A Skin Too Few

Jeroen Berkvens' 1999 documentary A Skin Too Few takes its title from a remark Gabrielle Drake has often made about her brother Nick, trying to describe why he found it so hard to cope with the world. This film is everything other Nick Drake documentaries are not - a raw heart-tugging document of a young man's terrible trouble adjusting to the pressures of growing up, being uncommonly talented and unreasonably sensitive at the same time. The film shows testimony from family and close friends and associates, illustrating Drake's slow turn away from the world into his own mind where demons of depression lurked and eventually overpowered him.

Unlike Nick Drake Under Review this film does not rely so much on assessments from other musicians or journalists/biographers. In fact the only other musician we hear from is Paul Weller whom we see in the opening scene in a recording studio w. John Wood and Robert Kirby, two of Drake's very close collaborators. Weller never knew Drake, nor does he have much to say about him, so I wonder why he has to appear at all, but never mind...

Rather, we should be very grateful for what we get from this film instead: a very moving portrait of a man and an artist who was very deeply rooted in a loving, supportive environment, both in terms of family and friends and his fellow professionals in the music world. We follow Drake's life chronologically, virtually from cradle to grave, and the main narrator of this story is his older sister Gabrielle, supplemented by the taped voices of both Rodney and Molly, their parents, telling us of events that Gabrielle did not herself witness.

It is quite interesting to get the whole story of the Drakes' time in Burma and to hear Gabrielle speak of Nick's birth and the easy life of a colonial well-to-do family in the late 1940s - illustrated by home movies of a happy family. Her assessment of Molly as a troubled soul, buoyed up by the love of her husband who made life livable for Molly without strangling her creativity is very poignant. The footage then takes us to Tanworth-in-Arden and inside the magically named childhood home of Nick, Far Leys, where we follow the camera into Nick's room, see his wonderful round window, while the soundtrack plays a home recording of "Hazey Jane I" (in a much more rocking version than the Bryter Layter version - a very cool performance by Nick), the camera then panning to a view of a fruit tree out of the window. The images thus already prefigure the theme of home, longing, escape, failure, return, sadness which structures the whole narrative of the film.

Gabrielle then plays one of Molly's songs, again emphasizing the very strong relation between Molly and her son, both in terms of the similarities of their temper and talent, and in terms of her maternal love. Over the sound of Molly's song we hear the train clickety-clacking, signalling Nick's departure to Cambridge which is the next period to be narrated by the film. The use of the train in image and sound is another unifying feature of the film, recurring throughout...

Brian Wells, a Cambridge friend of Nick Drake's, narrates the next portion, a story of dope smoking, guitar playing - in effect a 3 year holiday for the young men. In contrast, Gabrielle reads from a letter from Nick to his parents on liking Cambridge more than before, claiming to have "thrown off one or two rather useless and restrictive complexes that I'd picked up before coming here". One of course wonders where and when...? Gabrielle's stock of letters from Nick would certainly be superlative material for a sincere biographer to have access to. "River Man" is played over footage of Cambridge streets - people coming and going as the lyrics also detail. On tape Rodney speaks of Nick's Cambridge nostalgia, and of his desire that Nick should have a degree as a safety net, whereas Nick insisted that that was the one thing he would rather not have...

The scene shifts to London as Gabrielle remembers Nick one day coming home to their flat, tossing copies of Five Leaves Left on the bed - to her amazement, since she never realized that he was recording a whole LP. This portion continues with musical testimonials from producer Joe Boyd talking about Nick's skills and reliability as a player, Robert Kirby speaking of his arrangements ('lonely and bleak') complementing the perfect guitar line, which John Wood, the engineer, illustrates on the mixing board (playing the raw tracks of "Chime of a City Clock"). As the song plays on the soundtrack in its fully finished version, the images illustrate the song with night footage of rainy London street, segueing into the well known stills of Drake standing motionless against a wall as other pedestrians rush by.

Next, Boyd talks about Nick quitting touring in frustration over audiences being indifferent or hostile. Wells tells an anecdote about Nick slipping into isolation and depression. One of his most upbeat songs, "When Day Is Done", illustrates Nick's next move "back where you've begun," as the lyrics read. Wells remembers Nick returning home to Tanworth, and his being ashamed at having failed to live and cope in London. Drake was hospitalized, and diagnosed as clinically depressed, whereas Wells sees Nick's condition more as an existential crisis, brought on by the coldness and futility of life as such.

We next hear a recording of Molly, quoting Nick: "I don't like it at home, but I can't bear it anywhere else..." Molly concludes that Nick had "given up on the world", and she recalls her utter inability to help him overcome his sense of acute failure at everything he had ever tried to do. Gabrielle explains it like this: "I never did see a change - it crept up on us..." "He saw more, and he became more silent as he saw more." "That is expressed in his songs and almost nowhere else..." This sequence of the film is very dark, also in terms of images of the night, storms, even featuring Gabrielle dressed in black - all quite effective emotionally, as one understands the tragedy of his family not being equipped to help Drake at all. Love was not enough.

Boyd talks about trying to get Drake to seek help from a psychiatrist, but Nick being ashamed of such a course of action. Later Boyd details Nick's outburst against his lack of success, making an analogy between Nick's anger directed towards Boyd, and the lyrics to the song "Hanging on a Star" ("Why leave me hanging on a star when you deem me so high?") As Nick sings the desolate lyrics to "Know": "Know that I love you, Know I don't care, Know that I see you, Know I'm not there" we pan to the supernatural beauty of the English woodlands in misty, early morning shots, another technique Berkvens uses to great effect, showing the incongruousness between Nick's surroundings and his self-image.

Keith Morris, photographer for the Drake albums, remembers the Pink Moon sessions, especially Nick's almost total silence which contrasts dramatically with earlier occasions where they had worked together. The images taken during that session are shown with no musical accompaniment. The film shifts to Gabrielle reciting Molly Drake's poem "The Shell," describing how both Molly and her son had problems sensing the world directly without the feeling of being imprisoned in a shell - this is accompanied by images of Gabrielle placed in the woods as a stylized, tragic figure herself - obviously practising her actor's craft here...

We are next treated to English woodland and village scenes - evincing the same stylized beauty, as Drake finally sings "Hanging on a Star". The camera takes us again to Nick's room, and a montage of both parents' voices narrates the last night of Nick's life (we see Nick's round window increasingly freeze over during this narration). Molly remembers the final night and next morning - the agony of never having known how dangerous the Triptozol pills were, the inevitability of finding him dead that morning. Gabrielle remembers being in a comedy play in Bristol at the time, and how her parents drove down to tell her of Nick's death. As she tells us this, we see the room scene again, and Berkvens uses the out of the window motif, as Nick sings of the "endless summer nights" (from Pink Moon's "From the Morning"), escaping his shell for good.

Gabrielle's theory of Nick's death is that it was a spontaneous act - whether suicide or cry for help she could never determine... (We see the interior of the Tanworth-in-Arden church as a service ends.) Gabrielle muses on the blessings of having had such a family and the tragedy of losing them. Kirby relates his feeling of being shocked at the news of Drake's death, whereas Wood felt terribly sad, but not surprised...

The closing scene begins with Nick's voice on tape, apologetic that his voice is failing - but he promises to do one more song. Over images of Tanworth "Northern Sky" plays, and suddenly the music is lowered so we hear Nick's naked voice, as we see his headstone in the church yard. The sequence ends with an impossibly beautiful shot of the church in the distance.

Gabrielle closes the film by talking of Nick's recent fame, and the helping quality of Nick's music for so many young people of later generations ("had he only known..."). As "Northern Sky" closes, we end with the Drake family home movies - filled by images of Nick's happy childhood. The soundtrack ends with sounds of waves and moving trains.

I find the film very well made, especially as it allows itself to have a narrative that veers from the straight documentary aesthetics and into techniques borrowed from fiction: the use of leit motifs, colouring, sound effects etc. This enhances the film's emotional impact greatly and it is hard to not be very moved by its otherwise familiar story. I am very impressed by Gabrielle Drake's role in the film which she virtually carries single-handedly - both as a trustworthy narrator and as a great actress using her craft to play on our emotions. The 48 minutes spent with the Drake family are very enriching and enlightening.

Nick Drake Under Review

A few weeks ago my friend Gorm was visiting and spotted a couple of Nick Drake documentary DVDs on my shelf. I had been saving them for special occasions because I knew they would be emotionally challenging to watch and I would want to write about them (as this review bears witness to), and at the same time I hadn't really wanted to watch them for fear of disappointment - the usual syndrome that can hit the ardent fan when someone else dares to provide opinions on and analyses of the sacred object: On the one hand you want there to be as many Nick Drake documentaries as possible, but on the other hand you don't want to watch them because you know they'll be full of nonsense... Anyway, Gorm asked if my wife and I had watched the films, and when I said no, he concluded: Oh, you're not that big a fan, then! Thus challenged, I figured it was high time to actually get started and to deliver the review I rashly promised when I first started this blog named after a line in a Drake song...

The 90 minute Under Review film came out on DVD in 2007 (Chrome Dreams - Director and writer apparently both wish to remain nameless...). It is not sanctioned by the Nick Drake estate, Bryter Music; nor by Drake's record company, Island. Therefore, we are only treated to short snippets of Drake's recordings - I suppose to keep the copyright issues minimized by sticking to the standard fair use clauses. As a result the film contains longer clips by Bob Dylan and Davey Graham than it does by Drake. Of course there is also the matter of Drake never having been filmed live, so we don't get any performance footage either, but then that is a given in any Drake film.

What we do get is a bunch of interviews with people whose lives have in several ways brushed up against Nick Drake's, either because they knew him, or because his music somehow has captivated them. The film is chronological in that it follows Drake's life from childhood to his premature death at 26. It goes into great detail about some aspects of his life, primarily of course the creation of his three completed albums, but also to some extent his personal life. The interviewees thus function as narrators taking us through a mixture of basic information (although a voice-over narrator also provides that type of continuity, esp. in the first third of the film) and personal assessments. The chief narrators of that kind are the two main biographers of Nick Drake, Patrick Humphries and Trevor Dann, plus the only contemporary music journalist who took Drake seriously, Jerry Gilbert (Gilbert conducted the only interview Drake ever gave to a music journalist). Analysis is also provided by Caitlin Moran - columnist and journalist w. The Times, and her husband Pete Paphides - also a music journalist. They represent the younger voices, sanely assessing Drake's significance to our current time and its musical and cultural climate.

The second type of narrators consists of musicians, and again we get two different generational viewpoints: Drake's contemporaries and our contemporaries. Of the first kind are Fairport Convention musicians such as Ashley Hutchings (who 'discovered' Drake) and Dave Mattacks (who played on the Bryter Layter recordings w. Drake), as well as Ralph McTell - who headlined the last gig Drake ever played at. These three provide insightful analysis of why Drake failed as a live performer, but succeeded as a songwriter and musician in the studio. Other older members of the 60s folk scene in the UK are interviewed as well, but good people such as John Renbourn (who teaches us the difference between the blues style vs. the finger picking style on the acoustic guitar) and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band didn't really know Drake personally and have little to say about him. Here one sorely misses Linda and Richard Thompson, John Martyn and other, closer, musician friends of Drake.

The younger generation of musicians is represented by one of the relatively few women in the film, Kathryn Williams, who also performs fragments of Drake's songs. Keith James, a singer / songwriter in his own right, also performs covers of Nick Drake songs (some of which he has recorded on CD) and talks about Drake's tuning and playing techniques. A few comparisons are made with another English guitar innovator, Davey Graham, who has been rather more unkindly treated by time. Renbourn and Bert Jansch are of course also mentioned as influences on Drake's playing style, but other than that most of the film's interviewees emphasize strongly how Drake's music really transcends the narrow bounds of the 'folk' label, esp. because of his knowledge of other types of music, classical as well as jazz. As for the analysis of the music of Nick Drake the film is severely hampered by the lack of involvement from the people who really worked with Drake: Joe Boyd, John Wood, Robert Kirby - producer, engineer, arranger of scores, respectively, are all missing as voices...

The final type of interviewees consists of friends and acquaintances, and here we only really get snippets from an elderly couple who knew Drake's parents (but have nothing of interest to say) and a substantial contribution from Jeremy Mason - Drake's old friend (he wrote "Three Hours (to Sundown)" about Jeremy). Mason provides a number of rarely seen photos and lets us see some of his own drawings of Nick - great material, much of which stems from a stay the two of them had in Aix-en-Provence, France. Again, though, one misses more testimonials from (other) friends (where are the women who knew Nick?) and family - but Drake's parents are both dead and his sister Gabrielle is reluctant to talk to most journalists and biographers...

This leads me to my main bone of contention with the film - the role of Trevor Dann. I intensely dislike his bio of Drake, Darker Than the Deepest Sea, which spuriously suggests that Drake's problems all stem from childhood abuse of some unspecified sort (all based on so-called textual analysis of Drake's lyrics). While Dann doesn't voice any such views in this film, he still comes across as a very unsympathetic and snide character who routinely ventures into territory he has little knowledge of. His casual references to Drake's allegedly excessive drug use are left unchallenged by the film makers, whereas many of Drake's friends are willing to testify that these stories are vastly overstated. Further, it quickly becomes clear that Dann is in deep waters himself when one hears him waffle about the role of modal jazz as an influence on Drake, or - even worse - his muddy explanations of the so-called Blake and Tennyson influences in Drake's lyrics (Dann refers to the authority of so-called "lit crit guys", of which he himself admittedly is not one, to back this claim up, but he doesn't provide one specific example). Dann also claims an influence on Drake by James Lovelock's ecological ideas, despite the fact that Lovelock's book Gaia - A New Look on Life on Earth was not published until 1979, 5 years after Drake's death...

Patrick Humphreys comes off as a much less conceited biographer and wisely sticks to contributions of a musical and cultural nature, but as sources go, it is really Jerry Gilbert who is the most interesting narrator and analyst. The film is therefore, on the whole, informative and sober, and it may function well as an introduction to Drake's work and parts of the late 60s, early 70s folk scene in Britain. For the hardcore fan of Drake there is less of interest in the film, and little that one hasn't heard already. The aesthetics of the film can get quite annoying, particularly in the choice of images to accompany the short musical interludes. This footage is invariably bucolic in the early 1960s instances and then gets increasingly political and social as we enter the 1970s - but what is worse is the plodding literalism of the images: when Drake mentions food in his lyrics, we see food; when he mentions a fruit tree, we see rotting fruit; when he mentions the sky - you've guessed it...

Overall, I would recommend that even fans watch the film, but the experience is not really very deep, either emotionally or intellectually. One doesn't get under the skin of Nick Drake - and perhaps that is all for the best...

PS: As a "lit crit guy" I cannot resist mentioning that when Drake's first band (while he was still in school) took the name The Perfumed Gardeners, they were referencing an Arabic erotic classic: The Perfumed Garden, translated by Richard Burton (Sheikh Nefzaoui was the original author). Not much has been made of this curious fact, and I suppose Nick Drake's role in choosing the name is not quite clear. One wonders, though, what the reading of such a book (basically an erotic manual) might have done to a young boy's imagination... Drake's life of the mind certainly still remains largely uncharted, despite much biographical writing and documentary film making.

PPS: Make sure not to miss the extras features, in particular Robin Williamson's tarot reading of Drake's "Character - inner and outer". It is wonderfully 60s, whacked-out hippydom, yet strangely sane and a bona-fide analysis of Drake as a person, bound in a specific time and milieu...

Back in the thick of it

I still haven't gotten back in a proper routine after the Nordic Americanist events over the last two weeks, but every mill needs its grist, not least the publication one. Therefore it is gratifying to have two new book chapters out as a result of 2006's conference going!

Space Haunting Discourse is a volume out from Cambridge Scholars Press, edited by Maria Holmgreen Troy and Elizabeth Wennö from Karlstad U. Maria and Elizabeth put on two excellent interdisciplinary conferences in 2004 and '06 and I participated in both of them. The chapter I have in the fresh volume is on novels about Big Sur, California by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan. Maria and Elizabeth have written a comprehensive and generous introduction to the volume which is available as a PDF from the publishers' web site. They give the following description of my piece:

Presence and absence are also features of Bent Sørensen’s “Representations of Big Sur in Late Modernist and Early Postmodernist American Writing.” The textual referent is the actual geographical Californian Big Sur, inscribed with meanings by three writers in such a way that it is rendered absent and instead emphasises loss and disillusion. In effect, his analysis supports David Harvey’s argument that the genius loci, the place of special significance to the individual and the community, “is open to contestation, both theoretically (as to its meaning) and concretely (as to how to understand a place)” (309). Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan all wrote prose about Big Sur, and Sørensen demonstrates how this locus haunts these texts in three significantly diverging ways: Miller’s locus amoenus, Kerouac’s tremens, and Brautigan’s topos.

Within the short span of seven years, the potential of Big Sur as a locus representing ideas and emotions has been transformed into a fully textualised topos, which can only serve as a vehicle for pastiche and postmodern parody of Brautigan’s modernist precursors’ anxieties. His text is haunted by the intertextual ghosts of Kerouac’s and Miller’s gender and racial values, which are parodied by Brautigan’s incongruous collection of beatnik womanisers and exploiters of both land and Native American (and Confederate) heritages. At the end of the essay Sørensen quotes J. Gerald Kennedy’s remarks on the distinction between a subjective concept of place and a “textual, writerly image”: the difference between the two is not a structural one of “real and fictive” but “between textual scenes and the symbolic experiences of place which they inscribe.” Taking it one step further we could say that Sørensen’s analysis of modernist and postmodernist inscriptions also reflect the epistemological shift in theory as well as the shift in literature from the crypto-religious impulse of modernism to the playful linguistic preoccupation of much postmodernism.

My other new book chapter is an analysis of Uncle Sam as an American icon. It is published in a volume edited by Ari Helo of the Helsinki Renvall Institute, titled Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies. That chapter will be integrated in my forthcoming book American Icons: Transgression and Commodification.