White Bicycles (25 page)
We used the new eight-track tape machines during the recording of
Hangman
, so the possibilities for over-dubs were doubled. Robin liked to inject Licorice’s tiny dog-whistle voice at certain points; she also proved useful keeping time on hand drums and finger cymbals. Robin began to mutter about the possibility of including these embellishments in live shows.
On a rare excursion to London without Licorice, Robin turned up at my flat with a girl they had encountered after a concert at York University. In the middle of the night she left Robin’s sleeping bag – ‘I realized I was in the wrong bed’ – crawled in with Mike and stayed with him for the next three years. Rose Simpson was – and still is – as bright, cheerful and outgoing as Licorice was dour and secretive. Her laughter is as hearty as Mike’s and the pair were a delight to be around. She was further unlike the other three in that she
wasnae Sco’ish
! We hit it off immediately and I began to rely on her to inject clarity into discussions that took place out of my presence. She and Licorice were like a dog and a cat living in the same house: they ignored each other bar the occasional low growl or hiss. The day Robin proposed that Licorice join the group, Mike went out and bought Rose an electric bass. ‘Learn this,’ he said, ‘you’re in the group now, too.’
One of the most remarkable acts of pure will I have ever witnessed was Rose’s evolution into the ISB’s bass player. She has no natural rhythm or aptitude for music; her voice is tuneless, with no sense of pitch. Licorice was far more musical but could no more have learned to play the bass than fly to the moon. Mike would work out the parts and Rose, her lower lip firmly clasped between her teeth, would practise them. She memorized not just notes, but phrasing and feel. Later, when Mike was making a solo LP and Steve Winwood came to play organ on a track, he watched in amazement as she played an unusual and tricky part perfectly, take after take, as the guest musicians rehearsed the song in the studio. Steve rang me the next day about having her play on a track of his; knowing she could never manage it, she asked me to tell him she was unavailable.
On stage, Licorice had her virtues as an enigmatic figure, switching from one percussion instrument to another and singing weird but effective harmonies. Rose just grinned and glowed and audiences adored her. Shows now had the air of a family gathering. Musically, however, it was the beginning of the decline. Liccy and Rose were little more than extensions of the wills of two extraordinarily talented people. The first recording with the girls’ full participation,
Wee Tam & The Big Huge
, lacked the wall-to-wall richness of earlier LPs. It’s a shame the girls were on board for the first extended American tour: outside Newport, US audiences never got a chance to see the duo at its undiluted best.
Shortly after the girls joined, I accompanied the group on a Swedish tour. The final concert was in Lund, a university town near the southern tip of the country. The following morning we took the tram from Malmö down the coast to the end of the line. We got off in front of a huge old wooden hotel on the point looking south towards East Germany. It had once been a fashionable tourist destination but was now eerily empty except for two rooms on the fourth floor where the new owner, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was staying with one of his aides. Now that the whole world was getting high, Robin and Mike were plotting their next spiritual move. The five of us grouped ourselves around a bed where the tiny guru was perched dressed in a white dhoti that seemed an extension of the bed sheets. Mike and Robin had been to Krishnamurti’s lectures, studied Hinduism and Buddhism and were eager to discuss meditation. But the Yogi had no interest in oriental philosophy: meditation, he said, was only of value when the mantra had been given personally by him or one of his cohorts, and that meant joining the organization and paying the fees.
It puzzled me that they left the hotel that day so disillusioned yet a few months later were ready to sign on for something far more businesslike and formularized. The Maharishi wasted no tears on his failure to convert the String Band. Within a few months of our meeting, he was welcoming the Beatles to his ashram in India.
As their popularity continued to grow, the rituals of an ISB concert were celebrated at every stop: the long-haired girls in flowered dresses, the men in velvet or oriental finery, the aroma of incense, the home-made gifts lining the apron of the stage. The crowds knew the songs and joined in on familiar choruses such as that on ‘You Get Brighter Every Day’ (although to their credit, Mike and Robin never encouraged sing-alongs). The pair had lost some of their amateur spontaneity and could now orchestrate the sweeping waves of affection that passed back and forth between stage and auditorium with professional ease.
In November ’68, they played to a sold-out Fillmore East for the third time in less than a year. I had an early morning flight to LA and a late date and the tour manager had other tasks so I was anxious to see the group sorted out as quickly as possible after the show. I knew a nice vegetarian place called the Paradox a few blocks from the hall. While they chatted to fans and signed autographs, I ran down the street to hold a table.
When I entered the restaurant, I was surprised to see David Simon greeting guests and snapping his fingers at waitresses. I knew him from Cambridge, where he had been Jim Kweskin’s court jester. For a year or so he became a member of the Jug Band, adding some wacky vocals on old ragtime tunes and a bit of earnest harmonica. He did a nice line in pseudonyms, appearing on one Jug Band LP as ‘Bruno Wolfe’ and on another as ‘Hugh Bialy’. I ran into him in Greenwich Village in 1965 during the folk-rock supergroup period and he told me he was forming a band called Wolfgang and the Wolf Gang. I had heard nothing of him in four years.
When the group arrived, David ushered us to a large corner table. After they ordered, I told them the saga of David Simon: the deals, the names (Mike found ‘Wolfgang and the Wolf Gang’ hilarious), the shrugs from old Cambridge friends if I enquired about his whereabouts. The kid I knew in Harvard Square was never on time for anything, dressed like a bum, and never looked anyone in the eye. What a contrast to the bright-eyed, super-efficient, highly energetic maître d’ who had just seated us! They listened, gripped by this tale of transformation in ways I failed to comprehend.
In years to come I often pondered this moment when, despite the girl waiting at the bar of Max’s Kansas City, I couldn’t resist the sound of my own voice. Fate feeds off such egotistic impulses. I told them to have a good time and I would see them when I returned from California. By the time I met up with them next, Simon had enrolled them all as Scientologists.
‘UH, HELLO?’ THE VOICE ON the other end of the line was low and soft, almost embarrassed. In the years to come, I would get used to Nick Drake’s way of answering the telephone as if it had never rung before. When I told him why I was calling, he was surprised. ‘Oh, OK, uh, I’ll bring it in tomorrow.’ He appeared at my office the next morning in a black wool overcoat stained with cigarette ash. He was tall and handsome with an apologetic stoop: either he had no idea how good looking he was or was embarrassed by the fact. He handed me the tape and shuffled out the door.
When I had some peace and quiet later that winter afternoon in 1968, I put the reel-to-reel tape on the little machine in the corner of my office. The first song was not one of his best: ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’. The sentimental chord at the beginning of the chorus became one of the few moments in a Nick Drake song to annoy me. But that first time, it drew me in: it was, after all, the first Nick Drake song I ever heard. Next came ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, then ‘Time Has Told Me’. I played the tape again, then again. The clarity and strength of the talent were striking. It was like the moment I heard Robin Williamson’s ‘October Song’ or Richard Thompson’s solo at UFO, but there was something uniquely arresting in Nick’s composure. The music stayed within itself, not trying to attract the listener’s attention, just making itself available. His guitar technique was so clean it took a while to realize how complex it was. Influences were detectable here and there, but the heart of the music was mysteriously original.
Nick came in the next day and listened as I explained what I wanted to do. He nodded and stammered, staring down at his hands, then asked whether I minded if he smoked. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands: they were huge and stained with nicotine, the fingers strong and articulate, with long, evenly trimmed nails caked with grime. He moved them constantly as he listened to my plans for him.
My productions had until then been mostly with working groups, which meant simply recording what was already there. But Nick’s compositions cried out for arrangements, an ideal setting for each song. One source of inspiration was John Simon’s production of the first Leonard Cohen album. Simon had adorned the tracks with choruses, strings and other additions that set off Cohen’s voice without overwhelming it or sounding cheesy. Cohen’s voice was recorded close and intimate, with no shiny pop reverb. Nick hadn’t heard it, but he liked the idea of strings. He described performing with a string quartet at a Cambridge May Ball, the first moment of our meeting when he became animated.
His accent was at the aristocratic end of ‘received pronunciation’. Born in Burma, where his father was a doctor in the Colonial Service, he attended Marlborough and was now at Cambridge, reading English. I had met many public schoolboys (Chris Blackwell, for example) who seemed to have not an iota of doubt in their entire beings. Nick had the accent and the offhand mannerisms, but had somehow missed out on the confidence.
One evening, Nick played me all his songs. Up close, the power of his fingers was astonishing, with each note ringing out loud – almost painfully so – and clear in the small room. I had listened closely to Robin Williamson, John Martyn, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Half-struck strings and blurred hammerings-on were an accepted part of their sound; none could match Nick’s mastery of the instrument. After finishing one song, he would retune the guitar and proceed to play something equally complex in a totally different chord shape.
Sixties London was not brimming with good arrangers. George Martin did his own. Denny Cordell and Mickie Most used John Cameron, but I felt he would have been too jazzy. I rang Peter Asher at Apple and asked him about Richard Hewson, who worked on the first James Taylor record. Peter spoke well of him and gave me his phone number. I sent him a tape of three songs and we paid him a visit. Nick looked at his shoes a great deal and muttered agreements to things I said. It must have been painful for him to go through this process, knowing Robert Kirby was back in Cambridge. But I never thought to ask who had written the arrangements for the May Ball and Nick didn’t volunteer.
In those pre-computer days, there was no way to hear an arrangement before recording it. On the day of the session, Nick, engineer John Wood and I sat in the control room as the musicians rehearsed their parts, trying to imagine how they would sound with the songs. When Nick joined them in the studio, I listened as carefully to his performance as to the instruments. I needn’t have bothered: Nick was perfect every time. The arrangements, on the other hand, were competent, mediocre and slightly fey, distracting from the songs rather than adding to them. After we listened back to our morning’s work and I admitted it hadn’t worked, Nick breathed a sigh of relief: you could see how wary he was of complaining. After a silence, he said, ‘I know someone at Cambridge who might be able to do the job.’ John and I looked at him. ‘He’s already done some arrangements for my songs. They, uh, well, they’re not too bad.’
I wasn’t sure what to make of Nick’s suggestion. I wanted a world-class production, so the idea of using a fellow student struck me as a step backwards. Yet for the supremely cautious Nick to recommend his friend was impressive. I agreed to drive up to Cambridge the following week to meet Robert Kirby.
What can you tell about a musician from meeting him? Kirby was hearty and jolly like a young music tutor, but beneath the banter there was no hiding the deep affection he had for Nick and his music. I liked their ease together. When Robert talked about the songs, he was down to earth and practical. Encouraged, I set a date for the recording.
They started the session with a song I hadn’t heard because Nick didn’t play it on the guitar. As John isolated the sound of each instrument, adjusting the mic position or the equalization, I could barely contain my impatience to hear the full sextet. The individual lines were tantalizing, unusual and strong. When at last John opened all the channels and we heard Robert’s full arrangement of ‘Way To Blue’, I almost wept with joy and relief.
We moved quickly on to ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’ and ‘Fruit Tree’. Each arrangement was devoid of clichés and affectionate towards the song, setting off Nick’s voice and lyrics perfectly. The consistency of Nick’s performances gave us the luxury of recording everyone together in the same room, Nick and the strings moving together under Robert’s direction. John experimented with different microphones for Nick’s voice, eventually settling on a Neumann U67 that brought out the depth and also captured its breathy, delicate quality.
The words to ‘Fruit Tree’ didn’t particularly strike me that day. I took them as a gloomy romantic ode to the lives he may have read about in English class at Marlborough: poet Thomas Chatterton, for example, dead at nineteen and acclaimed decades later; Shelley, drowned in Italy at twenty-four; or maybe Buddy Holly and James Dean. How were we then to grasp the implications of his words?
Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound
It can never flourish
’Til its stalk is in the ground.
And then:
Safe in your place deep in the earth
That’s when they’ll know what you were truly worth.
These lyrics didn’t seem at all prophetic that first year. Nick was shy and unsure of himself, but seemed to have plenty of friends. He travelled frequently between London and Cambridge and was pleased to be working on his record. Sometimes I ran into girls at parties who would say, ‘Nick? Oh I simply adore Nick, isn’t he wonderful?’ One, Alice Gore, always made a point of telling me what great friends they were. Lord Harlech’s daughter, later Eric Clapton’s girlfriend and fellow addict in the early ’70s, Alice would die of an overdose a few years after Nick’s death.
