Fame can be a fickle mistress for the music industry's great disappearing acts, but some remain influential even in obscurity, writes CIAN TRAYNORS
IT’S SPRING 1994 and Leonard Cohen is at the pinnacle of his career.
His latest album has capped a critical and commercial return to form and the ensuing 71-date tour sees up to 14 encores a night. Yet all he can think about is heading for the hills overlooking LA and seeking sanctuary in the Mount Baldy Zen Buddhist monastery.
He shaves his head, dons robes and is renamed Jikan, meaning “Silence”. And then nothing. There would be no more albums until 2001; no more tours until 2008. Yet in the intervening time his fan base does not stop growing.
It takes a certain singlemindedness to step off the music industry’s merry-go-round. Artists break from the routine of writing, recording and touring at their peril. Forget the acrimonious splits and sell-out reunions. It’s the unpredictable figures who become estranged from their careers, seemingly content to do without us, that make for some of the most fascinating figures in music.
This year alone brought the first album in 15 years from the 13th Floor Elevators founding member Roky Erickson, considered terminally missing in action after a stint in a hospital for the criminally insane, and the first album in 17 years from Steve Miller, who recently admitted he “didn’t need to put another record out because the greatest hits just kept selling millions and millions”.
Next week marks the return of Brian Eno, who has remained quietly prolific since leaving Roxy Music in 1973. Though his new album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, is his first in five years and only his second solo recording of conventional songs since 1975, he has been busy branching into multimedia art installations and producing the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay at pivotal points in their careers. His use of studio technology as a means of musical composition has made him one of the most influential artists in contemporary music. Every time he goes away he comes back with something innovative.
If only Sly Stone’s open-ended sabbatical could be as productive. Last December it looked as if he would end a 27-year hiatus when he signed to Cleopatra Records, handing over material touted for a summer release. His fans knew better than to get their hopes up.
After creating some of the most uplifting, barrier-breaking sounds of the 1960s and 1970s with Sly and the Family Stone, the songwriter, band leader and producer gradually succumbed to drug abuse and became one of music’s great recluses.
In the decades he has been away, the fusion of soul, rock and funk in Stone’s back catalogue has been an immeasurable influence in mainstream pop. But when he appeared with the Family Stone at California’s Coachella music festival this summer, barely coherent and hours late, his rants about lawsuits and living in cheap motels sent the band and crowd into a panic.
Stranger still is the re-emergence of Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. In the two years and eight months he spent fronting the band’s original line-up, Black Magic Woman, Albatross and Oh Well , all written by Green, outsold The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. But success filled him with self-loathing and, following a drug-induced epiphany, he unsuccessfully tried to convince the band to give their fortunes away before quitting the group in 1970, aged 23.
After getting rid of his guitars, undergoing electroconvulsive therapy in psychiatric care and being jailed for threatening to shoot his manager, a comeback seemed unlikely. Yet Green has managed two returns – three if you count the impersonator who began touring under his name in 1992. He released a series of albums in the late 1970s when his brother Michael orchestrated a deal with the label he worked for, PVK Records. But by 1984 Green had unravelled once more, spending the next six years sleeping rough, his fingernails growing several inches long.
By the mid 1990s one of the most acclaimed guitarists of his generation was learning to play his instrument from scratch. Though Green has continued to tour and record sporadically he remains dismissive of his hits and is the first to admit he never quite made it back from the abyss he slipped into 40 years ago.
Sometimes all it takes to stage a comeback is to be remembered. In the case of the pianist Rubén González and the folk icon Vashti Bunyan success came long after they had given up on their music careers. González hadn’t even owned a piano for 11 years when Ry Cooder tracked him down in Cuba, convinced him to record a solo album in 1996 and enlisted him as an integral part of Buena Vista Social Club a year later.
In Bunyan’s case, she was so disillusioned by the failure of her debut album, 1970’s Just Another Diamond Day, she retreated to the countryside to raise a family. She had no idea it became a cult classic, and its celebrated re-release, in 2000, prompted a well-received follow-up, 35 years after her debut. (Bunyan was at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin on Thursday for a screening of her documentary, From Here to Before.)
And then some are wary of the spotlight altogether. Joseph Childress was at the centre of San Fransisco’s “new weird America” folk scene when it produced the likes of Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart in 2004.
But the idea of being discovered or having to push his material was something Childress felt uncomfortable about. He recorded an exceptional debut titled The Rebirths in his parents’ bathroom, but instead of trying to release it, he decided to explore the US by hopping trains, hitch-hiking between truck stops and sleeping on benches.
After getting arrested in New Orleans, Childress returned to San Francisco, where he lived in a car and walked dogs for a living. He saved enough money to record another album in 2008, but this, too, has been heard by only a handful of people.
“I once had a meeting with a publicist,” he says. “He just gave me statistics and talked about money. It was so separated from the actual art that I got freaked out.” Part of it comes down to confidence. When people tell Childress how good he is he doesn’t believe them. Even if he did, he’s convinced the music industry would snuff out whatever creative spark he has.
“I make music because I have to,” he says. “The guitar is just my healing device. I don’t want to ruin that for myself, having seen it happen to other people. But who am I to be this type of person that people would latch on to anyway?”
In the past year the 26-year-old has warmed to the idea of releasing music on his own terms through Endless Nest, a small label set up by friends. Nearly five years after he recorded his debut, they have persuaded him the time is right just to put it out and see what happens.
“Sure, I want to reach more people,” he says. “It just has to be done in a way that I know I’m not going to lose anything I hold dear in being happy and creating art. That’s the best I can give you. I think it really is a roll of the dice.”
