NICK DRAKE: Exiled From Heaven 1 (original) (raw)
During the academic year of 1968-9, Cambridge University felt an alien influence from beyond its ancient facade of curtain walls and quiet quadrangles. Sober flag-stones peered affrontedly up at kaftans, wooden beads, and waist-length hair. Staid court-yards winced to the strains of BEGGARS BANQUET, the White Album,BIG PINK, and Dr John the Night-tripper drifting through leaded windows. The stately air was fragrant with marijuana and no one seemed to be doing a stroke of work.
It was counterculture time, the heady aftermath of the Year of the Barricades. In every half-hip college room, hirsute youths lolled in drug-liberated converse while fey girls curled worshipfully at their feet or came and went with mugs of scented tea. When the holy relics of the moment weren't revolving on the turntable, out came the acoustic guitars. It was all very cool and tasteful in a faintly post-Beat, elliptically knowing way. Dylan was god. A word out of synch and one's cred could be toast.
One spring afternoon in 1969, my room in King's happened to be where it was at. The door was open; people entered and left as they pleased. There were a dozen or so loafers listening to the folk/jazz musicians among us when my friend Paul Wheeler put aside his guitar and introduced a fellow singer-songwriter sitting quietly beside him: "Nick." After a few moments spent checking his tuning (but perhaps to let the intervening hubbub hush), this tall, elegant person - at whom all the women in the room were now intently gazing - began to play, craned over his small-bodied Guild guitar and staring at the carpet as his long fingers moved deftly across the fretboard while he sang low in a breathy beige voice: "Time has told me... you're a rare find... a troubled cure... for a troubled mind..." My eyes met those of another friend, a pianist with a jazz penchant. He silent-whistled:what have we here?"Wow," chorused the gathering at the end of the song, "that was great, really nice", etc. Unspoken protocol was that those playing did a couple of numbers before giving way to someone else. Nick whoever-he-was finished another bout of tuning, cleared his throat, and began to play again. In 5/4. Not many folk guitarists play in 5/4. And he sang: "Betty came by on her way... said she had a word to say... 'bout things today... and fallen leaves..."
Few present are likely to have forgotten that afternoon. When, six months later, FIVE LEAVES LEFT appeared in its Lincoln Green sleeve on the prestigious Island label, we were impressed, but not surprised. Nick Drake was "class". We all knew that.
And that's enough of the legend, the personal recollections. In the brief period I was at Cambridge at the same time as him, I exchanged barely twenty words with Nick Drake. Three or four years later, I seem to remember him visiting my flat in London with Paul Wheeler. In my memory, I told Nick, earnestly, that his latest album, PINK MOON, was a masterpiece; but while I certainly held that opinion, perhaps I imagine this scene. The chronology doesn't pan out somehow. And the sad fact is we were all fairly constantly smashed in those days - into ourselves and our own things more than the outside world (or other people, especially "difficult" ones). The Me Decade had succeeded the We Decade. A year or so later, I heard that Nick Drake had died.
During the early Eighties, I drifted away from the music scene. When I returned, I was surprised to find that Nick Drake was becoming famous. Like most of those (make that all of those) who'd known him in whatever way, I'd got used to thinking of him as a private thing, an artist fated to be always on the exclusive periphery, one for the connoisseur. As time went by, I watched his fame grow. The ardour of those who were discovering him - young contemporary people, often born since his death in 1974 - was, as I discovered, intense. When, in related conversations, I mentioned that I'd known him, reactions were invariably wide-eyed. "You knew him? No shit! Did you see him walk on water? Were you there when he fed the five thousand?" Well, maybe not quite that intense, but genuinely galvanised, urgently fascinated.
So what is it they're transfixed by? Patrick Humphries, in his book NICK DRAKE (Bloomsbury, 1997), ponders this question at length in the company of a dozen or so people who knew the man far better than I, to the extent that anyone really knew that elusive soul at all. The myth, Patrick concludes, is powerful: the golden youth with the silver spoon who drifted into the dark, beyond the reach of the many who loved him, passing out of this life at the far end of a silent corridor he had moved through during the last three years of his time among us. And more, of course: the small, death-limited body of often perfect work he left; the promise unfulfilled; the wan conjectures on what might have been. The mantle of romance shrouding Nick Drake's story in retrospect is undeniably alluring. But its attraction wouldn't survive scrutiny if the work didn't hold up: if fellow songwriters weren't so intrigued by the forms and changes, if admiring fellow guitarists didn't puzzle at the strange tunings and extraordinary finger-picking techniques, if singers weren't drawn to the sighing melodies and cryptic lyrics. More crucially, new listeners, hearing this understated voice a quarter of a century after it ceased, love it for itself rather than for the aura of romantic doom which inevitably accompanies it like some unwarranted orchestra dubbed on by sentimental hindsight. Nick Drake means something today. But what?
Nowadays we live in a loud, shiny, mechanised musical ethos of shallow excitement, glamour and clamour. On the one hand, titanic drum-sounds pound the ground with the massive Metropolis robo-fours of dance club culture; on the other hand, post-punk Indie-rock guitarists vigorously scrub their instruments like demented archaeologists grubbing for expression beneath the dense surface of signal-distortion they're generating. It's not a subtle time. To listen to Nick Drake is to step out of this world of pose and noise, and enter a quiet, oak-panelled room, dappled with sun-light - a room opening, through French windows, into a lush green garden, equally quiet because we're in the country, far from the sound of the city. It's summer, bees and birds are abroad in the shade, and, beyond the nearby trees, a soft tangle of voices and convivial laughter can be felt, along with the dipping of languid oars in a rushy river that winds through cool woods and teeming meadows hereabouts: an English landscape with Gallic ghosts from LE GRAND MEAULNES and LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE. And an acoustic guitar playing gently beyond the hedgerow in jazzy 5/4: RIVER MAN.
Postmodern urban cynics will already be busy deconstructing this. A bourgeois fantasy of rural life that never existed; a dream; an evasion. Well, yes; up to a point. I've lived in the countryside for fifteen years and I can see what it "really" is as I speed through it in my car. Certainly, it's as much a social construction as anything else is, or isn't. But after writing the previous paragraph, I went downstairs to make a cup of tea and, when I paused to look out of the window, the human-husbanded utilitarian landscape of interlocking lanes and fields and neatly-pruned woodland which I normally see was suddenly deep, suddenly enveloping. I'm living in the country, I realised, as if briefly coming awake. And it's magical. Minutes later, after the kettle boiled, my ecstasy had lapsed and the view had returned to normal. So was the experience "real"? It arose through contemplation summoned by writing "poetically" about the outer world as inner experience. And the fact is that if we could live in that state all the time, that enveloping, magical view would be reality.
That's from 1968: an otherworldly Drake chanson called
I WAS MADE TO LOVE MAGIC. And how very late Sixties. Magic! No room for that now, in 2000. Another religion-deriding article by Richard Dawkins, another reduction of love by an evolutionist: day by day, reality thins further into physical matter as that obsolete spirit-stuff evaporates. Nowadays "spirit" is being squeezed out of our materialist society. To say that "it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it" is still acceptable, but to put it another way - to propose that what matters is the spirit in which we live - would strike most of us as outmodedly idealistic. The "spirit"? A fantasy, a dream, an evasion. Yet the difference between the view seen normally and the view seen "magically" is the spirit in which the seeing is done.
Penetrating the meaning of Nick Drake's work, beyond the instinctive attraction which so many continue to feel upon encountering it, starts from this apparently innocent proposition about magic and spirit. Beyond that, things soon get starker - and ultimately dark, as dark as it gets - but the corridor to the heart of Drake's vision is always lit by a mysterious light; and the pure luminosity of his work, the source of its attraction, emanates from its final redeeming revelation. If there's an artist of the last thirty years whose work speaks to us both directly and profoundly at this time of millennial transition, it's got to be Nick Drake. So, then: do you want to go deeper?
Drake's small opus - three albums (four, counting the posthumous collection TIME OF NO REPLY) - is a slim claim to fame. But it's quality that counts, and this is both obvious and timeless: the repeated refrain of those coming late to this music is that "it could have been recorded yesterday". More curious is that these songs speak to such diverse people. New Age idealists, dark-side nihilists, neo-Romantics, bedsit shoegazers, straights, gays, feminists, even the "nothing matters, get loaded, enjoy the trip" faction - all tip their hats to an artist whose work touches them. Hailing Drake in REFLEX in 1992, The Swans' Michael Gira declared "I know people as diverse as metal/industrial merchants to classical/art-music collectors who speak his name with a respect reserved for only a handful of songwriters or composers". Yet Drake's biographer Patrick Humphries is not alone in describing his output as "frozen in immaturity". How do such disparate points of view converge on the same work?
As presented by Patrick, Drake's friends are oddly uncertain of who he really was. Some, debunking the image of fragile translucence, point to his quiet determination in advancing his career in 1968-9. They suggest an image-conscious acuity in casting himself as the Sensitive Outsider, stress his featherlight irony and his ability, in his earlier days, to laugh his amusement out loud. Others allege a willingness to play up the mental dishevelment of his later years - to make winsome vagueness an excuse for unreliability, lack of commitment, and living by his own private sense of time.
Through this demystification runs a persistent motif: judge the artist, not the art; defuse expression by treating it as a symptom. Of course, sometimes what seems like deep meaning really is just flailing obscurity. Indeed, Drake's allusiveness is such a magnet for misinterpretation that some have asked whether any real significance exists beneath its beguiling surface. Investigating Drake after his death in 1974, Nick Kent conceded the evocative power of the songs, but thought their author had been "confused". Reviewing the 1994 anthology WAY TO BLUE, Stuart Maconie put the same opinion more forcefully: "Eulogies about Nick Drake often make romantic noises about his being 'not of this world' and the like while ignoring the fact that he was mentally ill. To treat him as some super cultural sage rather than a gifted, sick, unhappy young man is both to cheapen his tragedy and undervalue his music."
How "ill" Drake was is anyone's guess. His father Rodney thought the shrinks who examined him were shooting in the dark. Brian Wells, a qualified psychiatrist who knew Drake, doesn't believe he was "biologically depressed" at all; rather that he was rationally, if hypersensitively, responding to external events. Yet to stop washing and let one's fingernails grow like Howard Hughes is abnormal behaviour by any standard, especially for a guitarist. The fact that, by then (1972-3), Drake had done his best work shouldn't distract us from the evidence that, during the months after he recorded PINK MOON, he descended into a truly parlous state, whatever that state actually was. Distinguishing between deep introspection, sorrow, indifference, and the spiralling serotonin-depletion of clinical depression remains, 25 years later, hard even for experts. When, for example, Drake recorded his "four last songs" in February 1974, some who knew him thought him much recovered; others thought not. To complicate matters, there is a further suggestion, so far unconfirmed, that, during his final years, he became a heroin user - which, if true, might account for aspects of his behaviour hitherto construed as diagnostic criteria for depression.
There's no reliable link between Drake's work and anything we know, or think we know, about his states of mind. What an observer sees as blank passivity may, to the person experiencing it, be a logical sequence of sane, if sombre, thoughts obscure to those not much given to reflection. Psychology text-books admit that "depressed" people are often more realistic than the "well-adjusted". Many of the world's wisest minds have been retrospectively classified as "unipolar" (non-manic) depressives, including an impressive quantity of poets. (See Kay Redfield Jamison's TOUCHED WITH FIRE, Simon & Schuster, 1993.) All of which is to say that Drake's "illness" and his creativity are not necessarily connected. Certainly, he'd become monosyllabically withdrawn long before serious unhappiness set in after PINK MOON in 1972, but we must remember that he was shy and introspective by nature. We should also bear in mind that he who curbs his tongue and watches may see (and hear) much that others miss.
Contrary to legend, Drake did laugh, and more than occasionally. School friends found him warmly amusing, yet understated enough for them to concede that they never knew the real Nick. Innate reticence kept him on the edge of any social event, as if always on the verge of departing. "You felt there was a very reflective, pensive mode to his psyche," says one friend from Drake's days at Marlborough. "While he joined in the fun and the laughter, he was always a little apart from the crowd." At Cambridge, where peer-shock obliges newcomers to straighten up and study their cool, Drake's outright laughter was shared only with close friends; otherwise, his humour graduated to gentle irony. InPOOR BOY (from BRYTER LAYTER) he mocks the idea of himself held by some who claimed to know him, quietly deriding those who thought a wife would shake the "self-indulgence" out of him ("He's a mess but he'll say yes/If you just dress in white"). A similar irony shades the line "Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink... pink moon", where Drake, always careful with his tunings and their relationship to his vocal range, sings a descending line which takes him below his viable bottom note. If he hadn't meant this to be subtly wry, he'd have used a capo; the effect is intentionally graphic ("down we go...") and, again, faintly mocking.
If one good reason not to get carried away with the "romantic otherworldly sage" interpretation of Nick Drake is his understated irony, that's also a reason for giving him credit for knowing what he meant and saying it with intelligent consistency. As his friend and fellow singer-songwriter Robin Frederick observes (MOJO 63), Drake's lyrico-musical unity of expression was acute: words move organically with melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre. Yet if he was dry enough to control his work so deftly, he was more of an observer, and less of a victim, than many take him for. Despite the prejudices of our noisy society, to be solitary and contemplative is not in itself to be maladjusted. Far from immature, Drake's taste for solitude arguably represented a deep-set scepticism about aspects of life which most people take for granted. In truth, he's been more psychoanalysed than addressed on his own terms, his message obscured by misconceptions based on his image or outward behaviour.
The idea that a man as reserved and frightened of large audiences as Nick Drake had such a thing as a "message" to convey in his work verges on the counter-intuitive. This being so, it's important to see his later silence in perspective. Asked about him in 1979, Nick's mother Molly painted a picture of him provocatively at odds with the neurotic introvert of legend: "I think he had this feeling that he'd got something to say to the people of his own generation. He desperately wanted to communicate with them, he had a feeling that he could make them happier, that he could make things better for them, and he didn't feel that he did that. He said to me once: 'I have failed in everything I have tried to do.' I said, oh Nick, how can you! And then I elaborated all the things that he had so patently done. It didn't make a difference. He felt this - that he'd failed to get through to the people that he wanted to talk to."
Molly Drake's use of the word "generation" may have been a misunderstanding. The "generation gap" was never wider than in 1967-9. Parents then were genuinely challenged by their offspring, whose attitudes struck them as socially reformative rather than merely playfully rebellious. Mothers and fathers - but more particularly mothers - were disturbed by this and some tried earnestly to bridge the chasm before it was too late. No doubt Molly Drake was one such and, in her anxiety to maintain contact with Nick, she may have superimposed a "generational" focus on what he himself saw in more universal terms. Whether she correctly understood him is, for now, less important than the fact that he confided such a concern at all. How are we to square the silent solitary of 1970-4 with the Nick Drake who impressed his parents with his wish to make the world a better, happier place? Was this wish unserious - a passing pretension he put on for them in order to bolster his musical ambitions? The second of these questions may be answered tersely: Drake, though mild, was not a trivial man. The rest depends on deducing what his message might have been.
While correcting the romantic myth of Nick Drake as a man of constant sorrows, Patrick Humphries' research, partly because incomplete, creates its own imbalance. That Drake could be genial company comes as no surprise to those who knew him, but it so undermines the stereotype that critics too easily conclude that he was either a happy man overtaken by depressive illness or a gifted adolescent whose cultivated sensitivity turned pathological. Neither idea is just. The unfashionable probability is that Drake was different, seeing things in a way normal people don't: an incarnation of the poetic temperament, a reflective mind endowed with unusual perceptions.
Having said that, it's crucial to recognise that Drake was not a poet and that it's misleading to treat his lyrics as verse, rather than as the verbal aspect of a creativity manifested simultaneously through his music, his voice, and his guitar. Because of this, we shouldn't expect - and be disappointed not to find - self-sufficient poetry abstractable from musical context. Some of Drake's lyrics are vague, awkward, even gauche, as if dreamt into being and cast into a waiting musical form with little effort to refine them. Yet the whole is what matters in his work: the mood and movement of which the words are part. Often the aura of his songs is incantatory. A song like WAY TO BLUE, with its plagal cadences, verges on plain-chant. At times it's as if Drake is half-asleep, daydreaming of something on the spiritual threshold of the material world. This being so, it's hardly surprising that he should have cleaved to the more mystical poets - Blake and Yeats, each of whom were drawn to automatic writing - or that people new to his work often speak of its soothing, healing, timeless quality.
If Drake's lyrics can't be extracted from this whole without risk to their meaning, they nevertheless work in a consistent way. Using one-syllable rhymes, his songs employ metaphors and "images" so rarely that when such things turn up, they seem incongruously artful (e.g., "Autumn reached for her golden crown" in TIME OF NO REPLY). A dreamy boy, he switched to English in his last year at school, when he was allowed to spend a lot of time reading by himself. This late-awakened interest - together with the fact that his first love was music - would account for the lack of conventional word-play in his lyrics. Instead, he invokes a range of symbols and codes, almost all of which are drawn from nature: the seasons, the days of the week, and natural phenomena such as the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, rain, flowers, trees, leaves, sky, mist, and fog. Allied to these are a set of recurring actions (falling, flying, showing, leaving) and some symbolic non-natural objects (clock, fence, floor).
Drake may have derived this haiku-like simplicity from books on the shelves of every hopeful young writer in the mid-Sixties:THE PENGUIN BOOK OF JAPANESE VERSE and Basho's THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH. On the other hand, his symbols and codes form an harmonious system reminiscent of those of Blake and the 17th century mystic Henry Vaughan. Temperamentally, Drake had more in common with Vaughan (e.g., the latter's poem "They are all gone into the world of light!"); in practice, his affinity was with Blake, whom he studied at Cambridge. Larry Ayres, an English student who came from America on a pilgrimage to Drake's home village of Tanworth-in-Arden in July 1980, mentioned his own love of Blake to Molly Drake, whereupon she produced her son's copy of the complete works (Erdman's edition) and told him that Nick believed Blake to have been "the only good British poet". A number of parallels exist between Blake and Drake, not least being that both worked in more than one medium. Doubtless the main fascination for Drake, though, was Blake's concern with awareness and its relationship with reality seen in the normal way and potentially seen in other ways according to one's quality of consciousness.
Quality of consciousness was the key motif of the counter- culture's revolt against consumer materialism in the Sixties, running, for instance, through The Beatles' work from REVOLVER onwards and reaching its zenith with A DAY IN THE LIFE. The nub of the countercultural critique was that the "plastic people" of "straight" society were spiritually dead. New Leftists spoke of "consciousness-raising", while hippies offered a program of "enlightenment" through Eastern mysticism supplemented by a course of mind-expanding drugs. In today's pleasure-seeking world, introspection holds no appeal and the Sixties' focus on inner reorientation is ignored or derided as a cover for Nineties-style chemical hedonism. The truth was otherwise in 1965-9.
Nick Drake was no hippie, but one didn't need to wear flowers to agree with the counterculture, which any sensitive young person at the time would have endorsed. Drake's "generation gap" conversations show that he was one of these, as does the fact that he sang Dino Valenti's hippie anthem GET TOGETHER. Paul Wheeler, a fellow singer-songwriter whom he met at Cambridge in 1968, recalls that when EASY RIDER was screened there in 1969, Nick left the cinema in mild shock, seemingly stunned by the film's conclusion. Wheeler didn't pursue this - it wasn't done to be explicit in those days - but he remembers other occasions on which his friend was shaken by things which clearly held deep significance for him. Drake's reaction to EASY RIDER's death-of- hippie message, with its pessimistic view of the chances of achieving inner freedom in a conformist world, confirms that he took the clash between "straight" society and counterculture seriously. More significantly - though no causal link is necessarily to be inferred - it coincides with the first signs of his social withdrawal.
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