Bunky & Jake: Ex-Fug and Folkie Form Blues-Rock Combo
I am just one more cowboy
Sometimes high, sometimes low
If I stay in this city
I will die, don’t you know.
On one level, “One More Cowboy” is a lament by Allan Jacobs and Andrea Skinner—he an ex-Fug from Mount Vernon, where the Bronx suddenly ends 241st Street; she an erstwhile art director from the sidewalks and green grass of Brooklyn. Professionally, they’re known by their real names, which are far more apt than their accidental ones. Bunky and Jake.
Jake describes “Cowboy” as “just the feeling you get when you’re locked up in the city. It was completed over a long period of time. We’ve always dug cowboys and buckaroos. In fact, we started to write a real Western song about the prairies, but then we decided to put in more about how we felt. ‘I dream of the prairies’? I don’t know anything about prairies.”
Thus, the transformation—”I don’t wear no ten-gallon hat/It’s so I may be cool/If they see me with my spurs on/They’d call me a fool”—and the persistent image of two big-city kids, now twenty-six, up from the borough candy stores via the Village coffeehouse scene and now looking out the windows of a fifth-floor walk-up on Bedford Street and a loft off Union Square; looking out the windows with a genuinely delightful seriocomic cowboy vision of life and death in Woodrow Wilson Guthrie’s New York Town, where the only things you ride are your man, your woman, and the subways.
Until recently, no one in music had earned more right to a lament than Bunky and Jake. Although Bob Dylan has been a constant admirer, even that didn’t help. They still look forward to doing their first college concert and have yet to make a dime from either of their albums.
Q.: How did you get to where you are today?
Jake: Where?
Q.: Sitting on that bed.
Jake: We’ve been sitting right here on this bed for the last six years, just waiting for something to happen.
Bunky breaks up laughing.
There’s a place out in space called the candy store.
Bunky met Jake in 1962 at the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street. It was Christmas time, and there was a party and music. Jake, who had recently dropped out of Rider College, remembers hearing Bunky play with a band. “I was thoroughly impressed. When I saw what was going on in that school—people painting, people playing—I said to myself, Man, I’ve got to go there. I didn’t last long there either.”
Another visit, this time with an instrument case, led to banjo-and-guitar duets on the steps of the school. Then, Jake went away, and Bunky thought, “Well, I’ll never see that guy again. What a drag. But next year, there he was.”
Both were solid folk-music enthusiasts with a similar background: the city. “I practically avoided my entire high-school education strictly for singing,” admits Jake. The same went for Bunky, who, like Jake, had learned her harmony at the neighborhood candy store. “Ain’t nothing better than harmony,” they both agree. “Harmony is a complete knockout. When you sing harmony, you sound like the old records.”
The old records—in this case, classic pop and R&B performances of the Fifties by such groups as Nolan Strong and the Diablos, the Crows, Dion and the Belmonts, the Mystics, the Passions, et al.—are something that have left an eternal mark on Bunky and Jake; a mark which can be heard in their music and in their conversation today.
From Nolan Strong to the Kingston Trio and the Weavers to Reverend Gary Davis and Leadbelly wasn’t really that much of a trip for anyone growing up in the heartland of the urban folk revival of the early Sixties. Down the street, there was Israel G. Young and the Folklore Center, a place where, Jake remembers, “you could see just about every folk singer in the world during any given month.” Caravan, Sing Out!, Gardyloo, and The Little Sandy Review provided further inspiration.
Came an impromptu appearance at a Town Hall hootenanny which featured, among others, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Ian and Sylvia, and Sandy Bull. “We were scared shitless, man,” says Jake. “Town Hall, you know. We’d been rehearsing ‘This Train’ for a week. The minute we got on stage, we forgot half the words—and we only knew one song! After we recovered, we moved our act into the small clubs and the Village basket houses.”
“I’ll never forget our first gig in a club,” claims Bunky. “A place called the African Quarter in Brooklyn. We played there three times a week for ten dollars and all the Afro-burgers we could eat.” Jake winces at the memory. “I don’t think Bunky knew they didn’t like white folks there. I couldn’t understand why the owner didn’t like me, but I soon found out. He was going to cut my head off.”
Be you King or Queen
It’s a wonderful scene
Down in Uncle Henry’s basement.
The corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets was the center point of the Village in the mid-Sixties. From there spread a dingy system of coffeehouses with strange names and stranger clientele. Tim Hardin, Steve Stills, John Sebastian, Peter Tork, Jose Feliciano, Jesse Colin Young, David Blue, Fred Neil, Richie Havens, and Bunky and Jake all sang, played, and passed the hat for “contributions” in such dives as the Four Winds, the Bizarre, and the Cafes Id, Basement, Wha?, Why Not?, and Rafio.