All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Ray Davies: I’m trying to picture somebody’s head – all the open thoughts and the thoughts they’ve got locked in. Everybody has that little safe, which nobody is going to look into . . . I want to be like everybody else. I want my mind to click into place and say ‘Yeah, that’s right, there’s nothing unusual about doing what everybody else is.’ . . . [I mean,] I can get on with people. I can make anybody laugh, but I just can’t think like them. [1974]

  *

  At least Davies had cut down on the self-medicating slugs of booze, unlike his songwriting shadow, Pete Townshend, who was also having trouble reconciling his overwhelming desire to communicate with the realization that most of those with whom he communicated didn’t relate to his songs on anything more than a superficial level. Talking to Melody Maker the year after Quadrophenia, he even seemed to be suggesting he had done wrong in attempting to say something more meaningful than ‘I hope I die before I get old’:

  Pete Townshend: The unique thing about me as a writer is that I’ve done that sorta rock opera thing, and I did it solely and purely to try to expand the outward possibilities of rock . . . It happened to be very successful communicatively into the bargain. But it didn’t do anything for rock & roll; and it didn’t do anything for me as a rock writer. I still think that rock works most effectively on a song-by-song basis. [1974]

  This sense that it had all been in vain increasingly wore away at Townshend’s veering self-belief. In 1974 he saw the realization of his long-cherished dream to have Tommy made into a film. Not only that, but the meandering Ken Russell-directed film was a huge commercial success, bringing yet more converts to the very concept album that had sparked this entire psychoanalysis-by-song-cycle genre in rock. And yet, when he arrived at the London Leicester Square film premiere on 26 March 1975, he was appalled. As he told NME shortly afterwards, his first thought was, ‘Who the hell were all those people at the Tommy premiere? Whoever they were: I’m certainly not in their gang.’

  The perceived failure of Quadrophenia, the relentless grind of the road, and the onset of his first serious writer’s block in six years now conspired to place Townshend on his own solitary rock, and on this promontory he was slowly drowning in an ocean of booze. In the long interview he gave for the book of the movie of the album he admitted: ‘I got dragged very low by the amount that I was drinking, and by the fact that . . . [touring] was a very low level of existence . . . There was really no magic in the [shows] for me.’ Ironically, the 1974 shows were held in generally high regard by The Who’s hardcore fans, perhaps because it was the first time The Who really delivered the ‘greatest hits’ show they had always wanted; prompting Townshend to remark, ‘The Who have become a golden-oldies band and that’s the bloody problem.’34

  Unfortunately, try as he might to convince himself that ‘rock works most effectively on a song-by-song basis’, he had not recorded a single song with The Who that was not part of a larger conceit in such a long time that he’d forgotten how to do it. As he openly admitted in 1978, when the clouds had partly lifted, ‘I didn’t have any songs or any subject matter apart from the same old stuff that had brought forth all the dreary Who by Numbers material – alcoholic degradation.’ Indeed, almost the first song he demoed for that underrated 1975 album pretty much drunk that particular subject dry. It had the working title ‘No Way Out’, but ultimately appeared on album as ‘However Much I Booze’. Either way, he was drinking himself into an early grave, while the band’s other spokesman was telling anyone who would listen that their songwriter was bang out of order. And Townshend knew it:

  Pete Townshend: When Roger said I was drunk . . . he was right. Drunk? Was I drunk?!! . . . I was falling to bits. At the same time I was going slightly barmy. I was hallucinating. I was forgetting big chunks of time . . . At that particular period I felt the band was finished and I was finished and the music was dying. [1975]

  Such is the solipsistic nature of addiction that Townshend even convinced himself he had formed a pact with drummer Keith Moon to stop drinking. Moon – who had returned from a lost weekend in L.A. that lasted almost a year, definitively cost him his already-failing marriage and almost bankrupted him – was on a drug designed to make it impossible for him to drink: Antabuse – the clue’s in the name. Townshend decided to join him at the Teetotallers Inn. Unfortunately, as he wrote in a long confessional piece the NME would run in 1977 under the heading, ‘Pete Townshend’s Back Pages’:

  When . . . recording Who by Numbers, Keith’s courageous attempts to head off his alcoholism moved me to stop drinking too. I stopped overnight. The results were quite interesting. My hair started to fall out. Another remarkable side effect was that I carried on drinking without my knowledge . . . Apparently, at the end of one session which I had gotten through by pulling incessantly at a total of about twenty cans of Coke, I wished everyone good night, walked up to the makeshift bar set up on an amplifier flight case at the back of the studio and drank down a bottle of vodka. I just don’t remember doing that . . . The shock that hit me as the pieces fell into place was even more frightening than the black holes in my head.

  Such were these feelings of ‘alcoholic degradation’ that when producer Glyn Johns attempted to introduce some light and shade into an album of excoriating self-loathing by including the Formby-esque ‘Blue, Red and Grey’, Townshend responded by exclaiming, ‘What?! That fucking thing. Here’s me wanting to commit suicide, and you’re going to put that thing on the record.’ The fact that for the first time in a while he had written a song that celebrated the simple things in life did not change things a jot.

  The May 1975 Who by Numbers sessions were close to rock-bottom for Townshend, who would begin to climb out of his empty glass by the time his old mucker and ex-Face Ronnie Lane suggested they make an album together at the end of 1976. It had been eight years since Pete had first expressed an interest in joining Lane’s then-band, Small Faces, and finally they were making a joint LP, Rough Mix. By 1976, it was Lane who had fallen on hard times, and Townshend who had the gold albums on the wall. The years since Lane left The Faces in 1973 had turned what slim chance he had of ongoing chart action into no chance at all.

  *

  Certain other English figures from the same milieu who once dreamed of climbing the rocky mountaintop were no longer so keen to continue driving on to the pop summit. Whether they had ever enjoyed the intoxicating view from this peak – as Peter Green and Syd Barrett had – or stayed in the commercial foothills (Nick Drake, Vincent Crane), by the end of 1973 each of these troubled souls had seemingly abandoned their art and scuttled on home. For all of them, it was the last refuge from their inner scoundrel.

  Vincent Crane had managed to keep an increasingly dissolute version of Atomic Rooster together until the end of 1973, when Nice ’n’ Greasy became their final ragbag offering. Flat broke and still crazy (at one point, he bricked up his front door to stop the bailiffs from serving him with any writs), he spent the rest of the 1970s working in theatre production, writing for radio dramas and teaching music at a school in Battersea – anything that would not serve as a reminder of his days as chief bantam in a band of half-cocked crazies.

  For Peter Green, the decision to walk away from the curse of fame had proven relatively simple. In a sense, he had never really gone out in the big wide world. Throughout the whole Fleetwood Mac circus he had continued to live at home with his parents, and as his friend, guitar-shop owner Paul Morrison, told his biographer: ‘I think the reason is that he felt very vulnerable out in the big wide world. He was never able to cope with being a star.’ But even at home, he couldn’t quite live down his past; and on occasions he would take off without warning, leaving his bemused parents (and girlfriend) to fend for themselves, as he did one morning in 1973, when he woke his girlfriend to tell her ‘he had to go to Israel and be with his people’.

  But when he sent her a postcard from the land of Zion a few weeks later, it was to announce that he was thinking of joining the PLO. One
confidant throughout these years, Mich Reynolds, recalls: ‘It wasn’t a nervous breakdown; it was a slow decline . . . A lot of the time I [just] thought he was taking the piss out of people. It was difficult to know when he was doing it for effect and when he couldn’t actually help it.’ By 1974 Green’s parents had concluded ‘he couldn’t actually help it’, and he was finally committed to the kind of mental hospital to which Crane had periodically retreated. This one, recommended by a doctor for whom his mother used to work, was at West Park in Epsom. According to Green, his spell in this place, far from making him better, prolonged his time in the wilderness:

  Peter Green: They tricked me into agreeing to go to a nice place where Jewish boys and girls would be and then they took me to the hospital in Epsom, the madhouse . . . Next thing I knew I was stuck there and eventually they gave me ECT [electro-convulsive therapy] . . . injections and tranquilisers.

  His desire to bypass the problems thrown up by that brief, hugely creative period of self-discovery had led him to a life spent in a semi-permanent drone-like state. Far from curing him of any earlier psychosis, the experience merely convinced him he had been on the right path all along: ‘I [still] wanted the wisdom of LSD, but I couldn’t quite get back again . . . It took me somewhere where I wasn’t Peter Green and I had no cares at all; it was great.’ Shortly after he was finally sprung from this dreadful place by his then-girlfriend he wrote her a note, which he handed her one day while she was working at the booking agency where they first met. It read:

  The depression you try to escape from

  Is your lonely soul’s broken heart

  Realizing its mistake, and crying

  You are torn between the tragic truth of a lost soul

  And the falseness you have been led to believe is your way of life

  I choose the first to be my self

  If you look hard and deep you will see it in all Man

  If you don’t see it – you will see madness.

  The pair made plans to marry in September 1975, but two days before the supposedly happy day the lady realized that Green was still not a well man and decided to return home herself. When she asked if he would mind taking her there, he replied, ‘Not at all.’ Even he had come to realize he must travel the road to recovery alone. That road had a few more potholes along the way – including a short spell in prison in 1977 for pulling a pump-action shotgun on his long-time manager, Clifford Davis – before he picked up the guitar again late in 1977, and began re-learning those Robert Johnson riffs that once served as a shamanistic incantation.

  *

  Green was not the only hugely gifted guitarist who at some point in 1972 took a sabbatical from the unholy instrument to concentrate on expelling those inner demons, while the professionals of health care tried every faddish trick in the mental manual. Nick Drake also apparently spent a couple of months in full-time treatment for his chronic depression some time that year, but the medication merely dulled the senses and stilled his muse. By the time he returned to his parents’ home in Henley-in-Arden, he was in full retreat. As his mother Molly later remembered, ‘I think he felt it was a kind of refuge. He had to come back here. He tried many times to go away . . . I think he had rejected the world. Nothing much made him happy.’

  The one thing that had once brought Drake relief – and release – had been taken away from him, and he didn’t know why. When he finally picked up the guitar again, he just felt he was going through the motions. Previously, as sidekick Robert Kirby fondly recalls, ‘he would spend days developing a particular phrase or chord sequence. He was always writing. He would also play the blues – but as a study exercise, getting ever more complex.’ Now, though, he would sit at his parents’ home ‘strumming the same chords over and over again on his Gibson acoustic guitar’, as if trying to grasp how such a rare gift could have passed so out of reach. Perhaps the devil had stopped him at the crossroads, one night when out driving his parents’ car, and reclaimed his largesse.

  At least Drake could still hear the spirit of Robert Johnson coming through his phonograph, even as he confessed to longtime friend Ben Lacock that he believed he could sense the same ‘hellhound on my trail’. That hellhound finally got a name when Drake wrote his first documented song since Pink Moon got to him. ‘Black Eyed Dog’, written towards the end of 1973, was unlike anything in the Drake canon to date and the first of five tracks he would record at sessions in 1974, having again asked John Wood to act as his mediator.35

  The first session in February was quite unlike anything Wood had experienced to date: first, Drake no longer felt he could do justice to the songs unless he recorded the guitar part first, and then overdubbed a vocal; second, the process of paring down the lyrics – first apparent on Pink Moon – had reached such a point that they made the twelve-bar blues of Robert Johnson seem like epic ballads. ‘Black Eyed Dog’, five unsparing lines long, centred on a single premonitive couplet, ‘I’m growing old and I wanna go home / I’m growing old and I don’t wanna know.’ It was Drake’s ‘Me and the Devil Blues’. This black-eyed dog already knew his name when he came a-knockin’ to tell him it was time to go. Producer Wood did not know what to make of the pared-down lyrics or the scratchy staccato accompaniment, and wondered aloud if Drake might be ‘having a problem with words’. Drake’s response was a scary insight into the interior life of someone prematurely weary of the world: ‘I can’t think of words. I feel no emotion about anything . . . I’m numb – dead inside.’

  It seems Drake also began work on one or two other songs at this session – probably ‘Voice from the Mountain’ and ‘Tow the Line’, each of which seemed to inhabit the world of Hampstead and Cambridge. There was a reason why. He had been performing them in prototype as far back as 1969. They reflected a more garrulous world of possibilities, the former track in particular ticking all the usual boxes when it came to Drake’s pastoral lexicon of imagery: ‘voice from the mountain’, ‘voice from the sea’, ‘a tune from the hillside’, ‘a chime in the night’ – only to end on an ominous note, ‘Tell me, my friend . . . where can it end?’

  Meanwhile, in the case of the tonally upbeat but verbally ambiguous ‘Tow the Line’, there would be another ham-fisted attempt on the part of the Drake estate to rewrite history when the track was finally released on Made to Love Magic in 2004. In the sleevenotes ‘Cally’ set about asserting that: ‘Nick left us with a song full of assurance and a contemplative calm that adds another dimension to the notion that he was at the end of any tether at that time.’ No mention of its compositional status as a relic of the past, or its scratch vocal. ‘Cally’ also claimed that the track was unmarked on the reel, and only ‘made itself known [when] the tape was allowed to run on . . . never having been mixed or, indeed, heard since 1974’. But ‘Tow the Line’ was not so much a lost track, as a lost vocal. The song had been circulating on bootleg for years as a backing track, so the story about the tape running on to reveal this ‘unknown’ track was just another myth for the funereal pyre.

  In keeping with the other 1974 tracks, ‘Tow the Line’ was cut instrumentally and then overdubbed with a vocal, which means it must have been marked on the multitrack. The final nail in the coffin of Cally’s arch-revisionism was applied when Joe Boyd, the producer of the July 1974 sessions, told one Drake biographer he had no recollection of working on the track. It may well have received a guide vocal in February, but Drake had probably already rejected it as a candidate for the fourth album by the time he resumed his association with Boyd in July.

  The resumption of their collaboration had been in the works for a few months, Boyd having already been warned by Wood, ‘Nick had said that he had some tunes but no words.’ When Boyd himself pressed Drake to explain what he had meant, at a meeting that spring on a trip to London, the songwriter informed Boyd: ‘I haven’t got any tunes anymore.’ Boyd told him to go away and find some.

  By the July sessions, Drake had indeed penned two seemingly new songs, ‘Rider on the Wheel’ an
d ‘Hanging on a Star’, the latter of which ran to six whole lines, each and every one directed at Boyd for leaving him in the lurch at the end of 1970 after promising him the pop world. The song seems to have been directly inspired by what David Sandison called ‘a good talking-to’ and the protagonist himself called ‘a pep talk’, given by Joe to Nick at that spring meeting. According to Sandison, ‘What he did was to tell Nick that he was wasting and abusing a real and valuable talent and that he ought to stop pissing about and knuckle down to work.’

  If Boyd had initially hoped the ‘pep-talk’ might work, hearing the self-pitying ‘Hanging on a Star’ made him realize just how fragile his favourite songwriter had become, and that ‘the failure of his music to be successful in his lifetime was . . . the [real] source of his unhappiness’. In those final months that acute sense of failure would begin to consume Drake. The sessions in July merely brought home to him that a whole album of new material was beyond him. (The four songs they finished to Drake’s satisfaction took longer to record than the entire Pink Moon.) And without the prospect of any more music, why even go on? One evening that summer, he turned to his mother and said, ‘I have failed in everything I have tried to do.’ Molly vainly attempted to elaborate on ‘all the things that he had so patently done. It didn’t make a difference. He felt that he’d failed to get through to the people that he wanted to talk to.’

  Ironically, just as Drake was about to give up the ghost, there came the first sign that the world was catching up: in the pages of perhaps the most influential rockzine of the Seventies, Zigzag. In its June issue, Connor McKnight wrote a heartfelt first piece on the elusive work of the man, under the prophetic title, ‘In Search of Nick Drake’. Drake himself even showed it to his parents, and according to one American who interviewed them after their son’s death, ‘In the weeks after [it appeared, he] began to work on songs again’ – presumably a reference to ‘Rider on the Wheel’ and ‘Hanging on a Star’.