Some of the finest Americana songs had been tucked away in a Jacksonville, Florida garage since the 1970s. They are finally reaching our ears.
On March 20, the third volume of the Archives 1972-1975 by Robert Lester Folsom appeared, and that in itself is rather curious; for five decades, here is a man who recorded only two records, Music and Dreams in 1976 and Beautiful Nonsense in 2017. Neither of the two ever drew the slightest attention. And yet, every demo this guy laid down on a 4-track in the first half of the 1970s is now exhumed as a sacred relic by all the folk-rock enthusiasts on the planet. The English radio station NTS even dedicates entire mornings to him for ten years. It’s enough to baffle comprehension.
The seventy-something Georgia-born artist regularly confesses that he is somewhat overwhelmed by what has happened to his so-called “career.” The musician’s origins take us back to Auburn, a small university town in Alabama, around 1973. Robert Lester Folsom formed a band with a Latin-sounding name Abacus, named after the ancient counting frame with sand on which calculations were performed. Their aim was simple: rehearse between classes and play at campus parties whenever they could. Only Robert believed in them; the others burned through their coursework. Who can blame them? Abacus had neither a manager nor the least bit of reputation. The group folded but agreed to back Robert on the recording of his solo album, as one would support a friend when one does not want to tell the truth. Music and Dreams — pressed in a run of 1,000 hand-made copies, with a ballpoint-drawn cover — is a soft-rock or galaxy-country record that could have sounded like Supertramp, but the fragile songwriting leans more toward Dennis Wilson’s solo records with the Beach Boys or David Crosby’s masterful If I Could Only Remember My Name. It’s sometimes pretty enough to make you cry (Show Me to the Window), but everyone seems to not care.
Robert tries to help another Georgian, Bruce Joyner, who is fractured into countless pieces and somewhat insane, to stabilize his talent: he introduces him to a former elementary-school classmate, Don Fleming, and produces their group: The Stroke Band. It flops again. Joyner and Fleming would become legends of the independent circuit, but elsewhere, under different skies, three years later. Robert gets married, moves to Jacksonville, Florida, where he becomes a painting contractor. In 2008, he receives an email from a Californian, Douglas McGowan, who says he found on the internet a Japanese bootleg of Music and Dreams (a pirate he had never heard of) and offers to reissue the album on his Yoga Records label. The reissue creates a modest buzz and the folks at Anthology Recordings ask him in 2014 if he has any demos tucked away somewhere. RLF releases the equivalent of three albums recorded at home between 1972 and 1975, muffled tapes with the raw, piercing grace of early Big Star (everything sounds like Chris Bell!).
When one hears pieces as exquisite as See You Later, I’m Gone, Sunshine Only Sometimes, or Lonely, it becomes clear that the planet had housed in a Jacksonville house-painter’s garage, for fifty years, some of Americana’s most beautiful songs. One almost regrets that RLF is a kind, naive man: if he had been dangerous or blessed with two inches of charisma, he would be today almost as mythical as Gram Parsons.
If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes: Archives Vol. 3, 1972-1975 by Robert Lester Folsom (Anthology Recordings).
