‘We Don’t Want To Stray Too Far . . .’

 by whiteray

Last week, I began a series of posts featuring autumnal songs, recordings that feel to me as if they belong to my favorite season. The season actually starts on Wednesday, two days from now, but that’s a technicality: The days are shorter, the mornings more brisk, the leaves on some of the trees in the neighborhood have begun to turn, and my tendency to reflect on time’s passing is, as usual, becoming more pronounced. So, all the evidence – external and internal – tells me autumn is here. 

Over the years – and I’ve been writing for myself and for others for more than forty years – I’ve written probably thousands of words about autumn, and I’ll likely resurrect some of those dabblings in posts yet to come here, probably in October when the season is at its lovely peak. 

Today, though, we’ll just ponder one of those autumnal songs. 

During the late 1960s and especially into the early 1970s, the worst thing that could happen to a young singer/songwriter was for anyone – a critic, his record company, anyone – to call him “a new Dylan.” 

Why? Well, first of all, the original was still around, still writing, still recording. True, his output was sporadic, and – again especially into the early 1970s – was often of questionable critical merit. The austere 1967 album John Wesley Harding and the countryish Nashville Skyline from 1969 had puzzled critics and fans. Then in 1970 came the two-LP Self Portrait, an album so slight and baffling that critic Greil Marcus wrote, “I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.” 

Around the same time Eric Andersen became somewhat prominent on the scene. He’d recorded a clutch of albums for Vanguard, a haven for folkies in the mid-Sixties, and then moved on to Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, for whom he released a pretty good self-titled album in 1969. His songwriting and performing – both excellent – especially on his stellar 1972 album Blue River – brought him to the attention of those who wanted a new Dylan. 

Well, of course, he wasn’t the second Dylan, he was the first Eric Andersen. And he went ahead and worked on his next album, Stages, said by those in the know to be better than Blue River. And somehow, the master tapes were lost. Devastated, Andersen regrouped, re-recording some of the tunes planned for Stages and adding others for a 1975 album, Be True To You. And I get the sense from things I’ve read that folks pretty much said, “Well, he’s good, but he’s really not a new Dylan. Who’s next?”

(In the early 1990s, the master tapes for Stages were somehow found, and Andersen released the album, again with a few new songs added. Even twenty years out of time, it was a great album, and one can only wonder about its impact had it been released during the early 1970s.) 

We’ve wandered far afield, here, moving past the tune I have in mind from Blue River into Andersen’s later catalog, but that’s okay, because as I think about Andersen’s larger body of work, I find a sense of melancholy woven through. That was true in his early stuff for Vanguard, it was true in the early Seventies with Blue River and its follow-ups, it was true in the 1990s work he did with Norwegian Jonas Fjeld and former member of The Band, Rick Danko, and though I’ve lost track of him in the last few years, I have no doubt that his recent works – and there are some, as noted at discogs – are suffused with melancholy. 

And to me, melancholy is autumnal. It’s also oddly comforting. That says something about me, I guess, and it also says something about how I hear Eric Andersen’s work. And when I listen to the album Blue River and get to the title song – placed midway through (and at the end of Side One during the days of LPs) – I hear a tale of time passing, of lives passing amid the permanence of nature, the permanence of the titular river. 

It’s a quiet, contemplative track, enhanced immeasurably by the vocal backing from Joni Mitchell (improvised on the spot, so I’ve heard). It’s autumn in full: 

Old man go to the river
To drop his bale of woes
He could go if he wanted to
It's just a boat to row you know
(Listen to me now)

Blue River keep right on rollin’
All along the shore line
Keep us safe from the deep and the dark
’Cause we don’t want to stray too far

Spent the day with my old dog Moe
Down an old dirt road
What he’s thinking, lord, I don’t know
But for him I bet the time just goes so slow
(Don't you know)

Blue River keep right on rollin’
All along the shore line
Keep us safe from the deep and the dark
Cause we don’t want to stray too far 

Young Rob stands with his ax in hand
Believin’ that the crops are in
Firewood stacked ten by ten
For the wife. the folks. the kids
And all of the kin, and a friend
(Listen to me now)

Blue River keep right on rollin’
All along the shore line
Keep us safe from the deep and the dark
Cause we don’t want to stray too far

No, we don’t want to stray too far