Bizarre Blues, Black Night! - Drake's Dream

Last night I was flying back from Chennai to Delhi on a late night flight. I spent my entire flight tasting the dimly lit aircraft with songs from my ipod, soundtracking the jet black night outside the craft window with the blue eyed soul of the Doobie Brothers and the gruff rhythm and blues of Ray Charles.

My flight landed at the Delhi airport well past midnight. A knife edge cold gush of breeze brought a shivery grin on my face which faded to a warm glow when I sat snug in my pre-paid cab with my windows rolled up. My fingers stroked circularly the wheel of my ipod. I stopped at Nick Drake. I had never heard him. I wanted to hear someone new, something unfamiliar. I was tired of the playlist processions of floyd’s giving way to zeppelin’s to the stones and the beatles, the doors, Clapton…

I stopped at Nick Drake based on a thread of memory, a recommendation from a music store buddy of mine. I was getting into lyrics and singer-songwriters in a big way courtesy my girlfriend then (wife now) who was a lyrics devourer a post noon lyric luncher, a night poem mood setter and a turn of phrase taster. “Pick it up, he’s one of the best and the least known” beamed my music store buddy, he of the coterie’s of rare album aficionados, bootleg collecting boasters and cd collection kings!

I never heard Drake ‘til last night, speeding on the neon silence of late night Outer Ring Road towards home. The album was called Five Leaves Left. It was haunting! Lush, lost, sad, melancholic, baroque. Drake juxtaposed all life’s opposites to me on that listen, romantic and lush, sparse and cold, brooding and dreamy, full of longing at times and then far away, cynical and cut off. Life’s yin-yang of opposites and ambivalences on that cold night drive left me entering a silent, asleep house with the aftertaste of melancholy and intrigue. Who was he? I heard he died young. Was it another tragic rock ‘n’ roll plane crash a la John Denver, Randy Rhoads, Otis Redding, the kind of rock accident that spares no genre.

I stuck his album on again and and searched for his life story on the net. What followed was bizarre. His album unfolded his fate, foretold his death and wrapped-up his destiny 5 years before his death at age 26. A poetry prognosis! The album started with “Time Has Told Me:”

Listening, haunted again, by this young old voice:

“Time has told me, you came with the dawn, A soul with no footprint, A rose with no thorn, Your tears they tell me, There’s really no way, Of ending your troubles, With things you can say”

I scanned allmusic.com’s profile of Drake, my laptop screen glow reflecting on the bedroom window.

“A singular talent who passed almost unnoticed during his brief lifetime, Nick Drake produced several albums of chilling, somber beauty. With hindsight, these have come to be recognized as peak achievements of both the British folk-rock scene and the entire rock singer/songwriter genre. Ironically, Drake has achieved a far greater stature in the decades following his death, with an avid cult following that grows by the year. Part of Drake's failure to attract a mass audience was attributable to his almost pathological reluctance to perform live.


Drake's debut, Five Leaves Left (1969), was the first in a series of three equally impressive, and quite disparate, albums. Drake created a vaguely mysterious, haunting atmosphere, occasionally embellished by tasteful Baroque strings. His economic, even pithy, lyrics hinted at melancholy, yet any thoughts of despair were alleviated by the gorgeous, uplifting melodies and Drake's calm, measured vocals. Neither album sold well, and Drake, already a brooding loner, plunged into serious depression that often found him unable to make music, work, or even walk and talk. Drake's final couple of years were marked by increasing psychiatric difficulties, which found him hospitalized at one point for several weeks. He had rarely played live during his days as a recording artist, and at one point declared his intention never to record again, On November 26, 1974, he died in his parents' home from an overdose of antidepressant medication; suicide has been speculated, although some of his family and friends dispute this. In the manner of the young Romantic poets of the 19th century who died before their time, Drake is revered by many listeners today, with a following that spans generations.”

I mulled over his tragic, solitary life, by which time the last track on the album played. I turned of the laptop and switched off the lights allowing the honey-like brooding darkness of his voice to take over:

“Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound.
It can never flourish
Till its stalk is in the ground.
So men of fame
Can never find a way
Till time has flown
Far from their dying day
Forgotten while youre here
Remembered for a while
A much updated ruin
From a much outdated style.

Life is but a memory
Happened long ago.
Theatre full of sadness
For a long forgotten show.
Seems so easy
Just to let it go on by
Till you stop and wonder
Why you never wondered why.

Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light.
Safe in your place deep in the earth
Thats when theyll know what you were really worth.
Forgotten while youre here
Remembered for a while
A much updated ruin
From a much outdated style.

Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound.
It can never flourish
Till its stalk is in the ground.
So men of fame
Can never find a way
Till time has flown
Far from their dying day.

Fruit tree, fruit tree
No-one knows you but the rain and the air.
Dont you worry
Theyll stand and stare when youre gone.

Fruit tree, fruit tree
Open your eyes to another year.
Theyll all know
That you were here when youre gone.”

The Other World: Thoughts while listening to The Flaming Lips album "At War With The Mystics"

I love listening to albums at night. It’s the silence, the darkness, the sleepiness induced defocused daze that gets us closer to that “other world”, the world where ears taste, tongues listen and eyes think, I mean our cousins living below in alternative realities and parallel senses; the world of our unconscious, the universe of our dreaming state.

In this other world albums stroke our alternative consciousnesses with their sonic canvasses, tingling our synapses, our neural networks, leaving us suspended exquisitely, blissfully, between dreaming and waking in that “other world”.

It’s the world of pure individuality, where people who could’ve been standing in queues in a bank or depressing their breaks to halts at traffic lights become lords of their universes, creators of aural dreamworlds, the world where Pink Floyd makes The Dark Side Of The Moon or Tolkien discovers Hobbits, wizards, riders of rohan confronting orcs and servants of sauron in the middle earth.

It’s the space where psychedelic guitar tones and strings can create amber glows or impassioned blues make your face grimace with their needlesharp pricks and sharpened knife slices of notes.

Try lining up Floyd’s “Brain Damage”, The Flaming Lips “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”, Derek & The Dominos “Layla” and Miles Davis’ “So What” one after the other and you see the individuality the deep uniqueness of our senses, our consciousnesses, our selves, our natures, our expressions. Each piece is made by a person exploring another sonic world another universe in sound which we all tap into and explore like passengers in their realm.

Maybe it fulfills that wonderful Russell essay where he says: “In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces, but in thought, in aspiration we are free, free, from our fellow men free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free, even while we live, from the tyranny of death.”

How do these creators live in their day to day life, when they conduct business, order at restaurants, write cheques, analyze their pay checks, fill application forms; are they conscious of those other universes they’ve created, the parallel worlds they’ve created. Or is it blanked out in the daylight senses of singular, uniform reality.

Perhaps that’s why I like listening to albums at night.

Holding Still

A character initialled D..... thought these one January night in 2008 in his ephemeral 5 minutes life as an imaginary character.

'Flying, circling, cartwheeling atop the peaks, pitfalls and paralysis of fantasies I dipped into depression with buzzing malarial mosquito halos around my head. I was standing by a road under a sodium light. Buses passed by with long intervening gaps of silence. Sometimes I randomly lifted my hand and caught meaning and purpose, opened my palms, stared diffused as puropse slipped, slithered through my fingers. I was left only with memories: Why did Coldplay add blue-black beauty to solitary, late night train journeys on Mumbai locals? How did trance music notes become an elusive breeze which disappeared across a Goa sea before I opened my eyes to them? Why did late night literature add to my life, butressing my gooey brain with cloudy canvasses of pictures, characters, eras and thoughts. How could I never hold anything? Hold moments, thoughts, guitar notes, jobs. Here I was, standing knee deep in the sticky swamp of middle age with the smell of camphor-like, yellow, jaundiced death on the other shore, still looking for meaning and something to hold, to still the endless buzz of events in a dizzying, spinning, perplexing, death-ward life.

Bleak

Bleak, ...... have you seen a drop of water fall on a black letter of a page, the letter gets smudged, focussed black turns into vague, all encompassing, many shaded grey. Bleak and diluted, this new year's sunshine is muddy, puddle-like for me but without the liquid that puddles possess that give them their buoyancy, instead arched out against the sky is a wallpaper of muddy, eternally spread, lacklustre, life/humus/dead-leaves-sucking, shitty pale brown!

Bleak! Sitting alone on this laptop, a freezing delhi morning, rubbing my ice-like hands on the sandpaper stubble on my chin, my nose feels swollen and my eyes a grey-gossamer like insubstantial and distant pain as though it emanated from the furthest tunnel recesses of the eye softly billowing and stretching, slowly breaking into threads in front.

Maybe I'll talk to her mother, dressed in her skirt, anglicized beyond history, mannered beyond contemporary thought, stuck in the paperback, sticky pages of a novel about the Raj, perhaps The Far Pavillions or Heat & Dust, maybe The Jewel In The Crown. A non-existent England. She sits with creamers and tea cosy's which belie and decieve her enormously Indian interests. Perhaps I shall talk to her of shesher kobita. Perhaps her daughter and I should have retained our purposeless, wondering purity, lost now in the orders for toilet rolls, clean bathrooms, tv shows, driver's timings and cleaning cupboards......

Funnily, she understood, she smiled, and her eyes empathetically brown searched mine and smiled when I exclaimed my predicament with the metaphor of the smudged letter on a page. Depression, our depression! She smiled at my way of talking almost like she was falling in love with me herself, a paramour's empathy, my wife's mother, puritanical and English, falling in love, a flutter, incestuous, crazy.

My imagination! She's pours me tea and we chat some more, sitting in her garden, it's time for me to leave, I have to drive, spend this new year's first day driving through muddy and cold Delhi.

Strange notes of isolated and crazed jazz musicians lost in sepia or black and white, brilliantined hair, smoky venues, play in my head, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, mad, staccato, autistic notes. I walk past my car and lie on the grass, stare up as dew soaks into my jacket, soaking freezing dew, my jacket, stained with the earth, above my freezing back are my eyes facing the sky, no human world in ther horizon, only sky, the eternal, grey, muddy wallpaper, the lamb fleece clouds, shimmering and bearded ones, scattered and scrambled ones.

I get lost so easily in clouds, push my head into them the way childhood was spent pushing one's head into the clouds in the enchanted wood of enid blytons. So difficult to return, so fearful of the fear of getting lost of going mad in childhood day dreams.

Bleak! I rub my harsh, alien stubble again, run a finger across my chapped lips and the arid terrain of my frozen body. Feel the freezing earth smell of my jacket. I'm lost and arid this new year's day but around the aridity are the warmth of day dreams and day long drives, of muscial snapshots and dew smelling earth, the warmth around alienation, the blue sea water around an island. I smile and feel bleak,.... smilingly bleak!