The Fall and Rise of Sandy Bull

Liner notes for the 1996 album Steel Tears issued by Omnivore Records

A few years ago, I was at Sirius/XM studios in Manhattan to promote my Jann Wenner biography, Sticky Fingers, when a tall, lanky kid approached me to sign a copy of his book. I was shocked when he introduced himself as Jackson Bull, son of guitar pioneer Sandy Bull, a major character in the Wenner story. Turns out Jackson worked at Sirius. About a week later, Jackson asked me to write the liner notes for a reissue of his late father’s album, Steel Tears. Omnivore Records was packaging it with another album of unreleased recordings called Inventions and Tributes. I was thrilled and said yes. As part of it, I got to interview the legendary Bob Neuwirth, the Bob Dylan intimate and close friend of Bull’s, which was also a thrill. ⚡️

One night, Sandy Bull showed up at the famous Bluebird Café in Nashville to hear gonzo country star Kinky Friedman perform.

As usual, Bull went unrecognized by anybody in the room—except by Kinky Friedman, who, after Bull cut out early, hushed the crowd and gestured toward the door: “I’ll bet there’s not one son of a bitch in this room who’s hip enough to know who Sandy Bull is,” he said.

The music of Sandy Bull has long been a kind of secret handshake among aficionados. Maybe because Bull began as a solitary explorer of new sounds, he became the kind of artist who got discovered by solitary explorers. As Bull once said, “I like to think of my music as a dog whistle—only certain types respond.”

A musical alchemist, introvert, gearhead, junky, and erstwhile musicologist, his adventurous investigations on stringed instruments, whether guitar, banjo, the Hindustani sarod, or the Turkish oud, predated more celebrated pioneers like John Fahey and Leo Kottke. But Bull’s music got lost in the haze of his brief career, which began with the seminal Fantasia in 1963 and seemingly ended with an ode to destruction, Demolition Derby, in 1972. It would be sixteen years before he would make another record, by which time Sandy Bull was largely forgotten.

In many ways, Steel Tears, first released in 1996 on his own label, stands as the musical testimony of a man trying to make sense of his own past. These eleven songs form a kind of playlist-as-memoir, drawn from hard-won memories and a lifelong commitment to a very personal kind of music, the songs of a man who has arrived home and is ready to tell his story.

And what a story. Alexander “Sandy” Bull first gained attention as an eccentric in the early 60s folk scene, the tall, gentle kid with a flop of blonde hair who played Bach on a banjo and wrung Middle Eastern and Indian drones from a six-string guitar. There was a hermetic seriousness to Bull as he evoked Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, exploring the modal bond between the high lonesome and the high mystic. He moved across genres with the restlessness of a man flipping a radio dial. In Bull’s playful hands, Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” could sound like a train ride to Mumbai and “Carmina Burana” like an Appalachian lament. Critic Nat Hentoff, who penned liner notes for Bull’s first two albums on Vanguard, chalked it up to Bull’s “protean musical curiosity.”

Bull’s unusual background was part of the mystery. Born in New York City in 1941, he was the heir to a sizeable banking fortune bequeathed by his great-grandfather. After his early life living in Florida with his father, the magazine editor Harry Bull, Sandy returned to New York and lived with his mother, Daphne Van Beuren Bayne, a well-regarded jazz harpist who played in hotel orchestras in the 1940s under the stage name Daphne Hellman. She led a rich social life in Manhattan, hosting artists and intellectuals at her home on East 61st Street, whether Charles Mingus, Vincent Price or James Thurber. A legendary eccentric herself, she was married three times and kept live animals in her apartment, including an armadillo.

Growing up, Bull was culturally enriched but went largely unparented and was shipped to boarding school in Vermont in the mid-50s. There, he discovered the guitar and banjo and was introduced to the music of Pete Seeger. After taking music lessons from Erik Darling, of the folk group the Weavers, he began traveling in the same circles as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, playing at the Golden Vanity in Boston, the 47 Club in Cambridge, the Fifth Fret in New York (renamed Gerde’s Folk City), and, later, the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where he first tried out his Arabic and Indian-tinged sounds, inspired by Ravi Shankar, who he saw at Carnegie Hall (he sat in the audience next to Miles Davis).

By this time, Bull was running buddies with Bruce Langehorne, a folk legend from the Village who went on to play guitar on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and Bob Neuwirth, a painter and bohemian who became one of Dylan’s storied sidekicks, and Bull’s closest friend. “That was just when Sandy was stretching,” Neuwirth remembered. “We were potheads together.”

Bull had long been fascinated with the drone, which he initially discovered in the banjo. But during a trip to Europe, he met the Nubian musician Hamza El Din, who introduced Bull to the oud, a Turkish instrument shaped like a lute. They became partners in endless jam sessions. Further inspired by hearing Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot in New York, Bull befriended trumpeter Don Cherry and recruited Coleman’s drummer, Billy Higgins, to play on Fantasias, Bull’s first album for Vanguard Records in 1963. The opening track, a spiraling 22-minute dirge called “Blend” announced Sandy Bull as a 24-year-old visionary.

The intimacy and exoticism of Bull’s music captured the dawning psychedelic age. The founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner, listened to Bull’s 1965 album, Inventions, during his first LSD trip in Berkeley, California. Wenner freaked out and hid inside a closet, but when he emerged, tears in his eyes, he had officially entered the gates of the counterculture. (”Nagra Sarod Take 1,” from Inventions and Tributes, evokes the sounds heard on Inventions.) As it happened, Bull was also living in Berkeley that year, playing a club called the Cabal and experimenting with psychedelics. His was a somewhat different experience: During one fateful LSD session, he heard the George Jones-Melba Montgomery duet “Long As We’re Dreaming,” which sparked a lifelong love of George Jones. On Steel Tears, his cover of that song, with Nashville singer Ginger Gosney, serves as an homage to the lysergic epiphany of 1965.

Over the next four years, Bull would become a satellite of the San Francisco rock scene. On stage, he could look like a mad scientist, running a Fender guitar through a host of effects pedals and accompanied by a reel-to-reel tape machine loaded with a prerecorded backing track. His 1969 album, E Pluribus Unum, featured a single song on each side, two long and snaking blues drones set against tambourine, Indian bass drum, and cowbell. (You can draw a straight line from Bull’s ‘69 sound to “Strat 1,” from Inventions and Tributes.)

If Bull himself was not a household name, his music was being deeply absorbed by fellow musicians: Steve Winwood would later say Bull’s music helped inspire Traffic’s 1971 album, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. But Bull’s drug use was overwhelming his musical powers and damaging his career. In 1970, Bull was profiled in Rolling Stone by writer Ben Fong-Torres, who described Bull as a “tanned, lanky figure who hides his almost oriental eyes behind a pair of tinted rimless glasses.” He then pulled up his sleeve and showed the reporter his track marks.

During this period, Bull became involved with two unlikely friends: the founders of Rolling Stone, Jann and Jane Wenner. To help save Rolling Stone from bankruptcy, Bull loaned Jann Wenner $20,000 and soon after became romantically involved with Wenner’s wife, Jane. Though few understood it, Bull was a key figure in the secret history of the magazine. In 1971, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson became an unlikely mediator in the troubled triangle and would allude to Bull in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, referring to his signature sunglasses as his “Sandy Bull Saigon-mirror shades.”

By then, Bull’s reputation was such that John Lennon and Paul McCartney reputedly wrote the lyric “he shoot Coca-Cola” from “Come Together” about Bull, who had once offered McCartney heroin while they rode together in Sir Paul’s Rolls Royce (McCartney demurred). Bull’s last album on Vanguard, Demolition Derby, was a kind of shambolic ode to his own dissipation, but also continued his roving experimentation, including a jangling junkyard samba punctuated with celebratory yips and howls. (”Rhumba,” from Inventions and Tributes, is an echo of that album’s style).

Rolling Stone art designer Jon Goodchild designed the cover script for that record, drafting Bull’s name like the Coca-Cola logo—a wink to the Beatles legend. But the humor in Bull’s addiction was fading. “I used to come down from my lifestyle a lot in those days and felt things double,” recounted Bull. The instrumental portion of the title track, “Steel Tears,” was inspired by a song from pedal steel great Pete Drake, which Bull felt evoked his own personal sadness about the Vietnam War as well as his drug dependence.

As his career faded, Bull briefly popped up on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, but he finally hit rock bottom and entered rehab in 1974. While in recovery, he wrote the melody that would become “Love is Forever,” which began as an oud instrumental inspired by Barry White (talk about a blend!). It is perhaps the best and most emotionally arresting song on the album, a quintessential message of love and redemption after years of addiction. Not that life after heroin was going to be easy. He was, for all time, an addict, which he acknowledges in his cover of Hank Williams, Jr.’s “Old Habits,” which includes the lines, “I had grown so used to you, and all of your ways/And old habits like you, are hard to break.” (”It was easy to relate to,” said Bull.)

After meeting his future wife, Candy, in New York in the late 70s—their wedding ceremony in 1979 was officiated by Don Cherry—Bull lived for a time in Florida and California before finally landing in Nashville, drawn there by a musical compadre, drummer Harry Stintson, who plays on much of Steel Tears. The Bulls built a new life around a community of musicians, most of whom had little knowledge of Bull’s prehistory as a guitar pioneer. “He didn’t really allude to the early days very much at all,” recounted Kevin Welch, the country singer-songwriter who contributed to this album. “There was one time when my son was reading Fear and Loathing and he came across that line about ‘Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.’ He called me up and said, ‘Is this our Sandy?’”

For friends in Nashville, Sandy was just the sweet, laidback, unusually talented guitarist with a fondness for Indian motorcycles and a total devotion to his family—a daughter, Casey, and two sons, Jesse and Jackson. On Saturday nights, Bull jammed with a group of “pickers” at a farm down the road from his house in Franklin, Tennessee, including John Hiatt and Jon Kay from Steppenwolf. On the song “Arabalabama,” recorded in Bull’s home studio, Bull wanted to capture the “humid, moon-struck, howling bluegrass” he heard at those jams.

If Steel Tears was not the avant-garde album of Bull’s youth, it was something pioneering nonetheless: the sincerity and heart of a musician quilting together a sound of home from the scraps of his itinerant past. Here is his friend Mickey Rafael, the great harmonica player from Willie Nelson’s band, with whom Bull once jammed at an after-hours party in New York in the 70s; and here is a cover of “Can I Get a Witness,” which Bull heard on AM radio while driving to a show to open for Lightning Hopkins in the early 60s.

His old friend Bob Neuwirth said this record sounded like country music by an outsider artist.

As it turned out, Sandy Bull had little time to spare after making this record. On April 11, 2001, after a four-year struggle with lung cancer, Sandy Bull died at his home in Tennessee. At his memorial, mourners gathered to sing the country hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Rolling Stone published an obituary. As friend John Hannah of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band told the magazine, “Sandy really loved country music, but he loved music from lots of countries.”

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