molly.com
Tuesday 26 August 2008
When You Met Nick Drake
BY THE TIME I’d “met” Nick Drake he was already long dead.
I believe it was after the “Pink Moon” Volkswagen commercial that aired in the United States. It’s possible I’d heard him before but I’m pretty sure I’d remember.
I’ve been listening to Nick Drake now nearly 10 years. What about you?
When did you see/hear/learn about Nick Drake?
Perfection has no stopwatch.
Filed under: music, blogging, pop culture, poetry & fiction, creativity, molly asks you, community, cults of personality
Posted by: Molly | 9:09 pm |
August 26th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
For me it was just a few years ago. In the movie Serendipity when Northern Sky set the tone for the sweet climax. And then in Garden State. One of These Things First plays when they’re riding around in the old motorbike. I finally bought Bryter Layter and Five Leaves Left. Before I bought them I randomly heard River Man play on some online radio station. Possibly KCRW. Well my jaw seriously dropped when the song came on. I was so moved. Big fan ever since
August 26th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
IIRC, I first “met” Nick Drake in the late 70’s, working at used record store in Cleveland. So yeah, already disappointingly dead. A secret favorite of mine. Secret because others either missed the point or were too busy acting snooty.
I think it was a boxed set of his albums at first. Man, I wore those grooves out.
Nick Drake’s music for me now has merged with a specific type of nostalgia to the point that I rarely hear his music as though for the first time anymore. His music is draped in reminiscing of my admittedly late blooming.
But every once in a while…
August 26th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Same as you - VW FTW! (apologies…)
August 26th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I remember the name, and a guy I used to know played a lot of his songs. But I can’t remember any. I also recall sitting in someone’s living room, with a lot of hippies and some Hell’s Angels (!) listening to an album by the chap. I was a bit, er, stoned so my memory might be a bit askew on some details. The flat wasn’t that far from the pub, I do remember that.
The guy I knew was a singular guitarist; I first met him playing an acoustic variation of Hendrix’ “Purple Haze”, sitting on a kitchen counter. He died a few years later from a heroin overdose.
Sorry, a friend died the other day, and I seem to be thinking about mortality, a lot. Can you point me to any (legal) sources of Nick Drake’s music?
Carolyn Ann
August 26th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Carolyn Ann, I will send you everything I can.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I can’t remember exactly when, but it was during grad school about 15 years ago. I had Walt Mink’s Miss Happiness, which is a great album. They covered Pink Moon, which inspired me to go looking for the original. I ended up getting Bryter Later an Five Leaves Left too.
On the subject of British folkies who died young, Rykodisc did a Sandy Denny boxed set which is also very good.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Never heard about Nick Drake before.
I found a lot about him on Youtube. And yes, he is great! Love it.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:06 am
I was introduced to Nick Drake through a musician friend of mine sometime around 2001 or 2002ish because I’d cited liking Belle & Sebastian and he thought I might like Nick Drake too…. and he was right.
My first dance song at my wedding was a Nick Drake song… Northern Sky.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:02 am
I napstered Riverman in … 1999? Still can’t get enough of that one. …
But my fave Nick Drake song is Robyn Hitchcockas song about/mentioning him.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Ack!… How did an ‘ turn into an a? What the hay? (Come what may. It’s okay.)
August 27th, 2008 at 4:46 am
I can’t remember the name of the book, but his music featured heavily in a mild horror novel set in a small English village. I think it also featured something about ritual dancing in an Orchard, but I can’t be sure.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:39 am
I was playing my acoustic guitar round a campfire on Varkala Beach in India. The Isreali chick I was trying to seduce said I sounded a little like Nick Drake. When I got back to the UK I bought the Best of and realised what a compliment she’d paid me.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Ha, Bruce.
I think Northern Sky is the greatest love song ever written.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I was over at my girlfriend’s house and she had Pink Moon playing. I asked her about the music and she told me it was Nick Drake. The following week I bought his box set.
I’m a huge Elliott Smith fan so Nick Drakes’ music fell right into place for me.
I married my girlfriend three years later.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I think it was after the movie “Garden State” came out. But I’ve been listening to him ever since and LOVE all of his albums. I agree that “Northern Sky” is amazing!
August 28th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
My first time was the movie Practical Magic, soundtrack. Black Eyed Dog. Brilliant song.
August 29th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Thirty two years ago, the bicentennial year of the good ol’ USA…and never thought about how many years it was until you asked the question. A tall guitar playin’ man with a crooked grin, who sported a fatigue jacket, massive thick curly hair and deep dark eyes to fall into played Nick Drake records (yes on vinyl) and I embraced that music entirely. Never let go.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:46 am
Hi Molly
Way to Blue and River Man are the ones that really do it for me. I first heard them on one of those compilation cds you get on the front of music mags. You can discover loads of good stuff the old fashioned way.
Have you heard John Martyn’s Solid Air? Has a similar feel to Nick Drake.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Same. The commercial . . . then a CD was purchased. Tearful sing-alongs ensued.
September 8th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I just discovered him a few years ago when a coworker had an extra copy of his boxed set. Still working my way through listening to all the music. I recently discovered Sondre Lerche, though, who did the soundtrack to Dan in Real Life and is amazing. Have you listened to him by chance?
September 10th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I first heard about Nick during a festival in the South of France, almost 20 years ago now. I was doing my singer-songwriter thing and met an Italian girl singing jazz (they did a great cover version of Joni Mitchell’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat). We talked and talked music and she was surprised I’d never heard of Nick, so she gave me the 2 C90 cassettes (remember those?) with Nick’s albums on it she always carried with her. Once that festival was over I never met her again, but I still have the tapes (and the CD’s of course) and the memories. Fame is but a fruit tree
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September 24th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
I was taking off my pants but decided to put them back on in Manassas, Virginia and I heard Nick Drake when a Mexican drove by blaring it. I was stoned off my ass.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I walked into my girlfriend Sheila’s apartment in the late 70’s. She had this really ugly cat named Max who used to scratch the shit out of my legs. She was lying on the floor naked rolling around without her underwear on. The cat was racing around the apartment like it was tripping balls. Nick Drake was playing in the background. Nick Drake is amazing, I’ve been listening to him ever since. I especially like the song Hazy Jane part I. I think it’s the best song with a flute ever written.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I was making love to a fat girl named Novela in Belgium in the late 80’s. She got up and put her pants back on and put on a Nick Drake album. I believe it was called Hazy Jane. I gently rubbed her back while listening to Nick Drake. Nick Drake has been a favorite of mine ever since.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:05 am
One Spring about a decade ago I was in my driveway bending over to pick up a pencil when I felt a boot kick my fat ass. It was my neighbor trying to scare the shit out of me. He invited me over and we sat on his porch drinking lemonade while the the sun went down. His wife was in the kitchen playing Nick Drake while fussing with the baby. He is my favorite artist of the 60’s hands down.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I “met” Nick Drake through a conversation I had with a stranger
I “met” Nick Drake through a conversation I had with a stranger. I was raving on about a John Martin’s album I’d just discovered called “Solid Air” to her. It was while I was miles away from home and was staying at a very pretentious convention for new-age circus performers. I was talking so over-animatedly to her really just to try and cover up how uncomfortable I felt.
I didn’t fit in there. I had short hair and I even had to leave early to get back for my job (which I hated). And I remember that before I left I ended up getting really drunk and offending all the hippies by being insulting and aggressive to everybody. Still the girl who’s name I didn’t even know (who’d told me “check out Nick Drake”) had, it turns out, given me good advice. The year was 1987.
When I got back to Manchester I went round to a guy I spuriously knew ‘cos he lived in the bed-sit below a friend of mine. I really was stuck in bed-sit land in those days (and so were all the other people I knew) It was depressing.
This friend of mine lived above a guy who had long hair. The guy seemed to live in some sort of 60s time warp. However he also had the best collection of records I’d ever seen.
It seemed to me like he’d be the sort of guy to have something like this and it turns out that I was right. Still though I did feel a bit weird knocking on his door and just asking him “Do you have any Nick Drake”. I was dressed in my postman’s uniform at the time having just finished my round.
Well the guy had two albums. These were “Five Leaves Left” and “Bryter Layter” I asked him if I could sit with him and listen to them and maybe even be cheeky enough to tape them off him. He was very accommodating and he let me do this. I may have had a horrible job then but still it gave me my afternoons free and it brought me into contact with people living in the strange land of having nothing to do all day.
The guy didn’t seem to mind sitting round taping his records for someone he barely knew all at. It was about 1.30 in the afternoon. It just didn’t phase him. We didn’t talk much either. We just sat there and listened while I wrote down the track-listings. Then I went away with my recording
I still have that C90 tape now.
Somehow over the years (and in the early 90s ) a CD of “Pink Moon” came along to join my old TDK cassette. I liked the music but even though I knew that my tape was somewhat muffled and had distorted the sound of the original somehow a magnetic recording of the vinal recording meant that a lot of it’s full atmousphere was still there. Pink moon seemed a bit “flatter” because of the way that it had been converted to digital.
People think I’m being a wanker when I say this but my feeling about listening to vinol over CD is a bit like how I feel about watching film versus video tape. It seems to me that some ways of capturing sound and vision just lend more authenticity to the recording.
Finally another tape came into my possession “Time of No reply” I just fell in love with the opening song “I was made to love Magic” because it is ME!! I’m also a relic. They have left me behind too. I also feel like I’m a remnant.
I wrote a poem once about an experience I had in Manchester City centre. I came round a corner and I saw a small group of Salvation Army Band musicians playing some old Hymnal being ignored by everyone racing past to get home from work and it did something to me.
Also when I write songs they hurt me. Its like I’m birthing something. It’s Painful.
Listening to Nick Drake is similar.
I have no absolutely no idea of how half of my collection of his songs ever came into my possession. I think that the CD belonged to somebody who lived briefly in my house for a while and who then left having forgotton to pack it. The thing is while they were staying with me I had never heard them playing it and I didn’t even know that they liked him.
Even more curiously the hand –writing on the sleave of my “Time of No reply” tape is definitely mine but I don’t ever remember sitting there writing down the list of tracks. I know that I never taped it off anyone and I know that I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA AT ALL of how it came in to my posession.
I also think its strange that not one of the Nick Drake songs that I own I have ever paid for. Its like they are meant to be in my life.
One time I went on holiday and I took the two cassettes with me because my girlfriend had been loaned the use of a car and it happened to have a radio cassette built into the dashboard. We’d been loaned a car and we’d been loaned the use of a caravan in the Yorkshire Dales and I had these tapes so I brought them.
I had the weirdest feeling on that holiday about how I’d been MEANT to listen to these songs in this context and how this dead guy had meant to speak to me like this.
I was the most depressed on that holiday with my girlfriend than I had ever been in the whole of that four year relationship and the music kept me alive. Also the beauty of the countryside around us and the peace of staying in that caravan meant that I could actually feel my pain. It was not like when I’m back in the city where mostly its all covered over (until that is I turn a corner and then I’m confronted with another band of throwbacks like myself)
Still though she didn’t even know.
She just thought I was being “quiet”
I “met” Nick Drake through a conversation I had with a stranger and sometimes I do feel that I’ve always remained a stranger even to those closest to me
October 28th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
thanks
October 30th, 2008 at 2:34 am
i am not understand:( thanks.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:22 am
I think it was after the movie “Garden State” came out.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I met Nick Drake when I needed him the most.
I’d just arrived at University and was bewildered by the sudden change of country, and fending for myself for the first time.
I think I’ve been depressed in different ways ever since a series of very disturbing events at the start of my teenage years, and it’s only when I came to the wonderful but dark, dark city of Glasgow that all those feelings fully crystallized, stealing the light from y soul before I realised it was gone.
I’d been introduced by my boyfriend to a wonderful place, the only place that felt like a bit of home, a small, grubby and intimate tea-house called Tchaiovna. The staff play whatever music they fancy, the less known the better, and I think it was in that cosy atmosphere, made hazy by shisha smoke, that I first fell under Nick’s spell. I’m pretty certain it was the ‘Treasury’ album, which seemed to be omnipresent at the time - my boyfriend was surprised I’d never heard of Nick’s music, and put the album on quite often after I asked about it.
I remember one particular day when I went to his flat to seek some kind of refuge from the nameless dread that followed me around like a curse, I couldn’t even speak, let alone find words to describe the living void that was draining all my life and joy and light, and no energy to try and see the cause - the darkness had a life of its own by then. I can’t remember if I asked him to put the album on, or if he just knew without asking, but I do remember vividly the incredible rush of feelings…
All depressed people are profoundly alone, by their very nature cut off from the only thing that they most need : understanding, true compassion rather than empty words and helplessness, no matter how good intentions may be.
On that day Nick Drake’s music burst the bubble of terrible emotions welling inside me, and I could finally let everything out - because every chord, every soft inflexion echoed exactly my own state, someone finally understood!
Over the fairly short time I’ve known his music, I’ve come to feel like so many others that I know Nick personally, that - dare I say - we share a special bond, so profoundly does his music express his innermost feelings and secrets. For music that is often very melancholy, there is such an beautiful and powerful outpouring of emotion in every track, that the feeling of the song transcends mere sadness into something more complex and shaded, a emotion that is profoundly heartfelt and human.
Today I no longer wish for the quiet of darkness and an end to the enduring pain of depression. I’ve thought a lot of things through, and seen a lot of things that can’t be anything but magic, and gradually built up the faith that I can face the future and be my true self in light and joy. I’m not a religious person in the traditional sense, and I don’t believe there is such a thing as angels with big golden wings who are somehow above us. But when my time comes, I do hope it will be Nick who ‘lends a hand and lifts me, to his place in the clouds’…
November 7th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
thanks