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Posts from the ‘Music autobiography’ Category

Jun 20

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Nick Drake: The Life

You had to wonder, looking around the October Gallery in London last night, what Nick Drake would have made of the gathering arranged to mark the publication of Richard Morton Jack’s account of his short life. As his sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, remarked in her elegantly moving speech, he might have taken it as a vindication of his own belief in his talent.

Among those present last night were many who had spoken to the author about their encounters with Drake. Among those I knew were Simon Crocker, Chris Blackwell and Jerry Gilbert. Crocker played drums at Marlborough in a band in which Drake played saxophone and later travelled with him on expeditions to Aix and Saint-Tropez; their final encounter, a few months before Drake’s death, is recounted in the book. Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, had liked Drake’s demos — and Drake himself — when he heard them at the end of Nick’s first term at Cambridge in 1967; a year later he signed him to the label at the behest of Joe Boyd, who became his producer. Gilbert, my colleague at the Melody Maker for a few months in 1970, secured the only real interview Drake ever gave, published in Sounds later that year**.

And, of course, there was Gabrielle, to whom the extraordinary way her younger brother’s posthumous reputation and record sales eventually took off must have been the source of such complex emotions: joy that he had finally been recognised, regret that he could not see and be part of it, all filtered through the memory of the mixed happiness and pain that marked his 26 years.

As she writes in the book’s foreword, this is not an authorised biography in the sense that the author’s approach or his final manuscript were formally approved by Nick’s estate or his surviving family. But Richard Morton Jack was given such generous access to all relevant sources and material, and has treated this opaque, enigmatic life with such care and skill, and with such a calm, understated ability to evoke time and place, that his 550-page volume can be considered definitive — a dangerous word when it comes to biography, or indeed any non-fiction work, but in this case almost certainly justified.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life is published by John Murray.

** Not quite the only one, as it turns out: during his research for the book, Richard Morton Jack unearthed a 1970 interview given to a writer from, amazingly, Jackie, a magazine for teenage girls.

Jun 19

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Lisa says

Lisa Robinson

Lisa Robinson’s There Goes Gravity — subtitled “A life in rock and roll” — contains photographs of the author with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, John and Yoko, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Ahmet Ertegun, Iggy Pop, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Patti Smith, all of the Ramones, Johnny Rotten, David Johansen and Johnny Thunders, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, Bono, Eminem, Dr Dre, Jay Z, Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy Jr, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga. Oh, and John McEnroe. What it doesn’t have is a photograph of Lisa with me. So I thought I’d fix that.

Here we are, caught by the flashbulb of her friend Leee Black Childers, who became the Weegee of the Max’s Kansas City/CBGB set. This picture was taken on July 6, 1972, according to the caption on the back, written in Lisa’s sloping hand. Apparently we’re at a restaurant in New York City called Butler’s, attending — and I can hardly believe I’m writing these words — a press reception for Black Sabbath.

We were, of course, on our way to somewhere else. I was in New York for the relocated Newport Jazz Festival, so we might have been bound for a concert by Ornette Coleman at Lincoln Centre’s Philharmonic Hall (where I think I embarrassed her by leaning over to invite Jerry Wexler and the New York Post writer Al Aronowitz to shut up) or Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall. Or we could have been heading off-piste to the St Regis Hotel to hear Mabel Mercer.

When she came to Europe in those days she stayed the Ritz in London and L’Hotel in Paris, and always insisted on changing her allotted room shortly after arrival, as a matter of principle. But New York was the capital of the world, and she was an excellent companion and sometimes guide. Mabel Mercer would have been her idea. Thanks to her, I saw the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Centre, Television (with Richard Hell) and Blondie, Talking Heads (then still a three-piece) and the Ramones, all before they had their first recording contracts — and it was she who pointed out Seymour and Linda Stein of Sire Records at a front table at Max’s, moving their lips with word-perfect accuracy to the songs of Talking Heads, whom they were extremely keen to sign.

Like most musicians, she never went to bed before the small hours and got up when civilians were having lunch. She was out every night. She spent hours on the phone and could be a kindred spirit. She loved to gossip but know how to keep a secret, or at least how to share one with care. She was an early adopter and a good interviewer, adept at establishing a lasting rapport, which means the book contains unusually valuable stuff from many of the people with whom she was photographed. And she had a sharp New York wit, often employed to deflate pomposity (her best friend, and the book’s dedicatee, is the social satirist Fran Lebowitz). When the Stones hired her to be their press adviser on their 1975 US tour, she had no scruples about spending a little time on the dark side because she knew that — like her closeness to Page or Reed — it would give her marvellous material.

We lost touch some time before she became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, where she has written about stars and edited the music issues for the last 15 years. Her very entertaining book came out last year and has just been published in paperback (by Riverhead). It’s good value if you enjoy stories about hanging out with Rick Rubin or Walter Yetnikoff, or anecdotes like the one about lending Jagger a pair of her lace knickers to wear on stage when his own underwear went missing. It’s a form of higher gossip but the less frivolous stuff is always worthwhile, too, because she engages with her subjects and approaches them from shrewdly chosen angles. She doesn’t write much about the music itself: she was an early friend of most of the great American rock critics, but she never wanted to be one. Good for her.