Print version Jackie Leven var en av verdens beste kulthelter

Fully legible print version of the Plus article. Double-page spread with photos (Leven in Norway in 1998, Doll by Doll in 1981, the whisky “Leven's Lament” – with the note that it has been claimed these were his own labels on other people's bottles –, Levi Henriksen).

Rakvaag reviews the tribute album The Wanderer – A Tribute to Jackie Leven and the compilation Straight Outta Caledonia (both Cooking Vinyl) and recalls Leven's Norwegian connection: Fairy Tales for Hardmen reached number 40 on the VG chart in 1997, which a British magazine noted as a near-improbable event; the album ends with Rolf Jacobsen's “Sunflower” in Robert Bly's translation. Leven had already played in Norway in 1966 as guitarist for the blues singer Doris Henderson (his own statement to Dagsavisen: his first trip abroad as a professional musician), and later liked playing in small places on the periphery. Mentioned are “Rainy Day Bergen Women”, the live album Men in Prison from Bergen's county prison, and the discovery, on a flight from Bergen to Tromsø, that he appears in a Rankin novel as John Rebus's favourite artist; Leven said at the time that he and Rankin wrote about men who experience their inner lives as a mystery. The compilation shows him from the crooner side, at times like a Roy Orbison of our time.

The second focus is Levi Henriksen, who discovered Leven late through an Uncut interview with a CD, listened to nothing else for a month and sensed a kinship in background and view of humanity. His contribution to the tribute, “Just Like Jackie Leven”, is a translated version of his Babylon Badlands song “Jackie Leven sier det snart skal snø”, the first song he wrote for the band, about the healing power of music. Other tribute contributors: Ralph McTell, Kathryn Williams, James Yorkston, Tom Robinson.