By Louis Addeo-Weiss
Twitter: @addeo_louis00 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/louis.addeoweiss Instagram: @louritos
When questioning the significance of November 25, 1974, to a random passerby, you’re more than likely to get a response on the lines of “I don’t know,” but for those a music fan who digs deep like a child at the beach, they may know this as the day, in my estimation, that the music died.
No, I’m not referring to Don McLean’s 1972 smash of social and cultural consciousness, “American Pie,” and I probably should have rephrased the remark as “the day that (folk) music died,” because November 25th will mark the 45th anniversary of the passing of Nick Drake.
Drake’s untimely death, coming at the age of 26 due to an overdose of antidepressant medication, has long been ruled a suicide given his long and extensive struggles with depression and the ensuing psychoses that followed in the later years of his brief time here on earth.
This, a sad reflection of a life in which our titular character felt he left unfulfilled, gives the works he conjured up an added sense of emotional potency that could send even the most joyous an individual into the depths of depravity, even if only for a brief moment.
Now I’m sure that most are unfamiliar with the English singer-songwriter, which comes as no surprise considering his cult-like status in the musical realm, but for those of us who knew and know the limited, yet, soul-crushing works of Nick Drake, let us take time on this upcoming Monday and celebrate the beauty beneath the trenches of melancholy.
You can argue it is the ever-present sense of sadness in Drake’s music that separates him from other folk musicians, where, while folk music deities such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Phil Ochs wrote and sang about social justice and informed their respective countercultures, Nick Drake’s introspective songwriting style was not only influential on just folk, but indie artists such as Elliott Smith (whose whispery, spider-thin vocals appear as an homage to Drake), Mark Kozelek, and alt-country’s Bonnie Prince Billy.
Unlike, say, Tangerine Dream or Frank Zappa, whose respective catalogs span more than one-hundred albums respectively, Drake’s musical output encompasses that of just three studio albums, accompanied by merely a handful of home-recorded tracks.
And maybe one of the biggest travesties was the critical and commercial success that eluded Drake during his career, selling less than 10,000 records during his lifetime, yet, despite this, those around him, including producer Joe Boyd, found Drake’s music to exude a mystical, angelic quality not seen in other artists past or present.
Whether it was his reluctance to perform live, which has been documented, or maybe just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the fact that Nick Drake failed to achieve any considerable amount of success during his 26-years remains somewhat lost in the fog of his legacy, but the retrospective acclaim his works have received has done wonders to inform the music listening public of the lost jewel that was Nick Drake.
Now, it should be noted that depression isn’t something to romanticize, but there is an element to Drake’s story that merits it.
Take this line from his 1972 recording “Place to Be”: “And I was green, greener than the hill where flowers grew and the sun shone still, now I’m darker than the deepest sea.”
Given its despairing content, “Place to Be” and its accompanying record Pink Moon aren’t a cause for celebration, but Drake’s lyrical content is what made him such a singular talent lost in the cosmos.
This singularity comes primarily from Drake’s ability to articulate these desolate emotions and incorporate them into song.
Arguably his most euphoric sounding recorded work, “Northern Sky,” the penultimate piece to his 1971 sophomoric masterwork Bryter Layter, sees Drake, accompanied by his signature finger-picked guitar style and lavish keyboard arrangments ala former Velvet Underground member John Cale, sees the then-23-year-old on his quest for happiness via love, something that eluded him throughout the vast majority of his life.
“I never felt magic crazy as this I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky.”
This evasion is what could best symbolize Nick Drake as the non-fictional version of a tragic hero, where, no matter how much one yearns and searches for his means of gratification, factors at play are what keep him from achieving this solace and sense of fulfillment.
And it is the successes that eluded Drake that make him one of the more compelling tales in the lore of musical history.
So, let us remember Nick Drake, not merely as the “Man in a Shed”, or a “troubled cure for a troubled mind” – though time has proven this narrative to reign true – but as a beautiful, yet tortured soul, where time had told him he was, in fact, “a rare, rare find.”
