From Forgotten Work

The band had yet to settle on a sound,Never mind a name. The common groundThey shared was comically vast in terms of styles.They could agree on Mozart, Dylan, Miles,And Beatles, not to mention bass harmonicaSolos (see Pet Sounds); ’60s electronica(The talk of vintage robots: blips and bloops);Talking blues; Talking Heads; loopsOf samples softwared together; also, humanBeings together in one room, their acumenTheir only software as they improviseSome standard. “That’s how jazzmen ionize,You know,” said Jim. “They get a charge off each other.”

Stevens, poet, said that “Death is the motherOf beauty.” Jim’s bandmates proved that insecurityIs the mother of snooty—and proved their purityBy prizing the obscure, which signifiedAuthentic art. Thus minor men who diedBefore their time lived on inside the mindsInside Jim’s band. They loved James Booker, blindIn one eye, black, and gay—a man, the kidsMight say, who occupied a point on a gridWhere several different selves had intersected.But one took spot-lit center stage: neglectedPiano genius. Booker, what he made,It sounded like a concert being playedBy several men at several sets of keys,Each one, an Eastern god etched on a friezeAnd armed with surplus arms. He was a starIn Europe; stateside, expired in an ER,Wheelchaired, awaiting care for renal failure.

Side note: the French thought Welles was cinema’s savior.But in the States, his voice supplied an earth-Sized robot’s gravity. To know your worthAnd yet to be condemned to cartoon voiceWork—or, in Booker’s case, your Sophie’s choiceOf closet-sized club to fade away in—isAn awful fate. “Do not be branded whizKid or a wunderkind” appears to beOne lesson. Having peaked at poetryIn youth, and duly stranded on Parnassus,Daryl Hine could only watch as assesLike Allen Ginsberg stormed the world below,While Hine, basecamped with gods, acquired snow.

Another lesson: don’t be loved in ParisAnd not the States. Nothing can prepare usFor the moment—having crisscrossed nations,Which equalizes, much the way equationsDo, two stages: stardom and the voidThat follows—when our genius, unemployed,Is plunged in shade. But fans who form a cultTend not to want a less romantic resultFor those they covet. Ending on a high,Well-loved, is no way for a man to die.Welles knew this. “God, how they’ll love me when I’m dead,”The author of Citizen Kane is said to have said.

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Rehearsal talk would often turn to Blake,Which meant, in Music Nerd, the late Nick Drake,Who cut his starkest songs without his label,Island, knowing. A figure out of fableAppeared at Island’s front desk one afternoonAnd left the master tape for one Pink Moon(His masterpiece to be) with reception,Then left—one part truth, one deception.(Drake said yes to tea, resolved to stayAwhile.) But yes, he left a tape that day(That part was true), a work of art entrustedTo the girl who worked the phones and fussed withThe made-up face inside her compact. Maybe

Drake, a desperate parent, left his babyOrphaned with this girl as if to severHimself from it. And maybe art is neverFinished, merely abandoned as the hard-Hearted like to say. (A work is marredBy too much work.) Pink Moon was cut in twoNights with a single engineer in lieuOf well-stocked studio. Drake peeled the backingBand clean off his songs, and none were lacking.“That album only has his voice, guitar,That’s it,” Lou marveled. “Plus a couple barsOf piano,” added Jim.      It was dismissed.“It could be that Nick Drake does not existAt all,” wrote one reviewer (Melody Maker).If sound could take a form, Drake’s voice, like vapor,Would bloom, then fray and fractal into air.He was, his critics felt, barely there.(Sometimes a man can seem less whole, less...