To Iron Mountain- Part 2
A Road Trip Through the Past Looking for a Guy
Part 1 can be found here.
The night of the 1975 Grammy Awards, Jeff Cowell strolled into Chicago’s Drake Hotel dressed up as something like a cowboy. Earlier that afternoon, he’d driven into the city from where he was staying in Southern Michigan. He linked up with his childhood friends Kevin, Kris, and Ken Jr., who were getting ready to head to a watch party put on by the Recording Academy’s Chicago Chapter. Their father Ken Nordine had been invited and extended the invite to Jeff. Needing some new clothes to replace his dirty black t-shirt and jeans, the Nordine brothers put together a mishmashed country western outfit for Jeff to wear. His get-up was a bit clownish, a Nudie suit-type jacket and sailor’s bell bottoms, but after years of toiling and false starts, Jeff Cowell stood in the lobby feeling like he’d finally arrived.
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The day after he graduated high school in 1969, Cowell hitchhiked from the Upper Peninsula to Colorado. Jeff considered himself a singer-songwriter. He liked rock music and had been in bands in high school, but found something he loved when he started writing his own songs. So when he got to the mountains he pawned his watch, bought a guitar, and drifted around, playing his folk songs where he could for a bed, meal, or beer. Among other sojourns, he had a failed pilgrimage to San Francisco. The truck he jumped aboard was piloted by a draft dodger headed to Vancouver, but when it broke down in the desert outside Elko, Nevada at three in the morning, Jeff was left on the side of the highway. Broke and alone, he hitched back to Colorado.
Maybe it was for the best to skip California in 1969. The Manson Family was in Los Angeles and Zodiac Killer in the Bay, the 60s were over anyway, idealism turned to paranoia; Jeff found his way back to the Midwest. Without enough money for a car, he hitchhiked around Lake Michigan, working various construction jobs from Traverse City to Manistee to Lansing. Along the way he was developing a setlist of originals and a growing interest in the bottle.
Jeff put a band together in Algonac, a small Michigan town across the St. Clair River from Canada. They recorded three albums worth of Cowell’s originals at GM Studios, an East Detroit spot that had hosted acts like Bob Seger, MC5, and Funkadelic. Cowell never got the masters for the recordings he did at GM— there was a miscommunication with the man who ran it, perhaps some greed or malice, and to this day they are lost, gone with the studio owner who has since died.
In 1971 Jeff got drafted, stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. It’s at this time in Texas, less than 80 miles away in Austin, that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were championing a new style of music: outlaw country.
But Jeff wasn’t an outlaw and didn’t fashion himself one. A goner and a drifter running from town to town sure, exhausted from years of getting nowhere, but his turn toward the sounds of country music was still a few years to come. He’d kept writing folk songs, and when he got out of the service in ‘73, he had what he felt was an album’s worth. So he took them to the only place he could think of.
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In Chicago, Ken Nordine was working through a radical idea. Nordin’s creation, Word Jazz, was improvisational poetry and social satire set to surreal, jazz-backed soundscapes. He put out albums and hosted an NPR radio show under the Word Jazz umbrella. In 1960, Nordine said that the goal of Word Jazz was to get people “to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.” Long before punk rock, Nordine’s unique vision and creative ethos set off waves for other artists. One disciple, Jerry Garcia, cited Nordine’s Word Jazz as formative, likening the music to a religious experience. The two would go on to collaborate in the early 1990s.
Ken Nordine’s mellifluous, singular voice brought him lucrative work. He built a studio in his Edgewater, Chicago home not just to record Word Jazz, but also for commercial voiceovers-- his voice so well-suited to advertising that a 1976 profile proclaimed he could “sell carloads of bourbon and filter kings to the Mormons.”
Ken Nordine and his family spent their summers at a lake house in Spread Eagle, a northern Wisconsin town on the Michigan border. It was there that the Nordine sons befriended a young Jeff Cowell, whose father had a cabin there. They’d all remained friends, so Jeff knew he could crash with the Nordines on the North side if he was ever passing through Chicago.
Cowell brought his songs, his guitar, and recorded what would become the album Plaint in Ken’s home studio in a day– Ken didn’t charge Jeff a dime. The album’s production is simple– vocals, guitar, the occasional harmonica. Plaint showcases Cowell’s idiosyncratic vocal phrasings, which are reminiscent of Jerry Garcia, Captain Beefheart, and Joe Walsh minus the guitar hero antics and the uppers. His endearing writing mixes idealistic hippie optimism and real world lived pessimism. On “Running,” Jeff sings My bags are getting lighter, my skin it’s getting tighter / I hope / I never turn old.
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In the cemetery, we’re looking right at Jeff Cowell’s headstone. What am I supposed to do with this? Trip’s a bust. But inspecting the grave further brings me hope. Specifically, there’s no death date on the headstone. This is a family plot: Jeff bought his final resting place in advance. He’s alive, somewhere.
We decide to visit the address from the phone book. I won’t knock, because that would be an invasion of privacy. I write a letter that I put into the mailbox on the street. The note has normal things written in it, like that I’ve traveled from Chicago to find you and would you like to talk on the phone? I try not to overthink it and we screech off the residential street like obvious criminals.
At the nearby historical museum we inquire into this supposed synagogue and are provided with an address. And sure enough just down the street is an unassuming house with a Star of David adorning the front door. It’s no longer active– in fact a church uses the space. As I investigate the house, I feel my phone vibrate. A number I don’t recognize is calling.
“Hello, is this Jonathan?”
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For his second album, Jeff returned to the Nordine home studio. He took more time to record, and also took advantage of his location, looping in the stable of session musicians who recorded with Ken. The sessions that would produce Lucky Strikes and Liquid Gold were being helmed by Kris Nordine, taking Cowell’s folk sound and giving it a full band jolt.
The musicians on Lucky Strikes are a fascinating collection of talent showcasing a Chicago recording world that is no longer. There was Manfredo Fest, a legally blind Brazilian bossa nova pianist who had worked with Sérgio Mendes; Doug Mazique, a bass player who was shot by a burglar in his mother’s Chatham home; Or Butch Butler, who plays some of the most celestial, gorgeous pedal steel I’ve ever heard, and who I tried to track down unsuccessfully. I even joined an online steel guitar community forum (It cost 5 bucks!) to do some snooping. Best guess is he found God and moved to Alabama.
Jeff and Kris were both inspired by Chicago’s country music scene, which sprouted from the honky tonks that postwar Appalachian migrants to the city’s Uptown neighborhood had established. Chicago made beggars of many who came there looking for a new start. “Throughout the 1950s and 1960s,” wrote the Chicago Tribune in 1978, “Uptown seemed to shrink beneath its layer of grime, covering its shame with a splash of neon and a dirge of country music.”
Urban Appalachians were down and out in Chicago, and it’s reflected in the music. Maybe the most striking song, “Sidewalks of Chicago,” made famous by Merle Haggard, is narrated by a destitute migrant who is thankful no one from his home in Kentucky can see how low he truly is. Lucky Strikes shares that same outsider vantage point, a pocket of broken down americana charged by Cowell’s willful desire to find the positive regardless. Cowell channels “Sidewalks” with “Not Down This Low”: in the gutter with his true love, a bottle of whiskey, Cowell would rather his family believe him dead than where he really is. “Jake Lake” sprouted from seeing a homeless man on the street. “I wasn’t that far away from that guy,” said Jeff. “I was in the same boat, kinda homeless at certain points.”
The most striking track of Lucky Strikes and Liquid Gold is the title track; on it, Jeff has a reckoning with the costs of addiction. He needs to drink, needs it more than the woman begging him not to go back to the bar. Over piano and pedal steel, he pleads with her to understand that it’s nothing personal. Then he walks out. His confession of helplessness is jarring, brutal honesty. A lesser singer would come across as callous and cruel, but Cowell’s voice is weary, almost gentle, like he’s tired of himself but can’t muster the power to change. It’s an exceptional & singular country music song.
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On his way to the Drake Hotel, Jeff had been drinking, having a good time with the Nordines. In the hotel lobby, Ken introduced Jeff to his friend Robin McBride. McBride was an A&R at Mercury Records and president of the Chicago Chapter of the Grammy Awards. McBride had heard some of Jeff’s songs. What’s more, he liked what he heard. He told Jeff that on Monday morning he should come by his office in the IBM Building. “So I’m elated,” said Cowell. “I said ‘Well I better get some scotch for this one.’ I mean 4, 5 shots. I said ‘hell, I’m gonna party man.’” After years of slumming it across the country, working odd jobs while writing songs, here was his big break.
Cowell proceeded to get so drunk he could barely stand. At the end of the party he went up to McBride, leaned on him, and drunk-spouted nonsense. “And so I called [McBride’s office] Monday and no go. I called Tuesday and no go.” Sunken after another loss, Cowell headed back home. “I did the albums in Detroit thinking that was going to work out, nothing came of that, I did the albums in Chicago, blew it at the Grammy party,” said Cowell. “That was the one thing that might have actually worked, was Robin McBride at Mercury, so when that fell through I said ‘to hell with it, I’m going to go back to Michigan, I’m gonna get married, and so be it. Live happily ever after.’” Jeff saw his drunken embarrassment as his undoing, his best opportunity irrevocably squandered.
Lucky Strikes and Liquid Gold was privately pressed and received no fanfare. Jeff sold the records where he could, at bars and bonfires. But music has a way, that long-sloping collision of time and talent, time being its own form of mercy. Two decades passed. Cowell and his wife had children and raised them in the U.P. Then a man from Dallas called Jeff out of the blue to tell him that he owned and loved Lucky Strikes and Liquid Gold. He wondered if Jeff would be alright if he put the album up on the internet. Jeff said sure. 15 years after that, another call, this time from a man in Kansas City who found the uploaded album and wanted a physical copy. The man alerted Cowell to Numero Group, a Chicago-based reissue label who might be interested. Jeff contacted them and more than 40 years after it was recorded, Lucky Strikes and Liquid Gold was finally released.
“I kicked myself in the butt for 40 years...thinking ‘You’re an idiot, now this thing is rotting in your basement,’” said Jeff. “So when this happened it just kinda fell out of the sky on me basically, with Numero, I was saying ‘there’s gotta be a God, right’. I was freed from the bondage of what I had done at the Drake.”
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Jeff’s retired now and his house is paid off. He paints. And he quit drinking too. He laughs recounting the years he spent on the road. “I remember hitchhiking in downtown Detroit on the freeway. At like midnight I get picked up by this guy and he felt sorry for me. His nose is running, his eyes are running, he gives me a sandwich and a Schlitz tallboy. Says ‘Go ‘head man, knock yourself out.’ He probably thought I was going to get killed once he dropped me off.” There’s also some wisdom when looking back on the past. The failure at the Drake might have been a blessing. “Yknow, I was an idiot. In retrospect how old was I? 21? Who knows man, I mean I might have wound up a one-hit wonder and died in a hotel room in Omaha at 23.”
Even still, the laughter quiets to reflection. “I had a hard time there. I was in and out of work, I was bumming it, hitchhiking, and oftentimes it was downright depressing, and lonely, and very unsure of what the next day was going to bring. So my life was very anxiety-ridden, in that I didn’t know what I was going to do, so there was sadness, there was definite sadness…standing on the road in Nevada at three in the morning wondering ‘What in the hell am I going to do now?’”
Who knows what would have happened if the missed connection had played out better. It’s another what-if in a lifelong sequence. But Jeff’s story is one of redemption now. After 40-some years, his music is finally out there. And he’s made peace with his past.
EPILOGUE: Robin McBride
Robin McBride lives in a small town in Michigan too. He hosts a jazz-focused radio show, which is how I find him. Frankly, I’m thrilled that he’s even still alive. Ken Nordine passed away in 2019, about 6 months before I conceived of this reporting, and it’s not like any of these guys are running 5K’s.
Working for Mercury and later, a Mercury jazz subsidiary Limelight Records, McBride worked with some important artists: David Bowie, Buddy Miles, Doug Sahm.
Robin remembers being the president of the Chicago Chapter of the Grammys and remembers the parties they’d throw. But still, the night I’m trying to pull out of his brain is over 45 years ago. He can’t remember the interaction where Jeff supposedly embarrassed himself. After I describe Jeff’s side of the story, he laughs a bit and says “I don’t recall ever not pursuing an artist because at one point he would have said something nasty to me or misbehaved.”
However, he doesn’t doubt that the story could have happened. He was friends with Ken Nordine, and if Ken was trying to help Jeff out, Robin McBride said he would have welcomed that contact. Did Jeff dream it all up? No, it probably happened. Miscommunication probably got built up into something it never was, something self-critical and sour and painful.
“So what happened to Cowell?” McBride asks me.
I tell him Jeff’s still living in the Upper Peninsula, that he seems happy now. “Bless his heart,” McBride says. “I hear it’s beautiful up there.”