tradition as he pushed forward to find new
ways of saying new things to say. In my notes
from 25 years ago I put it like this: The con-
sensus was that he was a vaguely psychotic
drunken fucked-up drug addict, deceiving
himself with vain delusions of glory.
Some of which may have been true, except
that he soon started showing an ambition and
an ability that belied all that. A smattering of
early high points—“From Her to Eternity,”
“Tupelo,” and the staggering “The Mercy
Seat”—remain in the Bad Seeds’ set today. He
also wrote a dense, quasi-biblical novel, And
the Ass Saw the Angel, a fully realized feat of
obsessive imagination that showed no signs
of being a dilettante rock star’s folly. He told
me in Athens that it was the one thing he
wished his father could have seen.
Cave had a fairly fearsome reputation
in those days, especially when it came to
journalists, but while he hadn’t let go of the
rhetoric—I watched him matter-of-factly
inform a group of five Greek journalists
that rock criticism is “a dog’s job”—one-on-
one he was frank and smart and almost
determinedly candid, and often pretty funny
too. But almost everything he said, how-
ever honest or revealing, seemed to come
with the kind of resignation of someone
who had no real expectation that he would
really be heard or understood. And con-
sequently I got the sense that I was still,
at best, a ridiculous distraction to be tol-
erated. One night I ate with him and the
Bad Seeds at an Athens restaurant, a fairly
long and drunken evening. Eventually,perplexed and exasperated by the way I con-
tinued to take notes, he began dictating to
me what I should write:
“...and I looked into his face and saw
a world of true sadness that, being a mere
journalist, I don’t have the power to express.
But it was there, believe me. A sadness from
every pore. The Sad Man. Man of Sadness.
And he raved on, and I saw that his tears
were not only for himself, but for everyone.
Especially me. And he put down his glass and
wept openly, unashamedly, and with great...
greatness. And then he belched. The saddest
belch. A belch so full of sadness that I too
wept, and cannot write anymore....”
At that point, he stopped dictating.
“There you go, mate. Wrote the fucking
thing for you. Go home now.”