Night Beat (56 page)

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

T
o 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

R
ock & 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 the 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.

When Dennis Wilson drowned on the evening of December 28, 1983—the victim of a diving accident—there was much talk about his ill-famed indulgences over the years. There was also much made of how the family and group—rarely inseparable but also rarely unified—had fallen into bitter bickering (the band, in fact, came close to disintegrating several times, and Dennis and Mike Love had such an abrasive relationship 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 family friction and drinking problems.

There wasn’t, however, much said about just how well this group 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 many reports point out how the Beach Boys had managed 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 reminder of a past long used and reclaimed merely to satisfy an audience’s whims. If he drank or sulked a bit more as a result of swallowing 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.

marvin gaye: troubled soul

M
ore than any other artist of the pop generation, Marvin Gaye rose to the emotional promise, stylistic challenge, and cultural possibility of modern soul. In fact, he was often cited as the man who singlehandedly modernized Motown: a sensual-voiced man full of spiritual longings (and spiritual confusion) whose landmark 1971 album
What’s Going On
commented forcefully yet eloquently on matters like civil rights and Vietnam—subjects that many R & B artists, up until that time, had sidestepped.

Though that eventful record was in some ways the apex of Gaye’s career (he would never again return to themes of social passion), Marvin remained a resourceful performer up through the time of the last work released in his lifetime, 1982’s
Midnight Love
(Columbia). Watching him command the stage at 1983’s Motown Anniversary TV special, or seeing him graciously accept his first Grammy Award a few weeks later, it felt as if we were witnessing the rejuvenation of a once-troubled man, who learned to transform his dread into artistic courage, even grace. Hearing the news of his violent and improbable end—shot to death on April 1, 1984, by his minister father—it seemed likely that rugged emotions and rampageous fears were never far from the singer’s closest thoughts, after all. According to David Ritz’s 1985 biography of Gaye,
Divided Soul,
Gaye remained deeply troubled and ungovernable toward his life’s end—indeed, a doomed and restless man marked by fear, debt, sexual violence, religious guilt, jealousy, and, ultimately, a self-loathing 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 uncommonly well, and at times that knowledge overwhelmed his music. In part, the worldly-spiritual insight was a product of the singer’s upbringing. Back during the period when his father, Marvin Gaye, Sr., was an active apostolic minister in Washington, D.C., Gaye grew up singing in an evangelical gospel choir, though he also spent much of his youth privately listening to the more secular forms of bebop, doo-wop, big band jazz, and R & B. Both the spiritual and early influences left an indelible impression on the singer, and following a term in the air force, he returned to Washington and began singing in street-corner R & B groups, melding the passion of gospel with themes of ever-suffering worldly romance (which, in that period, was a refined metaphor for sex).

In 1957, Gaye formed his own vocal group, the Marquees—a polished harmony troupe—and with the support of Bo Diddley, the group recorded for the Okeh label. In 1958, Harvey Fuqua enlisted the group as his backing ensemble in the Moonglows, who 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 him to his then-struggling Tamla-Motown label. Shortly after, Gaye married Gordy’s sister, Anna, and began working for Motown, primarily as a quick-witted, propulsive drummer (his bop-derived rhythmic drive can be heard on the early singles of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, among others).

In 1962, Gaye scored his first Motown hit, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and throughout the decade recorded the most extraordinary body of Motown singles—all rife with a definitionally sexy-cool brand of vocalizing and a sharp, blues-tempered backbeat. Working 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 prime songwriting 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,” “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You,” “Ain’t That Peculiar,” and his most successful 1960s recording, “I Heard It Through 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 the most passionate singing of his career—was with Tammi Terrell, with whom 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 tumor—collapsed into Gaye’s arms during 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).

When Gaye reemerged, it was in 1971 with the self-written, self-produced, politically thematic
What’s Going On.
The record not only forced soul music to deal with the unpopular realities of a hardened sociopolitical scene (though Sly Stone had also started to do the same in his music), but was also among the first albums to establish a soul-pop star as a major artist of his own design. The effect was seismic: Within months Stevie Wonder was fighting (successfully) for the same brand of creative autonomy that Gaye had achieved with Motown’s factory-minded structure, while such other venerable R & B artists as the Temptations and Curtis Mayfield began recording social-minded soul-rock that had been inspired and in no small part made possible by Gaye’s breakthrough achievement.

But Gaye refused to remain adherent to that one aesthetic-political epiphany, and in many ways that made for a varied but also wildly unsettled late career. In 1973, he turned his attention to purely erotic matters with
Let’s Get It On,
which introduced a manner of sexual explicitness to mainstream pop that, for such inheritors as Prince, certainly had tremendous impact. In the meantime, Gaye’s stormy marriage to Anna Gordy was coming to a rough end, and the divorce settlement (which caused Gaye to file for bankruptcy and eventually leave the United States for asylum in Belgium) was the subject of his most personal work, the two-record
Here, My Dear,
which the singer released to satisfy his overdue alimony payments (though his ex-wife later considered suing him over the record’s contents). In 1981, Gaye released his final Motown work,
In Our Lifetime,
a haphazard but oddly compelling meditation on love—and a tortured, hell-fire vision of death.

By all accounts, Gaye was a despairing man during this period (by his own admission, he once attempted suicide by overdose of cocaine), and when he left Motown for Columbia in 1982, even his staunchest admirers surmised that his prime work was behind him. But
Midnight Love
(1982) was not merely an elegant, stylistic rebound, it was also the most hopeful and celebratory work of his career. Gaye wrote, arranged, produced, and performed all the music himself, and though on the surface
Midnight Love
seemed merely a reprisal of the sex themes and rhythms of
Let’s Get It On,
the singer clearly pursued physical and spiritual notions of fulfillment on the album as if they were mutually inseparable ends. Gaye seemed to regard sex as a way of renewing will and spirit after debilitating emotional setbacks, and as an interesting if somewhat puzzling way of asserting his religious desires. “Apparently beyond sex is God . . . ” he told Mitchell Fink in a 1983
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
interview. “So one has to have one’s fill before one finds God.”

It is not likely that Gaye found his fill before his sudden, grievous death, nor is it likely that he was even close to peace of mind or to his God’s grace. Just the same, his fans were not ready to witness the end of such an ingenious and alluring sensibility. Gaye’s 1983 tour of America seemed to promise something more than a wildly enjoyable comeback: It seemed an act of brave reclamation—Gaye’s way of reasserting his musical preeminence, and making sense of all those counterpoised notions of joy and anger, pain and ecstasy, that made up the character of his singing and writing for over two decades.

He was a major artist of our passage from pop innocence to social unrest, and he was just beginning to illuminate a new, even more complex, sensual temperament. Perhaps, as biographer David Ritz suggests, Gaye wanted nothing more than a way out of the madness and pain of his life—but perhaps he may have found that way in kinder terms, had his life not been blasted from him by his father. To our everlasting loss, we must live with what now seems—along with Sam Cooke’s terribly foreshortened brilliance—the most hurtful of soul music’s unfinished promises. But if anything can blunt such pain, it is the wonderful and transcendent legacy of Marvin Gaye’s music itself. Though it was his friend Smokey Robinson, and not Gaye, who sang “I gotta dance to keep from crying,” it is in such times as Gaye’s murder that those words assert their deepest meanings.