TOP 40 DEBUT: January 26, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #34 (February 9, 1980)
Few acts in chart history seemed less poised for stardom than John Stewart, a cult artist who entered 1979 on the cusp of forty with no hits under his own name. The California native carried a sterling reputation in songwriting circles, thanks to his composer’s credit on the Monkees’ #1 smash, “Daydream Believer.” But he was no one’s idea of a pop singer. Stewart’s last appearance in the Top 40 had come in 1963, while he was still part of the popular folk combo Kingston Trio. His only charting single as a solo act, “Armstrong,” peaked at #74 on September 20, 1969. Over the following decade, Stewart released six more studio records and a double live album. None of them got any higher than #126.
And then Stewart befriended a younger musician who’d been a fan since his Kingston Trio days. That musician was Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham co-produced Stewart’s next release, Bombs Away Dream Babies. He brought in some of L.A.’s top session musicians to cut the tracks. He played guitar on a few numbers. He recruited his current bandmate (and former girlfriend) Stevie Nicks to sing backup vocals. And on August 25, 1979, two weeks shy of Stewart’s fortieth birthday, Bombs Away Dream Babies landed in the Top 10. All three of its singles hit the Hot 40; they would be the only Top 40 entries Stewart ever had. “Lost Her In The Sun” was the last of the three, bringing an end to a remarkable commercial blip in an equally remarkable career.
John Stewart grew up in southern California, where he spent his childhood learning a variety of instruments (guitar, banjo, ukulele) and composing his first song, “Shrunken Head Boogie,” by age ten. In high school, he headed up a garage band, Johnny Stewart and the Furies, before moving on to folk music with the Cumberland Three. The trio, which also included Gil Robbins (father of actor Tim), recorded three albums, all released in 1960 and heavily influenced by the era’s most popular folk combo, the Kingston Trio. That same year, Kingston co-founder Dave Guard announced he was leaving the group; Stewart, already friendly with the Trio’s manager, Frank Werber, offered his services as a replacement. In 1961, he officially joined the group. Stewart would record a dozen albums with the Kingston Trio before they disbanded in 1967.
Stewart wrote “Daydream Believer” around the same time he left the Trio, and he’d often drop the tune into his solo sets to minimal crowd reaction. (His own official, country-flavored rendition appeared on 1971’s Lonesome Picker Rides Again.) A chance meeting with Monkees producer Chip Douglas eventually led to the foursome recording their now-iconic version, albeit with one small change. “RCA wouldn’t let Davy [Jones] say ‘funky,’” Stewart explained in a 2006 interview, referring to the Monkees’ eventual “Now you know how happy I can be” lyric. Like any good integrity-driven artist, Stewart took the moral high ground and resisted the alteration—right until Douglas delivered an ultimatum from the label: “Let me put it to you this way, John. If [Davy] can’t sing ‘happy,’ they won’t do it.” At that point, Stewart’s pragmatic side surfaced: “I told him, ‘Happy’s working real good for me right now.’”
Released at the end of October 1967, “Daydream Believer” topped the Billboard Hot 100 just six weeks later, becoming the Monkees’ third and final #1 in America. (It’s a 10.) Twelve years later, Anne Murray revitalized the song, taking her own remake to #12 pop and #1 adult contemporary. (In a neat twist, the first two months of 1980 found Stewart’s current single sharing chart space with a song he’d written more than a decade earlier.) “Daydream Believer” would forever remain John Stewart’s calling card, eclipsing all the critically acclaimed work he wrote and recorded over the next forty years. It would also sustain him financially when those same critically acclaimed albums didn’t sell. Again, John said it best: “That song didn’t [just] pay the rent. That song kept me alive.”
In the glow of his “Daydream” success, Stewart recorded three efforts for Capitol, including 1969’s Bloodlines, later voted one of the “200 Best Albums of All Time” by Rolling Stone. But neither accolades nor appearances from James Taylor and Carole King (on the 1970 follow-up Willard) expanded Stewart’s audience beyond a small-but-passionate fanbase. He moved on to Warner Brothers for two albums, then RCA for three more. Nothing connected. Like fellow under-the-radar artists John Prine or Loudon Wainwright III, Stewart’s eclectic style handicapped his commercial potential, even during the singer-songwriter boom of the 1970s. If not for Robert Stigwood, he might’ve languished in obscurity forever.
By 1977, the Robert Stigwood Organisation was on its way to becoming one of the most powerful management companies in the industry. Stigwood’s clients included the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton; he’d also produced the successful film versions of Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy, with his next movie—a small-budgeted drama entitled Saturday Night Fever—set for release that December. I have no idea what prompted the Australian-born impresario to add a struggling folk artist to a roster that included extremely Seventies names like Player, Yvonne Elliman, and Andy Gibb. But Stigwood, to his credit, signed Stewart and then (initially) left him alone. 1977’s Fire In The Wind, released on the company’s own RSO Records, never attempts to put Stewart in a white, flared leisure suit; most of its cuts hew close to his usual country-rock template, with only the title track foreshadowing the more contemporary Buckingham production to come.
Of course, RSO eventually wanted hits. The company had finished 1978 with the two biggest albums of the year (the soundtracks to Grease and Saturday Night Fever) and nine separate #1 singles; they weren’t in the business of “critically acclaimed records.” RSO president Al Coury informed Stewart he’d be off the label if his next album didn’t reach the Top 10. (Again, he said this to a cult folksinger who had never once cracked the top half of the Billboard 200.) So Stewart reached out to his friend Walter Egan, fresh off his Top 10 single “Magnet And Steel,” and asked him for recommendations. And Egan put him in touch with the multi-platinum artist responsible for producing that hit: Lindsey Buckingham.
Stewart learned to play electric guitar by studying Lindsey’s fingerpicked work on 1975’s self-titled Fleetwood Mac. More than a decade earlier, Buckingham had learned to play acoustic guitar by studying John’s fingerpicked work on the Kingston Trio records. They were practically predestined to work together. Unfortunately, Lindsey’s primary focus for most of 1979 involved completing Tusk, the Mac’s insanely anticipated follow-up to Rumours. Out of necessity, his role on Bombs Away Dream Babies became more free-ranging: advising Stewart on mixing technique, suggesting musicians, adding the occasional guitar or vocal overdub, and even chipping in $20,000 when RSO cut the budget. There’s a reason his credit reads “Producer At Large.” As Stewart described the process in a contemporaneous interview: “Lindsey would come in for fourteen hours at a time and then I wouldn't see him again for a month.”
Bombs Away Dream Babies (cryptically titled after one of Dave Guard's favorite expressions) appeared in stores five months before the release of Tusk, just as the public’s appetite for anything Mac-related was reaching a fever pitch. So RSO took advantage, making sure to release “Gold” and “Midnight Wind”—the only two songs on the album containing prominent Stevie Nicks harmonies backed by Buckingham guitar—as the first two singles. That decision paid off in spades. “Midnight Wind” peaked at #28 in October ’79, while the earlier “Gold” made it all the way to #5 in August, becoming the first Top 5 (and Top 10, and Top 40) hit of Stewart’s solo career. Six weeks later, the actual Fleetwood Mac released the first of their four singles from Tusk. Amazingly, none would end up charting as high as “Gold.”
At the risk of overstating the significance of a few Buckingham/Nicks contributions, I’m sure plenty of the people buying Bombs Away Dream Babies had never owned a John Stewart album in their life. They probably had no idea who John Stewart even was. But they recognized that sound—that strange alchemy of Lindsey’s droning, snaking electric lines and Stevie’s husky howl—even in an unfamiliar context with an unfamiliar voice. And damn if both singles don’t conjure up the spirit of Fleetwood Mac as well as, or better than, anything on Tusk itself.
“Midnight Wind” imagines a world where Johnny Cash showed up midway through the Rumours sessions to sit in on lead vocals; the first time Nicks yells “Come on down!” is liable to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. (It’s an 8.) The sparse, spooky “Gold” might be even better, a 3 A.M. version of the Mac as dark and desolate as a back country highway. Stewart’s inspiration for the chorus—“There’s people out there turning music into gold”—came from Buckingham; so too did his guitar solo, explicitly patterned after Lindsey’s own lead work. Again, the chemistry between Stewart and Nicks is absolutely electric, their voices not so much blending as kicking against each other in raw, ragged fashion. (Stevie supposedly cut her vocal in one take by singing off cue cards. “Gold” is a 9 if just for that fact alone.)
“Lost Her In The Sun,” the album’s third and final single, is an outlier for one simple reason: It’s the only song of the three that sounds nothing like Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey doesn’t sing, or play guitar, or contribute in any way. Neither does Nicks. Stewart put most of the track together himself, even handling the final mix, and he keeps the production minimal: just bass, drums, and acoustic guitars, all lying in a bed of light, airy keyboards. The choir of background vocals comes from Chris Whelen, an unknown musician with no prior professional credits. Nothing about “Lost Her In The Sun” should work. Stewart makes it work anyway.
“Lost Her In The Sun” is built on a single, simple lyrical conceit: The narrator’s significant other takes a commercial flight, and he follows her plane across the sky until it disappears. That’s it. That’s the whole song. (So, basically, the inverse of John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane.”) Yet Stewart manages to wring every ounce of pathos from a handful of lines and one truly great metaphor. His lean, economic writing cuts to the emotional quick; in just the opening verse, a standard slice of melodrama (“And how was I to know she was leavin’ in the mornin’”) turns defiantly unsentimental within seconds: “I learned to love the light, ‘cause the light’s gonna get ya/ Right between the eyes, in the mornin’ like a gun.” Most of the chorus simply repeats the song’s title, over and over. The only other words sung are “What have I done.” Every time, they land like a ton of bricks.
From a production standpoint, “Lost Her In The Sun” isn’t particularly memorable. It’s lightweight, gauzy, AM pop, with none of the edge of Bombs’ Buckingham-assisted cuts; if not for Stewart himself, the entire thing would float off into the ether. But his deep, craggy baritone does more than provide some much needed ballast. That imperfect vocal gives “Lost” its soul, a ripple of sadness flowing beneath the song’s sun-dappled surface. Stewart was always an acquired taste, and I’ll acknowledge his version of soft-filter folk won’t be to everyone’s liking. But there’s something elemental in the song’s Beach Boys-meets- “Badlands” momentum. Let “Lost Her In The Sun” wash over you a few times, and that same momentum might just carry you away.
Not surprisingly, John Stewart’s time in the commercial spotlight was short-lived. The 1980 “sequel” album, Dream Babies Go Hollywood, failed to connect with the public, and he was quickly dropped from RSO’s roster and label. By the middle of the decade, Stewart had returned to making folk albums for his own company, Homecoming Records. (His 1987 composition, “Runaway Train,” would become a #1 country hit for Rosanne Cash the following year.) Over the next two decades, he toured constantly, while remaining as ornery as ever; by the 2000s, Stewart refused to put “Gold” in his setlists, calling it “vapid and empty.” He was still touring weeks before he passed away, on January 19, 2008, at age 68, leaving behind a catalog of four dozen albums, six hundred songs—and even a few pop hits.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BITS: In 1995, Stewart re-recorded most of his best-known songs (plus a few random others he just liked) for the career retrospective Airdream Believer. Don’t judge an album by its (shitty) cover: There’s some interesting work here, including a Nanci Griffith cameo on “Daydream Believer” and this distinctly country-fied rendition of “Lost Her In The Sun.”
I WANT MY MTV: RSO never made a promotional clip for “Lost Her In The Sun,” but given that this entry touched on Stewart’s other singles from the era, it seemed only fitting to include the videos for “Gold” and “Midnight Wind” here. The songs still hold up; Stewart’s RSO-mandated “rock star” look, not so much.