The quinces on my kitchen counter are starting to look a little mottled. I probably should cook them, but they’re the last of a small bag of the fruits given to me by my friend and co-worker, Jack McMahon, from a tree in his yard. Once these are gone, I won’t be getting any more. So there they sit, hard and bitter, as indigestible as grief.
Jack McMahon, an admired singer-songwriter and a beloved stalwart of the Portland music scene since the early 1970s, died unexpectedly in late October at age 76.
Having written about music for many years in Portland, I’d known Jack glancingly. In the past few years I got to know him a bit better, working alongside him at Music Millennium, the record shop where he’d long supplemented his performing career. Our schedules usually overlapped only briefly each week. A couple of months ago, when I took a fill-in shift one weekday evening, Jack said to me, “Oh, this is great. You’re working nights now. We’ll get to chat a lot more!” I replied that my regular hours hadn’t changed; somebody else just got the night off. Thinking back now on that exchange I feel both proud that Jack McMahon wanted to hang out with me and jealous of all the people who were closer friends of Jack; people who’d had much more time to hang out and chat with such a wonderful guy.
In the days immediately after news of his passing spread, on Oct. 23, his Facebook page filled with heartfelt testimonials.
“Jack was a beautiful soul,” wrote Calvin Walker, another Portland music veteran. “He was a compassionate man and it came out in his music.”
Robin Washburn was more thorough: “He was the very model of how one can devote their life to their art. Jack never took time off from songwriting and performing to say, go live in Tibet as a monk, there are no lost decades, just Jack McMahon for decades, kinda being a monk here, doing his thing – consistently working at the record store, maintaining his sobriety with grace, tending to his garden and his little house (‘Disgraceland’), being a good friend and Portlander, being a strong voice for reporting oncoming stormy weather in politics, loving the Trailblazers, frequenting local coffee shops (the best conversations), regularly performing at Portland venues as well as its outskirts, sharing his excitement about recording new batches of material, and just being who he was. Smart. Hilarious. Kind. Devoted. A man of honesty and integrity. A true songsmith and a good man.”
“Jack taught me things about music, about life, and about being human that I’ll carry forever,” recalled Pato Whittam, a former Music Millennium colleague. “He made the world feel a little more alive just by being in it.”
Sponsor
That ever-so-alive quality Jack had was echoed in a comment by Steve Butts: “I always felt an eternal youthfulness manifested in him that led me to never expect that this time would ever come.”
Jack McMahon’s working life over the past few decades had two poles. A few nights a week, he played gigs at a long list of clubs in Portland and around the region, honing the repertoire of (mostly) original songs that filled a half-dozen or so first-rate albums of soulful, folk-rooted rock. Other nights, instead of making records he was selling them, as the longest-tenured employee ever at Music Millennium. Considering the depth of craft and emotion with which he imbued his songs, the bet here is that his performances had the greater impact. But that he’s also so vividly remembered as a retail worker says something meaningful about the force of his personality.
He started at Millennium’s since-shuttered second location, on Northwest 23rd Avenue, in the mid-1990s, and since its closing had been at the original East Burnside store. His tradition of hosting live songwriter circles in the store ended, unfortunately, with the pandemic, but he still could be counted on to make a fresh pot of coffee whenever he arrived for a late afternoon shift.
“Staff loved Jack,” said Millennium owner Terry Currier. “In most cases, Jack was an elder statesman and was able to help educate many on the music from earlier eras. He also paid attention to the contemporary music that continued to come out and championed the albums that hit a nerve. Jack was a people person and loved to converse about music as well as many other things. … Customers loved to talk to Jack and always wished he worked more than his three nights a week. He had a great heart and was just a gem of a person to be around.”
Friends and fans of McMahon’s – from whichever part of his life – will gather to celebrate that life on Sunday, January 18, from 1-4 p.m., at Hoku Events on Madison (1125 S.E. Madison St, Portland). John Bunzow, who played guitar alongside McMahon decades ago in the band Tracks and in numerous contexts all the years since, will bring together peers – likely including Northwest luminaries such as Marv Ross, Craig Carothers, Gary Ogan, Denny Bixby, Ron Stephens and others – to pay tribute. “Jack’s kids loved the idea of all these singer-songwriters who admired Jack coming together and playing his songs,” Bunzow said.
McMahon worked in a style that calls to mind such contemporaries as Jackson Browne and James Taylor (all born in 1948). HIs songs most often were built on a scaffolding of intricate fingerpicked guitar, inspired, his longtime friend Owen Carey recalls, by an early-’70s fascination with Bert Jansch, a founder of the British folk-rock band Pentangle. McMahon had a knack for shaping melodies that sound inevitable yet never obvious, his songcraft as sturdy and unassumingly handsome as Shaker furniture.
“Jack had such imagination and a background in storytelling,” said Bunzow. “As a vocalist, he could elevate any lyric. His chords were amazing, in part because he used a lot of drone strings; his sense of harmony was so great, not garden variety at all. And the way he played guitar! It’s hard to do, and you could set your watch to it, his timing was so good.”
Sponsor
Carothers, who has had his songs recorded by country stars such as Trisha Yearwood and Kathy Mattea, and who has taught songwriting as an adjunct professor with the University of Miami, recalled the impact of encountering McMahon and his music.
“I first saw Jack in 1974 playing solo at a cabaret series in a basement somewhere in the Park Blocks of PSU. I was a sophomore in college. It was the first time I had ever seen somebody so good who I didn’t already know from radio, record, or television. World class. Really jaw-dropping. Such a soulful singer, a real master of phrasing. Jack had an R&B sense of groove and pocket in both his singing and his immaculate guitar playing, and all in service of the presentation of amazing songs.
“So many. There are just so many great Jack McMahon songs. Songs of devotion, reflection, and aspiration. Story songs, anthems, true love proclamations. Songs like ‘One and Only Flame,’ ‘All the Way To Hell,’ ‘Let It Rain,’ ‘I Toe the Line,’ ‘In the Islands,’ ‘California Driver,’ and so many more. I think in years to come more and more people will cover Jack’s songs. They are both urgent and timeless.”
The love of music suffused his life, whether through his own art and craft or what he heard and sold at the record shop. “New, old, all kinds of genres – If it had soul and heart, he’d pick up on it,” Bunzow said.
But he could be just as enthusiastic about other subjects. A voracious reader, he always could talk knowledgeably about history, current events, politics, philosophy, religions. When his sons were young, he coached their baseball teams. He avidly followed the Portland Trail Blazers. He loved to share the bounty of his garden (throughout September this year, he kept apologizing for having brought tomatoes to work for me on days I wasn’t there to get them). He posted frequently on Facebook, regaling his 1,300 “friends” with anecdotes, political commentary and the occasional dad joke (“Grandpa always said ‘When one door closes another one opens.’ Grandpa was a shitty cabinet maker.”).
McMahon was born in 1948, in Nutley, New Jersey, not far north of Newark. About ten years later, when Owen Carey moved to the area, “he became my buddy.” Around that same time, Carey began playing drums and soon joined a band. “When I was 12, the leader of the band said we needed a rhythm guitarist who can sing. I said, ‘I know just the guy!’”
Music made a fast bond between them: “We weren’t in the same class, but we’d hang out at lunch and recess. We’d sit outside the train station, across the street from our school, St. Mary’s, and practice singing harmony.”
Sponsor
Often, they’d head to Brooklyn for shows at the Fox Theater there, hosted by the disc jockey Murray the K. “We saw Jackie Wilson, the Shirelles, Frankie Lymon, Marvin Gaye, the Drifters – the Who. We had to go to every dance show.”
Long after Carey’s original bandleader had moved on, he and McMahon had a band called the Night Watch, which gained a following around the New York/New Jersey circuit. Carey recalled a club called Le Garage Discotheque, where Nightwatch would alternate weekends with the Nazz, led by a teenaged Todd Rundgren.
Somehow, McMahon met the lyricist Gerry Goffin, whose partnership with Carol King had created such hits as “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Up on the Roof.” Goffin hired McMahon to work at the legendary Brill Building, singing song demos. A story from that time showed up as a Facebook post several weeks ago:
“When I was young, we didn’t pay much attention to who wrote the songs. Occasionally it would come up, but it certainly wasn’t anything I obsessed over as I did later in life, when I began writing songs of my own. So, when Gerry Goffin brought his pal Barry Mann to hear The Night Watch perform at the Lake View Inn (Greenwood Lake, N.Y.) back in 1968, we thought nothing of doing our cover of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.’ For some reason, I knew that Barry (along with his wife Cynthia Weil) had written ‘On Broadway,’ but I had no idea at the time that they had written ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ and countless other hits, too.
“I must say, we did a really good version of the song with Owen Carey singing the low (Bill Medley) parts, and me doing the high (Bobby Hatfield) parts. Instrumentally, we were a standard four-piece (guitar, bass, drums and keyboards) combo, but we did our best to mimic the Phil Spector arrangement (sans orchestra, of course). When we finished our set, I came over to the table to greet Gerry, and he introduced us to Barry, saying ‘Barry really liked your version of his song!’ I had no idea what they were talking about until Gerry said ‘Lovin’ Feeling.’
“My eyes got wide when I realized (sheepishly) what had just transpired, but my jaw fully dropped when Barry said, ‘You guys do that better than the Righteous Brothers.’ All I could do was to say, ‘Thanks.’ I assume he meant a better live version (still high praise) because the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ is nothing short of a perfect record, in my opinion. Impugning that would be blasphemy! Maybe Barry was being overly kind, and maybe he had had a few drinks, but I still contend to this day that it’s the highest compliment I have ever received in my roughly six-decade music career. I’ll take that one proudly to my grave.”
In the summer of 1968, by Carey’s recollection, Goffin flew the Night Watch to Los Angeles, on a deal with the Screen Gems/Columbia label. “We were there recording for a week or two, and then they sent us home. They didn’t hear the hit record they were after.”
Sponsor
After the Night Watch split, McMahon worked solo, including gigs opening for the likes of the New York Dolls and Steely Dan. Peter Sando, a longtime friend and “musical soulmate” who met McMahon at Fairleigh Dickinson University, remembered a show at the Greenwich Village club Kenny’s Castaways, where McMahon opened for an up-and-comer named Bruce Springsteen.
“Jack came out and played great! Played original music. Then Springsteen came on and I thought, ‘This guy’s no good. He just sounds like everybody else.’ Little did I know…
“But there were a lot of famous people there, as I recall, and I was disappointed that Jack didn’t get the fanfare that I thought he deserved at that gig.”
McMahon’s life was soon changed, though, not by a leap into stardom but by a hitchhiking trip across the country. In San Francisco, he met a woman named Patty O’Connor; a while after she moved to Portland, and he followed. He quickly found bars where he could play, and on a Christmas visit back to New Jersey, he told his old bandmates about the fun little scene, in particular, at the Rock Creek Tavern.
“He said, ‘If I had a band, I could play weekends instead of Tuesdays’,” said Carey, who, along with bassist Chris Giunta, headed west to play in Jack McMahon & Friends in April, 1974 – the same year McMahon and O’Connor would marry.
“When he came back from out West, he was different,” Carey recalled. “His music was warmer, friendlier, more lively, happier. Something happened by meeting Patty and having that marriage.”
The ‘70s and ‘80s filled up with raising his sons (Casey, Dustin and Alex) and lots of gigs – at Rock Creek Tavern, Up the Down Staircase, the Refectory, Sack’s Front Avenue, Aldo’s, the Last Hurrah, etc. But also a little too much of, well, everything.
Sponsor
“He banged a couple of cars up,” as Bunzow put it. For the past 18 years, he’d instead maintained a scrupulous sobriety. Carey and Sando both suggest it was the breakup of his marriage that led to that turnaround, but also had lingering effects. “I think there was some element of regret and heartache in it,” said Sando. “It’s there in the songs: ‘The Man That Love Forgot,’ ‘Heartache Is Her Name’ …”
The last couple of months of Jack’s life had to have been stressful. In mid-August, he came home from work late one night to find that his water heater – unfortunately located in an attic/crawl space – had burst, flooding his small house. “I know there’s people w-a-y worse off, but still, this sucks,” he wrote on Facebook. “I’ll be up all night mopping up – and that’s just for starters.”
He didn’t know the half of it. He soon realized that the damage was worse than he’d first thought. Then, even after getting things dried out and buying a new water heater, his kitchen ceiling collapsed from more undetected damage. With the interior of the place largely gutted, he’d have to be in rental housing – and dealing with the myriad details of insurance claims and construction – for months. Time he’d no doubt rather spend reading or playing guitar went to doling out his guitars to friends for safekeeping, or sorting through a lifetime of belongings for what could and should be kept.
“That’s what’s going on in my world,” he wrote on another day. “Bring on the locusts and boils any time now.”
In hindsight, some of his posts look like premonitions.
“Jimi Hendrix passed on this day (Sept.18) 55 years ago, in 1970. … I have listened to ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’ thousands of times – and it still thrills me to my very soul. ‘If I don’t meet you no more in this world, I’ll meet you in the next one, and don’t be late!’ I hope someone spins it at my memorial. The music lives on.”
Would that the musicians did, too.
Sponsor
Posting on Oct. 13 about the death of a friend, Jack wrote, “The ranks of my generation are thinning.”
“He was so talented, so gifted; how can something like that just go away?,” Peter Sando asks.
Those who knew him and loved him each will have to find their way of making sense of the loss, to turn it into something more than just a gnawing emptiness in the gut.
For my part, well, I’ve cut up those quinces, poached them with some honey and spices, given them time to soften. They’re his last little gift to me. And also, of course, they’re not. Because – Voodoo Chile that he was – his music, his wit, his love, his goodness and graciousness, those things all live on.
And so, wouldn’t you know, the quinces, like the memories of all Jack gave to all of us, taste sweet.