All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  But the album that really drew Drake tightly to its solipsistic self through 1967 was an obscure offering recorded in London in the summer of 1965 by an American singer-songwriter friend of Paul Simon’s, Jackson Frank. Recorded in two afternoons, the self-titled ten-song set was the only record Frank would release in his lifetime (a start was made on a second album in 1975, only for Frank to confront solid walls of disinterest and another writer’s block).

  Chronically self-conscious, Frank remembered ‘hiding behind a screen while I was singing and playing, because . . . I didn’t want anyone to see me’. But before Frank’s album was even in the shops, its producer, Paul Simon, was already planning a return to the States. Frank, meanwhile, began a serious relationship with another fledgling folkie, then training to be a nurse, the nubile Sandy Denny (who briefly became pregnant by him). At the same time, he started booking acts for the music club Les Cousins, known as singer-songwriter central for any West End folkie looking for a gig. While there, he befriended the likes of John and Beverley Martyn, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch.

  However, Frank was already in the grip of psychological problems dating back to when he was eleven and a furnace at school blew up and nearly killed him, scarring him for life both mentally and physically. By the time Drake began to learn the songs of Jackson Frank, the American had returned to New York, hoping to find and renew his friendship with Simon. He never did, and soon he was wandering the streets homeless, suffering from what was clearly undiagnosed schizophrenia, until he was finally institutionalized9. Meanwhile, the likes of Denny, Jansch and Martyn continued to talk about Frank and sing his songs, making that soon-deleted eponymous debut a reverently whispered soundtrack to the English singer-songwriter boom.

  None of this was known to Drake at the time. And yet he was playing no less than four songs from that singular long-player: ‘Milk and Honey’ and ‘Blues Run the Game’, both popularized by Denny and others in the Cousins crowd; the almost Johnsonesque ‘Here Comes the Blues’, which Aussie folkie Ross Grainger recalled being still part of Drake’s repertoire in autumn 1969; and the traditional ‘Kimbie’, Drake’s home-demo that unmistakeably mimics Frank’s one-off interpretation. All of these he faithfully transposed on to his trusty reel-to-reel in the months after returning from France.

  Something of Frank’s tortured personality had evidently possessed Drake. And such was Frank’s baleful influence that, when Drake wrote his first documented original song, ‘Princess of the Sand’, in the summer of 1967, it was a barely disguised musical adaptation of ‘Milk and Honey’. And assuming that Robin Frederick was the princess who ‘moved her mouth but there came no sound’, as seems likely, the song was also the first in a series of chaste idealizations of women he just couldn’t bring himself to know biblically. Drake’s family, unconversant with Frank or Frederick, were greatly impressed by the newborn songwriter who returned from his summer sojourn ready, or so they thought, to prepare for a university education amid Cambridge’s lofty spires. His actress sister, Gabrielle, remembers how ‘he came home from Aix-en-Provence, [and] in the drawing room he played mum and dad and me “Princess of the Sand”, and a couple of other songs. I thought, “Gosh, he’s become a fully fledged writer.”’

  In fact, such was that initial outpouring of original songs that at least an album’s worth of titles fell by the wayside before Drake even began recording his debut platter, a year hence. ‘Blue Season’, ‘Joey in Mind’, ‘Mickey’s Tune’, ‘Outside’, ‘Leaving Me Behind’, ‘Blossom’, ‘Bird Flew By’, ‘My Love Left with the Rain’, ‘Princess of the Sand (Strange Meeting II)’ and ‘To the Garden’ were all songs he reserved for the family-home tapes and/or exercise-book of lyrics, which he began filling in the first flush of enthusiasm for his own songs and maintained to the bitter end.

  The nature of these songs only serves to bolster Anthea Joseph’s contention that ‘when he started seriously writing songs, and Joe acquired him, it was too late, the damage was [already] done. The growth wasn’t there – the intellectual growth in songwriting terms.’ There were already disturbing undertones to many of the songs that now poured forth. ‘Bird Flew By’, one of the songs he committed to reel, took the traditional image of ‘the wind and the rain’, and made them complicit in a world-weary compact: ‘The wind and the rain shook hands again / Untouched by the world, they managed to stay sane . . .’, while the song’s chorus regularly repeated an imponderable query, ‘What’s the point of a year / Or a season?’

  Elsewhere, too, the changing of the seasons would often as not permeate these songs, invariably imbued with a self-conscious, almost Keatsian melancholy. In ‘My Love Left With the Rain’, the burden repeats the message: ‘This was our season, but sorrow waited round the bend.’ ‘Blue Season’ goes further still, the ‘you’ chastized in the lyric being another ‘I’ in disguise: ‘Everything’s wrong and you know you’re to blame / Nothing will change while you’re still the same.’

  Such defeatism remains a consistent motif in these early lyrics, which is somewhat surprising coming from someone so young and privileged. In ‘Outside’, which survives only as a lyric, he already envisages the likelihood that he will end up defeated by the world, even as he celebrates his new-found poetic sensibility: ‘Going to find a word / Make myself be heard / But if the world is too loud / I’ll be home from the crowd / Keep it soft inside, if it’s strange outside.’ Perhaps the strongest premonition of failure, though, can be found in a ‘lost’ verse from ‘River Man’, one of the finer songs with which he announced himself on Five Leaves Left. In its fuller, original guise, it caught the sound of beating wings of mortality:

  Betty fell behind awhile,

  Said she hadn’t time to smile,

  Or die in style.

  But still she tries.

  Said her time was growing short,

  Hadn’t done the things she ought . . .

  Arriving at Cambridge in September 1967, the collegiate Drake proved just as hard to pin down as the man who wrote such lyrics. Fellow student Brian Wells, who got closer than most, remembers how, in the middle of a convivial evening with ‘friends’, ‘he would get up and go; because you got the impression that he thought it was uncool to stay there and get pissed, or whatever’. To many there, he remained throughout his short tenure a slightly spectral figure. His college tutor described him as ‘pleasant but beyond reach – beyond my reach anyway’, while his college supervisor prophetically wrote in a March 1968 supervision report of ‘a Mona Lisa smile [that] seems to be the main stock-in-trade; what’s going on behind it I have little means of knowing’.

  Cambridge dons like these were used to bringing out the hidden gifts of introspective, bright young things, but Drake was already, in the words of another contemporary tutor’s report, ‘find[ing] difficulty in expressing [himself] orally . . . [while] his written work . . . is vague, rather scrappy and invariably inconclusive’. Being ‘vague . . . and invariably inconclusive’ when writing an essay could be a real problem, but as a songwriter it would prove to be Drake’s great strength. He always seems on the brink of revealing some poetic profundity; and all one need do to discern that true meaning, is listen again. And again.

  From the very first, Drake was not at all sure he wanted to be surrounded by the flat fells of Cambridgeshire. The previous summer he had told a travelling companion, ‘I’m doomed to Cambridge’, a point of view that prompted his friend to ask what he meant. He explained, ‘It’s all organized from the moment you’re born.’ Once there he did work, but not at his English course. It was his guitar-playing that consumed him, until he could play circles around any of his Cambridge contemporaries. As Wells recalls: ‘He was more than averagely lazy – he didn’t do any [course] work at all . . . [But] he would find a tuning and a riff and play it to death. He would muck about with tunings, put a capo on, get an interesting sound, then put a vocal melody on top.’

  And somehow, serendipitously, the phrasing, the picking, the lyrical flights al
l came together in a cohesive whole with precocious alacrity. One night in late January 1968 at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, somewhere in the nether regions of another all-night bill (this one for students from Brunel), Drake wove his magic long enough to catch the attention of the ever-attentive Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings10, Fairport Convention’s bassist. Hutchings gave Joe Boyd the diffident Drake’s number and suggested he call him up, which he did, expressing an interest in hearing something. It took Drake a few weeks to find his way to the office, but when he did, he had a tape for the already-prepped Boyd. The demo tape Drake gave to Boyd showed he hadn’t been entirely wasting his time in Cambridge.

  Still consumed by the torrent of songs spitting forth from his flighty muse, he was writing up a storm, and playing the results to those few friends at Cambridge who shared his obsession with music, among them Paul Wheeler, who had already struck up a friendship with another remarkable guitarist on Boyd’s radar, John Martyn. Drake permed the five strongest songs he felt he had at this point, the same ones he had just performed at his first ‘official’ Cambridge concert in the Bateman Room, and recorded them specifically for Boyd’s benefit. However, just two of these songs – ‘The Day is Done’ and ‘The Thoughts of Mary Jane’ – would feature on his debut album11. One of the songs ultimately overlooked was actually his signature piece at the time, ‘Time of No Reply’, the first time he directly addressed his own ‘difficulty in expressing [himself] orally’, blaming it all on the seasons:

  Summer was gone and the heat died down,

  And autumn reached for her golden crown,

  I looked behind as I heard a sigh,

  But this was the time of no reply.

  The recording Boyd heard came with no extraneous embellishment – a kind of preview for the Drake who would be defined by Pink Moon and his final 1974 recordings – but this was not just some home tape the undergrad had slung together. He had persuaded Peter Rice, a fellow student with a 15 i.p.s. reel-to-reel, who knew something about how to mike up a room, to record this handful of originals. According to Rice: ‘It took several goes to get him to be in a suitable state to do any recording.’ After all, a lot hinged on the results – even if Drake never revealed the purpose of these recordings to an out-of-pocket Rice.

  As well as finding ‘the clarity and strength’ of the performances ‘striking’, Boyd immediately thought he could hear a space for strings, and began to talk to Drake in terms of Leonard Cohen’s 1967 debut, Songs of . . . , a record that, surprisingly, Drake said he hadn’t heard. However, as Boyd relates in his own memoir: ‘He liked the idea of strings. He described performing with a string quartet at a Cambridge May Ball [sic], the first moment of our meeting when he became animated.’ So Drake and Boyd were agreed; the songs would be embellished with strings, to sweeten them for public consumption.

  But the strings in Drake’s head sounded nothing like those on Cohen’s album, or the ones that London arrangers gratuitously dolloped across other contemporary pop records. Boyd’s initial suggestion for an arranger, Richard Hewson – who had just worked on James Taylor’s Apple LP – proved ‘too mainstream’ for this young artist, who seemed unable to articulate what he wanted, but knew right away what he didn’t want. The Sound Techniques engineer John Wood, Boyd’s right-hand man at all those miraculous late-Sixties Sound Techniques sessions, was not the only one surprised to catch first sight of the intransigent side to this polite and well-spoken man:

  John Wood: Some people in a recording studio will do what you tell them. But he was getting quietly more and more aggravated. In the end he dug his heels in and dismissed the [original] arrangements . . . He knew what he wanted and if he didn’t get it, he would do it again, which is why [that first album] took such a long time.

  Boyd thought of himself as something of a perfectionist – that is, until he met Drake, who would introduce a song, then go away and work on it until he thought he’d got it, before eating up yet more tape working on the song, only to change his mind. But this was hardly the only reason why that all-important first album became such a drawn-out affair. Even if, for the moment, we discount Joseph’s view that ‘Nick would sort of pack up mentally’ (and we should not), another problem was that Drake’s idea of the album kept changing. This was not only as a result of the songs he was now writing, most of which were superior to those flights of fancy with which he’d wowed Boyd initially, but also due to some of the music he was being exposed to by other Cambridge conspirators.

  The songs and songwriters he had been covering on his home reels, with the exception of Frank, were standard folk revivalist fare. On these oft-bootlegged reels a couple of Dylan’s early acoustic paeans to an absent Suze trade places with lovelorn trad. stalwarts such as ‘The Water is Wide’ and ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’. But in Cambridge he was exposed to Tim Buckley, Randy NewmanThe 5th Dimension and mid-period Donovan – all great models for someone still in the formative stages of establishing an independent identity as a songwriter.

  Then, probably early in 1969, he chanced upon the second solo album of a blustering but surprisingly sensitive Ulster cowboy by the name of George Ivan ‘Call Me Van’ Morrison. Although Nick Kent has claimed, ‘Astral Weeks was another Drake Cambridge listening innovation’, it is more likely that the folk-oriented Drake was introduced to this devastating work by fellow students Brian Wells or Paul Wheeler. But whoever heard it first, the effect of the album was profound on all concerned. And once again, Drake latched on to an artefact made by a damaged soul, this one with a profoundly British sensibility.

  Morrison, an undiagnosed Asperger case, (still) prone to irrational outbursts and deep melancholia, which he self-medicated with hard booze, had been trying to make this album for the past two years. A singular suite of songs about his own East Belfast childhood, Morrison said in 1970 that he ‘wrote it as an opera’. The themes were as big as they come. As the late great Lester Bangs wrote for his definitive piece on the album (in Greil Marcus’s Stranded anthology): ‘It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison’s previous work had only suggested; but . . . there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work. I really don’t know . . . [if] there’s anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. [But] it did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate.’

  Drake’s Cambridge friend Robert Kirby later recalled the shared experience of listening to that album with Nick: ‘We were certainly listening to Astral Weeks heavily at that time . . . the string-bass playing, the violinist.’ But Drake did not just latch on to Morrison’s blues-infused, damaged-by-life sensibility, he seized on the subtle combination of flute, acoustic bass and guitar that producer Lewis Merenstein had skilfully applied as aural brushstrokes; and although he was a long way along with his own album, modelled on Cohen, Drake began to almost imperceptibly change the focus of his own album so that it sounded not so much like that, and more like this!

  Kirby, though, now had his own personal investment in the album. He had, after all, been brought in at Drake’s behest as someone who could arrange strings sympathetically, and had quickly inveigled himself into the process – much to a despairing Boyd’s relief. But now Drake seemed keen to get Pentangle acoustic bassist Danny Thompson – as close to a Richard Davis-type figure as he or Boyd could find – to dub his jazzier inflections on to parts of the album as a counterbalance to the more Cohenesque conceit initially imposed by Boyd.

  ‘River Man’ – the final song Drake recorded – was one song he cut with Thompson, though only after Kirby had admitted that scoring the song effectively was beyond him. But Boyd, still convinced it needed strings, drafted in another arranger, the eminent Harry Robinson, to whom Drake ‘played the song through, then strummed chords as the tape played, showing Harry the textures he wanted for the
string parts’. By now, Drake wasn’t about to let an ‘outside’ arranger ruin such a key song, and cut the song live while an impressed Robinson conducted the fully prepped string-section to play along, as the unexpressed battle with Boyd for the album’s sound continued to the last.

  Like Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, Drake’s Five Leaves Left suffered its own series of delays, not all down to the artist’s increasingly demanding vision. As such, despite being advertised as early as May, it did not appear until September 1969. And when it did appear, it was to the sound of one hand clapping. Boyd’s confidence in the capacity of the songs to communicate on the artist’s behalf proved unfounded. As he openly admits, ‘I was probably over-confident with Nick, thinking since everything had gone to plan with The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention . . . Nick proved the exception. I didn’t have a Plan B.’

  As far as Drake himself was concerned, he seemed to think the album would find its audience in much the same way he himself had stumbled on Jackson Frank’s album and Morrison’s Astral Weeks, by word of mouth, maybe after enjoying a period of critical recognition. But the former album was already a second-hand rarity while the latter, pre-Moondance, was still known only to a nominal cognoscenti of discerning folk (one of whom was a certain David Bowie, who again showed his magpie instincts were second to none by introducing ‘Madame George’ into his winter 1970 set).

  Like Barrett, Drake mustered every ounce of creative energy to make his statement, even though he suspected he was destined to be a prophet without honour (hence ‘Fruit Tree’, which argued that ‘fame . . . can never flourish / till its stalk is in the ground’). At least he had achieved this precious goal, and when a box of the pink-label ILPS 9105 arrived at his flat, he immediately headed over to his sister Gabrielle’s already a notable actress was slightly taken aback by this unexpected appearance: ‘By this time, he had become much more introverted. [But] he suddenly came into my room one day, said, “Here you are”, and threw down this record.’