In general, the late 1970s was a restive time for Baerwald. He recorded with one L.A. punk band, the Spastics, then spent three years playing bass, singing lead, and writing for another, the Sensible Shoes. “There was a part of me that knew that world was not a place I belonged,” he says. “It seemed to me that punk had just become a cartoon of itself, and I didn’t want to be in any more nightclubs. That life was too stupid and pathetic.”
IN 1984, BAERWALD began collaborating with an old acquaintance, David Ricketts, a musician of serious training who had played in the Philadelphia club scene in the 1970s, and who had moved to L.A. in hopes of writing film scores. The two Davids were markedly different people—Baerwald held bedrock musical values, Ricketts was more attuned to jazz and progressive musical forms; Baerwald was impulsive and moody, Ricketts, methodical and introspective—but somehow the combination worked. “We just plugged into each other at exactly the right time,” says Baerwald. “I remember the first thing we wrote was an abrasive punkish piece, and the second song was this sweet piano-and-string ballad. We did both in the same day, and we looked at each other and said: ’There’s no limit to what we can do.’ It felt like an incredible freeing up. Basically, I backed off from the music part, and Ricketts had no lyrical input or sense of what the lyrics were. So it was extremely easy to work together.”
Almost immediately, Baerwald began to focus on songs about desperate dreamers, wounded lovers, and corrupt visionaries. “I could sense that I had a good well to draw from,” he says, “that I had been living in a story-oriented environment. Also, I was formulating my experiences of the past, and I felt I had a lot to say about it all. I remember driving down Sunset with David, saying, ’Let’s write the archetypal record about L.A. as metaphor.’ I actually said that to him. It seemed like a fertile starting point for making records. So we approached it as if it were a first novel, setting the groundwork for everything else to come. The idea was to provide a cast of characters that would give us a deep oeuvre to work in.”
In 1985, Baerwald and Ricketts signed a deal with A & M Records as David + David, and shortly teamed up with critic and producer Davitt Sigerson. Within a few sessions, the crew had fashioned Boomtown, a work that took a significant step toward realizing Baerwald’s highfalutin literary ambitions. Indeed, like the L.A. literature of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Diane Johnson, and James Ellroy, Baerwald was writing stories about the hopeful and the hopeless interconnecting in a desperate and morally polluted cityscape. Some of these characters come to the city with excited, even virtuous dreams of love, luxury, and salvation. Others—like the chronic, pathetic wife-beater of “Ain’t So Easy” or the drifters and grifters of “Swallowed by the Cracks”—have darker needs, like uncaring sex and obliterating drugs, and as their own mean dreams fail, they take the innocent and loving down with them. Says producer Davitt Sigerson: “Baerwald wrote about some typically romanticized rock & roll characters—the down-and-outers—in a way that was unmawkish and that seemed to capture those people. And the musical settings that Ricketts came up with did a great job of cinematizing those stories. We always had this picture of the music as a beautiful setting with people losing their grip on life in the middle of it.”
Indeed, Boomtown was something of an anomaly in L.A.’s mid-1980s rock scene. Like Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, Concrete Blonde, the Minutemen, X, the Blasters, and other local bands, David + David were serving up abrasive truths, though in a musical manner that was more conventionally accessible, and that sensibility, with its Steely Dan-derived blend of pop melodies and jazz rhythms, was well suited to the mainstream aesthetic. This approach earned the pair some scabrous dismissal from the scene’s more rigid postpunk ideologues, but it also won David + David a fast-rising Top 40 single (“Welcome to the Boomtown”), and some fervent critical praise.
Within a season, though, David + David began to pull apart. “We got a lot of attention quickly,” says Baerwald. “Too quickly. We began by pursuing this thing as a hobby, and six months later found ourselves doing an Italian TV show between two dog acts. When things happen that fast—when you’re touring constantly, cooped up in hotel rooms under pressure, answering the same press questions over and over—you start drinking more. When you start drinking, you get more hostile and start picking at the things the other person says and does. It had always been something of a volatile relationship, though mainly in a pleasant way. Now, it was volatile in an unpleasant way.”
In addition, the follow-up to Boomtown had to be delayed. Ricketts had become involved with folk singer Toni Childs, and started to arrange and produce her debut effort for A & M. Baerwald found Childs’ posthippie mysticism a bit cloying and humorless, and when he couldn’t resist poking fun at her manner, it led to tensions all around. Meantime, Baerwald was writing prolifically on his own, but A & M discouraged a solo venture so soon.
It was quickly turning into one of those bitter scenarios from Baerwald’s songs: A pair of dreamers link up in a town of high hopes, only to crisscross one another and lose their dream in the process. In 1988, David + David entered the studio to record their long overdue second LP, but the strain was too much. “On the first LP,” says Sigerson, “it was the fact that they barely fit that made it all brilliant. By the time of the second one, Ricketts had more of a sense of his career from having worked with Toni Childs, but Baerwald, who is explosive to begin with, had had a cork jammed in him for a year and a half. It was clear that he was growing as a writer—he had developed a better eye for characters—but it was hard for the two of them to be in a room together. Ricketts would try to get the keyboard sound right, and Baerwald—the K-mart Charlie Bukowski, who can get stuck in the schtick of his characters—would say, ’Fuck the sound; let’s do the song.’ But when you say fuck the keyboard sound, you’re also kind of saying, ’Fuck you and what you do’—or at least that’s how Ricketts heard it. In the end, the vibe was more than the process could bear.
“You know,” Sigerson continues, “Baerwald’s kind of like a cocker pup. He’s charming and delightful, but he’s inclined to pee on your leg. If you treasure cocker pups, it’s great. If you have a problem about getting your leg peed on, it can be an upsetting experience.”
Baerwald concurs with Sigerson’s assessment. “I never saw Ricketts as a sensitive guy,” he says, “as somebody whom I could hurt. And so I said and did things that were hurtful, and in time I realized Ricketts was an open, bleeding wound. He felt his music as deeply as I felt mine. And the truth is, what a lot of people liked about David + David was not “David Baerwald’s streetwise, world-weary personification of the gritty realities of modern life’ but rather the fact that the music sounded good, and Ricketts is the one who deserves credit for that.”
Baerwald pauses to light up a cigarette. He looks suddenly weary and a little doleful. “When people think of David + David,” he says, “the word innocence doesn’t come to mind. But we were very innocent: We were doing our music because it felt good. And then it got taken out of our hands. It was corrupted very quickly, and we didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to resist it. The record business is geared for fame bullshit and iconization bullshit.
“I guess it was over long before we realized it.”
BAERWALD MADE UP for the disintegration of David + David with some hard living. He moved around L.A. a lot, moved through a few love affairs, and started running with a faster, flashier crowd—including several pop stars and actors, including Sean Penn, with whom Baerwald roomed for a time, and with whom he wrote an as-yet-unproduced screenplay loosely based on Boomtown’s themes and characters. In some ways, it was a heady time, though much of it amounted to frenzied behavior—not unlike the lives led by the characters of his songs. “That world of stardom and luxury,” he says. “It can be a snobbish, vulgar, secret, sickened world.”
As Baerwald speaks, it is a few days after our first meeting, and he is seated on a worn sofa in his living room, in the bottom part of the wooded duplex he occupies
in Topanga Canyon. The place is a bit of a mess—strewn with clothes and bedding, and filled with guitars, exotic stringed instruments, and recording equipment. The dwelling has a makeshift feel about it, as if the person who lives here clearly lives on his own, and hasn’t yet found a place he would describe as home.
“A big part of me dug that whole scene,” says Baerwald about his fast-and-hard Hollywood life. “I was like a guy who’s addicted to gambling or something: He knows what he’s doing is stupid and ugly and wrong, but he keeps on doing it. Then you wake up one morning and find that you’re not anything, that you lost perspective on what it is that you do. I could say, ’Hey, I’m doing research for my writing’—that I was actually carving something horrible out of my heart or psyche—which on a certain level was true. But as a person, I wasn’t okay at all. I was a schmuck. I was twenty-six and I had a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things, and validation from some strata of society meant a lot to me at that moment.”
Perhaps it was simply his mood, but Baerwald began to see his own dissolution reflected in the world around him. In 1988, he was living close by the Chinese Theater, in Hollywood. By day, it is a tourist district. By night, it is a tense, restless community of runaways, young prostitutes, bikers, skinheads, drug dealers, and occasional gang members: all those castoffs bred—and then discarded and condemned—by a society that is unwilling to examine the causes of its own ruin. Baerwald already knew what life on the fringe was like—he had lived it at times, and had chronicled it in Boomtown. Now, he wanted to see how the deterioration looked from a different vantage. At the prompting of Sean Penn, who had been acting in Dennis Hopper’s Colours, about L.A.’s gang life, Baerwald began hanging out with cops, and interviewed them about the death and futility they faced every day.
“It was really a disturbing experience,” he says, “and it entered into my life. I would look at these acts of degradation that these cops saw all the time, and I’d ask myself: ’How different am I from that?’ You start realizing your own wicked soul, you know?”
Baerwald gets up, moves around restlessly for a few moments, then finally grabs a beer from the refrigerator and settles back into the sofa. “I started seeing all these connections,” he says, unscrewing the cap on the beer bottle and taking a sip. “Connections between gangs and drugs and cops and the government, and I began thinking about what it meant to live in a free society. I just started thinking very dark thoughts about our civilization and everything we were doing, and I got a feeling of total impotence in the face of such insanity and such stupid violence.
“I saw I was as much a criminal as anybody,” Baerwald continues, “because I was a part of the media, and I’d had this long fascination with violence. And I understood better how violence breeds violence and becomes a chain that never stops. The danger of the kind of environment we live in is that our own failures can breed a desire for violence—or at least we start using that as an excuse for our violence. But if you start thinking in social terms, you can get very bitter and very mad. Real community is a hard thing to achieve in our lives, much less our society. That’s why I began writing so many love songs, because I didn’t want merely to preach about these things. I wanted to relate them to the specifics of my own life.”
From this mix of personal disappointment and social disenchantment came a new body of songs. In June 1989, Baerwald did some initial solo sessions with producer Steve Berlin (of Los Lobos), then a few months later, hooked up with bassist and producer Larry Klein (married at the time to Joni Mitchell). In many ways, the resulting album, Bedtime Stories, is superior to Boomtown: It is a musically affecting work, rife with finely observed vignettes about a city and nation disintegrating from denial, and it is a record brimming with haunting portrayals of people trying to make love work, despite the pain of their pasts and the hopelessness of their futures.
In the album’s first single, “All for You,” a hopeful man brings his young beautiful wife to L.A. He works hard to support her—so hard, she feels abandoned by him, and takes to bed with another man who seems more understanding. Along the way, the husband gets involved in illegal activities; he loses his wife and his hope; she loses her lover; and the lover—who had been a friend of the husband—loses some of his honor. There are no heroes in the tale, and no villains. Just real people, trying to find love and connection and meaning. And the adulterer, the lover who helped end his friend’s marriage, was Baerwald.
“I’m trying to be more honest and intimate and specific about individuals this time,” he says, “in the hopes that those individuals will illuminate a larger whole. The idea was that I wanted these characters to emerge with something intact—their humanity, or compassion, or sensitivity. Just surviving, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a heroic act. It’s easy to survive if you’re a killer—especially if what you’ve killed is something inside yourself. It’s easy to live if you’re dead. But surviving with your humanity intact, I think, is always heroic.”
Across the room, the phone rings. Baerwald’s machine picks up the call, and the caller—whoever he is—plays a wild Hendrix-like guitar solo, then hangs up. Baerwald shakes his head bemused. “Sounds like Ricketts to me,” he says.
The two Davids are still good friends, still get drunk together, but there is clearly a distance between them now. “There’s something about that relationship that just won’t quit,” says Baerwald. “Ricketts was like a terrific big brother, but I had to find out what I could do on my own, and I’m just now finding that out.”
Baerwald takes another sip of beer and begins to explain that one of the harder-hitting songs on Bedtime Stories, “Dance,” was written about the experience he had shared with Ricketts in the music industry. “I adapted ’Dance,’ ” he says, “from a Paul Bowles short story. It’s about a naive language student who goes to Morocco to find a tribe that speaks this dialogue he’s studying. He goes to the chieftain and says, ’I am a seeker of knowledge.’ And the chieftain says, ’Oh, are you?’ And the tribe grabs the student and they tear his clothes off and they castrate him, and blind him, and cut his tongue out. They feed him hallucinogenic drugs and they pierce his flesh with needles and dangle bells from him. And they make him dance for their entertainment.”
Baerwald finishes his beer, and laughs uproariously at the story he has just told. “That story,” he says, “reminded me of my experience with the record business. I came into this scene, and I said, ’I just want to learn to make music.’ And these guys said, ’All right, fine. But you’ve got to dance, you know.’
“ ’But I don’t know how to dance,’ I said. And they said, ’Well, you will.’ ”
PART 6
endings
dark shadows: hank williams, nick drake, phil ochs
Three “popular music” artists long dead—Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs—all had new collections in record stores in the same week in August 1986. If this coincidence seems at all curious, or even a bit morbid, then consider what other traits these singers have in common:
Hank Williams was a restive country-western singer and songwriter who, in both his work and life, seemed perpetually torn between visions of heaven and sin, hope and fear, love and death. Somewhere along his celebrated route, dread gained the upper hand and the singer fell into drink, pills, and a bitter malaise. On January 1, 1953, at age twenty-nine, Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car, en route to a performance in Charleston, West Virginia. He was the victim of a deadly mix of drugs, alcohol, and hard living. All indications were, Williams had seen the end coming for some time. He even addressed it in a song called “The Angel of Death”: “The lights all grow dim and dark shadows creep.”
Roughly twenty years later in England, a frail-seeming folk singer named Nick Drake took an equally consuming 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 Novembe
r morning in 1974, Drake was found dead at his parents’ home in Birmingham, England, the casualty of an overdose of antidepressant medication and, according to 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 humor, songs that seethed with idiosyncratic dreams of a better and more ethical culture. At the same time, some of Ochs’ most memorable work also radiated with affecting, firsthand images of anguish and madness, until by the mid-1970s—after his vocal chords had been severely damaged by a mugging attack in Africa and his career had all but collapsed in disillusion—the agony became insufferable. In April 1976, Phil Ochs hanged 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 all men who knew torment on an intimate and enduring basis—knew it so well that it robbed them of any practical will to escape its devastation. It is hard to say whether their music served to deepen or assuage their agony (certainly, in Ochs’ and Drake’s cases, the lack of a caring audience at times aggravated their depression, while for Williams, success seemed only to hasten dissolution), but one thing is plain: Their songs did not mask the reality of the men behind them. If anything, the quality of longing and desolation that characterized much of Williams’, Ochs’, and Drake’s most indelible work seemed inseparable from the frightful realities of longing and desolation that eventually weighed down each man’s life.
Night Beat Page 44