Night Beat (55 page)

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 relationship, 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,
’Fuck
the sound; let’s do the
song.’
But when you say fuck the keyboard sound, you’re also kind of saying, ’Fuck
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 cocker pup. He’s charming and delightful, but he’s inclined to pee on your leg. If you treasure cocker 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 assessment. “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 bullshit and iconization bullshit.

“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, flashier 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 snobbish, 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 makeshift 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 prostitutes, 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, unscrewing 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 bassist and producer Larry Klein (married at the time to Joni Mitchell). In many ways, the resulting album,
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 brimming with haunting portrayals of people trying to make love work, despite the pain of their pasts and the hopelessness of their futures.

In the album’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 compassion, 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 relationship 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

T
hree “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 compassionate 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 assuage 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 albums 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 classical trimmings, 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 passion for aural beauty: There are moments in the singer’s first two albums,
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 assemble such a complete and well-documented library of the singer’s studio works—though a ten-LP 1981 Japanese 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 assembled 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 compassion 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 finishing 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 hell,” Williams tells his audience before moving into a desperately passionate version of his gospel classic, “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 damn hard to find it. Acuff-Rose, the Nashville publishing 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 façade 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.”