I can never listen to Nick Drake without
feeling a nagging, non-specific sense of guilt. This is crazy, of course: there
wasn't anything I could have done to change the course of his short life. Heck,
I was ten years old when he died, had never heard of him, and anyway at that
time his music hadn't even travelled very far beyond the few people who had a
hand in it being recorded and released; it certainly wouldn't have reached the
ears of a child in South Gippsland. (And even if it had, what would that child
have made of its quiet, non-demonstrative, haunting tones?)
(In fact, my first exposure to the name
"Nick Drake" came in about 1977 (or so), when I read a review of
"Bryter Later" in the Australian fortnightly music paper RAM; it must have been either a reissue
or, perhaps, the first Australian release. I don't remember getting any sense
from the review of it being anything other than a new record. For whatever
reason, lost to time now, the review stayed with me. (Thanks for that and much
else besides, Anthony O'Grady.))
Nevertheless, his story permeates his
music, even forty years later. Who, after all, was Nick Drake? Aside from the
records, other recorded fragments, photographs, and reminiscences (and as much
as I worship at the feet of Joe Boyd, I can't help suspecting that his own
memories might, intentionally or otherwise, have been twisted by decades of external hagiography),
we only really have mythology.
My best guess is that, to paraphrase Brian
Wilson, Nick Drake not only wasn't made for his times, he wasn't really made
for any times. Living in the world, at least the world outside of his family
home, seems to have been too much for him. So, if he had had during his
lifetime the success that his music obviously deserved (and has posthumously
attained), what then? The evidence suggests that he wouldn't have handled it. His
story was destined not to have a happy ending. Perhaps the best he (we?) could
have hoped for would have been three albums released to moderate acclaim and
sales, followed by more of the same, to similar or reduced sales, a common
enough career arc for a musician (think Ron Sexsmith; or Aimee Mann; or, maybe
even, Elvis Costello). Maybe there would have been a latter-day hipster-driven
revival, a la Johnny Cash or John Fahey.
But that's not what happened. Those three
albums remain, they have always been with us, they have never been diluted by
whatever may have happened next because nothing happened next.
Well, nothing except the Four Last Songs. They
first surfaced, at least officially, on the vinyl box set "Fruit
Tree", which was released in 1979 and then released again, in slightly
different form, in 1986. I spent many afternoons gazing wistfully at the
latter, perched, as it was, on a high shelf beside the counter at Discurio
Records in the city, but, as a poor university student, I had no hope of ever being
able to buy it. By then Nick Drake was a name that you saw around, but, in that
pre-internet age, it wasn't easy to actually hear the music. That didn't happen
for me until some time later, when I picked up a copy of the 1986 "Time of
No Reply" CD compilation. So to my ears "Black Eyed Dog" sits
(un)naturally as a part of the Nick Drake discography. It wasn't until later again
that I learnt the real story of it, and of the other three stark, desolate,
desperate pieces of music that were recorded at the same time. They are all the
sound of a door closing.
"Black Eyed Dog", I think, hits
hardest of all of them, harder than any other piece of music I can think of. I
cannot listen to it without involuntarily shuddering. And yet I cannot not
listen to it. Look, here I am doing it again. Like a rabbit in the headlights,
waiting to be struck down but unable to move; mesmerised.
