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APR CD 1070 • CD only John Stewart has spent more than forty years and over forty albums helping to change and channel the direction of American popular music. Havana is John’s first new CD of studio recordings in five years, a cornucopia of ebullient rockers and bone-deep ballads that have been road-tested and honed before rabid audiences of “Bloodliners,” as John’s fans are known, across the country and in overseas Stewart strongholds such as the United Kingdom.
Since his apprenticeship in the “college folk” group The Kingston Trio, which was greatly responsible for bringing the folk boom of the early Sixties into millions of American homes, Stewart has created his own distinctive style of Americana, a mixture of folk, rock, hints of country and bluegrass, and a repertoire of memorable original songs that have provided hits for such diverse artists as The Monkees, Anne Murray, Rosanne Cash, and even a Top 5 single and Top 10 album for John himself (1979’s “Gold” and Bombs Away Dream Babies, respectively).
Havana features fourteen memorable Stewart originals that ponder modern life and materialism (“Davey on the Internet,” “Who Stole the Soul of Johnny Dreams”), mortality and existentialism (“Dogs in the Bed,” “Starman”), personal and public heroes (“I Want to Be Elvis,” “Turn of the Century [Diana],” about the late Princess of Wales), love (“Miracle Girl,” about wife and singing partner Buffy Ford Stewart, “Cowboy in the Distance”), and the mysteries of existence (“Star in the Black Sky Shining,” “Rally Down the Night”). John tackles these emotions with unquenched wonder and hard-won experience, a wry cynicism forged by reality but tempered with optimism based on faith in the individual. The one non-original composition on the CD is John’s interpretation of the standard “Lucky Old Sun,” a hit in 1949 for Frankie Laine that has since been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson and many more. Havana (the title refers to the CD’s last song, “Waiting for Castro to Die,” expressing John’s fascination for forbidden Cuba) was produced and mixed by John, who also plays most of the instruments (guitars, banjo, bass, harmonica, keyboards, percussion). His accompanists include Buffy Stewart Ford on harmonies and percussion (her backing vocals on “Turn of the Century” make the ear hunger for the song’s chorus) and longtime sideman John Hoke on drums and percussion. Rich, bright layers of ringing guitars, propulsive rhythms (check out the rollicking “Davey on the Internet,” for example), dollops of banjo, lyrics ranging from thoughtful to playful, and John’s wise, seasoned vocals add up to another great CD from a frequently overlooked but major musical talent. About JOHN STEWART To the baby-boomers of the Fifties, John Stewart’s name is synonymous with the Kingston Trio, whose early Sixties hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Greenback Dollar” brought folk music out of the coffeehouses and onto campuses, concert halls and radio playlists. To mid-Sixties teenyboppers, John Stewart was the pen behind The Monkees’ #1 hit, “Daydream Believer.” To rock fans in the Seventies, John was that friend of Fleetwood Mac’s who had a hit single (“Gold”) co-produced by Lindsey Buckingham and a Top 10 album, Bombs Away Dream Babies, that featured Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as guest musicians. Most enduringly, to fans of the singer-songwriter movement that began at the end of the Sixties and continues to unfold, John is an icon of uncompromising talent and integrity. Born in San Diego in 1939, John wrote his first song, “Shrunken Head Boogie,” at the age of 10. In high school, he formed a band called Johnny Stewart and the Furies that played Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Buddy Holly covers, even recording a subsequent collector’s-item 45 (“Rockin’ Anna”). John’s singing and writing shifted to folk music while he was in college, and two songs he wrote were recorded by the Kingston Trio. At the urging of the Trio’s manager, John moved to San Francisco and formed the Cumberland Three, a Trio-styled group that recorded an album for the Roulette label. When founding member Dave Guard left the Kingston Trio in 1961, John was his logical replacement, providing banjo, guitar, on-stage jokes and, most importantly, original material. The Trio recorded more than two dozen Stewart compositions during his seven-year tenure with the group, including “One More Town,” pegged by Paul Simon as the inspiration for his “Feelin’ Groovy.” John also performed on many of the Trio’s best-remembered songs – “Greenback Dollar,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “The Reverend Mr. Black” and “Seasons in the Sun.” During his final days with the Trio, John wrote “Daydream Believer,” which soon became a worldwide hit for The Monkees (and, years later, for Anne Murray). With folk music as the soundtrack to activism in the Sixties, John took part in the March for Freedom in Selma, Alabama, and also joined his friend Robert Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign. In 1968, Stewart again stumped for Kennedy, this time in the latter’s tragically curtailed run for the U.S. presidency. After seven years and sixteen albums with the Trio, John left the group in 1968 and recorded Signals Through the Glass with his wife-to-be, singer Buffy Ford. The following year, John went to Nashville to record his first solo album, the classic California Bloodlines, which was chosen as one of the 200 Best Albums of All Time by a Rolling Stone critics’ poll. More albums and more cover versions of John’s songs were to follow; over the course of his career, John’s songs have been recorded by everyone from Harry Belafonte and Pat Boone to Joan Baez and Nanci Griffith, from the Four Tops and the Lovin’ Spoonful to the Beat Farmers and the Violent Femmes. In 1979, John returned to the charts himself with “Gold,” a Top 5 hit from his Bombs Away Dream Babies album (itself a Top Ten success co-produced and played on by Lindsey Buckingham, longtime Stewart fan and creative leader of Fleetwood Mac). The album spun off two more Top 20 songs (“Lost Her in the Sun” and “Midnight Wind”), but the lack of sales for its successor, Dream Babies Go Hollywood, led to a parting of the ways between John and the RSO label, leaving an unreleased album of songs finally issued by Appleseed Recordings as Wires from the Bunker in 2000. Since the start of the Eighties, John has been releasing live and archival recordings on several labels. Recent years have brought John a Number One country hit with Rosanne Cash’s version of his “Runaway Train,” and in 1999, Appleseed released John Stewart & Darwin’s Army, a collection of non-Stewart songs that garnered a “Pick of the Week” designation in Billboard. The CD contained new versions of mostly folk classics like “Darlin’ Corey” and “Wild Mountain Thyme,” performed by John, Buffy Ford Stewart, John’s songwriting drummer and guitarist John Hoke and fellow Appleseed artist Dave Crossland, constituting John’s first membership in an actual group since the Kingston Trio.
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