dark shadows: hank williams, nick drake, phil ochs

Three “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.”

To my mind, Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave did just the opposite: It got as close to the artist’s greatness as any biographical or fictional work might. The only thing that gets closer is the frightened yet lucid soul of Williams’ own songs. “The lights all grow dim and dark shadows creep.” The Show He Never Gave takes us right into those shadows—and maybe that’s not an easy thing to forgive.