Part 13 (2/2)

PART 6

endings

dark shadows: hank williams, nick drake, phil ochs

Three ”populardead-Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs-all had new collections in record stores in the saust 1986 If this coincidence seems at all curious, or even a bit ers have in coer and songwriter who, in both his work and life, seemed perpetually torn between visions of heaven and sin, hope and fear, love and death Soained the upper hand and the singer fell into drink, pills, and a bitter e twenty-nine, Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car, en route to a perforinia He was the victi All indications were, Willia for soel of Death”: ”The lights all grow dihly twenty years later in England, a frail-see look at notions of loss Drake wrote haunting songs full of tenderness and resignation, beauty and despair-until, apparently, he could no longer find the words to convey the panicky depths of his experience On a late Nove in 1974, Drake was found dead at his parents' holand, the casualty of an overdose of antidepressantto the coroner, a suicide

By contrast, Phil Ochs-a folk singer who had served as both an early champion and contemporary of Bob Dylan-had spent the better part of his career writing songs of angry hope and fierce hus that seethed with idiosyncratic dreams of a better and more ethical culture At the same time, so, firsthand iuish and madness, until by the ed by aattack in Africa and his career had all but collapsed in disillusion-the agony becaed himself at his sister's home in Far Rockaway, New York, and pop music lost one of its most conscientious and compassionate voices

Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs were allbasis-knew it so well that it robbed them of any practical will to escape its devastation It is hard to say whether their ony (certainly, in Ochs' and Drake's cases, the lack of a caring audience at tiravated their depression, while for Willia is plain: Their songs did not , the quality of longing and desolation that characterized much of Williams', Ochs', and Drake's htful realities of longing and desolation that eventually weighed down eachabout the 1986 posthumous releases of these artists is that each project, to varying degrees, provides a telling-even definitive-overview of each singer's sensibility That is, these works not only offer a glimpse of the artists' journey from inspiration to desperation, butexaht to resist-or at least temper-their hopelessness

In the case, however, of Nick Drake's Fruit Tree (a four-disc set on Hannibal made up of Drake's three late-1960s and early-1970s Island albuely unissued material), this quality of resistance an his career (with the 1968 Five Leaves Left) in what see songs about fleeting desire and lasting solitude in a smoky, almost affectless tone-and abandoned his vocation four years later hat is a the darkest works in modern folk history, Pink Moon By that time, Drake had stripped his s, until all that re, al voice that seemed to emanate from within a place of impenetrable solitude

Yet for all its ly little in the actual sound and feel of Drake'sor unpleasant In fact, what is perhaps theaspect of Drake's work is a certain hard-earned passion for aural beauty: There are er's first two albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter-with their chamberlike s-that co the effect of Bill Evans' or Ravel's brooding s that are as pri as Robert Johnson's best deep-dark blues In short, there is so about Drake's music despite all the painful experience that formed it

By comparison, Hank Williams' music may seem far more soulful, but it was no less fundaes froaps in the singer's story The first set, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, is the fourth voluathers all of Williaical order, including nu thes never released before As impressive as this series is (remarkably, it is the first attempt to asseer's studio works-though a ten-LP 1981 japanese set was a big step in the right direction), the other new Willias (Country Music Foundation), is perhaps even more priceless Here, available for the first tismith recorded for Acuff-Rose in 1946, and at the very least they reveal that froer That is, not only could he convey the spirit and uitar, but in fact such a spare approach often reinforced that essential ”lonesomeness” that always resided deep in the heart of histhe road between faith and dejection-and modern music would never be the same as a result of that brave and hurtful journey

Siration-and one would be hard-pressed to find a work that better illuedy than A Toast to Those Who Are Gone, a cos assembled by Ochs' brother, archivist Michael Ochs, for Rhino Records Apparently, nearly all of the fourteen songs presented here were recorded early on in Ochs' career-probably during 1964-65-and yet, like Willias, this seround that would concern the singer throughout his career What ees is a portrait of a man who loved his country fiercely and fearlessly, who could not silently abide the way in which its hardest-won ideals were being corrupted by slaughterous hate- to sorew sad and manic and that enabled hi to this er's best-one hears only the inspiring expression of a man anted to live very, very randest promises Perhaps as he saw all that became lost, both in his own reality and in the nation's, he could not sanely withstand such pain

Listening to these records, one is forced to consider an unpleasant question: What is there, finally, to celebrate about men who lost their faith and ended their lives? Certainly there is nothing to extol about willful or semi-willful suicides, but there is neverthelessthe work of Hank Williareat deal about dignity and the liainst the dark as forcefully as possible and, in doing so, created ht help improve and sustain the world they eventually left behind Maybe, by exaht beauty that they created despite their anguish-we can gain enough perspective or coht coht help theether After all, if Williams or Drake or Ochs were still here, chances are it would be a better world foryou andCanadian director named David Acomba made a fil the best-certainly aettable-music films I have ever seen It uses pop ) i, and perhaps redee the drama of one man's public life and sorrowful end Shot in Canada, The Show He Never Gave opens its story on New Year's Eve, 1952, Hank Williaht-blue Cadillac is traveling on a lonely, snowy road In the back seat, the lean griure of Hank Williaer, Sneezy Waters) stirs fitfully On the radio one of Willia forward, he abruptly snaps it off

Williaht ”I wish I didn't have to be playing that big concert arenatoht I should be playingone of those little roadside bars we're goin' by right now” He gazes out at the blue darkness as if he were looking at a long-desired woman

Moments later, Willia up to a ja the strains of ”My Bucket's Got a Hole in It,” a crowd of old rubes and young rowdies in sepin With self-conscious ins to play his exhilarating and broken-hearted s-”Half as Much,” ”Hey Good Lookin',” ”Cold, Cold Heart,” ”I Can't Help It If I'a,” ”Lovesick Blues,” ”Your Cheatin' Heart,” aly about his alcoholism, muses over his separation from his first wife, worries that the audience at this little wayside stop may reject him Indeed, the one injunction that every important voice in the filood show” Williaestion

Not much else happens There are brief bouts of flirtation, cae, some more icy self-reflections in the back seat of the Cadillac And yet it beco to account for himself-his hurts, his hopes, his soul, his terror, his deviltry-in the s

And that's just what happens When in ins to reminisce about his first wife, Audrey, and thenfolk ballad, ”Alone and Forsaken,” the et From that point on, the crowd in the barrooradually become aware that they are privy to the confessions of a et out of this world with his soul intact

By the end, we have coht seem funny that aabout heaven when he should be talking about hell,” Willia into a desperately passionate version of his gospel classic, ”I Saw the Light” Mo reality of the Cadillac's back seat, Williaht I tried, Lord kno hard I tried, to believe And sos I wake up and it's al and desolate than ood as Hank Williaht have to look da firbook, withheld pers, thus in effect barring the film's US release Acuff-Rose's response was a little hard to fathoend-they were a matter of record Roy Acuff hientleman Nashville establishment that expelled Willia use, intoxicated perforret Nashville's staidness so deeply that he preferred to see its history go unpublicized, orto keep his de the smooth facade of Nashville's decorum In 1983, Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose told me: ”What I didn't appreciate about the film-because Hank was a personal friend-is the part where they show soive him the needle I never saw Hank take a needle It isn't what you call expert criticism; it's what I call personal criticism [The filreatness that rose from his work”

To my mind, Hank Williaot as close to the artist's greatness as any biographical or fictional work htened yet lucid soul of Williarow diht into those shadows-and ive

tiot off on smack I said, out loud, ”Why can't I feel like this all the time?” So I proceeded to feel like that all the time

TIM HARDIN,

WET MAGAZINE INTERVIEW, 1980

To while away the ti in Cleveland, Paul Siame whose object it is to nauued 1960s folk-rock hero is alive in Woodstock A bet is placed: Twenty dollars says he OD'ed

Life, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, imitates art Less than six months after the film's release, the Tim Hardin joke turned sour Its point, however, remains true: So many rock stars have died that one can hardly keep track of them Hardin pursued an infamously brutal and reckless manner of existence Most people who loved the o for his end

For the record, Hardin wrote so, and frequently recorded love songs of the 1960s Musicians who knew hi that time considered him to be one of the best John Sebastian, formerly of the Lovin' Spoonful, played harmonica on Hardin's early Verve Forecast alburound,” he recalls ”Probably everybody in the Village during that period stole soular since ere all stealing froular; he dared to go, both o, and there was plenty to learn from the way he melded rock & roll and blues and jazz into a style all his own”

During a two-year span in the s that secured his reputation, including ”Misty Roses,” ”If I Were a Carpenter,” ”Reason to Believe,” and ”Lady Ca account of his romance with actress Susan Moore (who later becas of his songs never enjoyedthem better than anybody else, in a stray, harrowed voice, redolent of his chief vocal idols, Billie Holiday and Hank Williaround Beset by erial suits, and narcotic funks, he eventually fled to England, where he recorded one wholly unradually receded into the dark custody of his own legend

In 1980, he was back in Eugene, Oregon-his holy intent on a fresh start Michael Dilley, a studio owner and forh school buddy of Hardin's, believed it was a serious effort Hardin had gone off heroin in favor of beer and was in a good ot what he was doing He'd come into the studio, sit down at the piano, and coeous, and then it would hang there someti of Dece to a tip fro on the floor of his se thirty-nine Just a few nights earlier he had finished work on the basic tracks for his first album in seven years The centerpiece of the collection, a ballad called ”Unforgiven,” is one of the oes like this: ”As long as I aiven/As far as I a/I still try”

dennis wilson: the lone surfer

Rock & roll has had such a pervasive social influence because, in the postwar era of popular culture, it sometimes worked as the equivalent of a familial bond Indeed, its principal rise-in thethe advent of Elvis Presley-occurred during a period when fa strained, soenerational freedo Ah Presley were often enuine than the ties they found at home The irony behind this, of course, was that rock & roll sprang fro fah not always for the better)

By contrast, the Wilsons were a California family, subject to those same mid-1950s perely undefined land, where both Western civilization and popular culture ran to their ends Like arded California as so of a pro people, his children experienced that opportunity as a boundless scenario of instant surface fun: sex, nature, cars, and even quick religious incentive Underneath those surfaces resided so the reality of the Wilsons' home life, where Murry was reportedly an often cruel and brutal man But in the fast exuberance of the early 1960s, few pop lovers were yet adood, bad, or otherwise-under the surfaces

In 1961, along with cousin Mike Love and neighbor Al Jardine, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson beganout California dreaed by father Murry Wilson Brian wrote the songs-quick, brilliant anthes of contrapuntal rock-but it was younger brother Dennis (the band's early drus with a ional pastient exemplar of hedonism (which reportedly led to much trouble between Dennis and his iron-handed father) Still, with Brian's talent and Dennis's unconstraint, the Beach Boys defined a new California pop ethos, and under the tutelage of Murry (who died in the early 1970s), the group became a pop force very nearly the equal of the Beatles

But rock & roll, like any family affair (or family substitute), can be painfully capricious, and when the fun-and-sun style of that period gave way to a h-flown late-1960s hedonisroup toyed for a while with the idea of a topical nae, and also flirted with psychedelia and mysticism (in fact, ”Good Vibrations” is possibly the best psychedelic single by any group in that period) Challenged by the tirowth, the Beach Boys settled into a period of increasingly experimental albums-Pet Sounds (one of pop's finest and most intricate works), Wild Honey, Smiley Smile, and Friends-but none of them sold like their earlier work (with the exception of Pet Sounds, which barely hit the Top 10), and the public never again bought the group's contes Aside from a quirk hit in 1976 with ”Rock and Roll Music,” the Beach Boys never had a real hit after ”Heroes and Villains” in 1967 (Four years after this article ritten, the Beach Boys again had a nule, 1988's silly and laave in to the dark side of Californian a proble presence in the band (replaced onstage by Glen Campbell, then Bruce Johnston) Meanwhile, Dennis fell into a fairly freewheeling lifestyle, including a surprisingly effective acting job in the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop (with James Taylor), and a brief association with Charles Manson (Manson co-wrote ”Never Learn Not to Love,” on the 20/20 albuhts) Despite these lapses, the band still , often wonderful work-Sunflower, Surf's Up, Holland-but these records remained unloved by a new California audience that preferred the Doors and Buffalo Springfield In tiroup made its peace with the public: The political and artistic ambitions of the late 1960s subsided, and the Beach Boys were popularly accepted as a nostalgia act: a ”reely consigned to living out their history according to past glories, despite occasional attempts to make newof Dece accident-there was ences over the years There was also roup-rarely inseparable but also rarely unified-had fallen into bitter bickering (the band, in fact, ca several times, and Dennis and Mike Love had such an abrasive relationshi+p that they obtained restraining orders against one another) In the group's last tour, Dennis Wilson didn't even appear for several dates, purportedly for reasons of fa problems

There wasn't, however, roup had lived up to its artistry during their long period of public neglect (they were an inestimably better, more resourceful band than, say, the Doors), nor did ed to take all the disenchantment of their best late-1960s work and continuously parlayed it into creative resolve Dennis Wilson was perhaps the most volatile member of the band, but he was also its most archetypal: He embodied the public's ideal of the band's myth, and he understood how the flipside of that myth was probably an inevitable turn of events In the years since the late-1960s, Dennis-like the rest of the band-had come to live out his celebrityhood as a novelty star: as a re used and reclaimed merely to satisfy an audience's whi that knowledge, I wouldn't want to begrudge him Perhaps even more than his brother Brian, Dennis Wilson exemplified the band's real ethos, and when he fell into that deep, irretrievable chill on that Wednesday night in 1983, so did a part of the band's best history

aye: troubled soul

More than any other artist of the pop generation, Marvin Gaye rose to the ee, and cultural possibility of lehandedly ings (and spiritual confusion) whose land On cohts and Vietnam-subjects that many R & B artists, up until that tih that eventful record was in soain return to themes of social passion), Marvin reh the tiht Love (Colue at 1983's Motown Anniversary TV special, or seeing hiraciously accept his first Gra the rejuvenation of a once-troubled e, even grace Hearing the news of his violent and improbable end-shot to death on April 1, 1984, by his ed eer's closest thoughts, after all According to David Ritz's 1985 biography of Gaye, Divided Soul, Gaye reovernable toward his life's end-indeed, a doomed and restless uilt, jealousy, and, ulti so active it almost purposely created the circumstances of his own murder The facts presented in Divided Soul weren't pretty: Gaye abused cocaine to a degree of madness; he often struck and ridiculed the women in his life; he claimed to envision a violent death; and he even took a crack at suicide during his last weeks On the surface, Gaye's art seemed passionate yet well proportioned; behind that surface, in the man's life and heart, it was all turmoil and craziness

But then Gaye always understood the tense play between fear and rapture uncoe overwhelht was a product of the singer's upbringing Back during the period when his father, Marvin Gaye, Sr, was an active apostolicin an evangelical gospel choir, though he also spentto theband jazz, and R & B Both the spiritual and early influences left an indelible i a teran singing in street-corner R & B groups,worldly romance (which, in that period, was a refined metaphor for sex)

In 1957, Gaye forroup, the Marquees-a polished harroup recorded for the Okeh label In 1958, Harvey Fuqua enlisted the group as his backing enseloho recorded for Chess In the early 1960s, while playing a club in Detroit, Gaye's breathy, silken tenor caught the interest of local entrepreneur Berry Gordy, Jr, who signed hi Tamla-Motown label Shortly after, Gayefor Motown, primarily as a quick-witted, propulsive drummer (his bop-derived rhythles of S others)

In 1962, Gaye scored his first Motown hit, ”Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and throughout the decade recorded the les-all rife with a definitionally sexy-cool brand of vocalizing and a sharp, blues-te with every substantial Motown producer of the period (including Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield, and the Holland-Dozier-Holland team), Gaye yielded a vital body of dance hits and sex-minded ballads that still remain as popular and indelible as the finest work of his pri competitors of the period, the Beatles Gaye's best-known hits from the epoch included ”Hitch Hike,” ”Baby Don't You Do It,” ”Can I Get a Witness,” ”I'll be Doggone,” ”Hoeet It Is to Be Loved by You,” ”Ain't That Peculiar,” and his h the Grapevine” In addition, he advanced a romantic duet style with label-mates Mary Wells (”Once Upon a Time” and ”What's the Matter with You”), and in the 1970s, with Diana Ross

But Gaye's finest duet work-perhaps theof his career-ith Tammi Terrell, hom he recorded such late-1960s standards as ”Ain't No Mountain High Enough,” ”Your Precious Love,” ”Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and ”You're All I Need to Get By” In 1967, Terrell-who had developed a brain tu a concert performance Three years later she died, and Gaye, reportedly shattered, began rethinking the importance of a pop career As a result of Terrell's death, he remained an infrequent and reluctant live performer until his 1983 tour (the final tour of his life)