What is especially intriguing about 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, but more important, also provide heartening examples of how the singers sought 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 albums plus another disc of largely unissued material), this quality of resistance may seem a bit elusive at first hearing. After all, Drake began his career (with the 1968 Five Leaves Left) in what seemed a moody, perhaps even disconsolate frame of mind—singing songs about fleeting desire and lasting solitude in a smoky, almost affectless tone—and abandoned his vocation four years later with what is among the darkest works in modern folk history, Pink Moon. By that time, Drake had stripped his music of its innovative jazz and classical trimmings, until all that remained were his guitar and a mesmerizing, almost frozen-sounding voice that seemed to emanate from within a place of impenetrable solitude.
Yet for all its melancholy, there is surprisingly little in the actual sound and feel of Drake’s music that is dispiriting or unpleasant. In fact, what is perhaps the most alluring and uplifting aspect of Drake’s work is a certain hard-earned passion for aural beauty: There are moments in the singer’s first two albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter—with their chamberlike mix of piano, vibraphone, harpsichord, viola, and strings—that come as close as anything in modern pop to matching the effect of Bill Evans’ or Ravel’s brooding music, and there are moments in Drake’s final recordings that are as primordial and transfixing as Robert Johnson’s best deep-dark blues. In short, there is something bracing 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 fundamentally heartsick—or at least that’s the portrait that emerges from two 1986 eye-opening retrospectives that fill in important gaps in the singer’s story. The first set, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, is the fourth volume in an ambitious series from PolyGram that gathers all of Williams’ late-1940s and early-1950s studio recordings in chronological order, including numerous invaluable outtakes and demo tracks—among them, versions of several songs never released before. As impressive as this series is (remarkably, it is the first attempt to assemble such a complete and well-documented library of the singer’s studio works—though a ten-LP 1981 Japanese set was a big step in the right direction), the other new Williams’ set, The First Recordings (Country Music Foundation), is perhaps even more priceless. Here, available for the first time, are the seminal demo sessions that the young songsmith recorded for Acuff-Rose in 1946, and at the very least they reveal that from the outset Williams was an immensely effective folk singer. That is, not only could he convey the spirit and meaning of his material with just voice and guitar, but in fact such a spare approach often reinforced that essential “lonesomeness” that always resided deep in the heart of his music. More important, though, Williams was already traveling the road between faith and dejection—and modern music would never be the same as a result of that brave and hurtful journey.
Similarly, Phil Ochs also made a difficult migration—and one would be hard-pressed to find a work that better illuminates that journey’s brilliance and tragedy than A Toast to Those Who Are Gone, a compilation of previously unreleased songs 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 Williams’ The First Recordings, this seminal material staked out virtually all the thematic ground that would concern the singer throughout his career. What emerges 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-mongers and truthless presidents. Eventually, according to some, there was a part of Ochs that grew sad and manic and that enabled him to take his life. However, listening to this music—which is among the singer’s best—one hears only the inspiring expression of a man who wanted to live very, very much, and who wanted his country to realize its grandest 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 nevertheless much to learn from them. For example, in heeding the work of Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs, one learns a great deal about dignity and the limits of courage: These were men who held out against the dark as forcefully as possible and, in doing so, created music that might help improve and sustain the world they eventually left behind. Maybe, by examining their losses—and by appreciating the hard-fought beauty that they created despite their anguish—we can gain enough perspective or compassion to understand how lives might come undone, and therefore how we might help them (or ourselves) hold together. After all, if Williams or Drake or Ochs were still here, chances are it would be a better world for many people—including you and me.
IN THE EARLY 1980s, a young Canadian director named David Acomba made a film called Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave. It’s among the best—certainly among the most unforgettable—music films I have ever seen. It uses pop music as a means of contemplating (even entering) imminent death, and in the process resolving, explaining, and perhaps redeeming 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 Williams’ final few hours on earth. A night-blue Cadillac is traveling on a lonely, snowy road. In the back seat, the lean grim figure of Hank Williams (played by a Woody Guthrie-influenced Canadian folk singer, Sneezy Waters) stirs fitfully. On the radio one of Williams’ pedal-steel-laden hits is playing. Leaning forward, he abruptly snaps it off.
Williams begins to rue the loneliness of the night. “I wish I didn’t have to be playing that big concert arena . . . tomorrow night,” he mutters to himself. “Tonight’s the night I should be playing . . . one 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, Williams’ ruminations become reality: We see him pulling up to a jam-packed honky-tonk, his five-piece band finishing the strains of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” a crowd of old rubes and young rowdies in semi-religious awe of this country kingpin. With self-conscious meekness, Williams takes the small stage and begins to play his exhilarating and broken-hearted minstrel songs—”Half as Much,” “Hey Good Lookin’,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You,” “Kaw-Liga,” “Lovesick Blues,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” among others. He also talks to the audience self-deprecatingly 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 film—devil or keeper—tells him is, “Give ’em a good show.” Williams looks paralyzed at the mere suggestion.
Not much else happens. There are brief bouts of flirtation, camaraderie, and self-destructiveness backstage, some more icy self-reflections in the back seat of the Cadillac. And yet it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a man struggling to account for himself—his hurts, his hopes, his soul, his terror, his deviltry—in the measure of this handful of unpolished songs.
And that’s just what happens. When in mid-show Williams begins to reminisce about his first wife, Audrey, and then moves into an unaccompanied reading of his haunting folk ballad, “Alone and Forsaken,�
�� the movie provides an emotional wallop that we never quite forget. From that point on, the crowd in the barroom watches Williams more heedfully, more perplexedly, as they gradually become aware that they are privy to the confessions of a man with a heart so irreparably broken that he may never get out of this world with his soul intact.
By the end, we have come as close to a reckoning with dissolution, death, and judgment as film—or pop music—has ever brought us. “It might seem funny that a man who’s lived the kind of life I have is talking about heaven when he should be talking about hell,” Williams tells his audience before moving into a desperately passionate version of his gospel classic, “I Saw the Light.” Moments later, in the lonely, fading reality of the Cadillac’s back seat, Williams admits to himself: “Only there ain’t no light. I tried, Lord knows how hard I tried, to believe. And some mornings I wake up and it’s almost there.” The moment is more frightening and desolate than might be imagined.
As good as Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave is, I’m afraid you might have to look damn hard to find it. Acuff-Rose, the Nashville publishing firm that owns the rights to Williams’ extensive songbook, withheld permission for the filmmakers to use Williams’ songs, thus in effect barring the film’s U.S. release. Acuff-Rose’s response was a little hard to fathom. After all, Williams’ excesses were not merely pop legend—they were a matter of record. Roy Acuff himself was a member of the country gentleman Nashville establishment that expelled Williams from the Grand Ole Opry because of his drinking, drug use, intoxicated performances, and occasional gunplay.
Maybe Acuff came to regret Nashville’s staidness so deeply that he preferred to see its history go unpublicized, or maybe he never quite forgave Williams for refusing to keep his demons private and thus marring the smooth façade 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 someone give 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 filmmakers] stressed the weakness of the man, rather than the greatness that rose from his work.”
To my mind, Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave did just the opposite: It got as close to the artist’s greatness as any biographical or fictional work might. The only thing that gets closer is the frightened yet lucid soul of Williams’ own songs. “The lights all grow dim and dark shadows creep.” The Show He Never Gave takes us right into those shadows—and maybe that’s not an easy thing to forgive.
tim hardin: lost along the way
First time I got 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 time on their way to a gig in Cleveland, Paul Simon and fellow band members in One Trick Pony play a game whose object it is to name the most dead rock stars. Tim Hardin comes up, and an argument ensues. One guy insists the drug-plagued 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 man, or revered his work, had steeled themselves long ago for his end.
For the record, Hardin wrote some of the most indelible, affecting, and frequently recorded love songs of the 1960s. Musicians who knew him in Greenwich Village during 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 albums (Tim Hardin I and Tim Hardin II). “Timmy was breaking new ground,” he recalls. “Probably everybody in the Village during that period stole something from his songs—which isn’t exactly singular since we were all stealing from each other, anyway. But Timmy’s talent was singular; he dared to go, both musically and emotionally, where most of us feared to go, 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 mid-1960s, Hardin wrote the bulk of the songs that secured his reputation, including “Misty Roses,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Reason to Believe,” and “Lady Came from Baltimore,” the latter a frank, self-indicting account of his romance with actress Susan Moore (who later became his wife). And although his own roughhewn readings of his songs never enjoyed much chart success, he still sang them better than anybody else, in a stray, harrowed voice, redolent of his chief vocal idols, Billie Holiday and Hank Williams. By 1970, Hardin’s career had run aground. Beset by marital wrangles, managerial suits, and narcotic funks, he eventually fled to England, where he recorded one wholly unmemorable album, Tim Hardin 9 (1973), and gradually receded into the dark custody of his own legend.
In 1980, he was back in Eugene, Oregon—his hometown—for a while, seemingly intent on a fresh start. Michael Dilley, a studio owner and former high 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 mood. “Occasionally, though, it was like he forgot what he was doing. He’d come into the studio, sit down at the piano, and come out with something absolutely gorgeous, and then it would hang there sometimes, like an unfinished sentence.”
On the warm evening of December 29, 1980, responding to a tip from an anonymous caller, police found Tim Hardin’s body lying on the floor of his small, austere Hollywood apartment. He was dead, at age 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 most haunting, lovingly crafted works of his career. It goes like this: “As long as I am unforgiven/As far as I am pushed away/As much as life seems less than living/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 the mid-1950s, following the advent of Elvis Presley—occurred during a period when family bonds and values were being strained, sometimes severed, by postnuclear conditions of generational freedom. Consequently, for millions of unrestrained young Americans, the connections they shared through Presley were often more genuine than the ties they found at home. The irony behind this, of course, was that rock & roll sprang from the Southern region, where strong family ties still mattered (though not always for the better).
By contrast, the Wilsons were a California family, subject to those same mid-1950s permutations, but distinct in their placement in a still largely undefined land, where both Western civilization and popular culture ran to their ends. Like many other Westerners, Murry Wilson regarded California as something of a promised land, rife with opportunity; like many other young 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 something far more debilitating—including 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 admitting to the depths—good, bad, or otherwise—under the surfaces.
In 1961, along with cousin Mike Love and neighbor Al Jardine, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson began making music as the Beach Boys—a real family, acting out California dreams and rock & roll ambitions, advised and managed by father Murry Wilson. Brian wrote the songs—quick, brilliant anthems of youthful transcendence and romance, whirligigs of contrapuntal rock—but it was younger brother Dennis (the band’s early drummer and later harmony singer) who provided Brian’s songs with a model: He was the sole group member who took up t
he regional pastime of surfing, and he was also the family’s most indulgent 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 more high-flown late-1960s hedonism, the Beach Boys’ run was, in a way, over. The group toyed for a while with the idea of a topical name change, 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 times, and by the Beatles’ exceptional creative growth, 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 contemporary recordings. 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 was written, the Beach Boys again had a number 1 single, 1988’s silly and lamentable “Kokomo.”)
Pushed aside, the group’s members gave in to the dark side of Californian ambitions. Brian, beset by personal and drug problems, became a shadowy, receding 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 album, though the group later purchased the rights). Despite these lapses, the band still made enterprising, 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 time, of course, the group 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 “reminder” of more “innocent” years. After that, they were largely consigned to living out their history according to past glories, despite occasional attempts to make new music.
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