No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny

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No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 20

by Clinton Heylin


  Not surprisingly, it was mostly Sandy’s small band of close female friends who were on the receiving end of the Sandy version of Trevor. And yet she couldn’t imagine life without him, admitting in a letter to one of those friends in 1976, “if I hadn’t bumped into Trev. I often think who would have [had] me.” But her lack of self-esteem made her especially susceptible to the well-chosen putdown, something Trevor had readily at his disposal.

  Bambi Ballard: I never sensed that he supported her as a musician. My take on [their relationship] was that Sandy was with a man who was using her, who was spending her money, who despised her and who didn’t desire her. There are men who only see themselves reflected in a woman’s eyes when they’re in bed with her. He was one of those … He was always not quite laughing at her, but [was like] the kind of father I’m very glad I didn’t have – the kind who [when] you make a cute remark, they laugh, but they have to cap it. Sandy didn’t need that kind of person. Sandy needed either the classic power-behind-the-throne figure, or somebody with whom she could have a really good creative relationship, and I don’t think that Trevor was a good enough creative artist for this. Trevor did in a sense have what she wanted, ‘cause he was down to earth, [and] not volatile intellectually, so even if Sandy was drunk and talking nonsense, Trevor wouldn’t have known the difference … [but] his view of women, and this woman in particular, was, “Oh God, she’s doing that again,” rather than, “Why is she doing that?”

  Sandy needed someone who bolstered, rather than eroded, her fragile self-confidence. She herself admitted, in an interview prior to her first solo tour, that she “needed to get a bit of confidence back; I seem to have lost a lot in the past couple of years, been undermined by lots of things.” Going out on tour was a rare opportunity to remind herself that she needed “to get out there and sing, and know that people really want to hear me, and enjoy what I do.” In this, at least, Trevor was as supportive as ever. But Sandy was also increasingly guilty of not communicating, not only with her partner but with everyone around her. Bambi Ballard remembers the reputation that Sandy had begun to acquire even before they first encountered each other at the turn of the decade.

  Bambi Ballard: By the time I met her I had heard so many negative Sandy stories, how difficult she could be. And she was somebody who if she drank too much there’d be that moment when she … didn’t communicate anymore. And she was a great drunk. But at the same time there were moments when she sort of shut off, [and] you really felt that she’d left the room. As I got to know her better, I felt that these shut downs were often because she’d kinda lost confidence in herself. Almost as if she was mentally [as well as physically] staggering.

  And yet, even when boorish, Sandy remained someone who treasured friends, old and new. Maddy Prior, then riding high fronting an increasingly commercial Steeleye Span, remembers someone saying, one time, “‘Oh you’re a friend of Sandy,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was a friend. I know her.’ And the next time I saw her, she was really offended, … She obviously thought of us as friends … [But] her and Linda [were] a formidable team, [who] used to terrify the life out of me, ‘cause they were devastatingly witty. I’d always felt slightly that they thought I was a bit of a clown.”

  The increasing distance between Sandy and her old singing companions – as the likes of Maddy Prior and Linda Thompson established their own niches; while Val Berry and Gina Glazer brought up families – only served to remind her of her new-found solo status. It perhaps even prompted the occasion, one afternoon in 1972, when after “a happy afternoon sitting around drinking and trying a few songs,” Sandy suggested to Heather Wood, Linda Peters and Todd Lloyd that they form a singing group together.

  Sandy’s craving for companionship had never confined itself to her own sorority and now, in her hour of darkness, she had need of a true friend of the male variety. One experience prompted the first song in recent times that didn’t attempt to get “as far removed as I could get from the real subject matter … [just because] I didn’t really want anyone to know what I was really like.” ‘Friends’ dealt specifically with an unhappy liason with Pete Townshend, an old drinking-partner from the Speakeasy, at a time when Trevor was away. Townshend now admits that, though he enjoyed Sandy’s company, and though her “albums of those days, 1973–1976 … seem to me today to have been seminal, essential … I was rather strange about British folk [at the time].”

  Pete Townshend: I liked her tremendously. She was, to my eyes, very pretty and compactly voluptuous. I was very attracted to her. Adding fire to this chemistry was the fact that I found her intelligent and assertive as a writer. When she sat to play the piano … she had a strident, purposeful attitude. One night we nearly slept together. She had come several times to the Who studios and I ran her home in my chauffeured Mercedes 600 stretch limousine. The driver sat in the street while we talked. She had been crying at the studio. I had no idea about what. I had some notion that she had parted company with her man … She had a lovely flat in Parsons Green with a huge grand piano and an even larger double bed with lace and linen sheets. I kissed her, but she insisted that I should stay all night, otherwise I could not touch her. I took my driver’s presence as an excuse and left. I was married, and very rarely unfaithful to my wife at the time. I remember Sandy and I were both drinking a lot, but she seemed, like me, able to handle it physically. I feel very dim not to have realised that she was reaching out to me so urgently, in need not only of some physical love, but also some … of my spiritual strength perhaps … She [later] rang and told me she’d written me a song.

  The song certainly pulled no punches. Though the identity of the figure who has “lost everything/ but what money can own,” is never overtly stated, the last two verses suggest just how cut to the quick Sandy felt by Townshend’s change of mind:

  “My love is not here, my love is away.

  You’ve caught me alone, but you’ve nothing to say,

  And it’s time to leave now, and you know the way [x2].

  Go and live in the country, and I’ll stay in the town,

  I have everything but what money can own,

  And I’ll be just fine now,

  so long [x2]. So long.”

  Townshend is not alone in believing that Sandy had at some point temporarily “parted company with her man,” a view alluded to in lines scattered through Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (“I can’t communicate with you/ and I guess I never will” certainly implying irreconcilable differences). The difficulties Trevor’s new career presented may have had less of a bearing on this than a more mundane explanation – Sandy’s belief that the fire had gone out of their sex-life. Bambi Ballard remembers one particular heart to heart about “the fact that Trevor didn’t find Sandy as attractive [as he used to]. She was beginning to sense that he was going off the boil, so we had a long chat about sexuality … [and] what began as a heart-to-heart talk about perhaps not being sexually attractive to Trevor the way she’d want to be … [became,] ‘He oughta like me as I am.’” A certain bitterness swept over Sandy on such occasions, manifesting themselves in lyrics like:

  “Whatever you did for me

  Save that which helped your company

  Beguile and cheat behind my back

  So that no one ever can keep track.

  You expect me to be famous

  And you despise those whose help I seek

  While you grew rich on someone else

  But can’t afford the time for me….

  Your friendly voice

  which one time swept away

  my bitter thoughts

  of kings and courts

  Will now no longer make me see

  For while you speak, the echoes say

  What did you do for me?”

  The reference to somebody who “grew rich on someone else,” but remains incapable of figuring out a way to live, reoccurs in another lyric probably written around this time, which begins with a line later used in ‘Solo’:

/>   “What a way to live

  What a day to die

  You may think it easy

  With all your piles of money

  When you’ve got the right idea.

  I’m a singer, I’m a woman

  I’m together and alone

  But I wish I was a hobo

  with a freedom of my own,

  in the heart of me.

  In the heart I wish I knew which is the way to go

  Do I run and hide [in the undergrowth].”

  The impending prospect of a lengthy sojourn in the States – a time when she would have to be both “together and alone” – was clearly playing on Sandy’s mind, even as she was insisting to Steve Peacock, “I don’t want anyone saying, ‘ah, poor old Sandy’, because [touring] is just something you either choose to do or you don’t. And if you do it, you just have to become strong and get yourself together.” Her more acid assessment, in ‘Solo’, was far closer to the sentiments expressed in the second verse above:

  “What a wonderful way to live,

  She’s travelling all over the world,

  Why, the fame

  And all the golden opportunties unfurled.”

  With the idea for ‘Solo’ already germinating in her mind, and in surprisingly confessional mode in the days before her six-week trip Stateside, Sandy revealed to Steve Peacock some of her deepest fears:

  Sandy Denny: It’s when I’m sitting in hotel rooms on my own that I tend to get a bit morose … Men have different ways of entertaining themselves on the road, and no way could I get into entertaining myself in that way, it’s just not part of the way I feel, and it only messes you up anyway. I think women get very emotionally attracted to people – blokes have the ability to entertain themselves for an evening and then forget about it. [1973]

  Sandy’s solitary female companion on the road was the friend she once described in her diary as “quite intolerable … no wonder I get on with her,” Miranda Ward. Miranda confirms the chaste nature of her charge, “She would just feel so rootless, that’s what would mess her up. I was there as her sort of anchor … but Sandy … was not promiscuous at all.”

  Sharing the same room throughout the U.S. trip, Miranda witnessed a woman who had indeed ‘gone solo’, not, as Sandy later explained, in the sense “that I went solo, as it were. It’s more the way we live within ourselves.” On the other hand, if, in the quote above, ‘Women’ was a cipher for Sandy, for ‘Men’ read ‘Trevor’, and the idea that Trevor might “have the ability to entertain [himself] for an evening and then forget about it,” clearly ate at her. On her previous tour, Sandy had asked Miranda Ward to “keep an eye on Trevor, and we went out for dinner, and we were having this lovely dinner and this great flirt, and then I suddenly realised Trevor was fucking serious … The guy was amoral.” Though Miranda never talked to Sandy about the incident, the opening verse to ‘Solo’ suggested a growing distance between Sandy and her man:

  “Good morning, good afternoon,

  and what have you got to say,

  Well, I’m waiting, but I can’t stay long,

  it’s such a lovely day.

  There’s a time to be talking

  and a time when it’s no use,

  Right now I think the things you say

  are liable to confuse.”

  ‘Solo’, perhaps Sandy’s most complete song since ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’, could as easily be seen to deal with the break-up of a relationship as the prospect of touring, its key admission coming at song’s end, “Ain’t life a solo.” Thrown back upon her own resources for the first time in a long time, Sandy knew that this was “a bit of hard work coming up – and I don’t often admit that.” How hard, ‘Solo’ can only hint at.

  The jaunt across the pond, due to begin on March 31 and run through to May 14, involved a whole series of support slots on other artists’ bills, and just two shows, at the intimate Main Point, on the outskirts of Philly, as a headliner. Required to ‘wow’ fans of Loggins & Messina, Steve Miller, Shawn Phillips and Randy Newman, Sandy found the whole shebang tough going. Barely a week into the tour, after two sets at Constitution Hall, in Washington, on a bill with the terminally staid Loggins & Messina, Sandy told a Georgetown journalist, “If this is what it means to get three thousand people to come and listen to you, I’d rather go and play to my best friends.” Even supporting Randy Newman, with whom she shared most of the shows, the audiences seemed unusually inattentive and boisterous during Sandy’s set. Miranda later found out “that Randy had a rider in his contract that no drinks were allowed to be served [during his set] because of the noise of waiters and chinking glasses, and so everyone was stocking up on drinks during Sandy’s set.”

  Sandy later told an English journalist, “I found it very heavy … There were only three of us … a sort of assistant … and David, my brother.” Miranda, who had taken a sabbatical from school to be with her friend, did her best to bolster Sandy’s spirits, with picnics in the Rockies and tracking down old friends like Gina Glazer and Paul Simon. But sometimes it was only the prospect of meeting up with Trevor and the Fairport gang in L.A. – where the three of them were scheduled to find themselves in early May – that kept her going.

  As Sandy admitted in one of her notebooks, “When you are with the one who loves you, you want to get away somewhere, yet no-one else is quite the same when you do, so you run hell for leather home to him, and swear to yourself you’ll never leave again.” It was in just such a state of mind that she began to idealise her relationship with Trevor in song, penning her own ‘Moonlight Mile’, under the title ‘At The End of the Day’, on one of the endless plane journeys she was forced to endure (though not, as she would later claim, “on the plane journey home, after an extensive tour of the U.S.”):

  “Just miles and miles of rosy sky,

  I’ll fall asleep, by and by.

  I’m crying now ‘cause you’re so far away

  But I’ll be home at the end of the day.”

  First page of Sandy’ 1973 U.S. tour itinerary.

  Finally – after shows in New York, Toronto, New Paltz, Washington, Bryn Mawr, Boston, Upper Darby, East Rutherford, Passaic, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Chico and Berkeley – as well as enough air-miles to qualify for her own pilot license, Sandy found herself in Los Angeles, at a Hollywood ‘motor hotel’, on the afternoon of May 5, 1973. Don Henley of the Eagles had offered her the more salubrious surr-oundings of his Laurel Canyon home, but Trevor and the boys were at the Tropicana, a legendary stopover at the West Hollywood end of Santa Monica Boulevard.

  Before six nights of two sets at the Troubador with The Association wrapped up another U.S. Tour, three days had been set aside for Sandy to get some recording done at A&M’s fabled studios, the self-same studios she had enthused about on her first visit, back in the summer of 1969. Reunited with two-fifths of Fotheringay, adjoined to the trusty Fairport rhythm-section, she had four songs she was ready to record – ‘Friends’, ‘Solo’, ‘At The End of the Day’ and ‘No End’.

  ‘No End’, the oldest of the quartet, was another song about the intrusions of the road – “It’s strange how time just seems to fly away/I can’t remember things.” It had already been quite beautifully captured back in December by a mobile truck, solo at a vacant Walthamstow Town Hall, an attempt on Trevor’s part to capture Sandy singing and playing in a classical music environment. It is tempting to view the painter who is asked by the traveller, “Why don’t you have no brushes any more? I used to like your style,” as the person Sandy felt she could have been, before her dreams “like autumn leaves … faded and fell so fast.” Certainly, no real-world confidant seems to fit her depiction here.

  The four songs recorded in L.A. suggested Sandy had a very wintry album in mind. Only a handful of dots were now needed to complete the circle from ‘Solo’ to ‘No End’. The album’s major statements were in the can. Her voice had also stood up surprisingly well to the demands of a week of two-set shows. At the Troubado
r, though, tired from the sessions and struck down by that smog-induced condition, ‘L.A. voice’, she was grateful for the occasions when Fairport’s schedule permitted a little musical support. Dave Pegg remembers the audiences “being very polite to Sandy, but I don’t think she was enjoying herself very much.” For Sandy, when Fairport “got up on stage with me, … and we did some looning about … I felt a sudden sense of relief when they started playing, it was just really nice to have them all behind me.” That “sudden sense of relief” felt a lot like coming home.

  Unfortunately, come the end of her tour, whilst Sandy took the red-eye via New York to London, Fairport were required to head onto Trevor’s homeland for their first Austalian shows. With a few more weeks ahead before Sandy could be reunited with Trevor again, it was perhaps ‘Dark The Night’, her personal ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’, that was really written on the plane home:

  “Parting comes too soon,

  My weary tune has lost its pleasure.

  Waiting for the time,

  This lonely wine has lost its treasure.

  Dark to me the night,

  and dim the morning light tomorrow.

  How could I not see

  the simple melody of sorrow?”

  Such wistfulness carried over into the two remaining originals on the album, ‘Carnival’ and ‘Like an Old Fashioned Waltz’, recorded along with ‘Dark The Night’ at sessions in August at Sound Techniques. As Sandy told a journalist at the time, “I’m a bit of an old softie at the moment. I’m going to have to get myself some boxing gloves.” The seven original songs, as they stood without their “fur coat on” (as Sandy liked to call the strings), would have made a powerful statement, by a strong, independent female singer-songwriter at the peak of her songwriting powers. And, with two six-and-a-half minute works reserved for side two, the seven songs constituted a good thirty-four minutes of material (six whole minutes longer than Nick Drake’s 1972 offering, Pink Moon). Unfortunately, Sandy had another side to her personality, one that she had surpressed throughout a seven-year career.

 

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