NICK DRAKE - A GAY PERSPECTIVE

Was Nick Drake gay? Arthur Lubow asked the question in 1979 in his notes for FRUIT TREE, and writers looking for a key to Nick's sensibility still quote him:

"His sensitivity became a shield. His friends sometimes wondered if he was a repressed homosexual. That would have explained his sense of defeat at age 18, his intense need for privacy, his denial of the body, his inability to touch people, his idealized view of women and his failure to have a girlfriend. But if he was homosexual he was far from gay. He was so deeply repressed that he could not imgine a physical salvation.
"Too private to talk about his moods, Nick wrote songs that mapped his melancholy with precision. Singing to an audience, he could communicate."

In a recent article in his magazine THE TRACKING ANGLE about the records Joe Boyd produced for Island, audiophile record reviewer Michael Fremer quotes part of this passage, and comments:

"What caused Drake's emotional condition is not germane to appreciating his music which expresses his inner world in more complex and abstract terms. On occasion we all experience the hopelessness Drake seemingly lived with throughout his short life. To have it conveyed with such elegance and beauty is Drake's gift to us all. Indeed his legend grows with the passing of time, as generation after generation of young adults discover an artist who so powerfully expresses their innermost fears and feelings." (I:3, Late Summer 1995)

Fremer is right in one sense: sexual orientation is not a factor that limits one's appreciation for Nick's songs, and just why they appeal across that continuum is one of the questions I'd like to explore a bit. But I'd disagree somewhat with Fremer in this regard: Nick's particular psychology is germane or at least of great interest because of the almost confessional quality of his work, the way it evokes an emotional and very personal response from the listener.
To come back for a moment then to the question of Nick's own sexuality, a couple of things probably need to be said. First, he apparently did have girlfriends (although that in itself is of course hardly conclusive). Thus Lubow may be overstating the case for as he characterizes it an almost pathological state of repression. And second, the songs themselves and Nick's interpretation of them are sometimes described as if the writer seemed to be thinking of him as somehow asexual or beyond sexuality - Paul Evans in THE ROLLING STONE ALBUM GUIDE (1992) might serve as an example:

"....Everything Drake wrote - and sang in a haunting, sometimes chilling near-whisper - is pervaded by a fragile hypersensitivity, and while his mood seldom varies, it has its dark, resonant magic."

Well, yes, for a thumbnail sketch this will do, but there are more facets to his art than that. Nick often wrote 'mythically', always symbolically, and sometimes I suspect that down-to-earth meanings were veiled in a kind of transcendental Romanticism, but the temptation to mythologize him as an example of the ethereal artist who tragically dies young etc. should be resisted. His music and his life, apparently so closely bound together, demand more justice than that cliche can deliver. His songs are of a strength that tears at the heart, and while this may indeed be partly the result of his and/or the listener's repression, it seems very bound up with post-adolescent sexuality, at least if my own reaction was anything to go by.

It's not my intention to speculate further on what only additional biographical research may (or may not) uncover, nor am I attempting to 'claim' Nick as a gay artist from the internal evidence of his work, which I think remains very ambiguous. I would though like to briefly share my own response to him as a gay man, suggest how his music speaks to me in a way I can relate to as gay, and point to how I think his work helps to heal sexual difference even as Nick may himself may have suffered from his sense of such differences. I'll then turn to a song which deals concretely, though as always indirectly, with his love-life.

Four years Nick's senior, I discovered a used copy of FIVE LEAVES LEFT in 1970 while I was doing graduate work in Los Angeles; in England later that year I bought a copy of BRYTER LAYTER, and back in the States in '72 PINK MOON. I played those records quite a lot over the next few years - usually late at night when the world had gone away and there was only me, an empty bed, and Nick through the headphones.
Yes, I was in love with this handsome, gentle-looking youth with the upper middle-class British looks and manner, or at least I was in love with his photographic image, his insinuating voice, and the beautiful person he revealed in his music. He seemed to be mostly alone and seeking, I was too. I hadn't found out much about him through the music press, and what little there was to know didn't at all prevent me from identifying with him, projecting my own loneliness and desire for a soul-mate onto him. (Does any of this sound familiar, straight girls, gay guys? Well, I was still young.)

There were many things about his songs that got to me: having done extensive English studies in university, I really enjoyed the literary cast of his lyrics; being a serious fan of jazz, as well as blues, English folk-rock and psych-rock (Fairport, Traffic, etc.), I found his melodies, arrangements, and guitar playing of an often indescribable beauty and tenderness. But in the end it was his voice that tied everything together and made him live in my imagination.
There's something very individual about our response to the timbre of a voice, to the way a singer phrases a lyric and embellishes its musical line: what for one listener can be natural and attractive, someone else can find mannered. For me though Nick's voice is his glory, so much so that I can't imagine anyone else singing his songs as well.

When I read the news of his death, I was shocked and deeply saddened. Now the music took on a different hue; it became truly haunting - especially PINK MOON but the other discs as well. What had only been sensed implicitly before was now inescapable: there was a truly existential aloneness, a profound separation at the heart of this (for me) deeply inward and present music, and also an unalterable absence - which had always been there of course in reality - in my relationship with it, with Nick.
Despite or because of this, I would always be moved to the edge of tears listening to it. There was something of the grief of a personal loss, yes, but also it felt like such a waste of the world's potential for someone so blessed to have checked out so soon.

Later, I played the records only once in a long while. I had internalized them to the point where I didn't want over-familiarity to lessen their power. No chance: when I went back to them the magic was always there. Twenty-five years later I'm a rather different person of course, but Nick and I are somehow frozen in time together; the melodies still linger in my mind while the emotions he evoked are with me as vividly as always.

It was only in the late '80s I that I caught up with FRUIT TREE and read Lubow's notes. By then I was busy with other things musical: I was playing in a gamelan group, and in the early '90s I started my own record label, Songlines, producing and releasing left-of-centre jazz with classical, rock, and world music influences from the New York "downtown" scene as well as Vancouver. But when I ran into Mikael's website the other week I listened, actually for the first time, to TIME OF NO REPLY, and started thinking again about what it is that's so special about Nick's music, how its healing power works. An occasion to return to the songs at leisure to attempt to tease out their complexities will have to wait, but for now I can offer a few impressions.

As I've already mentioned, I think Nick's music speaks across gender roles and sexual divisions while hardly ever addressing such issues in an obviously self-conscious way. His self-presentation, his artistic persona, has everything to do with this. It's a curious paradox for example that his lyrics, so allusive (and elusive, even at times evasive), should seem so confessional. Of course it's this enigmatic quality that allows listeners, to some extent, to read what they will into them. Still, the more one hears and rehears his songs, the more specific one's response to them becomes.
There's a unique identity at work here, and one comes to know it incrementally, without being able to pin down all the specifics yet confident in the end that one knows everything that's important to know about the person. This is of course the conviction, the illusion, of art - an art that's nevertheless being filtered through a highly aestheticized screen of poetic language. Even so, the picture of the psyche that's built up is so convincing that we seem to experience a direct transfer, a true communication of the essential person. And when the soul that's so revealed is a sensitive male psyche, one who also knows and practices very skillfully and with originality an emotional, deeply nostalgic language of words-in-music that his listeners are familiar with, the gay male listener is perhaps especially moved.
Again, I have to point out that the medium of this transfer, without which it simply wouldn't happen, is the music's body, Nick's voice - so open and suave at the same time, 'soft' yet intense, by no means a hypertenuated whisper. His voice itself is the guarantor of his sincerity, the expression of his physical and affective being.

Moreover, some of the specifics of what's being communicated by this voice are easy enough to characterize. Nick's intimate yet charismatic delivery, with its hint of androgyny or femininity, allows both men and women equal access to his persona, and somehow the messages he conveys in that voice break through the internal dividing lines in all of us between male and female, straight and gay.
And then there's the pain - somewhat transmuted, even played with, in many of the earlier songs, nakedly expressed in much of the last, minimalist work. All of us have suffered, all of us have psychic wounds. Nick's demons were persistent, but by transforming pain into beauty I think he for a time redeemed his suffering, and certainly assuages ours. His songs are profoundly comforting in spite of, indeed because of, the struggle with negativity they evoke, the longing for and failure of transcendence they document. The catharsis of this art can be strong medicine, the more powerful for not being shouted from the rooftops.
It's indeed tragic that in the end his saving grace failed him, and the artistic communication inside him died - perhaps in part because he felt that he'd failed to reach others through it. (If he'd known then what his music meant to us, would that have helped?)

Many years later his siren song still beckons us into deeper waters, and in a voice that elides categories, he brings us into a space we can in some way share with him and come to know in part through him, a psychic realm that's sometimes frightening yet also liberating - one where all roles can be seen as ultimately limiting, where sexual dichotomies are also best put aside, and perhaps only love (of life, of art and beauty as expressions of life) can address mortality, counter despair.

Now I'd like to circle back to the question I started with, was Nick Drake gay, and as a case study look at the first song on his first record, TIME HAS TOLD ME:

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind.

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore.

So I`ll leave the ways that are making me be
What I really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making me love
What I really don't want to love.

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.

And time will tell you
To stay by my side
To keep on trying
'til there's no more to hide.

So leave the ways that are making you be
What you really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making you love
What you really don't want to love.

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind.

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
For some day our ocean
Will find its shore.

I'll admit right off that I can't pretend to be sure about what this song is saying. But bear with me while I give it a gay reading, then you can tell me yours.
It's a love song of course, and it seems grounded in a real situation, although it's written in such a way that one can imagine different, and even contradictory, scenarios that might have inspired it. But I do find the lines

"Time has told me/You're a rare find/A troubled cure/For a troubled mind"
[italics mine],

and

"Time will tell you/To stay by my side/To keep on trying/'til there's no more to hide",

and especially the mirror-like reciprocity expressed in the first and second chorus

"So I'll leave the ways that are making me be/What I really don't want to be/
Leave the ways that are making me love/What I really don't want to love"

"So leave the ways that are making you be/What you really don't want to be/
Leave the ways that are making you love/What you really don't want to love"

- I find these lines really quite suggestive. At the very least Nick and his potential lover share a similar emotional history and the understanding that comes with that, and Nick is urging them both to break away from old patterns and love what they both really want to love (i.e. each other).
What's standing in the way of their doing this? Perhaps the other person's troubles, too deep to be talked out, is a hurdle, but one which in time Nick is confident can be overcome if they stay together. Yet with the promise there is also a certain sense of resignation (fate), a point beyond which there's no use struggling:

"And time has told me/Not to ask for more/Someday our ocean/Will find its shore"

Is this an echo of something Lubow says Nick used to do while at Cambridge? ("Sometimes he would drive a friend to the Suffolk coast at night. In the blackness they would hear the sound of the pounding waves.") In any case it suggests that there is some disappointment involved even in settling for this desired love, important as it is, and that there are things about it which make it difficult in the present situation at least.

There are other aspects of the song's imagery that by contrast present a highly idealized view of the loved one:

"Time has told me/You came with the dawn/A soul with no footprint/A rose with no thorn"

This is indeed an ethereal, insubstantialized vision of human love, one in which sexuality seems to have no part - a rose with no thorn? Maybe in the Garden of Eden. Not certainly in Blake's THE SICK ROSE, a famous poem from SONGS OF EXPERIENCE which Blake himself illustrated with many thorns. It's a poem that Nick would doubtless have studied, an allegory of the problems of earthly, sexual love:

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

In some commentaries the rose is specifically identified as female, but the worm is unquestionably male. Could there possibly be a hidden pun on "prick" implied in Nick's rose with no thorn? In any case, the beauty of his lines in that stanza evokes some state of perfection beyond the daily grind of relationships, not to mention the guilt and shame of Blake's vision, a "dark, secret" (and male) love.
I should add here that this almost mystical promise that the beloved inspires, a condition in which souls commune without leaving footprints in the physical realm, is rather typical of the intense emotional response that some gay youths feel for another boy before completely coming out to themselves about their sexuality, and it's tempting to link this particular stanza with other parts of the song in which Nick's tender and protective romanticism is grounded in a more pressing reality ("to stay by my side/to keep on trying/'til there's no more to hide").
Taken as a whole, the song seems to be about embracing genuine feelings and going with them, rejecting all pretence. But one is left with the question of how exactly to read the crucial lines

"Leave the ways that are making me [you] love/What I [you] really don't want to love"

Certainly, for sexually conflicted young men, bisexuality/homosexuality itself, and the physicality of gay love, are often first experienced as unwanted, intrusive desires at odds with one's true being, which is somehow felt to transcend sexuality.
However, while consistent with the idealization of the loved one, this interpretation seems a bit at odds with the passionate commitment to revealing the truth in each other that Nick also desires, and I have a hard time reconciling the gently seductive feeling of warmth and the equanimity and guarded optimism I hear in Nick's vocal delivery of the song with the rejection of one aspect of sexual/emotional authenticity such an interpretation of these lines seems to imply.
Another gay reading of them might also at first seem problematic, namely that they refer to a feigned or unsatisfying heterosexuality - because that wouldn't really be love at all, would it? Yet I think this is being too simple-minded and literal. Guilt and peer pressure can certainly make you 'love' what deep down you know you don't really want to, and the hypocrisy and self-denial of such a stance is of course deeply destructive of all relationships and of one's own sense of personal integrity, without which love is impossible. Coming out is difficult, even in the somewhat more tolerant 90's, and ultimately I find this interpretation consistent with the rest of the song.

But, you may object, internal consistency is necessary but not sufficient for a reading to be convincing, particularly given other songs that are addressed to women and which offer up little evidence for interpreting them as anything other than heterosexually inspired. And I agree. But why is it we return again and again to Nick's work if not for the lovely enigma at its core, a sense of self that thrives on possibility and refuses to submit to the analyst's knife? Whether Nick loved men and/or women is finally beside the point after all, but the vision of a love that overcomes restrictions makes his art universal.

So it's possibility, and the way Nick imagined possibility into his art through language, that I'll leave you with. I want to return to the lines I quoted first and look at their structure and the shades of meaning that inhere in their form, because art speaks through form, and the crafting of form was/is Nick's inner world made real.
First, what's the implication of "a troubled cure/for a troubled mind"? People are troubled, cures aren't. But of course in this case the cure is a troubled person. Yet, the way this adjective/noun combination works suggests that in some way the trouble itself is also (an aspect of) its own cure - and the juxtaposition of the lines "You're a rare find" and "A troubled cure" could also imply that this trouble that somehow promotes its own cure is itself an unusual and valuable thing.
In any case the trouble is one significant basis for the correspondence between the two people. And there's a mirroring, self-contained quality to the troubled cure/troubled mind reciprocity that's a notable aspect of Nick's precise and somewhat unexpected choice of words. Of course, I've been seeing the trouble of the two people as essentially identical; it's also possible to read the troubles as not the same in both cases, but more generally complementary.

Nevertheless this mirroring, as I've pointed out, is greatly strengthened in the lines of the two choruses:

"So I'll leave the ways that are making me be/What I really don't want to be/
Leave the ways that are making me love/What I really don't want to love"

"So leave the ways that are making you be/What you really don't want to be/
Leave the ways that are making you love/What you really don't want to love"

Again, there's an initially somewhat unexpected choice of words here - not who but what I/you really don't want to be/really don't want to love. But after all, who they really want to love has already been defined, at least for Nick. What's also immediately striking is the extreme parallelism of the structures, almost a mise-en-abime effect that could well represent the inward-turning vertigo of discovering oneself falling in love with one's semblable, whether it's reciprocal/reciprocated or not.
If a homosexual, as French novelist Jean-Louis Bory quipped, is just a heterosexual who loves boys, there's also a necessarily different quality to same-sex attachments that Canadian writer Yann Martel encapsulates in his novel SELF, in a love scene in which a young woman is exploring for the first time the body and genitals of another woman: "What an incredible feeling, a sameness that is someone else." (p.146).

What I'm saying is that the structural correspondences in the language and form of the lyrics bind the two people together in ways that strengthen and perhaps clarify the meaning of the words themselves, and point to the possibility of a shared identity, a love, based in strong homosexual feelings (if not necessarily sexuality).
In any case, I think what the song is really about, trying to see it in its unity, is bringing together the ideal and the real, seeing the ideal in the real and vice versa, accepting the whole package.
For me, looking at Nick's life and work as I perceive it, the troubled cure is just such an inclusive one, and the knowledge of self and other that is offered and asked for here isn't something that one can attain by avoidance of any part of the situation. As well, stanzas 5 and 6 say that the other's troubles aren't something that can be rationalized or ended through words alone (even words, that is, such as this lyric, heartfelt as it is). The words have to be voiced in a kind of music, as the love has to break through psychological if not physical barriers to be made real, and this magic can only be accomplished through a commitment "to stay by my side/to keep on trying/'til there's no more to hide".
It's a song of innocence and experience, and its melody, and the way Nick sings it, give the words a subtle emotional depth which both shadows and highlights the wonder and sense of transcendence his soul yearned for.

- Tony Reif, 1999.