Jack Adkins - American Sunset (1984/2018)

Recommended if you like: Trans-era Neil Young, Repo Man and other Ronald Reagan apocalypse now vibes.
Why you should care: At its best, American Sunset is an uncanny, instantly familiar evocation of the death of the west, the greatest country in the world heading into the sunset, set to the sound of guitars and drum machines.

"I was a bit of a road warrior. I was comfortable out there."

Jack Adkins spoke on the phone from his home in Florida, talking about his ten years—1983-1993—on the road. "They had a corporate concept of presentation—it was really good for me to learn rapport — bantering, entertaining, not only your music, but your personality. I was a shy person. Day after day, year after year, I developed the skill. Ten years, you have time to work on everything."

He toured as Jamin’ Jack, the One Man Band, cycling through 22 rooms in the south—restaurants and malls, mostly near military bases. No dancing, just entertainment, with Jack doing it all. Adkins looks back on the time fondly, as a process of growing comfortable with performing when his natural habitat was the studio. It was just before the tour began that Jack Adkins walked into London Music, a small studio in Tampa, Florida. He was there to record his LP debut, American Sunset.

He was 36 and already a music veteran. He’d began in Cincinnati in the mid ’60s in one of the dozens of American garage bands who called themselves the Coachmen before joining up with the Invalids to record “The Buzzard” b/w “Love That Girl” for Crutch Records in 1965. That’s his arpeggiated guitar you hear on OFS Unlimited’s “Mystic,” which came out on Columbus’s Prix label in 1973. Adkins stuck around just long enough to watch the group morph into Sussex recording artist Segments of Time, but is absent from their self-titled LP. The back half of the 1970s was spent doing time with singer named Jodi Hungerbuhler in a stage duo known as The Two Of Us. He came to Florida shortly after.

In a bit of poetry in motion, Adkins took the American Sunset master tapes with him on the road, knowing that he might not be on terra firma for a while, and that he’d eventually press them up somewhere along the way. He did so the following year in Houston, making both LPs and tapes, and would sell them from the stage throughout the course of the decade.

Playing one to four weeks in one place after another, with no home base for an entire decade, of course, was the kind of lonesome experience American Sunset, at its best, captures so perfectly. When he finally made the decision to abandon the road life in ‘93, he gave the company nine months notice. "I made friends out there,” he said, “but those are empty friendships. They don’t get to know you."

After this, Adkins would drift into working the computer world in its ‘90s boom years, and it was a case of "right place at the right time." As his fortunes increased, the road fell away, and today his musical excursions happen at home, and in front of the green screen he uses for music videos.

Tracklist
01. American Sunset (4:29)
02. Ooo Wee (4:00)
03. Truth (2:40)
04. Sunset Beach (6:22)
05. Hurts to Be a Hero (3:38)
06. Linda's Birthday (3:47)
07. Off the Road (2:52)
08. Lookin' for a Lady (3:15)