THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,589) Doug Ashdown — “Something Strange”
Here is one of the firsts songs written by Australia’s folk giant Doug Ashdown (see #1,375). Brilliant.
Ashdown tells us of Ashdown:
After playing lead guitar in a Shadows/Beatles cover band, I descended into the subterranean world of the folk clubs where I became a Dylan impersonator supreme. My first real break came when I recorded my debut album for CBS. I think it garnered me a tin record for 25 sales! My album Source released in 1968 featured one of my first compositions “Something Strange”. I got busy writing my own songs and began to write with Jim Stewart. Jim and I co-wrote an album called the Age Of Mouse. Featuring the band Fraternity, it was the first double album of original material released in Australia. I then travelled to Nashville where I lived and worked for three years. While there I met many great writers and singers, ate and drank lots of “country breakfasts” and co-wrote many songs. One of these, “Just Thank Me”, became a number one country hit for the late David Rogers. Another unforgettable experience while in Nashville was co-producing a single for, and touring with, the great Broadway star Carol Channing. During my stay in America I also performed at Gerdes Folk City in New York, at the Exit Inn in Nashville and on the Mike Douglas TV show in Philadelphia. Upon returning to Australia I fronted the country rock band, The Sleeping Dogs.
The definitive Milesago: Australasian Music & Popular Culture 1964-1975 tells us:
Adelaide-born Doug Ashdown . . . . had travelled to England [by age 17], where he played in a rock band, returning to Adelaide the following year and working as lead guitarist in The Bowmen with Bobby Bright . . . . Doug’s first major break came when he signed with CBS. . . . [O]ver the next three years he recorded three albums for them . . . This Is Doug Ashdown in 1965. . . . The Real Thing (1966) . . . . [and] Source (1968) . . . . [B]y decade’s end, he was an accomplished performer, songwriter and recording artist, and a leading light on the Australian folk scene. After his CBS contract expired Doug . . . [i]n 1969 . . . joined forces with expatriate Irish singer, songwriter and producer Jimmy Stewart who had recently formed the Sweet Peach label. . . . Doug’s fourth album, his first for Sweet Peach, was The Age Of Mouse which earned him a place in the history books as the first double album of original material ever released in Australia . . . . The songs were co-written with Jimmy Stewart . . . . Sweet Peach lifted three Singles . . . [t]he first two . . . local chart successes, and the album gained considerable critical acclaim. As a result, it was picked up by MCA for overseas release in fifty countries. . . . [and] had generated enough interest in the USA to prompt Doug and Jimmy to move there. . . . Doug was unable to crack the US market, so Jimmy and Doug returned to Australia where they set up a new label . . . . Stewart produced Doug’s next album entitled Leave Love Enough Alone (1974). . . . [T]he album’s evocative title track, co-written by Doug and Jimmy Stewart during a bitter winter in Nashville. . . . was released in September 1974 and received some airplay, but . . . [didn’t] ma[k]e the charts . . . . [It] proved to be a classic ‘sleeper’ and the breakthrough finally came more than a year later when it was retitled and reissued as “Winter In America”. . . . bec[oming] a major hit through late 1976 and early 1977, reaching #14 in Melbourne and #30 in Sydney. . . . [and] remains one of the most popular and enduring Australian songs of the ’70s . . . .
Kimbo adds:
[Ashdown] formed his own skiffle band, The Sapphires, in 1958. When his father transplanted the family back to England for nine months in 1960-1, the youthful Ashdown played electric guitar with an ensemble called Rommel and the Desert Rats. On return to Adelaide, he spent time (1961-4) as one of The Beaumen along with Bobby Bright . . . . “I discovered Dylan and that was it”. . . . Ashdown debuted as a folksinger at Adelaide’s Purple Cow, late in 1964, and he had his first big break when Tina Lawton asked him to substitute for her at a Town Hall concert. [He] . . . brought the house down. . . . . [H]e quickly became a fixture on the coffee lounge circuit. . . . Saturday nights frequently found him performing five gigs . . . . It was as the Folk Hut’s chief drawcard that Ashdown came to the attention of CBS’s Sven Libaek, then in Adelaide scouting for new talent. He was offered a recording contract . . . . Almost from the beginning, Ashdown objected to being categorised, insisting that he never thought of himself as a folksinger, and that he found the whole folk thing too restrictive. . . . Unsurprisingly, this lack of commitment to the folk scene earned Ashdown the disdain of the folk establishment – as did the commercial success and orientation of his recordings, or his willingness to record Lennon-McCartney’s ”Hide Your Love Away” . . . . On one occasion, a number of audience members walked out of a folk concert in Sydney when he attempted to perform an electrified version of Dylan’s ”I Shall Be Released”. Ashdown, in turn, once confessed to interviewer Greg Quill that his third album, the ground-breaking 1968 LP Source reflected his dissatisfaction with both the folk and mainstream music scenes. Intensely critical of the pop scene’s preoccupation with drugs, doom and destruction, he teamed up with Jimmy Stewart in 1968, creating a solid body of self-composed material about “real things” – small portraits and studies of individual lonelinesses and the patterns of particular loves, recounted (he maintained) without either judgment or world-shattering conclusions. The material was preserved on . . . The Age of Mouse . . . .
https://historyofaussiemusic.blogspot.com/2013/09/doug-ashdown.html
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