White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  His sophistication was on display in a clip from The Dick Cavett Show. The host brings up the ‘gimmick’ charge over Jimi picking the guitar with his teeth, playing it behind his head and setting it alight at Monterey. (The first two were blues traditions commonly practised by Buddy Guy, but generally unknown to white audiences.) ‘Gimmicks! I’m sick and tired of hearing that all the time. People are always accusing me of using gimmicks!’ Long pause. Then, faux meekly, ‘Yes, they’re right, we do.’

  Our film was a memorial, not a piece of investigative journalism, so it draws no conclusions about his death. We came to feel that he had spent his life torn in different directions: between his mother and his father; his sensitive nature and the toughness of his street buddies; the R&B world and Greenwich Village. He always tried to keep both sides happy. In the final week of his life he promised Alan Douglas that he would leave Jeffreys just as he assured Jeffreys he would stay. He told Bill Cox he was now the permanent holder of the bass chair and sent word to Noel Redding that he wanted to talk to him about coming back. He was, for whatever reason, fascinated with Monica Dannerman and they talked of getting a flat together, but he had phoned Devon that last day saying he couldn’t wait to come back to her. Is it any wonder he wanted a good long sleep?

  The film – entitled simply Jimi Hendrix – did reasonably well but the Hendrix family (Al had remarried, his new wife a middle-class Japanese woman) disliked its references to drugs and sex and the interviews with his friends from the Harlem days. Al grew impatient with the estate’s modest income and demanded to be bought out for a million dollars. Leo found him his million and the rights were turned over to an investment company in the Dutch Antilles. Leo and Alan Douglas became the odd couple, working together for this mysterious firm to make the Hendrix catalogue into something of value. When they started negotiating a hundred-million-dollar sale of the catalogue twenty years later, Al came out of the woodwork, backed by billionaire fan Paul Allen, and sued to regain ownership.

  On the face of it, he had no case: a sale, after all, is a sale. But Allen’s detectives turned up the awkward fact that Branton was an owner of the Antilles company with whom he had negotiated the deal. Alan and Leo were forced to walk away, missing their big payday, and Leo, one of America’s greatest civil rights attorneys, had a question mark hanging over his career as he came to retire. When Al died, he left the estate in the hands of his stepdaughter, a Japanese-American born-again Christian of no blood relation to Jimi. Paul Allen has built a museum in Seattle to memorialize him. Jimi Hendrix is now available on DVD.

  Chapter 33

  THE CALL FROM JOHN WOOD didn’t come as a complete surprise. Not after that terrible evening in early 1974 when Nick came to see me. He looked far worse than I had ever seen him: his hair was greasy, his hands dirty, his clothes rumpled. More unnervingly, he was angry. I had told him he was a genius, and others had concurred. So, he demanded, why wasn’t he famous and rich? This rage must have festered beneath that inexpressive exterior for years. I confessed my own disillusionment – I had thought a great record would open all doors. Some good reviews, a few plays on John Peel – with no live shows, it hadn’t been enough.

  I proposed starting a new album. I had no idea what would emerge, but it was the only therapy at my disposal. At Sound Techniques he stumbled trying to play and sing at the same time. We decided to record the guitar first, then overdub the vocals. John and I exchanged anguished looks: this was the man who had recorded the guitar and vocal of ‘River Man’ live with an orchestra. We struggled to get four guitar tracks down on tape the first night, then came back the following evening for the vocals and to do a rough mix. The words of the songs were even more devastating than the way he recorded them:

  Why leave me hanging on a star

  When you deem me so high

  When you deem me so high?

  Why leave me sailing in a sea

  When you hear me so clear

  When you hear me so clear?

  And:

  Black-eyed dog he called at my door

  Black-eyed dog he called for more

  Black-eyed dog he knew my name

  Black-eyed dog he knew my name

  Growing old and I want to go home

  Growing old and I don’t want to know.

  Cerberus and Robert Johnson’s ‘Hellhound’ were never more ominous.

  I was in California months later when John rang to tell me Nick was dead. The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of suicide, but I wasn’t convinced. The anti-depressants Nick had been taking were different from modern drugs; doses were far stronger and the side effects only beginning to be understood. Nick’s parents said he was very positive in the weeks before his death, planning a move back to London and starting to play the guitar again. But the drugs have been known to cause patients to ‘roller-coaster’. How would he have responded if, after weeks of feeling good about the future, he suddenly crashed back into despair? Might he, one terrible night, have decided he needed a lot more of those pills that once made him feel so optimistic? Did he know that too many could be fatal? The lyrics of his last songs may support the coroner’s view, but I prefer to imagine Nick making a desperate lunge for life rather than a calculated surrender to death.

  The months after his death brought anguished thoughts. Would he still be alive if I had stayed in London? Was it my phone call which gave him the reassurance he needed to start the treatment that led to the fatal pills? I kept thinking about ‘Fruit Tree’, as if those prophetic lyrics somehow made it all OK, that this was his choice. But the angry man I met that evening was not fulfilling some gloomy romantic fantasy, he was in a hell of bitter loneliness and despair. That story was not from ‘Fruit Tree’ but from another of his early songs, ‘Day Is Done’:

  When the game’s been fought

  You speed the ball across the court

  Lost much sooner than you would have thought

  Now the game’s been fought.

  When the party’s through

  Seems so very sad for you

  Didn’t do the things you meant to do

  Now there’s no time to start anew

  Now the party’s through.

  When the day is done

  Down to earth then sinks the sun

  Along with everything that was lost and won

  When the day is done.

  The sale of Witchseason included a provision that Nick’s LPs must never be deleted, although I didn’t need to argue the point with Blackwell – he loved Nick, too. When he died, his sales were non-existent. Slowly, they began an annual increase that grew steeper year by year. Thoughtful articles by Arthur Lubow, Brian Cullman and Peter Paphides helped. In the late ’70s, his family and I started to get an occasional pilgrim from a small town in Ohio, or Scandinavia, or the north of England. They just wanted to tell us how much his music meant to them and talk to someone who knew him. His parents were so touched by this that some were permitted to spend a night in Nick’s room and make copies of his home recordings – hence the bootlegs of recent years.

  Then we started getting enquiries about film scripts and biographies. By the time the Volkswagen commercial with ‘Pink Moon’ arrived on American television in the late ’90s, there was an established Nick Drake cult, the records were selling tens of thousands a year and Nick’s was a fashionable name for young singers to drop when asked to cite their influences. Is Nick’s music, as critics often state, ‘timeless’? Or has it been liberated from its period by failing to connect with audiences when it was released? Nick’s music was never a soundtrack for their parents’ memories, so modern audiences are free to make it their own.

  Nick listened carefully to Dylan, to Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, and to genteel bluesmen like Josh White and Brownie McGhee. He enjoyed Delius and Chopin, Miles Davis and Django Reinhardt, and read English poetry. He and his sister Gabrielle used to perform duets inspired by Nina and Frederick. But analyses of his influences have difficulty explain
ing the originality of his music, particularly the shape of his chords. When I visited the family home in Tanworth-in-Arden, I saw a piano in the hall with music paper scattered on top. His mother Molly, a wonderfully energetic and funny woman, mentioned that she had written ‘a few amateur things’. Many years after Nick’s and Molly’s deaths, Gabrielle gave me a tape of her mother’s songs. There, in her piano chords, are the roots of Nick’s harmonies. His reinvention of the standard guitar tuning was the only way to match the music he heard as he was growing up. Molly’s compositions are of a period but very beautiful and not just because they foreshadow Nick’s. Perhaps the core of his musical nature was so strong because his greatest influence had nothing to do with the world outside his home.

  Many have speculated about Nick’s sexuality. There is certainly a virginal quality about his music and I never saw him behaving in a sexual way with anyone, male or female. Linda Thompson tried to seduce Nick once, but he just sat on the end of the bed, fully clothed, looking at his hands. He assumes the role of onlooker in his songs, yearningly observing girls from a distance, begging them to pay him some attention. He sings of others living fast and exciting lives – ‘three hours from London, Jeremy flies, hoping to keep the sun from his eyes’.

  English public schools could be devastating places for male sexuality. It was a cliché in the sixties that boys emerged from such places ‘inverted’ or inhibited while girls left their boarding schools eager for action. Yet Nick’s music is supremely sensual: the delicate whisper of his voice, the romantic melodies, the tenderly sad lyrics, the intricate dexterity of his fingers on the guitar – all fascinate and attract female listeners.

  Gabrielle Drake has had a successful career as an actor in the theatre and on television. Her characterizations often take on the classic sexiness of the husky-voiced upper-middle-class English rose, like a Joan Greenwood or Glynis Johns. She seems to have suffered none of Nick’s isolation or loneliness. In person, she is self-contained but direct and seems very comfortable in her physicality and her femininity with none of Nick’s apologetic stoop or hesitant speech.

  Gabrielle now administers the estate with great determination and concern for Nick’s legacy. As the sixties drew to a close, who would have predicted that the end of the millennium would see Nick’s music so much more prominent than that of the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, John Martyn or Sandy Denny? Perhaps even Leonard Cohen’s? I might have said ‘Don’t bet against it’, but only under my breath.

  The smart money then would have been on Sandy. Despite the problems with Fotheringay, she entered the ’70s with her career in full sail. John Wood, Richard Thompson and husband Trevor all worked with her as producers and came up with powerful versions of great songs, but there was no single classic album. She and I restored friendly relations when I returned to London in the mid-’70s but were never again as close. A song she wrote soon after the breakup of Fotheringay seemed directed at me:

  I’ve just gone solo

  Do you play solo?

  Ain’t life a solo?

  Solitude was something she was determined to avoid, throwing herself into relationships with needy urgency:

  When the music’s playing

  That’s when it changes

  And no longer do we seem like total strangers

  It’s all those words which always get in the way

  Of what you want to say

  When I wake up

  In the morning

  I think it only fair to give you warning

  I probably won’t go away

  I’ll more than likely stay.

  After years of increasing problems with drink and occasional white powders, she became pregnant – possibly to save her crumbling marriage. But the birth of her daughter Georgia in 1977 failed to provide the cure, and when Trevor left for Australia with their child – ostensibly to show her to his parents – she despaired of seeing either of them again. The last of a series of bad falls – first at her home, then her parents’ house, finally at a friend’s flat in London – left her with a cerebral haemorrhage. She never regained consciousness and died on 21 April, 1978. Trevor remarried, moved back to Australia and died in his sleep eleven years later. Georgia was raised by Trevor’s second wife and still lives in Australia.

  Sandy and Nick regarded each other with respect but from a distance. Sandy couldn’t relate to Nick, and Nick was as reticent towards her as he was towards most people. They were both English to the core, but what might seem a nuance of difference between suburban middle class and rural/colonial upper middle class is actually a chasm; it was easier for the working-class Bob Squire or Danny Thompson to communicate with either than for them to relate to each other.

  Both benefited from an upbringing and education that steeped in them a sense of history. Sandy had a solid grounding in English literature and adored the relationship between the history she learned at school and the ancient ballads she taught Fairport. Nick grew up inhaling the air of an elite education: the Romantic and Elizabethan poets were omnipresent in his school years. Nick’s emulators rarely have the cultural context to grasp how remote their lyrics are from his.

  Another gap between Nick and Sandy was drugs. She never liked cannabis much – it was too introspective. For her, drink was the way to relax, and when her life began to spiral downhill, cocaine briefly boosted her confidence. Nick never, to my knowledge, ventured much beyond hashish. But he shared with Sandy an instinctive rejection of moderation and his endless spliffs played a large part in his isolation.

  I listened in the studio control room as musicians’ modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything. When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse. If I joined in, the next day’s playback would provide clear evidence of the deterioration of both the performances and of my critical ability to judge them. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains – at least in part – why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.

  Psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were dismissed from Harvard for failing to maintain a professional distance: they used to trip along with the students. When I was at Harvard and a girlfriend started having a bad trip, I rang Alpert’s home at 3 a.m. and he calmly advised me to put her into a warm bath to relax her. By the time millions of kids were re-creating those Harvard experiments, Alpert had decided he wanted something else. He set off for India where he met a Californian hitch-hiker who seemed calmer than anyone he had ever met. He followed him to the remote cave where his guru lived on a diet of moss. The holy man recounted all Alpert’s dreams since he had met the hitchhiker and, among the aspirins, anti-diarrhoea pills and Valiums in Alpert’s pillbox, picked out the twelve tabs of Owsley acid. After swallowing them, he proceeded to discuss spiritual paths for the next eight hours as if nothing had happened. In that cave, Alpert was transformed into Baba Ram Dass and never took drugs again.

  Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity? As to the sixties’ musical bequest, other generations will decide whether it proves more durable than that of the later decades of the century. I wouldn’t bet against it.

  The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium. The prediction that our biggest dilemma in the new millennium would be how to use the endless hours of leisure time freed up by computers has proved to be futurology’s least amusing joke. In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.

  Fri
ends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe. There was a feeling that nothing was nailed down, that an assumption held was one worth challenging. The meek regularly took on the mighty and often won – or at least drew. Debt-free students with time on their hands forced the Pentagon to stop using drafted American kids as cannon fodder and altered the political landscape of France.

  The tightening of fiscal screws that began with the 1973 oil crisis may not have been a conspiracy to rein in this dangerous laxness, but it has certainly worked out to the advantage of the powerful. Ever since, prices have ratcheted upwards in relation to hours worked and the results of this squeeze can be seen everywhere. Protesters today seem like peasants outside the castle gates compared to the fiercely determined and unified crowds I joined in the sixties. Our confidence grew out of a feeling that large sections of the population – and the media – were with us and from what we saw as the inexorable power of our music and our convictions. In our glorious optimism, we believed that ‘when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake’. And we achieved a great deal before the authorities figured out how to capitalize on our self-destructiveness. Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society. The environmental and human rights movements and the theoretical equality of races and sexes are only the tip of a huge iceberg. Ideals that remain our source of hope for the future took root in the sixties.