Gone Girl
Karen Dalton: In My Own Time discusses the ill-fated singer.
by Richard von Busack
Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz’s documentary about folk singer Karen Dalton (1937–93) starts off with an apology. The narrator explains that there’s a lack of source material to work from. “Incompleteness” is the word used. Actually Karen Dalton: In My Own Time tracks down quite a bit of original material and vintage film of her performances, as well as a long interview with Dalton by a very pleased-with-himself radio interviewer called Bob Fass.
The necessary quality of this film is clear at the end, when we consider what befell the boxes of original material that survived Dalton — I guess you’d call it an archive, saved for a time by her friend Peter Walker
It was important to harvest the reminiscences of Dalton while the people who knew her and loved her are still alive. Interviews here include Dalton’s daughter Abralyn “Abbie” Baird. She’s a lot more forgiving of such a difficult mother than many people would be, considering her dropped-off and picked-up childhood. Baird describes the rottenness of staying at an NYC crash pad where the bathroom didn’t work, so she had to sneak in to use the facilities of the Phillips 66 station down the street.
Dalton never met her own granddaughter, because she was too vain to accept the idea of being grandmother at what she considered a too-young age. Blair and other witnesses give personal insight on a chaotic, hard-luck life, and a kind of music that’s inevitably misunderstood and misfiled by the music industry
There’s a joke here that Dalton’s 1971 album In My Own Time was named that because of her drug-induced tardiness to get to the studio. But Dalton never really clicked: not just because of her uniqueness, but probably because of the wrong place/wrong time phenomena that plagues every pop musician who never gets as big as they ought to have been.
Her album It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You The Best came out in 1969. If it had been released two years earlier, when there was still a lot of folk rock in the air, it might have made more of a splash. Dalton was behind the times a bit because she’d been greening out, living the rural life in Boulder, Colorado. It seems a healthy, happy interlude — singer Lacy J. Dalton, no relation, describes how good Karen was at cooking up a pot of beans for her fellow broke guitar-pickers.
But rock had quite devoured folk music by the year of Woodstock. A Village Voice critic named Annie Fischer, writing about Karen Dalton, gives the singer primacy over Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. It’s hard to agree. I’ve seen horrifying footage of Joni Mitchell bombing because she was way too small for a way too large stage. This was Dalton’s problem, too. Yet for a time, when she was playing with Tom Scott in Miles of Aisles album, Joni knew how to put on a rock show. This isn’t a skill Karen Dalton ever really had.
It’s understandable (if depressing) that some producers thought that Dalton ought to be matched up with John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas — a marriage of the slick with the rough as a cob. But it’s completely bizarre that Dalton’s management thought that she’d be a perfect opening act for Santana. She toured with them for a time, for what turned out to be a lot of George Jones-level no-shows. When you see Dalton in concert footage, it’s clear she needed smaller spaces to work her particular witchcraft. An astute witness here, the sage old folky Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, says that Dalton’s ideal stage would be a living room.
What was it like to see her, then, in the coffee house days?
“She was a folk” says Stampfel. Dalton was an actual Oklahoman from Enid, in a scene where lots of gently-reared preppies posed as hayseeds. The outlaw last name was hers, by marriage. Dalton had dark hair long enough to sit on, and a few lower teeth knocked out by her soon to be ex. (She had been married twice before she was 18.) She left an impression on Bob Dylan, who mentions Dalton in his memoirs. Like Dylan, Dalton was impressed by the music of that great denizen of the Sooner State, Woody Guthrie. (Dalton’s version of Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” heard here, is stunning; it brings all necessary doom to the lines “we come with the dust/and we’re gone with the wind.”)
This documentary doesn’t quote Mike Powell’s 2006 hit and run review in the Voice of a reissued Dalton album, dismissing her as “A smudged footnote of Dylanalia…the harpy responsible for a small handful of people wanting to sing like old doors.”
Powell might as well have mentioned Joanna Newsom by name. The creak in Dalton’s voice recalls the ‘Lisa Simpson sings’ putdown of Newsom, herself a Karen Dalton fan.
But this documentary shows Dalton a lot more melodic than all that. For one thing, as Dylan noted, Dalton was a fan of Billie Holiday. Usually the chime of Dalton’s well-played 12 string guitar contrasted the earthiness of her voice. There usually was generally a lot more throb and honey in Karen Dalton’s singing than in her best-known, scratchiest song. That’s her banjo-accompanied version of a 1700s era traditional about a clapped-out camp-follower, whom all the soldiers call Katie Cruel. In “Katie Cruel,” it’s spine-chilling to hear Dalton gone-girl’s quandary. She’s trapped like a person looking for corners in a round room: “If I was where I would be/Then I would be where I am not/Here I am where I must be/Where I would, I can not.”
In her last years, Dalton was a woman left to wander. She treated her anxieties with ever-harder drugs, shooting them up with an ex-Marine named Tim Hardin, composer of “Reason to Believe” and “If I Were A Carpenter”. Stampfel allows us to see the funny side of the chaos, describing the time Dalton ripped a sink out of a wall, Hulk-wise, when coming out of convulsions from a syringe full of meth. Lacy J. Dalton tried to get Karen into rehab. She made it two days and left, snarling and swearing.
Some high profile fans are here. Maybe the best known is singer/novelist Nick Cave, who describes weeping at Dalton’s music, not because of its sadness, but because of its perfection. Cave’s director on Wings of Desire is the documentary’s executive producer. Dalton’s journal entries are read by Angel Olsen.
If Dalton’s story carries a message, it may be the old Freudian idea that what the second generation wants to forget, the third generation wishes to remember. The cult of Dalton continues with the recent various-artists compilation, Remembering Mountains (2015); and fresh-faced musicians of today talk on camera of Dalton’s influence. The tragedy of the gone life is redeemed somewhat by the music left behind after her death.
