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Precious Cargo

from 1965 by Bill Jackson

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    ABOUT ‘1965’: LINER NOTES
    1965 was the year of my musical awakening, coinciding with what some would describe as a watershed and revolutionary year in music. Everyone got a licence to write, inspired by the creative output of artists like The Byrds, Dylan, The Stones, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, the Bakersfield and Nashville sounds, Motown – the list goes on. Pop became Rock and Roll and accelerated the drive for personal freedom. My life would never be the same as I launched into my first chords on guitar. I also started writing not long after that and here I am…
    ‘I had a dream last night it was the strangest thing
    Chapter by chapter it drew me in
    New York city 1965
    With beatniks and hipsters in a West Side dive’
    Songs and writing - different children, same kin. Sometimes it takes a muse, sometimes it takes a drink or a moment or forever. Most of the time it just takes hard thinking and hoping that the magic will arrive and that it pleases you. That last song you wrote. It always feels like your last but deep down inside you just keep writing. It’s what you do.
    Ten new songs – simple little folk songs but the layers will go as deep as you are willing to peel them back. Most are new and most are collaborations with Ross Jackson and Kerryn Tolhurst. Ah Ross the lyricist. Kerryn pushing me into landscapes I had never imagined and the reason this record sounds different and why each song sounds different to the one before it - why you can maybe live more inside these tunes than inside anything else I’ve ever done before - karma, love, war, aging, promises, brotherhood, cold beds, lost love, traveling and so on.

    And then there are the sounds of the beautiful musicians Kerryn called on for this record who each gave some part of their soul to these songs. And then the jigsaw puzzle finally becomes an image. And then you give that image to the world and hope, like every parent, that it finds its own community and love. I love this record and I hope you do as well. In so many ways I have come the full circle since 1965 – Bill Jackson (2023)

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of 1965, The Kelly Songs (Bill Jackson - 2023), The Wayside Ballads Vol 3 (2021), The Wayside Ballads Vol 2 (2016), The Wayside Ballads Vol 1 (2015), Try / Somebody's Darlin' - (Single from 'The Wayside Ballads Vol 1' - Bill Jackson), Jerilderie (2011), The Nashville Session (2010), and 3 more. , and , .

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about

This is a special song for me. My Producer Kerryn Tolhurst is somewhat of an icon in Australia as the main songwriter for a 70’s band ‘The Dingoes’ and especially a song that he wrote called ‘Way Out West’. He relocated to New York where he worked as a musician/producer for 25 years. As a writer his most commercially successful song was ‘All Fired Up’ which Pat Benatar had a major worldwide hit with.

During this period Kerryn’s publisher would hook him up with different writers to co-write. This is how he met Mac Gayden in Nashville in the mid-nineties. Mac wrote the classic song ‘Everlasting Love’. Kerryn and Mac jammed onto cassette and gave the jams each a name. Kerryn kept the tapes. In 2022 he gave me one of those jams which they had called ‘Precious Cargo’.

My brief was to write a song around the two parts they were playing. I came at it from the writer/creatives point of view – the words and life experiences created are ‘Precious Cargo’. All this amongst the backdrop of all of those great early sixties Beat Poets and Folk Singers.

lyrics

Precious Cargo

I had a dream last night it was the strangest thing
Chapter by chapter it drew me in
New York city 1965
With beatniks and hipsters in a West Side dive

My tongue was tied as I shuffled along
Surrounded by faces that I'd known so long
Like that ‘On the Road’ guy and old Ramblin' Jack
They were talking in rhymes and slapping my back

Now I don’t know but I’ve been told
The poet’s fate is in the words they roll
To carry that weight is a mighty load
It’s a precious cargo on a lonesome road

Well I woke up thinkin' that I'd been blessed
I poured me a strong one and lay down to rest
The snowflakes danced to the Christmas bells
As I started my journey into a deeper well

Now I don’t know but I’ve been told
The poet’s fate is in the words they roll
To carry that weight is a mighty load
It’s a precious cargo on a lonesome road

All my friends were there they held my hand
As I moved my pen into the shifting sand
It wrote in love and it wrote in rage
And that precious cargo leapt off the page

Now I don’t know but I’ve been told
The poet’s fate is in the words they roll
To carry that weight is a mighty load
It’s a precious cargo on a lonesome road

credits

from 1965, released October 14, 2023
1. PRECIOUS CARGO (M.Gayden/K.Tolhurst/B.Jackson)
Bill Jackson – Vocals/Acoustic Guitar/Harmonica/Backing Vocals
Kerryn Tolhurst – Mandolin/Electric Guitar/Resophonic Guitar/Keys
Simon Bruce – Backing Vocals
Ruth Hazleton – Banjo
James Gillard - Bass
Andrew Swann - Percussion

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Bill Jackson Melbourne, Australia

'His songs are gritty and real and come at you like a hammer, ringin' in the mornin'. Take it or leave it, he's telling it straight up' (Shane Howard)

' Take a chance and listen to some Roots Music that cuts across Borders...' (Keith Glass)

‘We heard Bill Jackson for the first time at the Unpaved Sessions earlier in the year and he’s up there with Paul Kelly’ (The Melbourne Folk Club) ... more

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