The true story of Jim Sullivan, it clarifies, rests in harsh reality and brilliant music: a life lost, somehow; a promise, and a career, never quite fulfilled.