White Bicycles (33 page)
Theoretically, as our associate producer, he was there to view our most recent changes to the film. But Leo was from a generation of educated, upwardly mobile blacks for whom ‘sophistication’ was a key word. He was a friend of Harry Edison and his musical taste was epitomized by Sarah Vaughan, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Dorothy Dandridge and – on the outer fringe – Miles Davis. He disliked Miles’s Hendrix-inspired experiments and found Jimi’s influence on music and on the image of black people in general somewhat distasteful.
This conflict between his position and his taste usually led to a quick change of subject. He would give us a blow-by-blow account of the week’s events at the trial. He could do wicked impersonations of the judge, the prosecuting attorney and the police witnesses as they twisted like pretzels to try to pin the charge on Davis. We understood why he was such a great defence attorney; Angela Davis was found not guilty.
Many hours in the editing room were spent poring over the Isle of Wight footage. In contrast to the situation with the other Hendrix material, we had secured all five camera rolls (shot by the remarkable ‘Tattoist’ camera operators collective) and could make our own choice of cuts. We were particularly impressed with Camera 5, Nic Knowland’s camera from stage right. During ‘Red House’, Knowland focuses on the microphone in profile as Jimi leans in to sing a line then resists the temptation to follow as Jimi backs away to play a guitar lick. With the left side of the frame filled with aquamarine light and mist, Jimi’s face suddenly darts back in through the haze as he delivers the next line. The shot is so musical, the viewer is pulled into the metre and flow of the song. We stayed on Camera 5 for huge swaths of the Isle of Wight sequence at the end of the film. The mood created by director Murray Lerner and the Tattoist team captured the despair and genius of Jimi’s performance. We ended the film with the shot of him dropping his guitar on stage with a thud and walking away, as if he had just tossed an empty cigarette pack into the gutter. Three weeks later, he was dead.
I had little contact with Hendrix during his lifetime. I met him once at UFO and was at the famous Saville Theatre show where he jumped on top of Noel Redding and seemed to be either hitting or humping him. Delving into his short life to assemble the film was fascinating and unbearably sad. Before being discovered, he made pilgrimages to the Greenwich Village clubs I had frequented with Paul Rothchild and became obsessed with Dylan and the folk-rock scene. In the R&B world where he made his living he was surrounded by brilliant talents who dreamed of
The Ed
Sullivan Show
, Las Vegas,
American Bandstand
and the Top Forty. Jimi, alone of his Harlem friends, fantasized about being managed by Albert Grossman, playing in London with the Rolling Stones or the Beatles and writing songs about gypsies and space travel. Fayne Pridgin told of the time Jimi brought a ‘special present’ for her from London. ‘
Acid?
What the fuck is
acid
?’ There were few in Harlem into anything besides grass, coke, booze or smack.
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.
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 explaining 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: