Time Is A Rhythm: Nick Drake, Wilco and the Wilmington Film Fest
Matthew Ralph

An innovative rock band puts out an album that is called "a career ending record" by its record label, which in an odd twist of events ends up buying back the record it dropped through a deal signed with one of its subsidiaries.

A singer/songwriter is loved by many, yet can't get fans in a bar to quiet while he plays and can't seem to make any kind of a living writing music. He dies a tragic and mysterious death long before his worldwide fame and cult status is ever realized.

A theater in the heart of an agressive downtown revitalization effort sits half empty during the primetime Saturday night screening of a film at an advantageous independent film festival.

In recalling a recent Saturday night visit to the Wilmington Film Festival in Wilmington, Del.,I still sit scratching my head trying to make sense of it all, trying to get a grip for and understanding of why so many people fail to see and hear the genius that's right underneath their noses. Why, so many don't ever take the time to listen, to hear, to smell, to taste. Why, the greatest art, music and film has and will always remain outside of the radar while the general public continues to be oblivious to its elegance and ignorant to its lasting power.

Delaware, with its southern half known by many as "slower lower" and its state capital that hosts some of the country's biggest NASCAR races, is not often noted for its cultural achievments, but fortunately the city of Wilmington and its sister academic city of Newark has made great efforts to bring culture to the region. Its first attempt at a film festival in late September was by every estimation a brilliantly planned showcase of 70 full-length and short films in a series of assorted venues throughout the downtown's "cultural loop."

This might have been best evidenced by the showing of two documentary films that made a natural fit to show side by side; I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, the documentary about the band Wilco's making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Skin Too Few, a documentary about British singer/songwriter Nick Drake.

With I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, the seemingly few that were in attendance at the screening on its second night at the festival witnessed as much a brilliant story captured incidentally by a filmmaker who was in the right place at the right time as they did a stellar documentary. But despite the argument that could be made that fimmaker Sam Jones only had to peek his camera at the band from a series of different angles for a few months and then piece the no brainer story together, the film captures that raw quality that has makes Wilco so great in the first place. There is nothing MTV about them. Jeff Tweedy prefers trying to guess what song his son is banging the drumbeat for on his thighs to living the heralded rock lifestyle. He even has to bum money in order to feed his family at a rest stop fast food restaurant. Self-indulgence goes out the window when Jay Bennett is fired from the band and they all breath a collective sigh of relief.

But in the end, the film ultimately captures the very essence of the irony of how a major label would give a band a big chunk of money to do a record completely on their own with no label input, listen to the finished product and promptly drop the band from among its ranks, only to buy the record back through one of its labels' for three times the amount.

Simply put, there is no logic to how it all works, but specifically through an interview on camera with Dave Frank of Rolling Stone magazine, the film captures the harsh reality of what the whole Wilco story truly demonstrates. As Frank so eloquently puts it in the movie, we live in a culture where people not only talk on their cell phones, but use their cell phones to say they will be somewhere in five minutes. At one point he asks why we are all in such a hurry and why so many have such a difficult time recognizing pure genius in an album like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that has so much to offer. The album has everything, he said, and for that reason a label wasn't willing to risk marketing something it couldn't label and package into a guaranteed money-making box. Years down the road of course, he explained, the album will continue to inspire and capture the imaginations of music fans while countless other throw away bands and CD's will come and go. The record is just that good, he said.

And who could disagree with him. Rolling Stone may have a knack for championing everything crappy in the music scene, slapping it inside a magazine with a half-naked movie star on the cover, but some things, like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, can't go unnoticed anywhere. And if they do go unnoticed, sooner or later people will catch on and realize the pure genius it was by the shear token of how long it has withstood time.

Perhaps, no musician better demonstrates standing the test of time than Nick Drake, the British singer/songwriter whose life is portrayed in the Jeroen Berkvens film A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake.

Unlike a previous made for television Biography-style documentary that belabored the fact that Drake somehow predicted his own stardom long after his death in the lyrics of his songs, the Dutch-produced documentary takes an extremely minimalistic approach to capturing the artist in his surroundings.

Through elegant cinematography, the director paints the picture of the scenic backdrop from which the tortured songwriter grew up and the lonely second story room at his parents' home where he tragically and so prematurely died. Filling in with what few photographs of Drake there are available, recordings of his late parents, and crisp and colorful interviews with his surviving sister and a few people involved with the making of his three records, the film doesn't offer much by way of new information or details on the musician so much as it celebrates the music and what little is known of his life.

In the end, the subtle and painful attention that is taken to tell the story through this artistic and shall we say spiritual viewpoint is summed up emotionally and profoundly when his sister Gabrielle says how Nick's goal was to reach people and make their lives better. Knowing he had reached one person's life would have made him feel as though his life had been worth it, she says at the film's climatic point, the painful reminder that Drake's own disappointment with his career may have somehow contributed to his untimely death.

As his friend in London who helped book his one and only failled attempt at a tour puts it, Drake never could understand why, if he was considered such a genius, he could never make a living off his music and was forced to return home to live with his parents after graduating from college in Cambridge. Of course, long after his death his strong legion of fans would now kill to have had the opportunity to see him play in an intimate live setting, something that quickly became a rare occasion after fans greeted his melancholy tunes with loud chatter and clanging of beer bottles in the few live pub performances he gave before threw in the towel and resorted back to lonesome writing and recording sessions.

So from the modern tale of a band overcoming adversity to move forward, securing its place in rock history and legend in the process, to the mysterious tale of a musician whose efforts have finally been recognized and appreciated decades later, at least one portion of Wilmington's first attempt at a film festival proved successful in its ability to entertain an audience with two films not normally accessible to a starved audience in Delaware that, short of driving to a Ritz Theater in Southern New Jersey or Philadelphia or any other art house theater, would have never been able to see.

Of course, naturally and so unfortunately, many forgot to read the memo and failed to take advantage of this wonderful event right in their backyard that, based on this and another screening a day later and the emptiness of the cultural loop on both days (the film festival might as well have been in a ghost town) was grossly unequal in its quality versus quantity ratio.

posted 10-30

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Matt Ralph is the editor and chief writer of Tangzine. Enough said. E-mail him at matt@tangzine.com

2002 White Elephant Productions