Night Beat Part 13

Later, though, back in her hotel room, when asked what it means to her to have a number 1 single in America, O'Connor greets the question seriously. "I don't feel like it's me, almost. It's like a big fantasy. All the time you grow up, watching 'Top of the Pops' or being interested in music, you always wonder what it would be like.

"I mean, I'm very excited and very grateful that it's happened, but it really doesn't change what I said before. I don't want to be a rock star, I don't want to be treated like one, and I don't want any of the a.s.sociations that go with it. I just want to be treated like an ordinary person, and I want people to remember that the most important things in my life are not making records and going around the world on tour. The most important thing is my family, and my spiritual beliefs. If I didn't have those things, I wouldn't be inspired to do anything."

O'Connor pauses, and then blushes. "I just remembered something," she says. "My publicist tells me that once I told her I wanted to be as big as Madonna. It surprises me that I said that. I was young, foolish, I suppose. Well, I'm a very different person now."

O'Connor seems utterly sincere and a.s.sured in her comments, but earlier, Chris Hill had said something trenchant about her capacity for success: "I think she has a fire in her to be the biggest. In fact, she once told me, 'I'm gonna be the biggest star there's ever been.' And I think she certainly likes the fame. But I also think that there's a point where she won't give any more than she needs to, and where she'll say, 'f.u.c.k it, I'm not doing any more than this; the rest of my life is mine.' She could actually do that next week. She could turn around and say, 'This is as big as I want to be; beyond here I don't like it.'

"But at the moment," Hill continued, "there is a more important question that confronts Sinead: Does her art always have to come from pain? And it is an important question. I mean, David Bowie hasn't made a f.u.c.king record worth thruppence in the last ten years, and the reason is, he's happy. It's also the reason why Keith Richards actually makes better records than Mick Jagger, because Keith is relatively f.u.c.ked up, compared to Mick Jagger.

"With Sinead, we won't know for years, because she's still a child compared to these others. She will still go through extremes of happiness and unhappiness in the next few years, unless she is in control of the unhappiness so much that she never again has to suffer from it. And I pray to G.o.d she'll be able to make great records when she's happy-not for our sake, because all we have to do is sell them. It's for her sake. No one should be sentenced to the unhappiness of a Van Gogh just because that's the only way they can work."

Watching O'Connor, as she calls friends and relatives and, with a sweet mix of shyness and pride, tells them that her single has gone to number 1, the last thing anyone would wish on her would be more hurt-even if it would make for more records as meaningful and captivating as I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Indeed, if the depths of the heart and mind can be determined by how one deals with unforgettable losses, or unattainable longings, then O'Connor has paid for her depths. She has learned some bitter truths-that life and love will break your heart, that success and fame are at best fleeting victories, and that no matter what blessings she finds in adulthood, nothing can undo the scars of past experiences, or undo their memories. And though she has found a way to accept those truths, she has also found a way to rage back at them.

Still, there are moments when O'Connor can be talking about all the newfound peace in her life, and a tortured look will suddenly cross her face. Maybe in those moments she fears the happiness as much as she ever dreaded the hurts-because few things hurt more than realizing that, sooner or later, happiness goes the way of all evanescent dreams. Or maybe it's a fear that what Chris Hill and others say is right: that maybe pain is the source of her art, and that she may have little choice but to serve that particular muse. In moments like that, sitting in crowded rooms with all the lights on, Sinead O'Connor may not be all that distant from an all-too-familiar darkness, though maybe now it's been internalized into a more manageable or companionable place.

Whatever the sources of that look, O'Connor wears it with a brave face. "Every experience I've had," she says, "is a good experience, even the bad ones. An understanding of sorrow and pain is an important thing to have, because if nothing else, it also gives you an appreciation for happiness. People who've been brought up happy and normal often don't have an understanding of what life might be like for other people. Whereas people who have had an unhappy life have that understanding. In the kind of work that I do, it's important to understand pain and what life is like for other people-and I never take that knowledge for granted.

"I realize," she says, offering a shy smile, "that I'm in a very lucky position, and maybe something I pa.s.s along in my songs might be able to help somebody else. But that couldn't happen if I didn't have the experiences I've had."

david baerwald's songs of secrets and sins.

David Baerwald sits at an upright piano in the den of his mother's home in Los Angeles' well-heeled Brentwood district, and plays a private recital of a song called "Secret Silken World." It is a darkly humorous and unsettling song about a man who is lured into a world of power and s.e.x and seduction-it is, in fact, about the bond that exists between the seducer and those whom he seduces. Some of Baerwald's friends-including Joni Mitch.e.l.l-were so disturbed by the song's mix of d.a.m.nation and glee that they persuaded Baerwald to leave the tune off his fine 1990 alb.u.m, Bedtime Stories. Still, Baerwald takes a certain pleasure from regaling the occasional visitor with the song in its full, uncensored form. "The seats of his car were like velvet skin," Baerwald sings, glancing over his shoulder with a smile. "They made me think about all those places I've been/They made me understand violence . . . and sin. . . . /He said, 'Things would go better if you would be my friend/You don't have to like me but I can be a means to an end. . . . /It's a secret silken world/Of s.e.x and submission/Of money and violence and acts of contrition/Where your enemies succ.u.mb/And the ladies all listen. . . . ' "

At song's end, Baerwald studies his thin hands resting on the keyboard, then laughs. "You know what I think after singing something like that?" he asks. He strides over to the far side of the den, gesturing at something that hangs on a wall around the corner. It is a hand-tinted picture of Baerwald himself, at about age fifteen. His hair is browner and his face is fuller than now, with none of the lines, scars, and sunken pockets that currently make up his hawklike visage. It's a smiling and sweet face that looks out from the picture, but there is something lopsided and sly in its smile, not unlike the smile with which Baerwald now regards the photo. "Look at that face," he says, gazing at his former self. "Whatever happened to that kid? He looks so innocent-at least compared to this snaggle-toothed guy, singing about s.e.x and violence."

Baerwald studies the picture for a moment longer, his thoughts seemingly far away. "What happened to that kid?" he says one more time, with a mirthless laugh.

IN ONE WAY there's an easy answer to that question: What happened to David Baerwald was that he became an uncommonly literate and seasoned songwriter. That is, he took the experiences and perspectives of a life lived hard, and fas.h.i.+oned them into a part-hard-boiled, part-empathetic lyrical sensibility that-in his songs with the much-acclaimed L.A. duo, David + David, as well as his own solo work-rivals the best musings of such similar-minded Southern California pop artisans as Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, and Donald f.a.gen. But whereas Zevon and Newman typically write in fictional modes, there is something deeply personal about Baerwald's scenarios. It's as if the voice singing about those who are living existences of ruin and longing has also known that existence himself.

The catch is, while Baerwald likes to joke about his own dissipated image, he isn't overly fond of disclosing the details of what shaped that sensibility. Indeed, Baerwald can prove a bit of a perplexity: He can speak endlessly and compellingly about a wide range of matters-from his favorite American authors (which include Raymond Chandler, Paul Bowles, Raymond Carver, and Andre Dubus) to his political pa.s.sions (which lean toward unsentimental leftism), and he can tell hilarious off-the-record tales about some of his more famous acquaintances. But for all his obvious intelligence and wit, there is an unequivocal streetwise quality about Baerwald-an edginess that comes across in flash-quick moments, when a dark glare can cross his face, as a warning against delving too deeply into certain private concerns. In other moments, Baerwald can turn resolutely vague. For example, a few minutes later, as he sits on the veranda of his mother's home, he seems both nonplused and cagey when the question is put to him directly: What did become of the young innocent-looking kid in that cla.s.s photo? What is it about his past that turned him into such a keen profiler of bad-news souls?

Baerwald regards the question quietly for several long seconds, staring at the sharp points of his faded brown boots. "Um . . . I guess I gained perspective," he says, beginning softly, "and, uh, strength and, uh, knowledge. And I think I lost unquestioning good faith and innocence and, uh, you know, the youthful optimism that is untempered by facts. I'm not sure that those are terrible things to lose. But what I'm really upset about," he adds, pausing and fixing his visitor with an utterly sincere look, "is my complexion." Baerwald beams a quick, roguish smile, then lets out a loud laugh that echoes off the nearby hills.

Over the next hour or two, a slightly more detailed answer emerges. Baerwald was born in 1960 in Oxford, Ohio. His father was a respected political-science professor and his mother taught English and music. When Baerwald was five, his father accepted a position as Dean of Students at an English university in j.a.pan, and moved the family to just outside Tokyo. Baerwald is sketchy about what the family life was like. There were two older sisters-both were musical prodigies, and both went through long unhappy periods-and his parents' marriage, he indicates, was strained and would eventually come apart. "They were an odd pairing," Baerwald says. "My father's a very austere, aristocratic German intellectual, and my mother's a warm midwestern woman from a family of farmers. I'm still pretty close to my mother [now a psychologist], and I have a very, uh, cordial relations.h.i.+p with my father. The two of us are definitely cut from the same cloth, which can be a bit distressing to admit."

It was a tumultuous time to be living abroad. America was involved in Vietnam, and there were riots and military actions at the university where Baerwald's parents taught. As a young American, Baerwald shared sympathies with those who protested the war, but he was also drawn to some less peaceful ideals. "I got interested in the way the j.a.panese cultural aesthetic can combine serenity with sudden violence," he says. "It's a trait I find I have an affinity toward, that warrior-poet ideal." In time, Baerwald found he had an even stronger affinity for the rock & roll revolution that was taking place back in America and in Britain-especially the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and the Band. To his parents' distaste, Baerwald began playing his own rock & roll, and shortly began writing some politically acerbic songs.

When he was twelve, the family moved to the Brentwood district around UCLA, but Baerwald found Los Angeles' air of cultural languor disorienting. "I mean, this neighborhood," he says, gesturing at the sprawling hills around him. It is a seductive landscape, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with beautiful homes tucked into rolling hills of affluence and privilege. "It just seemed kind of unreal, especially after coming out of a very vibrant scene. It's like, what's really going on here? You see nice houses, and nice people in nice cars with nice clothes, and you can't believe it's as idyllic as it looks.

"Anyway," Baerwald continues, "I started getting ejected from my junior high and high schools. I had a terrible temper, and I felt that the educational system existed solely to kill thinking. Coming from my background, there was nothing of interest to me in school. I'd already read and understood the religious symbolism of The Scarlet Letter at eight, and I wasn't going to get anything more from it at age fourteen. So I became a problem student. It started out with a war because I refused to wear shoes. And it deteriorated from that to, uh, violence." Baerwald pauses and smiles grimly. "It would be fair to say my teenage years were filled with violent explorations. Which I still draw on."

Somewhere along the line, Baerwald fell into trouble with the law, and ended up on probation. When this subject comes up, the singer leans forward with a dour look on his face and makes an admonis.h.i.+ng gesture. "I will not go into the details of this," he says flatly. "Suffice to say that I survived it. And let me make one thing clear: It was not drugs that endangered me. I never had a drug problem, or anything on that level. It was people, you know? People were dangerous to me; drugs weren't."

Baerwald realizes he has tensed up, and leans back in his chair, offering an appeasing chuckle. "I'm going to do everything I can not to talk about that stuff, because it would end up becoming a focus. It's just something I went through, and it's over." He pauses. His eyes flicker warily behind his sungla.s.ses, and for the moment, his thoughts seem to scan distant memories. "The people I knew then . . . ," he says after a bit, "the experiences I was involved in, the things I did . . . " He lets out a long sigh. "Those are things that I will probably continue using as details or colors for the characters in my songs for as long as I write." Baerwald fixes his visitor with a level gaze and crosses his arms over his chest. This subject, he signals, is closed.

In general, the late 1970s was a restive time for Baerwald. He recorded with one L.A. punk band, the Spastics, then spent three years playing ba.s.s, singing lead, and writing for another, the Sensible Shoes. "There was a part of me that knew that world was not a place I belonged," he says. "It seemed to me that punk had just become a cartoon of itself, and I didn't want to be in any more nightclubs. That life was too stupid and pathetic."

IN 1984, BAERWALD began collaborating with an old acquaintance, David Ricketts, a musician of serious training who had played in the Philadelphia club scene in the 1970s, and who had moved to L.A. in hopes of writing film scores. The two Davids were markedly different people-Baerwald held bedrock musical values, Ricketts was more attuned to jazz and progressive musical forms; Baerwald was impulsive and moody, Ricketts, methodical and introspective-but somehow the combination worked. "We just plugged into each other at exactly the right time," says Baerwald. "I remember the first thing we wrote was an abrasive punkish piece, and the second song was this sweet piano-and-string ballad. We did both in the same day, and we looked at each other and said: 'There's no limit to what we can do.' It felt like an incredible freeing up. Basically, I backed off from the music part, and Ricketts had no lyrical input or sense of what the lyrics were. So it was extremely easy to work together."

Almost immediately, Baerwald began to focus on songs about desperate dreamers, wounded lovers, and corrupt visionaries. "I could sense that I had a good well to draw from," he says, "that I had been living in a story-oriented environment. Also, I was formulating my experiences of the past, and I felt I had a lot to say about it all. I remember driving down Sunset with David, saying, 'Let's write the archetypal record about L.A. as metaphor.' I actually said that to him. It seemed like a fertile starting point for making records. So we approached it as if it were a first novel, setting the groundwork for everything else to come. The idea was to provide a cast of characters that would give us a deep oeuvre to work in."

In 1985, Baerwald and Ricketts signed a deal with A & M Records as David + David, and shortly teamed up with critic and producer Davitt Sigerson. Within a few sessions, the crew had fas.h.i.+oned Boomtown, a work that took a significant step toward realizing Baerwald's highfalutin literary ambitions. Indeed, like the L.A. literature of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Diane Johnson, and James Ellroy, Baerwald was writing stories about the hopeful and the hopeless interconnecting in a desperate and morally polluted cityscape. Some of these characters come to the city with excited, even virtuous dreams of love, luxury, and salvation. Others-like the chronic, pathetic wife-beater of "Ain't So Easy" or the drifters and grifters of "Swallowed by the Cracks"-have darker needs, like uncaring s.e.x and obliterating drugs, and as their own mean dreams fail, they take the innocent and loving down with them. Says producer Davitt Sigerson: "Baerwald wrote about some typically romanticized rock & roll characters-the down-and-outers-in a way that was unmawkish and that seemed to capture those people. And the musical settings that Ricketts came up with did a great job of cinematizing those stories. We always had this picture of the music as a beautiful setting with people losing their grip on life in the middle of it."

Indeed, Boomtown was something of an anomaly in L.A.'s mid-1980s rock scene. Like Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, Concrete Blonde, the Minutemen, X, the Blasters, and other local bands, David + David were serving up abrasive truths, though in a musical manner that was more conventionally accessible, and that sensibility, with its Steely Dan-derived blend of pop melodies and jazz rhythms, was well suited to the mainstream aesthetic. This approach earned the pair some scabrous dismissal from the scene's more rigid postpunk ideologues, but it also won David + David a fast-rising Top 40 single ("Welcome to the Boomtown"), and some fervent critical praise.

Within a season, though, David + David began to pull apart. "We got a lot of attention quickly," says Baerwald. "Too quickly. We began by pursuing this thing as a hobby, and six months later found ourselves doing an Italian TV show between two dog acts. When things happen that fast-when you're touring constantly, cooped up in hotel rooms under pressure, answering the same press questions over and over-you start drinking more. When you start drinking, you get more hostile and start picking at the things the other person says and does. It had always been something of a volatile relations.h.i.+p, though mainly in a pleasant way. Now, it was volatile in an unpleasant way."

In addition, the follow-up to Boomtown had to be delayed. Ricketts had become involved with folk singer Toni Childs, and started to arrange and produce her debut effort for A & M. Baerwald found Childs' posthippie mysticism a bit cloying and humorless, and when he couldn't resist poking fun at her manner, it led to tensions all around. Meantime, Baerwald was writing prolifically on his own, but A & M discouraged a solo venture so soon.

It was quickly turning into one of those bitter scenarios from Baerwald's songs: A pair of dreamers link up in a town of high hopes, only to crisscross one another and lose their dream in the process. In 1988, David + David entered the studio to record their long overdue second LP, but the strain was too much. "On the first LP," says Sigerson, "it was the fact that they barely fit that made it all brilliant. By the time of the second one, Ricketts had more of a sense of his career from having worked with Toni Childs, but Baerwald, who is explosive to begin with, had had a cork jammed in him for a year and a half. It was clear that he was growing as a writer-he had developed a better eye for characters-but it was hard for the two of them to be in a room together. Ricketts would try to get the keyboard sound right, and Baerwald-the K-mart Charlie Bukowski, who can get stuck in the schtick of his characters-would say, 'f.u.c.k the sound; let's do the song.' But when you say f.u.c.k the keyboard sound, you're also kind of saying, 'f.u.c.k you and what you do'-or at least that's how Ricketts heard it. In the end, the vibe was more than the process could bear.

"You know," Sigerson continues, "Baerwald's kind of like a c.o.c.ker pup. He's charming and delightful, but he's inclined to pee on your leg. If you treasure c.o.c.ker pups, it's great. If you have a problem about getting your leg peed on, it can be an upsetting experience."

Baerwald concurs with Sigerson's a.s.sessment. "I never saw Ricketts as a sensitive guy," he says, "as somebody whom I could hurt. And so I said and did things that were hurtful, and in time I realized Ricketts was an open, bleeding wound. He felt his music as deeply as I felt mine. And the truth is, what a lot of people liked about David + David was not "David Baerwald's streetwise, world-weary personification of the gritty realities of modern life' but rather the fact that the music sounded good, and Ricketts is the one who deserves credit for that."

Baerwald pauses to light up a cigarette. He looks suddenly weary and a little doleful. "When people think of David + David," he says, "the word innocence doesn't come to mind. But we were very innocent: We were doing our music because it felt good. And then it got taken out of our hands. It was corrupted very quickly, and we didn't have the emotional wherewithal to resist it. The record business is geared for fame bulls.h.i.+t and iconization bulls.h.i.+t.

"I guess it was over long before we realized it."

BAERWALD MADE UP for the disintegration of David + David with some hard living. He moved around L.A. a lot, moved through a few love affairs, and started running with a faster, flas.h.i.+er crowd-including several pop stars and actors, including Sean Penn, with whom Baerwald roomed for a time, and with whom he wrote an as-yet-unproduced screenplay loosely based on Boomtown's themes and characters. In some ways, it was a heady time, though much of it amounted to frenzied behavior-not unlike the lives led by the characters of his songs. "That world of stardom and luxury," he says. "It can be a sn.o.bbish, vulgar, secret, sickened world."

As Baerwald speaks, it is a few days after our first meeting, and he is seated on a worn sofa in his living room, in the bottom part of the wooded duplex he occupies in Topanga Canyon. The place is a bit of a mess-strewn with clothes and bedding, and filled with guitars, exotic stringed instruments, and recording equipment. The dwelling has a makes.h.i.+ft feel about it, as if the person who lives here clearly lives on his own, and hasn't yet found a place he would describe as home.

"A big part of me dug that whole scene," says Baerwald about his fast-and-hard Hollywood life. "I was like a guy who's addicted to gambling or something: He knows what he's doing is stupid and ugly and wrong, but he keeps on doing it. Then you wake up one morning and find that you're not anything, that you lost perspective on what it is that you do. I could say, 'Hey, I'm doing research for my writing'-that I was actually carving something horrible out of my heart or psyche-which on a certain level was true. But as a person, I wasn't okay at all. I was a schmuck. I was twenty-six and I had a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things, and validation from some strata of society meant a lot to me at that moment."

Perhaps it was simply his mood, but Baerwald began to see his own dissolution reflected in the world around him. In 1988, he was living close by the Chinese Theater, in Hollywood. By day, it is a tourist district. By night, it is a tense, restless community of runaways, young prost.i.tutes, bikers, skinheads, drug dealers, and occasional gang members: all those castoffs bred-and then discarded and condemned-by a society that is unwilling to examine the causes of its own ruin. Baerwald already knew what life on the fringe was like-he had lived it at times, and had chronicled it in Boomtown. Now, he wanted to see how the deterioration looked from a different vantage. At the prompting of Sean Penn, who had been acting in Dennis Hopper's Colours, about L.A.'s gang life, Baerwald began hanging out with cops, and interviewed them about the death and futility they faced every day.

"It was really a disturbing experience," he says, "and it entered into my life. I would look at these acts of degradation that these cops saw all the time, and I'd ask myself: 'How different am I from that?' You start realizing your own wicked soul, you know?"

Baerwald gets up, moves around restlessly for a few moments, then finally grabs a beer from the refrigerator and settles back into the sofa. "I started seeing all these connections," he says, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap on the beer bottle and taking a sip. "Connections between gangs and drugs and cops and the government, and I began thinking about what it meant to live in a free society. I just started thinking very dark thoughts about our civilization and everything we were doing, and I got a feeling of total impotence in the face of such insanity and such stupid violence.

"I saw I was as much a criminal as anybody," Baerwald continues, "because I was a part of the media, and I'd had this long fascination with violence. And I understood better how violence breeds violence and becomes a chain that never stops. The danger of the kind of environment we live in is that our own failures can breed a desire for violence-or at least we start using that as an excuse for our violence. But if you start thinking in social terms, you can get very bitter and very mad. Real community is a hard thing to achieve in our lives, much less our society. That's why I began writing so many love songs, because I didn't want merely to preach about these things. I wanted to relate them to the specifics of my own life."

From this mix of personal disappointment and social disenchantment came a new body of songs. In June 1989, Baerwald did some initial solo sessions with producer Steve Berlin (of Los Lobos), then a few months later, hooked up with ba.s.sist and producer Larry Klein (married at the time to Joni Mitch.e.l.l). In many ways, the resulting alb.u.m, Bedtime Stories, is superior to Boomtown: It is a musically affecting work, rife with finely observed vignettes about a city and nation disintegrating from denial, and it is a record br.i.m.m.i.n.g with haunting portrayals of people trying to make love work, despite the pain of their pasts and the hopelessness of their futures.

In the alb.u.m's first single, "All for You," a hopeful man brings his young beautiful wife to L.A. He works hard to support her-so hard, she feels abandoned by him, and takes to bed with another man who seems more understanding. Along the way, the husband gets involved in illegal activities; he loses his wife and his hope; she loses her lover; and the lover-who had been a friend of the husband-loses some of his honor. There are no heroes in the tale, and no villains. Just real people, trying to find love and connection and meaning. And the adulterer, the lover who helped end his friend's marriage, was Baerwald.

"I'm trying to be more honest and intimate and specific about individuals this time," he says, "in the hopes that those individuals will illuminate a larger whole. The idea was that I wanted these characters to emerge with something intact-their humanity, or compa.s.sion, or sensitivity. Just surviving, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a heroic act. It's easy to survive if you're a killer-especially if what you've killed is something inside yourself. It's easy to live if you're dead. But surviving with your humanity intact, I think, is always heroic."

Across the room, the phone rings. Baerwald's machine picks up the call, and the caller-whoever he is-plays a wild Hendrix-like guitar solo, then hangs up. Baerwald shakes his head bemused. "Sounds like Ricketts to me," he says.

The two Davids are still good friends, still get drunk together, but there is clearly a distance between them now. "There's something about that relations.h.i.+p that just won't quit," says Baerwald. "Ricketts was like a terrific big brother, but I had to find out what I could do on my own, and I'm just now finding that out."

Baerwald takes another sip of beer and begins to explain that one of the harder-hitting songs on Bedtime Stories, "Dance," was written about the experience he had shared with Ricketts in the music industry. "I adapted 'Dance,' " he says, "from a Paul Bowles short story. It's about a naive language student who goes to Morocco to find a tribe that speaks this dialogue he's studying. He goes to the chieftain and says, 'I am a seeker of knowledge.' And the chieftain says, 'Oh, are you?' And the tribe grabs the student and they tear his clothes off and they castrate him, and blind him, and cut his tongue out. They feed him hallucinogenic drugs and they pierce his flesh with needles and dangle bells from him. And they make him dance for their entertainment."

Baerwald finishes his beer, and laughs uproariously at the story he has just told. "That story," he says, "reminded me of my experience with the record business. I came into this scene, and I said, 'I just want to learn to make music.' And these guys said, 'All right, fine. But you've got to dance, you know.'

" 'But I don't know how to dance,' I said. And they said, 'Well, you will.' "

PART 6.

endings.

dark shadows: hank williams, nick drake, phil ochs.

Three "popular music" artists long dead-Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs-all had new collections in record stores in the same week in August 1986. If this coincidence seems at all curious, or even a bit morbid, then consider what other traits these singers have in common: Hank Williams was a restive country-western singer and songwriter who, in both his work and life, seemed perpetually torn between visions of heaven and sin, hope and fear, love and death. Somewhere along his celebrated route, dread gained the upper hand and the singer fell into drink, pills, and a bitter malaise. On January 1, 1953, at age twenty-nine, Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car, en route to a performance in Charleston, West Virginia. He was the victim of a deadly mix of drugs, alcohol, and hard living. All indications were, Williams had seen the end coming for some time. He even addressed it in a song called "The Angel of Death": "The lights all grow dim and dark shadows creep."

Roughly twenty years later in England, a frail-seeming folk singer named Nick Drake took an equally consuming look at notions of loss. Drake wrote haunting songs full of tenderness and resignation, beauty and despair-until, apparently, he could no longer find the words to convey the panicky depths of his experience. On a late November morning in 1974, Drake was found dead at his parents' home in Birmingham, England, the casualty of an overdose of antidepressant medication and, according to the coroner, a suicide.

By contrast, Phil Ochs-a folk singer who had served as both an early champion and contemporary of Bob Dylan-had spent the better part of his career writing songs of angry hope and fierce humor, songs that seethed with idiosyncratic dreams of a better and more ethical culture. At the same time, some of Ochs' most memorable work also radiated with affecting, firsthand images of anguish and madness, until by the mid-1970s-after his vocal chords had been severely damaged by a mugging attack in Africa and his career had all but collapsed in disillusion-the agony became insufferable. In April 1976, Phil Ochs hanged himself at his sister's home in Far Rockaway, New York, and pop music lost one of its most conscientious and compa.s.sionate voices.

Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs were all men who knew torment on an intimate and enduring basis-knew it so well that it robbed them of any practical will to escape its devastation. It is hard to say whether their music served to deepen or a.s.suage their agony (certainly, in Ochs' and Drake's cases, the lack of a caring audience at times aggravated their depression, while for Williams, success seemed only to hasten dissolution), but one thing is plain: Their songs did not mask the reality of the men behind them. If anything, the quality of longing and desolation that characterized much of Williams', Ochs', and Drake's most indelible work seemed inseparable from the frightful realities of longing and desolation that eventually weighed down each man's life.

What is especially intriguing about the 1986 posthumous releases of these artists is that each project, to varying degrees, provides a telling-even definitive-overview of each singer's sensibility. That is, these works not only offer a glimpse of the artists' journey from inspiration to desperation, but more important, also provide heartening examples of how the singers sought to resist-or at least temper-their hopelessness.

In the case, however, of Nick Drake's Fruit Tree (a four-disc set on Hannibal made up of Drake's three late-1960s and early-1970s Island alb.u.ms plus another disc of largely unissued material), this quality of resistance may seem a bit elusive at first hearing. After all, Drake began his career (with the 1968 Five Leaves Left) in what seemed a moody, perhaps even disconsolate frame of mind-singing songs about fleeting desire and lasting solitude in a smoky, almost affectless tone-and abandoned his vocation four years later with what is among the darkest works in modern folk history, Pink Moon. By that time, Drake had stripped his music of its innovative jazz and cla.s.sical tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, until all that remained were his guitar and a mesmerizing, almost frozen-sounding voice that seemed to emanate from within a place of impenetrable solitude.

Yet for all its melancholy, there is surprisingly little in the actual sound and feel of Drake's music that is dispiriting or unpleasant. In fact, what is perhaps the most alluring and uplifting aspect of Drake's work is a certain hard-earned pa.s.sion for aural beauty: There are moments in the singer's first two alb.u.ms, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter-with their chamberlike mix of piano, vibraphone, harpsichord, viola, and strings-that come as close as anything in modern pop to matching the effect of Bill Evans' or Ravel's brooding music, and there are moments in Drake's final recordings that are as primordial and transfixing as Robert Johnson's best deep-dark blues. In short, there is something bracing about Drake's music despite all the painful experience that formed it.

By comparison, Hank Williams' music may seem far more soulful, but it was no less fundamentally heartsick-or at least that's the portrait that emerges from two 1986 eye-opening retrospectives that fill in important gaps in the singer's story. The first set, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, is the fourth volume in an ambitious series from PolyGram that gathers all of Williams' late-1940s and early-1950s studio recordings in chronological order, including numerous invaluable outtakes and demo tracks-among them, versions of several songs never released before. As impressive as this series is (remarkably, it is the first attempt to a.s.semble such a complete and well-doc.u.mented library of the singer's studio works-though a ten-LP 1981 j.a.panese set was a big step in the right direction), the other new Williams' set, The First Recordings (Country Music Foundation), is perhaps even more priceless. Here, available for the first time, are the seminal demo sessions that the young songsmith recorded for Acuff-Rose in 1946, and at the very least they reveal that from the outset Williams was an immensely effective folk singer. That is, not only could he convey the spirit and meaning of his material with just voice and guitar, but in fact such a spare approach often reinforced that essential "lonesomeness" that always resided deep in the heart of his music. More important, though, Williams was already traveling the road between faith and dejection-and modern music would never be the same as a result of that brave and hurtful journey.

Similarly, Phil Ochs also made a difficult migration-and one would be hard-pressed to find a work that better illuminates that journey's brilliance and tragedy than A Toast to Those Who Are Gone, a compilation of previously unreleased songs a.s.sembled by Ochs' brother, archivist Michael Ochs, for Rhino Records. Apparently, nearly all of the fourteen songs presented here were recorded early on in Ochs' career-probably during 1964-65-and yet, like Williams' The First Recordings, this seminal material staked out virtually all the thematic ground that would concern the singer throughout his career. What emerges is a portrait of a man who loved his country fiercely and fearlessly, who could not silently abide the way in which its hardest-won ideals were being corrupted by slaughterous hate-mongers and truthless presidents. Eventually, according to some, there was a part of Ochs that grew sad and manic and that enabled him to take his life. However, listening to this music-which is among the singer's best-one hears only the inspiring expression of a man who wanted to live very, very much, and who wanted his country to realize its grandest promises. Perhaps as he saw all that became lost, both in his own reality and in the nation's, he could not sanely withstand such pain.

Listening to these records, one is forced to consider an unpleasant question: What is there, finally, to celebrate about men who lost their faith and ended their lives? Certainly there is nothing to extol about willful or semi-willful suicides, but there is nevertheless much to learn from them. For example, in heeding the work of Hank Williams, Nick Drake, and Phil Ochs, one learns a great deal about dignity and the limits of courage: These were men who held out against the dark as forcefully as possible and, in doing so, created music that might help improve and sustain the world they eventually left behind. Maybe, by examining their losses-and by appreciating the hard-fought beauty that they created despite their anguish-we can gain enough perspective or compa.s.sion to understand how lives might come undone, and therefore how we might help them (or ourselves) hold together. After all, if Williams or Drake or Ochs were still here, chances are it would be a better world for many people-including you and me.

IN THE EARLY 1980s, a young Canadian director named David Acomba made a film called Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave. It's among the best-certainly among the most unforgettable-music films I have ever seen. It uses pop music as a means of contemplating (even entering) imminent death, and in the process resolving, explaining, and perhaps redeeming the drama of one man's public life and sorrowful end. Shot in Canada, The Show He Never Gave opens its story on New Year's Eve, 1952, Hank Williams' final few hours on earth. A night-blue Cadillac is traveling on a lonely, snowy road. In the back seat, the lean grim figure of Hank Williams (played by a Woody Guthrie-influenced Canadian folk singer, Sneezy Waters) stirs fitfully. On the radio one of Williams' pedal-steel-laden hits is playing. Leaning forward, he abruptly snaps it off.

Williams begins to rue the loneliness of the night. "I wish I didn't have to be playing that big concert arena . . . tomorrow night," he mutters to himself. "Tonight's the night I should be playing . . . one of those little roadside bars we're goin' by right now." He gazes out at the blue darkness as if he were looking at a long-desired woman.

Moments later, Williams' ruminations become reality: We see him pulling up to a jam-packed honky-tonk, his five-piece band finis.h.i.+ng the strains of "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It," a crowd of old rubes and young rowdies in semi-religious awe of this country kingpin. With self-conscious meekness, Williams takes the small stage and begins to play his exhilarating and broken-hearted minstrel songs-"Half as Much," "Hey Good Lookin'," "Cold, Cold Heart," "I Can't Help It If I'm Still in Love with You," "Kaw-Liga," "Lovesick Blues," "Your Cheatin' Heart," among others. He also talks to the audience self-deprecatingly about his alcoholism, muses over his separation from his first wife, worries that the audience at this little wayside stop may reject him. Indeed, the one injunction that every important voice in the film-devil or keeper-tells him is, "Give 'em a good show." Williams looks paralyzed at the mere suggestion.

Not much else happens. There are brief bouts of flirtation, camaraderie, and self-destructiveness backstage, some more icy self-reflections in the back seat of the Cadillac. And yet it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a man struggling to account for himself-his hurts, his hopes, his soul, his terror, his deviltry-in the measure of this handful of unpolished songs.

And that's just what happens. When in mid-show Williams begins to reminisce about his first wife, Audrey, and then moves into an unaccompanied reading of his haunting folk ballad, "Alone and Forsaken," the movie provides an emotional wallop that we never quite forget. From that point on, the crowd in the barroom watches Williams more heedfully, more perplexedly, as they gradually become aware that they are privy to the confessions of a man with a heart so irreparably broken that he may never get out of this world with his soul intact.

By the end, we have come as close to a reckoning with dissolution, death, and judgment as film-or pop music-has ever brought us. "It might seem funny that a man who's lived the kind of life I have is talking about heaven when he should be talking about h.e.l.l," Williams tells his audience before moving into a desperately pa.s.sionate version of his gospel cla.s.sic, "I Saw the Light." Moments later, in the lonely, fading reality of the Cadillac's back seat, Williams admits to himself: "Only there ain't no light. I tried, Lord knows how hard I tried, to believe. And some mornings I wake up and it's almost there." The moment is more frightening and desolate than might be imagined.

As good as Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave is, I'm afraid you might have to look d.a.m.n hard to find it. Acuff-Rose, the Nashville publis.h.i.+ng firm that owns the rights to Williams' extensive songbook, withheld permission for the filmmakers to use Williams' songs, thus in effect barring the film's U.S. release. Acuff-Rose's response was a little hard to fathom. After all, Williams' excesses were not merely pop legend-they were a matter of record. Roy Acuff himself was a member of the country gentleman Nashville establishment that expelled Williams from the Grand Ole Opry because of his drinking, drug use, intoxicated performances, and occasional gunplay.

Maybe Acuff came to regret Nashville's staidness so deeply that he preferred to see its history go unpublicized, or maybe he never quite forgave Williams for refusing to keep his demons private and thus marring the smooth facade of Nashville's decorum. In 1983, Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose told me: "What I didn't appreciate about the film-because Hank was a personal friend-is the part where they show someone give him the needle. I never saw Hank take a needle. It isn't what you call expert criticism; it's what I call personal criticism. [The filmmakers] stressed the weakness of the man, rather than the greatness that rose from his work."

To my mind, Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave did just the opposite: It got as close to the artist's greatness as any biographical or fictional work might. The only thing that gets closer is the frightened yet lucid soul of Williams' own songs. "The lights all grow dim and dark shadows creep." The Show He Never Gave takes us right into those shadows-and maybe that's not an easy thing to forgive.

tim hardin: lost along the way First time I got off on smack I said, out loud, "Why can't I feel like this all the time?" So I proceeded to feel like that all the time.

TIM HARDIN,.

WET MAGAZINE INTERVIEW, 1980.

To while away the time on their way to a gig in Cleveland, Paul Simon and fellow band members in One Trick Pony play a game whose object it is to name the most dead rock stars. Tim Hardin comes up, and an argument ensues. One guy insists the drug-plagued 1960s folk-rock hero is alive in Woodstock. A bet is placed: Twenty dollars says he OD'ed.

Life, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, imitates art. Less than six months after the film's release, the Tim Hardin joke turned sour. Its point, however, remains true: So many rock stars have died that one can hardly keep track of them. Hardin pursued an infamously brutal and reckless manner of existence. Most people who loved the man, or revered his work, had steeled themselves long ago for his end.

For the record, Hardin wrote some of the most indelible, affecting, and frequently recorded love songs of the 1960s. Musicians who knew him in Greenwich Village during that time considered him to be one of the best. John Sebastian, formerly of the Lovin' Spoonful, played harmonica on Hardin's early Verve Forecast alb.u.ms (Tim Hardin I and Tim Hardin II). "Timmy was breaking new ground," he recalls. "Probably everybody in the Village during that period stole something from his songs-which isn't exactly singular since we were all stealing from each other, anyway. But Timmy's talent was singular; he dared to go, both musically and emotionally, where most of us feared to go, and there was plenty to learn from the way he melded rock & roll and blues and jazz into a style all his own."

During a two-year span in the mid-1960s, Hardin wrote the bulk of the songs that secured his reputation, including "Misty Roses," "If I Were a Carpenter," "Reason to Believe," and "Lady Came from Baltimore," the latter a frank, self-indicting account of his romance with actress Susan Moore (who later became his wife). And although his own roughhewn readings of his songs never enjoyed much chart success, he still sang them better than anybody else, in a stray, harrowed voice, redolent of his chief vocal idols, Billie Holiday and Hank Williams. By 1970, Hardin's career had run aground. Beset by marital wrangles, managerial suits, and narcotic funks, he eventually fled to England, where he recorded one wholly unmemorable alb.u.m, Tim Hardin 9 (1973), and gradually receded into the dark custody of his own legend.

In 1980, he was back in Eugene, Oregon-his hometown-for a while, seemingly intent on a fresh start. Michael Dilley, a studio owner and former high school buddy of Hardin's, believed it was a serious effort. Hardin had gone off heroin in favor of beer and was in a good mood. "Occasionally, though, it was like he forgot what he was doing. He'd come into the studio, sit down at the piano, and come out with something absolutely gorgeous, and then it would hang there sometimes, like an unfinished sentence."

On the warm evening of December 29, 1980, responding to a tip from an anonymous caller, police found Tim Hardin's body lying on the floor of his small, austere Hollywood apartment. He was dead, at age thirty-nine. Just a few nights earlier he had finished work on the basic tracks for his first alb.u.m in seven years. The centerpiece of the collection, a ballad called "Unforgiven," is one of the most haunting, lovingly crafted works of his career. It goes like this: "As long as I am unforgiven/As far as I am pushed away/As much as life seems less than living/I still try."

dennis wilson: the lone surfer.

Rock & roll has had such a pervasive social influence because, in the postwar era of popular culture, it sometimes worked as the equivalent of a familial bond. Indeed, its princ.i.p.al rise-in the mid-1950s, following the advent of Elvis Presley-occurred during a period when family bonds and values were being strained, sometimes severed, by postnuclear conditions of generational freedom. Consequently, for millions of unrestrained young Americans, the connections they shared through Presley were often more genuine than the ties they found at home. The irony behind this, of course, was that rock & roll sprang from the Southern region, where strong family ties still mattered (though not always for the better).

By contrast, the Wilsons were a California family, subject to those same mid-1950s permutations, but distinct in their placement in a still largely undefined land, where both Western civilization and popular culture ran to their ends. Like many other Westerners, Murry Wilson regarded California as something of a promised land, rife with opportunity; like many other young people, his children experienced that opportunity as a boundless scenario of instant surface fun: s.e.x, nature, cars, and even quick religious incentive. Underneath those surfaces resided something far more debilitating-including the reality of the Wilsons' home life, where Murry was reportedly an often cruel and brutal man. But in the fast exuberance of the early 1960s, few pop lovers were yet admitting to the depths-good, bad, or otherwise-under the surfaces.

In 1961, along with cousin Mike Love and neighbor Al Jardine, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson began making music as the Beach Boys-a real family, acting out California dreams and rock & roll ambitions, advised and managed by father Murry Wilson. Brian wrote the songs-quick, brilliant anthems of youthful transcendence and romance, whirligigs of contrapuntal rock-but it was younger brother Dennis (the band's early drummer and later harmony singer) who provided Brian's songs with a model: He was the sole group member who took up the regional pastime of surfing, and he was also the family's most indulgent exemplar of hedonism (which reportedly led to much trouble between Dennis and his iron-handed father). Still, with Brian's talent and Dennis's unconstraint, the Beach Boys defined a new California pop ethos, and under the tutelage of Murry (who died in the early 1970s), the group became a pop force very nearly the equal of the Beatles.

But rock & roll, like any family affair (or family subst.i.tute), can be painfully capricious, and when the fun-and-sun style of that period gave way to a more high-flown late-1960s hedonism, the Beach Boys' run was, in a way, over. The group toyed for a while with the idea of a topical name change, and also flirted with psychedelia and mysticism (in fact, "Good Vibrations" is possibly the best psychedelic single by any group in that period). Challenged by the times, and by the Beatles' exceptional creative growth, the Beach Boys settled into a period of increasingly experimental alb.u.ms-Pet Sounds (one of pop's finest and most intricate works), Wild Honey, Smiley Smile, and Friends-but none of them sold like their earlier work (with the exception of Pet Sounds, which barely hit the Top 10), and the public never again bought the group's contemporary recordings. Aside from a quirk hit in 1976 with "Rock and Roll Music," the Beach Boys never had a real hit after "Heroes and Villains" in 1967. (Four years after this article was written, the Beach Boys again had a number 1 single, 1988's silly and lamentable "Kokomo.") Pushed aside, the group's members gave in to the dark side of Californian ambitions. Brian, beset by personal and drug problems, became a shadowy, receding presence in the band (replaced onstage by Glen Campbell, then Bruce Johnston). Meanwhile, Dennis fell into a fairly freewheeling lifestyle, including a surprisingly effective acting job in the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop (with James Taylor), and a brief a.s.sociation with Charles Manson (Manson co-wrote "Never Learn Not to Love," on the 20/20 alb.u.m, though the group later purchased the rights). Despite these lapses, the band still made enterprising, often wonderful work-Sunflower, Surf's Up, Holland-but these records remained unloved by a new California audience that preferred the Doors and Buffalo Springfield. In time, of course, the group made its peace with the public: The political and artistic ambitions of the late 1960s subsided, and the Beach Boys were popularly accepted as a nostalgia act: a "reminder" of more "innocent" years. After that, they were largely consigned to living out their history according to past glories, despite occasional attempts to make new music.

When Dennis Wilson drowned on the evening of December 28, 1983-the victim of a diving accident-there was much talk about his ill-famed indulgences over the years. There was also much made of how the family and group-rarely inseparable but also rarely unified-had fallen into bitter bickering (the band, in fact, came close to disintegrating several times, and Dennis and Mike Love had such an abrasive relations.h.i.+p that they obtained restraining orders against one another). In the group's last tour, Dennis Wilson didn't even appear for several dates, purportedly for reasons of family friction and drinking problems.

There wasn't, however, much said about just how well this group had lived up to its artistry during their long period of public neglect (they were an inestimably better, more resourceful band than, say, the Doors), nor did many reports point out how the Beach Boys had managed to take all the disenchantment of their best late-1960s work and continuously parlayed it into creative resolve. Dennis Wilson was perhaps the most volatile member of the band, but he was also its most archetypal: He embodied the public's ideal of the band's myth, and he understood how the flipside of that myth was probably an inevitable turn of events. In the years since the late-1960s, Dennis-like the rest of the band-had come to live out his celebrityhood as a novelty star: as a reminder of a past long used and reclaimed merely to satisfy an audience's whims. If he drank or sulked a bit more as a result of swallowing that knowledge, I wouldn't want to begrudge him. Perhaps even more than his brother Brian, Dennis Wilson exemplified the band's real ethos, and when he fell into that deep, irretrievable chill on that Wednesday night in 1983, so did a part of the band's best history.

marvin gaye: troubled soul.

More than any other artist of the pop generation, Marvin Gaye rose to the emotional promise, stylistic challenge, and cultural possibility of modern soul. In fact, he was often cited as the man who singlehandedly modernized Motown: a sensual-voiced man full of spiritual longings (and spiritual confusion) whose landmark 1971 alb.u.m What's Going On commented forcefully yet eloquently on matters like civil rights and Vietnam-subjects that many R & B artists, up until that time, had sidestepped.

Though that eventful record was in some ways the apex of Gaye's career (he would never again return to themes of social pa.s.sion), Marvin remained a resourceful performer up through the time of the last work released in his lifetime, 1982's Midnight Love (Columbia). Watching him command the stage at 1983's Motown Anniversary TV special, or seeing him graciously accept his first Grammy Award a few weeks later, it felt as if we were witnessing the rejuvenation of a once-troubled man, who learned to transform his dread into artistic courage, even grace. Hearing the news of his violent and improbable end-shot to death on April 1, 1984, by his minister father-it seemed likely that rugged emotions and rampageous fears were never far from the singer's closest thoughts, after all. According to David Ritz's 1985 biography of Gaye, Divided Soul, Gaye remained deeply troubled and ungovernable toward his life's end-indeed, a doomed and restless man marked by fear, debt, s.e.xual violence, religious guilt, jealousy, and, ultimately, a self-loathing so active it almost purposely created the circ.u.mstances of his own murder. The facts presented in Divided Soul weren't pretty: Gaye abused cocaine to a degree of madness; he often struck and ridiculed the women in his life; he claimed to envision a violent death; and he even took a crack at suicide during his last weeks. On the surface, Gaye's art seemed pa.s.sionate yet well proportioned; behind that surface, in the man's life and heart, it was all turmoil and craziness.

But then Gaye always understood the tense play between fear and rapture uncommonly well, and at times that knowledge overwhelmed his music. In part, the worldly-spiritual insight was a product of the singer's upbringing. Back during the period when his father, Marvin Gaye, Sr., was an active apostolic minister in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Gaye grew up singing in an evangelical gospel choir, though he also spent much of his youth privately listening to the more secular forms of bebop, doo-wop, big band jazz, and R & B. Both the spiritual and early influences left an indelible impression on the singer, and following a term in the air force, he returned to Was.h.i.+ngton and began singing in street-corner R & B groups, melding the pa.s.sion of gospel with themes of ever-suffering worldly romance (which, in that period, was a refined metaphor for s.e.x).

In 1957, Gaye formed his own vocal group, the Marquees-a polished harmony troupe-and with the support of Bo Diddley, the group recorded for the Okeh label. In 1958, Harvey Fuqua enlisted the group as his backing ensemble in the Moonglows, who recorded for Chess. In the early 1960s, while playing a club in Detroit, Gaye's breathy, silken tenor caught the interest of local entrepreneur Berry Gordy, Jr., who signed him to his then-struggling Tamla-Motown label. Shortly after, Gaye married Gordy's sister, Anna, and began working for Motown, primarily as a quick-witted, propulsive drummer (his bop-derived rhythmic drive can be heard on the early singles of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, among others).

In 1962, Gaye scored his first Motown hit, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow," and throughout the decade recorded the most extraordinary body of Motown singles-all rife with a definitionally s.e.xy-cool brand of vocalizing and a sharp, blues-tempered backbeat. Working with every substantial Motown producer of the period (including Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield, and the Holland-Dozier-Holland team), Gaye yielded a vital body of dance hits and s.e.x-minded ballads that still remain as popular and indelible as the finest work of his prime songwriting compet.i.tors of the period, the Beatles. Gaye's best-known hits from the epoch included "Hitch Hike," "Baby Don't You Do It," "Can I Get a Witness," "I'll be Doggone," "How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You," "Ain't That Peculiar," and his most successful 1960s recording, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." In addition, he advanced a romantic duet style with label-mates Mary Wells ("Once Upon a Time" and "What's the Matter with You"), and in the 1970s, with Diana Ross.

But Gaye's finest duet work-perhaps the most pa.s.sionate singing of his career-was with Tammi Terrell, with whom he recorded such late-1960s standards as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Your Precious Love," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing," and "You're All I Need to Get By." In 1967, Terrell-who had developed a brain tumor-collapsed into Gaye's arms during a concert performance. Three years later she died, and Gaye, reportedly shattered, began rethinking the importance of a pop career. As a result of Terrell's death, he remained an infrequent and reluctant live performer until his 1983 tour (the final tour of his life).