Nick Drake

When I think about Nick Drake, I’m compelled to obsess over what might have been. I arrived late to the Nick Drake party but honestly, we all did. He only sold about 20,000 albums during his lifetime and when he died, it didn’t even qualify as a “Rock And Roll Heaven” event. Amazing how all that changed over time. If you don’t know, Nick is now widely considered to be one of the most influential singer/songwriters ever. A Volkswagen TV commercial of all things that featured an audio snippet by him sparked renewed mainstream interest in his work about nine years ago.

His career is marked with personal and professional missteps. Some were of his own doing, others were not. Getting the personal stuff out of the way first, Nick took a lot of recreational drugs. He was also diagnosed with depression which resulted in him being prescribed legal drugs. It was these pharmaceuticals which he presumably overdosed on, taking his life.

Nick was an amazing, eccentric talent. The people that were put in charge of developing him did their best, but ultimately did not have the vision to do right by him. Nick wrote mostly on acoustic guitar, but he used alternate tuning techniques. Standard guitar tuning is typically E A G D B E. Nick however, might tune his guitar C G C F C E , then adding a capo to the fret board. Keep in mind that he’d only do that for one song. Another song might employ an entirely different structure. This made performing almost impossible as Drake would spend long stretches between songs tuning during the few times he could be coerced into actually giving a concert.

No one it seemed, had the vision or the budget to just buy 25 guitars for the guy and hire a roadie to keep them all tuned. For some reason this was never considered an option. No wonder the guy hated performing. Imagine being up there for long stretches at a time trying to tune in front of a bunch of people who were probably milling about impatiently.

Then there were the records themselves. Several online sources collaborate the theory that Drake was unhappy with the orchestral treatments that were employed on his first two albums. Listening to them now that may be hard to understand given their beauty. However you can also hear that these recordings were not something that was in step with any prevailing pop trend or style. They were truly unique for their time and remain so.

Record producer Joe Boyd was Drake’s professional mentor at the time. In addition to using orchestra on some tracks, other recordings were given an “English folk-rock” treatment, courtesy of another band Boyd was working with at the time, Fairport Convention. So there is this clumsy oscillation between two different musical styles that in retrospect seems all well and good. It’s actually all quite incredible. Taken into context however, in 1971 this approach (or approaches) had to have been confusing to critics, programmers and listeners.

However, his third and last LP, “Pink Moon” remains a stark contrast compared to the rest of his recorded output. Recorded in two days, (some reports say as little as two hours!) it contains one solitary 30 second piano overdub on the title track. The rest is just acoustic guitar and voice. Sublime finger picking combined with lead vocal, it’s simply one of the most hauntingly beautiful works of art ever committed to tape.

The artist at this time however was by all published accounts, no less than an emotional wreck. The phrase “clinically depressed” gets used a lot to describe Drake’s final days. He’d moved back in with his parents, too disconnected from life and disillusioned with the record business to do much of anything else. Around noontime on November 25th 1974, his mom found him dead in his room. He had overdosed on medication prescribed to him by psychiatrists to overcome his depression.

Was it intentional, or was the sickness overpowering him to the point where he took more pills than was prescribed as a desperate attempt to feel better? The answer to that question will never present itself, so it’s better instead we focus on the music. Some 35 years since his passing, the work of Nick Drake continues to both entertain and inspire.