#321 - Nick Drake - Pink Moon (1972)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
NICK DRAKE BIO
Nicholas Rodney Drake (1948-1974, 26 years old at death) was an English singer-songwriter known for his acoustic guitar-based songs. He was born in Burma but the family moved to England when he was 2 years old. Both parents wrote music. Recordings of his mother Molly's songs, which have come to light since her death, are similar in tone and outlook to the later work of her son. They shared a similar fragile vocal delivery. Encouraged by his mother, Drake learned to play piano at an early age and began to compose songs which he recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder that she kept in the family drawing-room
It was during his time later on in Cambridge at Fitzwilliam College that he discovered and became influenced by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and Van Morrison. This is also when he became more interested in smoking marijuana and playing guitar rather than playing rugby or cricket. He started playing local clubs, got noticed, and got a record deal.
He recorded his first album "Five Leaves Left" in 1969. In an interview, his sister Gabrielle said: "He was very secretive. I knew he was making an album but I didn't know what stage of completion it was at until he walked into my room and said, 'There you are.' He threw it onto the bed and walked out!". It didn't get much attention on the radio or in sales. His second album, Bryter Layter in 1971, was also a commercial failure.
His reluctance to perform live, or be interviewed, contributed to his lack of commercial success. While opening for Fairport Convention for a few shows in 1969, he had a bad experience performing live. Folk singer Michael Chapman recalled what happened - "The folkies did not take to him; [they] wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. He didn't say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. I don't know what the audience expected, I mean, they must have known they weren't going to get sea-shanties and sing-alongs at a Nick Drake gig!. The experience reinforced Drake's decision to retreat from live appearances. The few concerts he did play were usually brief, awkward, and poorly attended. Since many of his songs were played in different tunings, he frequently paused to retune between numbers.
There is no known video footage of the adult Drake; he was only ever captured in still photographs and in home footage from his childhood, and only did one known interview.
Pink Moon would be Drake's last album; two years later he died after overdosing on antidepressant drugs in what was possibly a suicide. The singer was battling depression - whether his death was an accident or suicide has not been resolved.
Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s, but the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree allowed his back catalogue to be reassessed. By the mid-1980s, Drake was being credited as an influence by such artists as Robert Smithof The Cureand Peter Buckof R.E.M.
BACKGROUND – PINK MOON
Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by Drake, released in the UK in February 1972, and later the same year accross the pond. It was the only one of Drake's studio albums to be released in North America during his lifetime: the only previous release there had been a 1971 compilation simply entitled Nick Drake featuring tracks from both his first two albums, which were not released in North America in their original forms until 1976. Pink Moon differs from Drake's previous albums in that it was recorded without a backing band, featuring just Drake on vocals, acoustic guitar and a brief piano riff overdubbed onto the title track.
In his autobiography, Joe Boyd, producer of Drake's first two albums, remembered that as they were finishing the recording of Bryter Layter, Drake had told him that he wanted to make his next record alone. The album was recorded with just Drake and engineer/producer John Wood, who had worked with acts like Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd, and worked regularly with Boyd.
Released two years before Drake's death in November 1974, at the age of twenty-six, the lyrical content of Pink Moon has often been attributed to Drake's ongoing battle with depression. The songs are shorter than on his previous albums, with a total album running time of just over twenty-eight minutes. Like Drake's previous studio albums, this did not sell well during his lifetime, and received a mixed response from critics. However, the album has since garnered significant critical acclaim.
An AllMusic User encapsulated the album this way - Many years before Kurt Cobain's suicide shocked the nation, folk singer Nick Drake released his own musical suicide note, a brief, beautiful album of such strife and anguish that it's almost shocking to listen to.
Contrary to popular legend that Drake dropped the album off in a plastic bag at Island Records' reception and then left without anyone realising, he did indeed meet with Island Records head Chris Blackwell when he dropped it off. Once they realized that was the master copy, they immediately made a copy before playing it.
Initially, photos of Nick were planned on being used for the cover of Pink Moon. However, the photos were not used as Drake's rapidly deteriorating appearance, hunched figure and blank expression were not considered good selling points. Island's creative director Annie Sullivan, who oversaw the shoot, recalled the difficulty in making a decision around the cover of the LP: "I remember going to talk to [Nick], and he just sat there, hunched up, and even though he didn't speak, and I can't remember how he conveyed it, he wanted a pink moon. He couldn't tell me what he wanted, but I had 'pink moon' to go on." Island picked a piece of surrealist Dalí-esque art by Michael Trevithick, who was incidentally a friend of Drake's sister Gabrielle. Although Drake was not outspoken in his opinion on the cover art of Pink Moon, many close to him felt that he approved.
Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis observed that "by the time of these sessions, Drake had retreated so deeply into his own internal world that it is difficult to say what the songs are 'about'. His lyrics are so compressed as to be kind of folkloric haikus, almost childishly simple in their structure and elemental in their imagery. His voice conveys, in its moans and breathy whispers, an alluring sensuality, but he sings as if he were viewing his life from a great, unbridgeable distance. That element of detachment is chilling. To reinforce it, messages of isolation gradually float to the surface of the songs' spare, eloquent melodies."