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Author: Matthew Dodd

Categories
Creative Writing

In Search of a Second-Class Train Ticket from Buffalo, NY

By Matthew Dodd

I’d read in a paper not too long ago – The San Francisco Chronicle I believe – about a boy who’d won the lottery with a ticket paid for by his week’s pocket money and had bought his parents’ house, evicting them both. It said that the boy had let them stay on in a basement annex on the condition that they let him have figure skating lessons on a Wednesday afternoon. The newspaperman covering the story – John or James or maybe Simon – had asked the boy why he didn’t just use the money to pay for the lessons himself. The boy offered no comment. There aren’t many things on which one can justify having no comment, I think, but maybe figure skating lessons are one of them. I’m not sure why this particular story had come to me at this particular moment – in the second class carriage of an Amtrak service running, late, from Buffalo to Poughkeepsie – but I hadn’t got a novel or a newspaper or a cereal box to read so I supposed remembering this half-chewed scrap of a story was all the entertainment I would find.

My head had already begun lolling slowly towards the window before I realised my mind was straying in the direction of unconsciousness. The jostling death-throes of the glass woke me up with its infernal rattling before I’d had the chance to fully make contact, sending my upper body in an urgent overcorrection back the way it came and, further, into the shoulder of a moustachioed man of about fifty sat to my immediate right. He looked up – his nose had been down as he’d remembered to bring a newspaper – and scoffed before shaking me off and returning to his reading. I apologised and came back to a postural middle ground between these two extremes. Outside, a tapestry was being constantly redrawn of leaf-less trees and car-ful motorways (highways, I mean): rivers whose waters vanished into forests and tossed twigs and logs out of their bodies like toys out of a baby’s pram. We came, every few minutes, to this or that small town which had once been a bustling centre of this or that industry before this or that tall man in an ill-fitting suit had bought and sold the land for some or other reason. Huge concrete mammoths of buildings – adorned with great tusks of moss and mould – stood erect and empty, languishing in vacuity. Out of a few leaked the vague sounds of angle grinders or young mothers crying.  These disparate visions slipped away at the pace with which they’d arrived. 

Narrow seats of an awkward maroon sighed against windows half blinded by frost and veneered with an array of assorted secondhand chewing gums, altogether topped by a baggage rack which, at every turn and fluctuation in speed, appeared ready to relieve itself of its duties. Up and down the aisle marched a seemingly endless parade of children, parents, students, pensioners and most every other denomination of personhood – as though the gangway were bifurcating humanity itself. I watched their passage in a daze. Idly, I wondered how my mess of limbs might be categorised by a spectator of this cavalcade. This line of inquiry went nowhere. According to the pamphlet that, crumpled and defaced, still just about survived in a pocket in front of my seat, this carriage in particular held seventy-six seats. Of these, I estimated that about sixty-two were occupied – though I wasn’t quite sure whether to classify a seat on which a handbag or small child had been placed as ‘occupied’. This meant that, on a carriage whose seats were unassigned, the gentleman who had sat next to me had decided to do so not out of necessity but out of choice. There were, at the very least, fourteen other options of seat and, by extension, fourteen other seat-fellows he could’ve made. Why, I naturally thought, me? Did something in my elegant air call to him in a voice of calm authority: this is a chap you should sit next to? Did he notice something in my debonair way of sitting? My habit of humming the opening to Duke Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood? What of my outward being reached out to him and brought him to my side? Just as I thought to ask him any one of these questions, the gentleman stood up and made for the toilet at the south end of the carriage. I would not see him for the remainder of the journey.

Somewhere past Utica – I think my old piano teacher once lived there – I engineered myself out of my seat and made a short pilgrimage to the restaurant car. The phrase ‘restaurant car’ is perhaps an overly romantic one. This was little more than a vestibule with a pile of assorted chocolate bars and a disaffected young girl stood behind them. I asked her what her name was, not because I particularly cared to know her – I know quite enough people already, I think – but because I felt it likely that nobody else had done so in quite some time. It was Donna. On second thoughts, it may have been Dana. It is one thing to hear someone’s name and another entirely to remember it. In any case, we had a rather meagre conversation which resulted in my acquisition of a shoddily constructed club sandwich and a small bottle of sparkling water. The whole ordeal cost me eight minutes and six dollars. As soon as I felt the money leave my hands on its maiden voyage towards hers, I realised that this was all the money I presently had in the world. That is to say, it was the money I had intended to use on purchasing a ticket for the train I was, at that particular point, already on and had been on for around one-hundred-and-thirty minutes. In that moment, I hoped with a more sincere belief than I had ever before mustered that this club sandwich tasted better than it looked. 

Changing tack as I walked back in the vague direction of my seat, I thought through my possible means to avoid any retribution for my ticket-lessness. My chief idea was that, when the inspector came, I would simply plead ignorance: at the very least of the ticket price, at most of the English language in general. Over my many years of forgetting tickets for various transports, I’d developed a fairly reliable alter-ego as the German tourist Jurgen Voss, whose grandmother’s dying wish was that he visit Lichtenstein – or wherever it was that I’d forgotten to purchase a ticket to or from. Failing this, I might be forced to rely upon my exhaustive quantities of charm and charisma. At school, I was briefly made acting captain of the debating team. This may come in handy, I thought. 

There’s no necessary criterion of evil required for becoming a ticket inspector, but I sometimes wonder whether it doesn’t help. I’m sure, once they disembark and shed their skins, that they are all very nice – if not just simply very unexciting – people with homes and garages and perhaps even dinner waiting for them. I’m sure that a husband or wife will be sitting cross-legged in the kitchen awaiting their return, poised to ask them ‘how was your day?’ only for them to brush the whole nine-to-five off as another in a long, identical procession. To me, however, at this point in my life, they represented nothing short of evil manifest. Turpitude in a suit and tie. 

I slunk back into my original seat, a task made easier by the absence of my hairy friend. The club sandwich – for which I had potentially sacrificed my very freedom – made little impression on me. Indeed, were it not for the slight unease felt in my stomach about ten minutes after consumption, I’m not too sure I would’ve remembered its existence once it had left my immediate eyeline. My kingdom for a sandwich; perhaps not my finest exchange. For a time, I held my head in my hands as though my ignorance of it would make the outside world disappear. Realising that this was likely untrue, I rested my head abruptly against the back of the chair and left my hands to drum a frantic rhythm on my trouser leg. This rhythm was, perhaps, more A Love Supreme than In a Sentimental Mood. The expectation of the ticket inspector was becoming unbearable. His eventual arrival – for I had decided that he was a young man named Samuel – was encroaching on my psyche like a band of guerilla fighters in a small Latin American city-state. My left leg jerked up and down repetitively in a manner suggestive of many small children on a trampoline. It was as though I were trying to operate a bicycle pump unnoticeable to anyone but myself. The paranoid sepia of the carpet was likely the most disgusting thing I had ever borne witness to. Briefly, I thought that I might vomit but decided, on the whole, that this was not the best use of my time. I screwed up my eyes and clenched my hands together. I could not, I did not think, let this spectral ticket inspector get the better of me. No, I repeated, no, I would triumph, I would win. I sat back in my chair with a notion of relaxed gravitas. It is a self-evident truth that he who acts as though he has nothing to fear has, indeed, nothing to fear. Consequently, all I had to do was act as though I were the sort of person who would have a second-class train ticket from Buffalo to Poughkeepsie. A simple task. I turned my attention towards the window to my left. The great American countryside was absconding before me in a wild frenzy of colours, predominantly browns and greens, and shapes, largely squares and rectangles. A tree, then a river, a barnyard, a cow – two cows! – an elderly couple on a bench, an elementary school, a bus – a bus crash – an ambulance, a dog, a post office; a world of errant banality subsumed any thoughts of ticket inspectors or the fines they may prescribe. This new persona of mine, the gentleman dandy who rides the railroad as a novelty, had, I thought, broadly dissuaded me from my mania.

Lost in this revery, I did not notice the door at the end of the carriage opening and a squat man in a hat and tie making his entrance. His footsteps fell as raindrops in a bathtub and I persisted in my innocence until it was, as it were, too late. The man poked my right shoulder, just above the clavicle, and asked in an upsettingly offhand way, ‘can I see your ticket?’ I looked at the man for a moment, and him at me, and proceeded to shift my attention towards his silver nametag. His name wasn’t Samuel but Lucius. This was unexpected. I hadn’t a chance to resuscitate Jurgen Voss before I found myself answering plainly, in my own accent. ‘Please forgive me Sir, I’m afraid I spent my ticket money on figure skating lessons.’

Categories
Culture

Don’t Look Back: The Definitive Dylan on Screen

By Matthew Dodd

‘I didn’t consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth, it was given to me–by God’, Bob Dylan told People Magazine in 1975. And yet, despite his best efforts, he remains the centre of a vast cultural legendarium encompassing university modules, murals in North London suburbs, street names in rural Minnesota and almost everything in between. He is, perhaps, the most documented, revered, critiqued, impersonated and mythologised musical figure of the last century. It’s no surprise then that he should also receive the 21st century’s favourite tribute to the giants of recent history: an Oscar-tipped Hollywood biopic. James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet in the lead role, depicts the life of the young Dylan arriving in New York and builds towards his infamous decision to ‘go electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Yet, despite being the first major biopic of Dylan, A Complete Unknown is far from the Nobel laureate’s first foray into the world of cinema. The Coen Brothers’ Greenwich Village fable Inside Llewyn Davis only features Dylan – or a version of Dylan – for a few seconds near the end but is nevertheless a beautiful evocation of the time and place which gave rise to his legend and an ode to the music that made him. More obviously, Todd Haynes’ 2007 film I’m Not There sees six actors – including Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin – playing different sides of Dylan’s persona, offering a kaleidoscopic view of this most multifaceted of figures. Still, however, no effort to capture Bob Dylan on film has been so singularly powerful, so essential to understanding the artist, as the very earliest: D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back. Recorded over the course of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain, Don’t Look Back offers an unceremonious and impromptu insight into a man who, before our very eyes, is being transformed into a myth.

As the film opens, we find our hero flanked by his team, shuffling through an airport interchange, ruminating on whether he’s allowed to smoke indoors and singing a nursery rhyme to himself. The genius of Pennebaker’s film is that he doesn’t approach his subject as though he were the most significant artist of his generation, but rather as though he were a 24-year-old college dropout with a talent for being supremely obnoxious. Coincidentally, this is exactly who Dylan was. Over the course of the film, we are presented with the dichotomous visions of Bob Dylan, a pop culture sensation who is shaking the very foundations of contemporary music, and Bob Dylan, a man. Between these warring images we almost find some granule of sincere truth about both figures. Through the window of a London phone box we watch as a middle-aged critic sends back a review of Dylan’s concert line by line, fearing that the audience ‘applaud the songs and miss, perhaps, the sermon.’ This insistence from the press that there must be something more to Dylan’s music, a serious literary value that couldn’t possibly be understood by lank haired teenagers, dogs the film. In response to every suggestion of genius, or even intent, Dylan obfuscates – ‘I don’t write for any reason’, he tells a Time magazine reporter before sounding off a polemical diatribe about the inherent phoniness of the mainstream press. The film looks on from afar at the active mythmaking put upon this young songwriter by the world around him. It argues, instead, that genius is happening largely by accident in little, unmajestical ways. While sitting improvising over an unfinished song, Dylan casually throws in a lyric, ‘I’m a rolling stone’. This line of improvisation does not lead him anywhere before the film’s end.

Other moments speak more overtly to the developing sense that this young star might just be something special. In the back of a car, Dylan hears about a British folk artist, a young man named Donovan, and insists on meeting him. This meeting, documented in full, sees the pair perform songs to one another. Donovan plays a sweet but unremarkable rendition of ‘To Sing for You’, to which Bob jovially responds ‘Hey, that’s a good song, man!’ before bringing the room to an awed silence with ‘It’s All Over Now Bay Blue’. The gap between these two artists, even at this stage, appears cavernous. For all his cocksure posturing, there is an acceptance that Bob Dylan is, by the age of 24, already an important artist. With the benefit of 50 years’ retrospect, the film now seems morosely vindicated. The artists who surround him, such as Donovan and the Animals’ Alan Price, have not quite faded into obscurity, but have certainly become footnotes in the grand narrative of Bob Dylan.

One major character whose legend has survived the Dylan monolith is his friend, on-and-off lover and creative partner Joan Baez – another of the folk movement’s most iconic figures. She first appears here making faces at the camera and doing mock accents before explaining to a reporter – who takes her as simply another element of Dylan’s cavalcade – how to spell her name. By the ‘Z’ of ‘Baez’, the reporter realises his mistake, jolting back with a peculiarly British ‘Oh strewth! I’ve been looking for you all day.’ The relationship between Dylan and Baez is perhaps one of greatest mysteries in the history of folk music, and one of the most beloved points of discussion amongst self-proclaimed Dylanologists, but it comes out here as nothing so nebulous, more so a casual intercourse between two young people drawn together into a massive and unknowable world of cameras, reporters and sold-out music halls. In the back of a car, she sings a deformed version of ‘Baby Blue’, ‘crying like a banana in the sun’. She uniquely refers to Dylan as ‘Bobby’, sticking out as quite possibly the only person in the film who doesn’t view him as a prophet, financial prospect or spoiled brat. Through this narrow window into the lives of two musical titans, we see them quite simply as tender friends.

Walking hand in hand with the development of Dylan the myth is the administration of Dylan the business. Long scenes are dedicated to Dylan’s manager attempting to squeeze as much money out of record executives as possible, the name ‘Bob Dylan’ becoming a byword for riches. Later, Bob and co. quibble over the position of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ in the charts – a meagre number 16 at first. These scenes are a bold reminder that the pursuit of art is not always one run on good will alone. The cultivation of this ‘voice of a generation’ was an opportunity to make a great deal of money, a fact that Don’t Look Back finds no shame in acknowledging. It is the banal, ugly and crass moments that Pennebaker chooses to spend his time on which makes Don’t Look Back such a singularly powerful accomplishment. It is a rare documentary which seems genuinely interested in revealing something about who its subject is, rather than trying to place them into an imposed narrative of success. We watch Dylan perform to sold out venues, but we also watch him, perhaps even more closely, as he awkwardly re-tunes his guitar after ‘The Times They Are A-Changing.’ This is a portrait of the artist unscripted, unceremonious and unpolished. 

The central limitation of the biopic in its current form is its futile desire to aggrandise its subject to legendary status, mapping a hero’s journey onto the life of a real human being. Perhaps the most egregious example of this in recent memory is Bryan Singer’s 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody. Instead of painting an intimate picture of one of the most iconic rock bands of all time, Singer’s film insists on transforming Queen’s career into a three-act tragedy and Freddie Mercury into its tragic hero. His homosexuality is treated as hamartia, his exploration of his sexuality as the pit of his moral degradation. It cannot go unnoticed that this film was made with the express supervision of the band’s surviving members – no wonder, perhaps, that one of the film’s climactic scenes see Freddie apologise at length to the rest of the band for his errant behaviour. This style of biopic turns people into caricatures and, as in Bohemian Rhapsody’s case, risks imposing prejudicial readings onto real lives. All too frequently, these films turn some of the most exciting figures of our time into obnoxious burlesques of their public persona, with every moment of their lives steeped in some sort of divine knowledge of their own greatness. How many times must we watch a biopic tell us just how important every aspect of an artist’s life is in leading them to write one of a dozen or so popular hits? Perhaps the sorry state of the music biopic was best diagnosed by the 2007 satire Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story, in which the fictional folk/rock/pop star’s drummer tells crowds ‘Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays!’

This is not to say that the biopic is a doomed genre altogether, recent offerings such as last year’s Oppenheimer and Priscilla are proof of that, but there is a sense in which the best examples are those which do not propose to be an authoritative biographical extravaganza but rather a reading of a life. Often, these films work best as a synthesis of artist and subject: Oppenheimer may be read as a film as much about Christopher Nolan’s own guilt of creation as his protagonist’s, Priscillia as a story not unlike Sofia Coppola’s own as a young girl forced to meet all too early the scrutiny of the public eye. But fundamentally, they are all simply versions of the story: recollections, urban legends, re-translations of ancient manuscripts.

A Complete Unknown may be a wonderful film about a young songwriter who changed the world, but he will be Bob Dylan the myth rather than Robert Zimmerman the man. It will tell us how this boy became the voice of his generation; how he, with little more than a guitar, a funny haircut and a polyamorous spirit, revolutionised popular music. But it will not give us, across two hours, any of the same insight into who this most elusive of artists actually was as D.A. Pennebaker does when he captures Dylan laughing at the British pronunciation of ‘bloke’, throwing a tantrum at his harmonica being out of tune or, most crucially, instructing his rowdy posse to ‘be groovy or leave, man.’ Bob Dylan has always been a figure who revels in indefinability. Throughout his life he has rejected classification as a folk singer, protest singer, poet, anarchist, and most every other moniker thrown at him. A Complete Unknown will try its best to define him again as one thing or another – voice of a generation, genius, asshole etc. – but, in Don’t Look Back, Dylan himself put all such definitions to rest in perpetuity, telling student journalist Terry Ellis, quite simply, that ‘I’m just a guitar player. That’s all.’

Image credit: The Criterion Collection

Categories
Creative Writing

A Feline Reminiscence in Winter

By Matthew Dodd

It was early in the morning, and for the first time in the year, snow was falling.  Plumes danced down through the air, scattering themselves across the sky and spreading out into a soft white net over the garden. Once vibrant flowers were now dulled to homogeneity. Where leaves once sat, crystals of ice now staked their claim. As the sun rose over the garden, beams of light glanced upon the field, painting a rather pretty picture of winter. The garden made an all but perfect tapestry of the season and its associated joys. That was if one could exclude the unmissable exercise in laziness who made his temporary abode in the middle of all this. 

Angelo splayed himself out across the snow-covered lawn, a black smudge on this otherwise undisturbed canvas. Angelo – as you may have ascertained – was a cat, and was therefore accustomed to taking his time when waking up. And yet, even by feline standards Angelo was a lazy cat. He had been known to sleep for near on twenty straight hours and, on one occasion, after a particularly filling meal, had spent an entire week unconscious. However, on this particular morning Angelo struggled to keep a hold on his doze. The incessant snowfall was proving to be rather the impediment to Angelo’s lie-in. His arms gesticulated wildly in a futile attempt to tire himself out again. When this attempt proved fruitless Angelo shook his head and began to wake. He opened his eyes slowly, one at a time – in case any larger cats were waiting in his immediate line of vision – and was slightly confused to find that the world had gone all white. His amber eyes flitted around his surroundings, processing the new information. The world had indeed gone white. That was if it was the world: the living world that is. Angelo jumped up at this. For a cat, Angelo spent a lot of time contemplating death. He often wondered what would happen to him when he eventually ceased to be. In all honesty he tended to believe that death would never happen to him, he was far too special for that.

 As he considered this, Angelo became aware that the white of the world seemed to be moving downwards. His eyes narrowed. That certainly was strange. The world only ever moved like this when the great showertime came. Angelo then realised what was afoot. He was not actually dead, as he’d been quite convinced, rather it was that time of year at which the clouds started falling from the sky. Angelo wasn’t quite sure why the clouds did this, but he supposed they had rather a good reason. Angelo knew this time of year well, this being his tenth experience of it, and had come to treat it as a friend, a reminder of everything he was and had been. Humans are often surprised to learn that cats are well aware of themselves and their own temporal position but, as Angelo had often noted, humans were surprised by most things. He was up on his feet by now and, as he began to move, slowly became aware of his situation. This was the Garden. That’s what the humans called it (comprehension of the English language was another feline skill that humans seem to forget). Ah yes, Angelo remembered now. He often liked to visit this spot, this very spot in fact, to take one of his naps. In fact, now that he thought about it, he’d taken one such nap very recently. In fact, now that Angelo had thought even more about it, he failed to remember very much of what happened between his last visit and the present. Lost in his train of thought, Angelo had neglected to note the tree – into which he had just walked. Despite his stature Angelo had somehow caused the tree to shake, which caused a large snowfall atop his head, in turn inciting a helpless mew of despair. He shook virulently. Angelo couldn’t entirely recall his position towards this cloudfall. 

Upon further examination of the garden, Angelo deduced that he’d only been asleep for at most half a night since the sun was only now rising over the garden fence. That was good for Angelo. This meant that he could go and be there to watch his human wake up. He loved his human more than anything in the world. Even more than he loved napping. Angelo couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t loved Human. Human was to him what the earth was to the moon. Both entirely wrapped in their own existence yet eternally dependent on the other. The Moon rises and falls with the Earth. The Earth may even one day be able to be without the Moon’s complementary being, but the Moon will always need the Earth, and in the same way Angelo will always need his Human. He slumped down against a tree and let memory flood over him. Memories of Human and Angelo together, Human and Angelo apart, and Human and Angelo reunited. Years stretched out in Angelo’s mind, with this Christmastime (yes, Angelo recalled, that’s what Human called it) being the one constant. Other humans had left Angelo’s Human over these years. Angelo had slept on the laps of countless others during the cold months. But Human had always been there. Angelo had even seen Christmases when Human was alone, and Human was sad, and so Angelo was also sad. But Angelo had watched Human find new humans, and be happy again, and that made Angelo happy. Angelo remembered, there was another human that spent some three Christmases with Human. It was a human with brown hair and big brown eyes who used to spend hours with Angelo, stroking him in the spots behind his ears where only his Human knew. Whatever happened to them? Angelo struggled to remember. In fact, he struggled to remember many details these days. Angelo was getting old, he didn’t have time to remember all the sad things. He preferred to spend his thoughts on the happy times he and his friend had shared, rather than dwelling on those awkward in-between times. Human had smiled and laughed in the company of others, and there were times when Human hadn’t. What was the point in trying to dissect the sadness when you could be enjoying the happiness? Angelo slunk forward through the garden towards the house’s back entrance. As he crept, he caught sight of a robin sitting on a tree-branch, rather content with the leaf he was picking at. It pricked its head up and peered at Angelo before returning to its leaf. Angelo made to greet the robin, only for it to fly away, leaving its leaf behind. How fickle and rude that bird is, he thought to himself.

Categories
Culture

This Cruel World Where I Belong – The Myth of Nick Drake

By Matthew Dodd

On the 25th of November 1974, at his family home in Warwickshire, the singer-songwriter Nick Drake passed away from a believed overdose of antidepressants at age 26. Drake, a Cambridge dropout, left behind him three studio albums: all of which were released to critical and commercial failure. Around fifty mourners attended his funeral and, by 1975, his record label Island had decided not to reissue any of his albums. Fifty years later, a fully orchestrated rendition of Drake’s music was performed to a packed out Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC’s annual programme of Proms. Having died in obscurity, by the 21st century Drake has far eclipsed more successful contemporaries like Donovan and Fairport Convention to become perhaps Britain’s most popular folk artist. But how did a career that lasted less than seven years and ended in unconscionable tragedy become such a defining chapter in folk history?

In youth as in adulthood, Drake was a guarded and often abrasive figure. His father recalled an old headmaster of Drake writing that ‘none of us seemed to know him very well. All the way through with Nick, people didn’t know him very much’. By the late 60s, Drake had won a scholarship to study English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Once there, he immediately aligned himself with, in the words of fellow student Brian Wells, ‘the cool people smoking dope’. Having found himself drawn to folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, Drake began performing his own music around London in 1967. Apocryphal accounts describe Drake as an imposing performer, his gangly build and harsh features giving him even at the outset the look of a star. Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings talks of how Drake performing at this stage ‘seemed to be seven feet.’ Still, Drake was uncomfortable performing, a fact that would persist throughout his career. For all the extended paraphernalia published on his short life, no actual live recording of Drake exists today. 

Drake skipped lectures to record his first album, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, and by 1969 had left Cambridge nine months before graduating to return to London and focus on his music. He expanded from the raw, Leonard Cohen inspired sound of his first album with his second, the fuller, jazz influenced Bryter Later in 1971. With the release of Bryter Layter, Drake began to withdraw further, refusing to promote the album publicly and delivering reserved performances. Across two nights in late 1971, Drake recorded what would prove to be both his masterpiece and his final album, Pink Moon. Unlike his previous two records, Pink Moon, features no instrumentation beyond Drake’s voice and guitar – save for a brief, revelatory moment of piano intrusion on the titular track. Island, Drake’s record label, had not expected a third album from him and only learnt of its production when Drake delivered it, completed, to producer Chris Brackwell. A popular story goes that Drake left the completed tape unannounced at the reception desk of Island Records, though this was not the case: just another piece of mythologising in Drake’s already developing legend. Despite the strength of Pink Moon, now considered amongst the greatest albums ever recorded, it won Drake no greater acclaim and his work remained on the fringes of the folk scene. By this point, all of Drake’s albums had collectively sold under 4000 copies, leading him to consider joining the army as an alternative career prospect. Nevertheless, despite mental deterioration, Drake returned to the studio in 1974 to work on an ultimately unrealised fourth album. Throughout the year, however, his mental state worsened and a few months after his 26th birthday, Drake died in his childhood bedroom.

Drake’s posthumous fame came in no single wave but as a slow, rumbling ascension to the heights of folk’s musical hierarchy. Artists such as Robert Smith and Kate Bush cited him as an influence during the 80s and, throughout the decade, his status as a tragic figure began to brew. Documentaries and biographies began to appear in the 1990s and the somewhat un-Drakelike use of Pink Moon in a Volkswagen advertisement brought his music to a wider audience. By the 21st century, Drake’s status among the emergent ‘indie’ crowd had been firmly established. The use of Fly in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Royal Tenenbaums, on whose soundtrack Drake appears alongside the similarly fated Elliott Smith, represented an early example of his newfound demographic base. 

In the decades following his untimely death, Drake has been transformed into the archetypal martyr of contemporary folk music. His guarded public persona, his staunchly un-traditional attitude to guitar playing, his introspective and often inscrutable lyrics find fresh ears with each generation of wayward rebels and dreamers. The model of his martyrdom and lifelong mental health struggles have drawn him into the massed tradition of ‘tortured artists’ – alongside Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Plath and countless others – whose respective mystiques have only ballooned in the wake of their early deaths. This tendency to cast Drake as a tragically doomed romantic hero does, as it does to those other artists who shared his fate, a disservice to both his artistry and his memory. There is, of course, a degree to which Drake’s reputation has been made by his tragedy, in the same way that Van Gogh’s paintings or Plath’s poetry is made all the more powerful by knowledge of their grim contexts. The brevity of his career, represented in three albums amounting to a little under two hours, certainly affords him a certain unassailability. Compare him, for instance, to his great friend and contemporary John Martyn, another legend of the British folk scene, whose forty year career has earned him enduring acclaim but failed to bring him to the mythic status of Drake. Death froze Drake as the brooding face of eternal tortured youth: clad in corduroy and woolly jumpers, unkempt hair pushed back by the wind as he wanders through England’s green and pleasant lands singing of the days and their endless coloured ways.

It is easy for every brooding adolescent to find some understanding in a figure like Drake – indeed, that’s the very way his music found me – but to define Drake by his death, to narrativize his mental illness as the climax of his hero’s journey, is a gross error. Poorly treated mental illness – whether he suffered from heavy depression or schizophrenia was a fact undiscerned in his lifetime and still not understood fully now – robbed the world of a lifetime of music and, more importantly, took a friend, a son and a brother from those around him. It’s easy to fall for the myth of Nick Drake, but for the sake of all those affected by issues of mental health, we cannot. Nick Drake didn’t die for our sins. As a culture, we are all too keen to fictionalise our heroes and reduce them to stepping stones on the path to our own self-actualisation. On this path, Drake becomes just another victim of a tendency to fetishise mental illness, to turn unbearable pain into an aesthetic choice and by extension alienate the suffering from their pain. Nick Drake’s music is a solace, a heartbreak, a tragedy but Nick Drake was also a man. Now 80 and with a successful career in acting of her own to her name, Drake’s sister Gabrielle has reflected at length on the way her brother’s cult of personality has affected her personally. She remembers candidly hearing of one fan gleefully taking a piece away from Drake’s gravestone. But, she claims, this mythologised Drake – the dreaming boy roaming Hampstead Heath – only bears slight resemblance to her actual brother, a man she found frequently obstinate and difficult. 

The temptation to project one’s own woes onto our idols is a dangerous one. To look into Nick Drake’s steely eyes and recognise, not the seismic melancholy attributed to him, but our own troubles is an understandable salve to the woes of the world. But we must understand our heroes as people as well as legends. Nick Drake’s body of work is unimpeachable, three near-perfect albums of consummate artistry, an unbridled marriage of poetry and music. Yet, his memory’s necessary entwinement with his tragedy bears attention beyond the ephemeral attachment to a romantic hero. Drake is baked into the ecosystem of contemporary music: his influences are felt throughout artists from Belle & Sebastian to R.E.M. But perhaps his most powerful legacy is his enduring ability to connect with and console generations of listeners, to draw out beauty from the heartache of the world. To find serenity in art is natural, and if serenity does have a soundtrack, it surely must be by Nick Drake.

And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be

Image credit: Songs From So Deep

Categories
Creative Writing

With Love, Frankie

By Matthew Dodd.

In a deckchair under the late afternoon sun, he sat lazily writing in a worn leather pocketbook. A pale blue linen shirt fit loosely over his torso, setting off the darker blue of his linen trousers. His deckchair stood a little off-centre on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, one of the finer hotels that overlooked the River Loire before its destruction by a German bomber, which was to prematurely eject its load en-route to Tours at the onset of the war. This would not happen for half a decade yet; he had no notion of staying that long.

In the pocketbook he was, with a fervent energy, composing passionate declarations of love to women he’d never met nor had any intention of meeting again. By this point in the afternoon (a large antique clock over the balcony entrance informed him, and twelve other patrons, that it was twenty-six minutes past four) he had completed one hundred and twenty-five such declarations in pieces that ranged from single sentences to polemics spanning a dozen pages. The object of this practice was unclear, but it evidently engaged the man deeply: his attention had hardly left the pocketbook since lunch, save short trips to the bar to order gin rickeys. By the bank of the river, a small child reached her hand out to feed a heron which had landed a metre or so into the water, only to tumble unceremoniously into the mud before her. Nearby, her parents did not seem to notice. They were, at that moment, preoccupied with the task of cutting a few slices of brie. 

The balustrades that enclosed the balcony were ornate with various vaguely Grecian images – an all but unrecognisable figure of Perseus that was recovered from La Porte’s wreck now takes pride-of-place in a local museum – and were spaced evenly as to allow guests an ample view of the river below. A single hollow chime announced the arrival of the half hour. At this, he set the pocketbook down on the table by his deckchair and got up, setting off once more on his familiar pilgrimage to the bar. The book, whose once black covers had grown brown by continued exposure to sunlight, displayed two open pages of an impassioned message to one Miss Delilah June. It was not one of the stronger pieces in the book but nevertheless exhibited the finely tempered prose on which he prided himself. At the end of the address he had written in a delicate hand: ‘With my love, which clings to you like climbing hydrangea, Frankie Oregon.’ 

Oregon wasn’t really his name. It was only the first name that his grandfather’s father had seen when he poked his head out from the boat on which he had stolen a trip out of Manila. And so it became his name. When it came time for him to pass his name on to a son – who would in turn pass it onto another son, who would then pass it onto Frankie – the suggestion of a family name preceding Oregon had evaporated. That life in Manila, and whatever name it was attached to, had been lost. Great-Grandfather Oregon was a man of few words and had never felt his own history to be worth wasting them on, so the memory of his life had died with him. By the time that Frankie Oregon was sat on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, working on his second gin rickey, he had no family in either Manila or Oregon as far as he knew. The few relatives that he was aware of were scattered randomly about the world, on ranches or living in sensible two-bedroomed apartments. The River Oregon had no clear mouth and Frankie hardly cared to seek one out. As far as he was concerned, all that he owed to his ancestors was the odd flower on a gravestone, if he should happen to pass it by. Beyond that, he was content to be a singular, floating person. He had drifted all over the world in this way. Europe, Africa, Asia – oceans to oceans and coasts to coasts. He had briefly stopped in both Manila and Oregon but had felt very little in either. Indeed, very few places elicited a response from him merely by the fact of his being in them. Of course, he remembered the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal and, of course, he could itemise and expound their many intricacies and resonances – he had taken courses in both history and architecture – but, excluding those, the places meant practically nothing to him. For him, there was nothing in between the lines.

While Frankie was sitting on the balcony, head poised immovably above the pocketbook, a telegram arrived at the hotel’s front desk addressed to him. It was an invitation to the wedding of his sister, Evelyn, in Syracuse. Frankie would not read this message and the paper on which it was printed would one day join the unrecognisably charred rubble that had once been this fine hotel. The concierge who was on duty at the time of the  arrival of this telegram had, most peculiarly, just received one himself. In it, he learnt that his uncle had passed away from pneumonia at his home in Nantes just last weekend. As such, the concierge, whose name was Antoine (although everyone called him Tony), abandoned his post for the first time in his decade at La Porte Ouverte and ran off in the direction of a nearby bus station.

Outside, Frankie was nearly finished with his gin rickey. The next morning, he would check out of La Porte Ouverte and take a car to Orleans where he would likely find yet another hotel, or perhaps a café, and another deckchair to sit in. For now, though, he persisted in his scribblings. Behind him, in the hotel’s quite extravagant dining hall, tonight’s dinner service was being prepared. A bearded and bespectacled old man in a gravy-stained apron was yelling directions at a fleet of young chefs who, as a rule, wore far tidier uniforms than their superior. This evening, they would be serving a Chicken Fricassee, a dish La Porte’s kitchen was renowned for, with a crab bisque for its starter. In a few hours, Frankie Oregon would take the staff up on both these dishes, as well as a Crème Brulée which he would take once more on the balcony. By all accounts, he would enjoy them. After dinner he would drink a glass of neat scotch in his room and be in bed by eleven; he might even dream. 

As the clock’s larger hand moved towards the Roman numeral V, Frankie noticed something. His pocketbook was full. By a stroke of sheer coincidence, Frankie found that upon completing a plea of gentle longing to an unattached book clerk in Somerset, he had reached the book’s exact end. There were now precisely one hundred and thirty-two full messages in the book. Without exception, they were signed by the author, although the specific nature of his closing remarks differed throughout. The final words of his last message, and by extension the whole book, were uncomplicated: ‘with love, Frankie’. If he’d known these were to be his final words, perhaps he would’ve thought of something more exciting, but he hadn’t, so he didn’t. 

Upon finishing, he closed the book and placed it in his left trouser pocket. From his right, he produced a silver cigarette case out of which he drew one white cigarette. He raised it to his lips and, with a gold lighter he’d picked up somewhere in Warsaw, lit it. After taking two drags he began to walk towards the edge of the balcony. A gentle wind blew through a poplar tree across the river. Frankie gripped the banister with one hand and gazed down at the Loire as it passed below him. With the other he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it off of the balcony, aiming vaguely for a small outcrop of thrushes on the riverbank. After a few moments he reached into his left pocket and took out the pocketbook. For a matter of seconds he observed the book, turning it over once, then twice, in his hands before casting it deliberately over the banister. It spun wildly in an arc through the air, its covers splayed to give the impression of a bird fruitlessly attempting to take flight. After a journey of some seconds it landed noiselessly in the river and was borne immediately by the current downstream, where it soon passed a small girl feeding some cheese to a heron, before disappearing ultimately and irretrievably into the dark recesses of the water.

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Pronunciation: ‘ˈweɪzɡuːs

An annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment.
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