sloopjohnc wrote:Rayge wrote:K wrote:He developed an interest in sport, becoming an accomplished sprinter over 100 and 200 yards, representing the school's Open Team in 1966. He played rugby for the C1 House team and was appointed a House Captain in his last two terms. School friends recall Drake at this time as having been confident and "quietly authoritative", while often aloof in his manner
Don't conflate the man with the persona presented by his songs, which was all I was talking about
One of the heroes of flight 93, one of the passengers who took down the plane in a field before terrorists could crash it into something else, was Mark Bingham, a star rugby player at University of California, Berkeley. He was 6' 4" and 225 lbs. Bingham also just happened to be gay.
Thanks for that, John, but at no point have I suggested that anyone was gay, or that if they were there was anything wrong with it, or that, in fact, one can deduce anything at all from a person's sexuality other than who they like to fuck.
My problem with Nick Drake has nothing to do with his sexuality (about which I know nothing, and care less), just that when friends played me his music in the early 1970s (I certainly never listened to any of it since) I did not like it, and formed the opinion that while he was a nimble musician, his SONGS were self-referential and precious and not directed at me, while his whole image was one I found relentlessly bourgeois, over-delicate and childlike in a not-good way (pretty much my objections to prog, since I put it like that). This was the time of the acoustic singer-songwriter, and I didn't like any of them of them much, at least not the men. I liked Spector punk and balls-out rock and roll at the time, and the sound on their records was so fucking weedy. James Taylor? Tim Hardin? Tim Rose? Give it a fucking rest. If someone played me a Nick Drake record now, I couldn't pick it out of a line-up of similar fare, I'm sure, but generally, if I'm going to listen to a male voice and acoustic guitar, the songs are going to have to be really engaging, and his weren't.
Whereas Arthur and Syd (anyone care what their sexuality was? - I certainly don't give a shit), at more or less the same time, made records that had something at least to do with rock & roll; they excited and intrigued me, and I continued to listen to well into my 60s. So I voted for Arthur.
Sheesh
In timeless moments we live forever
You can't play a tune on an absolute
Negative Capability...when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”