Jake Holmes - A Letter To Katherine December 1968

One of many journeyman New York folk-rock singer/songwriters of the late '60s, Jake Holmes, if he's remembered at all, is known as the author and original performer of "Dazed and Confused." It is still not widely recognized that he wrote and recorded the first version of this song on his 1967 solo debut album, prior to it being covered (in concert) by the Yardbirds, and then becoming one of the most famous numbers in Led Zeppelin's repertoire. A big part of why is that Holmes, for murky reasons, was not credited as a writer on Led Zeppelin's recording, which gave sole author credits to Jimmy Page. For that accomplishment alone, Holmes is worthy of a footnote, even if nothing else he wrote or released lived up to the level of that song.

Holmes earliest success came as a comedy duo with then-wife Kate. The pair performed under the alias Allen & Grier and released a popular collection of folk revival parodies called Better to Be Rich Than Ethnic in the early '60s. He had also worked in a group with fellow folk-rock singer/songwriter Tim Rose before going solo. "Dazed and Confused" was on Holmes' 1967 debut LP The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, which had an odd, edgy folk-rock sound built around a drumless trio, featuring Holmes' rapid rhythm guitar strums and Ted Irwin's spidery acid folk-jazz-lead guitar lines. As heard in this folk-rock context, "Dazed and Confused" was given a much more spare arrangement than it would be given by Led Zeppelin. The rest of the album was an erratic cluster of songs that explored similar anxious moods with less power, sometimes changing gears into light comedy or melodramatic sentiment.

The Yardbirds, with Jimmy Page on lead guitar, heard "Dazed and Confused" in August 1967 when Holmes opened for the band in New York. The group took a pretty radical rearrangement of it into their live set. Although they didn't release a studio version of it before their breakup in 1968, their live rearrangement can be heard on the Epic LP Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page, a 1968 recording that was briefly available in 1971 before being withdrawn (a superior live version from a March 1968 French TV broadcast subsequently circulated on the Cumular Limit compilation). When Led Zeppelin did it on their first album, with different lyrics but similar melodic and rhythmic ideas as the Holmes prototype, the songwriting credit was given to Jimmy Page.

Holmes' second LP, 1968's Letter to Katherine December, expanded into orchestral backgrounds, though he and Irwin still supplied their distinctive guitar work. An even more erratic work than its predecessor, it still supplied some interesting acid folk-pop, particularly on "Leaves That Break," with its ferocious fuzz guitar. His subsequent albums for Polydor, however, were far more ordinary, even sub-ordinary, singer/songwriter music with country influences, sometimes painfully exposing the limits of his vocal range and timbre. Holmes never profited from the worldwide success of Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," but he did strike gold as a writer of commercials with one of his jingles, the famous U.S. Army ad with the "be all that you can be" refrain. Holmes' LPs (especially the first two, on Tower) are now hard to find, though "Dazed and Confused" was reissued legitimately at least once, on Rhino's Nuggets, Vol. 10: Folk Rock LP. Holmes' second album boasts much fuller production than his debut, which gains in sonic scope, but also loses some of the hushed-and-damned atmosphere that was one of his strongest attributes. Often this sounds like a weird cross between mild acid folk and Broadway show orchestration -- a combination which isn't all that appetizing. Holmes' songs are often eccentric observational musings, like one on the "High School Hero," now saddled with a depressing mundane life that put him outside both the commercial mainstream and underground hipdom. Again, his vocals, whether by deliberate choice or as a consequence of underproduction, have a hollow cardboardish quality, and lamentably the limitations of his range become apparent the louder and higher he needs to sing. As on Holmes' first LP, Ted Irwin adds interesting if not always perfectly suited wiry jazz psychedelic guitar playing. For all its drawbacks, the record includes a startling doom-laden folk psychedelic track, "Leaves That Are Breaking," with some meltdown fuzz guitar by Irwin. That mood is broken/contrasted when the LP segues into "It's Always Somewhere Else," which sounds like the jazziest and breeziest cuts from Love's Forever Changes, yet in an even breezier and cheerier vibe. It's down in the dumps again for the closing "Houston Street," in which Holmes' vocal is barely a mumble against formless, wandering (but spare) guitars, cementing the somewhat manic-depressive aura of the record.

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