An assembly of contemporary friends, spouses, and colleagues tell their stories about her as we see and hear excerpts from her diaries and letters and a small range of photographs and film. Nick Cave (always more impressive when he's talking about someone else) appears in two bookending segments with genuinely poignant anecdotes of the discovery of her music and how it has passed on to his own son. The pace is gentle and the agenda plain and lean; we know a lot about her before we've heard a note and by the time we do hear her we're with her. The sole real departure from this straight up form is a kind of hippy era animation which looks like it began as a child's painting plays to illustrate Dalton's daughter's story. Even this intervention with its home-sewn look fits rather than jars (like the animated photos in the Bill Hicks docco).
Why Dalton didn't make it in the era where almost everyone did, talented or not, would seem a mystery until we get to the expected moment of diagnosis. She lived a druggy lifestyle but it wasn't drugs. She knew she sang well and projected her music strongly so it wasn't that. Her initial reluctance to deal with the suits and under assistant west coast promo men, the tv appearances, fans, she continued with the fame of scale in Greenwich Village while those around her went on tours and got menitoned in despatches. I say continued rather than chose because, as happened at every big break that came her way the closest thing to fulfillment was the first album which was really just her and the 12 string. After that, support spots for Woodstock level acts appeared with some patronage but she kept collapsing through an increasingly evident and crippling depression.
She wasn't a Janis or a Jimi who burned and then burned out, she made it well past 27. She wasn't an Ian Curtis who couldn't get through to the next day before he was 24. She wasn't a Leonard Cohen, the late bloomer who sunk after initial fame only to return with honours and credibility in his last years. She just couldn't connect and grit her teeth through the bullshit long enough. There's a vintage video of a song from the second album with a rock band behind her. They are playing that polished anodyne late '60s blues rock that I am incapable of connecting with. They are srrounded by a primitive effect that looks like a distorted video signal. Dalton sounds like she always did but her smile is embarrassed and she seems to shrink from the mic stand. The second album, In My Own Time, is not all like that but it's telling that that was the number chosen for broadcast.
We want our artists to succeed but more than that we want them to crave success and as long as they're on the treadmill of content production and we can tell ourselves they are suffering for their art. But what happens when they really want to opt out? Syd Barrett's death hit me hard for that reason until I read about how the others in the band made sure his legacy remained and that he got a cut of earnings from it and, really, he seemed to have chosen to do what he wanted in the end and if there was pain in that as well its not the kind that can be erased permanently by knowing 16 year olds hung on his every word. Why shouldn't Karen Dalton have lived for her music making and entertained whomever found themselves in front of her? Didn't her talent merit fame? Can't answer that, might never have happened and even if it did it might well have consumed her in its first dose. What this film does well is to let us mourn a person instead of a wasted opportunity.
No comments:
Post a Comment