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Excerpt From the article “Lost Treasures and Neglected Classics: Richie Unterberger celebrates 25 American Folk-Rock albums of the late 1960s” – RECORD COLLECTOR magazine, August 2005
The folk-rock revolution caught a lot of the old guard off-guard, and the late-1960s saw many veterans from the pre-Beatles folk revival, rock, and pop scenes vainly trying to get in tune with the times.  Most of these efforts were woeful; many of them were embarrassing.  But a few unlikely (relatively) oldsters did reinvent themselves as gentle folk-rock singer-songwriters with fairly successful, if aesthetically variable, results.  Bobby Darin – who’d given both Roger McGuinn and Jesse Colin Young valuable breaks when those future stars were unknown made the Top Ten with a cover of Tim Hardin’s If I Were A Carpenter.  Dion who, it’s worth noting, had made his own pretty respectable, almost wholly overlooked forays into folk-rock in the mid-1960s on Columbia with Bob Dylan producer Tom Wilson had a huge hit with Abraham, Martin & John.  And John Stewart, who’d just come to the end of a long run with the waning Kingston Trio, was –almost uniquely among his fellow early-’60s folk revival stars reborn as a critically respected singer-songwriter in the late 1960s and 1970s.

His first album under his new persona, however, was a bit of an awkward baby step into the brave new world.  First off, he shared billing with his wife Buffy Ford, who took frequent harmony and lead vocals, although in truth Stewart – who wrote all of the songs – was the main force behind the music.  Too, there’s a sense of a man desperately trying to make up for lost ground, as if the changing times were threatening to throw him off the pop music merry-go-round permanently if he didn’t prove he was up to date.  And it certainly is more serious, probing, and sophisticated, generally speaking, than what Stewart had done in the Kingston Trio, even on their later recordings.

Yet he hadn’t quite arrived at the rural-flavored, rootsy country-folk-rock that would characterize much of his solo work.  While the earnest Americana for which Stewart would become known is already in evidence in songs like Nebraska Widow and Lincoln’s Train, July, You’re A Woman was a quality middle-of-the-road production of the order of Glen Campbell, and Holly On My Mind quite fetching in its ornately orchestrated pop.  Yet social consciousness was the order of the day on Muckee Truckee River and the slightly contrived but extremely moving Draft Age.  As the LP’s closer, the latter song is a nearly cinema verite travelogue of the thoughts of one Clarence Malloy on the day he becomes eligible for induction into the American army, which in those days quite likely meant fighting in the horrific Vietnam War. Steadily building in tension with martial drums and fanfares, the bright sentimental melody and lush strings wholly undermined by the lyrics’ evocation of impending doom, it’s one of the most overlooked protest songs of the 1960s.

Bandera : Album Reviews
CMJ /New Music Report (David M. Avery)
Music Marathon
New Music Monthly
As much as John Stewart has contributed to folk rock and music in general, it's a shame that he isn't more of a household name. In the late '50's, John formed the Cumberland Three, a precursor to a more famous group he would soon be a part of - The Kingston Trio. Leading The Kingston Trio from 1961-1967 would have satisfied most people's musical itch, but for Stewart, the more he scratched the stronger his drive seemed to get. Immediately after leaving the Trio, he penned one of the Monkees biggest hits,"Daydream Believer," and his 1969 solo debut California Bloodlines appeared at #36 on the Rolling Stone list of the Top 200 albums of all time.

Stewart's style as a solo artist departed significantly from the sound of The Kingston Trio. Donning cowboy boots and a scratchy voice, John launched a career that would have more in common with Billy Joe Shaver, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt. Having now recorded more than 35 solo albums, one might think Stewart would show some artistic burnout, but his latest release, Bandera is one of his best, largely due to the fact that it was recorded live, which is where his talent is most readily heard. Backed by a very solid Scottish band, Lies Damn Lies, John is able to relax and let his dusty muse flow with incredible power and confidence.

Several Stewart favorites are featured on Bandera, including "Evangeline," "Keeper Of The Flame" and "Liberation Day," but also catch his beatnik-style poetry reading in "Ghost Of The Superchief."

The Album Network
February 6, 1998
John Stewart - Bandera
Album: Bandera
Label: Folk Era

Producer: David McTeague & John Stewart
Origin: Northern California

What You Should Know: John Stewart is an American icon, a living legend. HIs career began in the 50's when he formed a folk band The Cumberland Three --- at the time he also began to write songs for The Kingston Trio. In 1961 he joined The Kingston Trio and remained a member for six years. After leaving them, he penned the Monkees' hit "Daydream Believer," and then embarked on a long and successful solo career. In the ensuing years his songs have been covered by artists such as Rosanne Cash, Nanci Griffith ad Joan Baez. Stewart returned to the limelight last year with the release of Rough Sketches. His latest project, Bandera, was recorded live in Scotland with the Scottish band Lies Damn Lies backing him up. It amply displays his powerful songwriting and rugged performance style.

This new John Stewart release is taken from a live session recorded in Scotland in October 1994 and is a sparkling performance that captures Stewart at his best. Backed by the Scottish band Lies Damn Lies, the ringing electric guitar, three-part vocal backing and Stewart's own 12-string give many of the songs (like the opener "Keeper of the Flame" and "Liberation Day") an anthem-like feel. The theme of many of the songs is a critical look at American society today, none more so than the spoken word "Ghost of the Superchief," which summons up lost images of a simpler society and segues into the powerful "I Remember America," in which Stewart traces his disillusionment with the American dream to the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Stewart may have been around for 25 years, but Bandera shows his songwriting hasn't lost any of its social bite.

Rough Sketches : Album Reviews
Steve W.
Rough Sketches - From Route 66

This is remedy for winter's damp chill. Songs of the hot and dry; songs of Route 66 and the southwest; songs of the Mother Road, yeah, and of the people, who "somewhere in the short strokes, got lost along the way."

John calls this a musical. But without knowing how it plays out on stage, I'll say for sure that it's a song cycle; it circles like a hawk over a prairie dog town. The songs seem simple, straightforward, the instrumentation spare; as the desert appears from the highway. But is it? The songs flow from each other; to each other. One song is a mirage of another. The last track leads so perfectly into the first track that this disc will play 3,4,5 times around in my car player before I find the power to break the trance and push eject. But it's too late. My car has transformed into a '59 Chevy. I can only afford a half tank of gas; super, leaded. I drive...just to drive. I don't dare play this on my home stereo, for fear my home will meld into the Siesta Motel.. Kingman, Arizona.

You may need to listen a few times to decide about this one. These songs won't grab at you like a sidewinder, or the scorpion in your boot. But they will collect in your clothes and hair, a few grains at a time, like windblown sand. And they won't come out. But you won't care. Because you're Johnny Flamingo on the Blue Dream Road, looking for an angel you used to know; looking for the spirit of the road.

Although it was replaced by the homogenized Interstate 40, Route 66, the strip of highway that stretched through the Southwest into the Midwest, has remained an indelible image in the American psyche. For his first studio album in several years, John Stewart has released an audio sketchbook of two research trips along the remnants of the legendary road.

On tracks like the semiautobiographical "Johnny Flamingo and the Blue Dream Road" (also the title of a solo theatrical piece incorporating most of these songs) and the driving "Cadillac Ranch," Stewart captures the combination of escape, adventure, and mystery that the road epitomizes in popular culture. His songwriting is sharp and incisive, ranging from the ironic regret of "Because of a Dancer" to the abandon of "Spirit of the Road" to the claustrophobic paranoia of the inevitable Roswell anthem "MacBrasel's Farm."

Rough Sketches From Route 66 is a powerful tour-de-force, one of the high points of Stewart's long, distinguished career.

Folk singer/songwriter John Stewart has had a long, prosperous career, but that doesn't mean he simply trumps around the country performing as some sort of nostalgia act. As a member of the Cumberland Three in the 1960's, Stewart wrote for idols The Kingston Trio before eventually joining the legendary Pop folksters. Besides his solo hit "Gold" and several solo albums, he has garnered a reputation as a premier songwriter, with "Daydream Believer" being just one of his many tunes recorded by other star acts.

Today, Stewart is still productive,crafting the conceptual Rough Sketches, his most recent release. Sketches is a quintessential Folk album, honest and quiet, letting the songs speak for themselves. In a gruff rumble over sparse guitar chords, he sings of Route 66, the legendary cross-country highway. Like a musical On the Road, Rough Sketches is full of Stewart's personal observations collected over the past two summers.

What better messenger to define the spirit of Route 66 than a man who's been on the road for all of his adult life?

Nearly four decades of going from place to place, night to night, and motel to motel gives the road a special meaning to singer-songwriter John Stewart. Before he was twenty, Stewart recorded an album with his own folk group and sold songs to The Kingston Trio, which he subsequently joined.

After seven years and a succession of hit albums, Stewart left the Trio to give voice to his own words and music, and that's what he's been doing ever since. Songs like Gold, California Bloodlines, Chilly Winds, Lost Her in the Sun, and July You're a Woman insured his name on Billboard's lists. His words and music were vaulted into the Top Ten by artists like The Monkees and Ann Murray (Daydream Believer) and Roseanne Cash (Runaway Train.)

Inevitably Stewart's travels and his word-spinning talents converged on the Mother Road. His recently released Rough Sketches CD is a collection of critically acclaimed songs written on and about Route 66.

JS: When I was ten years old, my family was going up Route 66 to the Grand Canyon on our one and only summer vacation. I think it was somewhere in the Mojave, near Amboy, maybe. Anyway, it was like noon, and we made a rest stop. I was sleeping in back on the luggage in the station wagon. Everybody got out. I got out too, and walked over to the bathroom. When I came out, I saw the car pulling off up Route 66 without me. My first inclination was just that they had left me. I was lost and afraid, and then this tremendous wave of peace came over me. I felt my life was my own! Then I thought I saw a town up the road - it was just billboards in the shimmering heat - but I figured I could go up there and get a job at a cafe washing dishes and live upstairs and...

Well, so here I am, ten years old, hitchhiking up Route 66. It's about 120 degrees. About twenty minutes later, here comes the station wagon barreling back.

But I've never forgotten that moment and the American desert and Route 66. It's always been a real sacred place to me. Although I discovered it then, it wasn't until three years ago that I went back and rediscovered it.

JS: That's a good question. I just started hearing more and more about Route 66 and was attracted to it. Three summers ago this year. I decided to go out and try to find what I could of Route 66 in California and in Arizona. As soon as I found the old alignments and went there, I was hooked, and I had to go and find all of it. Now I drive it every year.

Q: When we talked after your concert in Santa Monica, you summed up the Route 66 experience in two words: "It's magic."

JS:Well, that's what it is! Yes, it's mysterious and spiritual. Magical! You can't really say it's a place because it's really so many places. But yet it is a place, one that carries the spirit of a time when America was who we would like to be. The spirit of the people who travelled that road still exists there and one of the most appealing things about it is - it's so undefinable.

When you're on it, to me, it's screamingly obvious. But I imagine some people could drive Route 66 and say,"I didn't see anything. There's nothing there." But other people would say,"It's the greatest trip I ever had." And still others might even say,"Now there's a couple of interesting old abandoned gas stations." So much of it is in the eye of the beholder.

Q: A museum?

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