Tom Ovans: On the road

It's 30 years since the folk survivor Tom Ovans first went in search of an alternative America. But, he tells Nick Hasted, his raw, rootsy music couldn't exist without the experience

In 1971, when he was 18, Tom Ovans dropped into an underground America, and never came back. Born into a working-class community just outside of Boston, he went on the road back then with no intention except to head west, and no possessions except his guitar. He found a country being criss-crossed by others like him, an almost 19th-century society of teenaged wanderers surviving by playing music, and resting in a secret network of abandoned apartments, flophouses, friends' floors, or simply under the stars. Songs were exchanged not by listening to records, but around campfires, raw and first-hand.

In the midst of the Space Age, the folk roots of America's music must have seemed close enough to touch. It was a culture that was already collapsing, being replaced by a more expensive world. Ovans saw the light go out in each of its old centres as he reached them, in Berkeley, then Greenwich Village, then Nashville. But he kept faith with the America he'd seen. It took till 1991 for Ovans's own songs to make it on to record, with his debut, Industrial Days. Seven more albums have followed, often taped in a matter of hours, in the dead of night, for unknown labels, fitting nowhere in the modern world.

A fine introduction to this buried body of work is 15 Unreleased, out next week. With subjects ranging from the dissolution of Elvis Presley to the destruction of the Branch Davidians at Waco, to the wearing nature of everyday work and the violent desperation and subtle pleasures of street life, it ignores the mediated America we're used to. Sung in a parched, sly voice, over music that's steeped in blues, it celebrates the nation's forgotten, failing side, where Ovans still lives.

I find him in Austin, Texas, a bakingly hot, humid outpost of liberal values in the American South. Ovans exists here as he's always done, doing whatever manual jobs come his way to pay the rent, and songwriting from the experience. A gangling 49-year-old with nervously trusting eyes, he recalls the travels that set him on this course with little sense of romance. He was a realist from the start.

"By the time I got out there, the whole Sixties thing was really getting mean," he recalls. "It was at the point where there was a lot of ripping off going on. If anybody called you 'brother', you'd look over your shoulder. But I never had those ideals anyway. I wasn't looking for utopia. I never believed everybody could go live in a commune and be peaceful. I was from the city, I knew what the deal was. I was in survival mode instead.

"There's a certain amount of paranoia you have to have on the road. And a certain amount of faith. If you're hitchhiking around, you get so tired you have to lay your head somewhere. And once you go to sleep, your life is out of your hands. If you wake up in the morning, that'd be cool, but... A friend once said to me, 'Use death as an adviser'. It seems like I always have done."

When Ovans reached Greenwich Village in 1974, the lessons only got harsher. He saw washed-up remnants of the Sixties' folk landscape such as Phil Ochs and Tim Hardin scrabbling around the scenes of their success for drink and drugs. They shared the streets with strung-out Vietnam veterans, in filthy flophouses that Ovans, too, called home. Ochs especially, the leading protest singer in America until Dylan supplanted him, was a crazed figure, floating in and out of his psychotic alter ego John Trane, a vision of fame's underbelly. To Ovans, he was just part of a wider despair.

"In those circles, especially in New York, so many fall in between the cracks, and go all the way down," he says. "You're used to seeing people on the street going crazy every day, and people in the Bowery sleeping out in the winter-time. One of the saddest things I've ever seen was a guy rolling his friend on the ground, to keep his circulation going so he wouldn't freeze to death. Phil Ochs wasn't any more important than that."

Even as Ochs slid towards his own death in 1976, he once warned Ovans, sick and shaking beside him, to take better care of himself. In his first years in New York, Ovans survived a life of bare-bones poverty, even as he learnt his craft, watching the last folk singers and first punks play the city's unforgiving clubs. The experience forged the person he'd become.

"It made me tougher," he considers, "sitting there at Thanksgiving with a can of chicken soup. I guess everything was pretty much what I expected it to be. It wasn't like I expected to live in a penthouse. And it becomes like you don't have a choice, after a while. It becomes who you are. You know: this might be my level, this is my lot in life. And I felt comfortable in that world. I don't have any money now, I'm living month to month, nothing's really changed. It's all I know at this point."

In a song on 15 Unreleased, "Crazy", Ovans imagines a truckstop waiter, meeting "every kind of person, in almost every kind of imaginable state", as he quietly perseveres with his unglamorous, grinding job. That's been Ovans's experience of life on the margins, too. "It can be a richer life," he says. "A lot of people are afraid of stepping out of their existence, because they've got what they do down, they go to the same places and meet the same people every day. But I find the people in my world more generous with what they have, and also what they share with you as they talk, as you're digging a ditch or whatever. I think these people are more radical, too, because they don't show up in polls, they've fallen off the map. It's the America I discovered when I went on the road. It still exists, it's just not talked about any more."

In 1981, fearing the crazed atmosphere of New York would infect him, too, Ovans fled to Nashville, then a small, open musicians' town. He hoped he could at last earn a living writing songs. But almost as soon as he arrived, with typically jinxed timing, it began to change into a corporate, country music production line. It still took him 18 years to leave for Austin. And it's only now, 30 long years after he first went looking for America, that listeners are beginning to show real interest in what he found. But, as he prepares to record yet more raw reflections on his cast of forgotten and rejected countrymen, he still has fragile hopes for himself.

"I'd love to be able to get up in the morning and go, 'I've got nothing to do today, except play music','' he says. "It'd be a nice change. Maybe I wouldn't be able to have written the songs I have, because I'd get so out of touch. But I'd still like to say: 'This is my job here. I'm a musician.'"

'15 Unreleased' is released on Monday on Floating World Records