Dark Passage: Nick Drake's Rough Magic

Until fairly recently, few people had heard of Nick Drake at all, or knew him mainly for his apparent suicide 30 years ago. Those who had fallen under the spell of his smoky voice and hypnotic guitar playing, however, became fervent admirers, including talents as diverse as Elton John, punk maestro John Cale (who played on one of his albums), Paul Weller, Tom Verlaine, REM, and Everything But The Girl, who used some of Drake's back-up musicians on Amplified Heart (and whose song "Get Me" was clearly inspired by him). The three albums Drake made in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and the hermetic Pink Moon -- have managed to remain available (if at times tenuously) in an age when most discs have the shelf life of a Big Mac.

With every passing decade, his work seemed to garner renewed interest, though the climb out of obscurity was still a long one. In 1986, an album of mostly unreleased songs appeared under the title Time of No Reply. In 1992, Rykodisk reissued Drake's complete recordings in a four-CD set called Fruit Tree, which helped inspire several tribute albums and a full-scale biography by Patrick Humphries. But the big breakthrough came in 2001, when Volkswagen, in one of the more celebrated TV spots of recent times, set his song "Pink Moon" to moody visuals of friends on a nighttime drive. Suddenly Nick Drake was no longer the property of the happy few, and his songs began penetrating the public consciousness through NPR interludes and CD compilations (especially Gen-X-targeted compilations of TV ad songs), not to mention reissues of his original albums that sported labels proclaiming, "As heard in the new Volkswagen Cabrio commercial." Now Island Records has put out the first disc of "new" Drake material in nearly twenty years, Made to Love Magic.

To be honest, Made to Love Magic will offer few revelations to anyone familiar with Drake's music, and if these tapes had been recorded by practically anyone else they probably wouldn't have been released at all -- a testament to the cult stature he has now acquired. It gathers together recordings that were recently discovered in the Island vaults, a mix of alternate takes, demos, tracks reprised from Time of No Reply, and one hitherto unknown song. The work is from very early or very late in his career, with nothing in-between. As with any alternate versions, the pleasure lies in the comparison. But more than this, these recordings show a young man both thinking through his presentations and already sure of his sound. The orchestration on a few pieces might be different, on a few others a backing instrument has been added or subtracted, but by and large there is remarkably little difference between the home recordings and the cuts that made it to vinyl.

Drake was a shy, middle-class Cambridge University literature student in 1969 when Island, one of the hottest labels of the time, released his debut Five Leaves Left. Although he was barely twenty when he made it, the album contains some of his most captivating material. "River Man," with its cyclical chord repetitions, elliptical verses, and muted string underpinnings, creates an aura that is cloud-swept and sensuously hypnotic. And the brooding "Fruit Tree," driven by Drake's quietly insistent guitar, ponders fleeting success in terms that could almost serve as his own epitaph: "Forgotten while you're here/Remembered for a while/A much updated ruin/From a much outdated style."

But the crowning touch of Five Leaves Left is Drake's masterpiece, the fevered, visionary "Three Hours." A six-minute tour de force of darkly elegiac lyrics and shifting guitar motifs, backed only by acoustic bass and congas, this song alone would justify Drake's canonization: "Three hours from sundown/Jeremy flies/Hoping to keep/The sun from his eyes/East from the city/And down to the cave/In search of a master/In search of a slave." Enigmatic and enveloping, "Three Hours" seems to be about nothing in particular while somehow attaining transcendent significance, humankind's fall and redemption recast as a weekend outing. Remarkably, it works. (This song, incidentally, provides one of the more interesting inclusions on Made to Love Magic: a looser, less controlled version, featuring Reebop Kwaakhu Baah on congas, that gives a sense of what Drake must have sounded like in concert.)

Five Leaves Left was a mediocre seller, but its relative critical success led Drake to drop out of Cambridge and go on tour -- an experience the introverted singer found so painful that he apparently never repeated it. (Contrary to legend, however, he had no reticence about playing new material for friends, and had earlier performed at various venues in London and Cambridge, including the university's annual May Ball.) It also spurred a second album the following year, which Drake and Island producer Joe Boyd expected would lead this time to fame and fortune. To heighten the songs' commercial appeal, Boyd filled out the arrangements and brought in a crew of experienced session men, including John Cale, guitarist Richard Thompson (who had also contributed to Five Leaves Left), and drummer Dave Mattacks.

Bryter Layter, as the title suggests, features Drake's sunniest work (comparatively speaking), from the jazz-tinged "Poor Boy," with its bluesy piano-and-sax back-up and humorously chiding female chorus ("Oh poor boy/So sorry for himself/Oh poor boy/So worried for his health"), to "Northern Sky," in which Drake's gentle lyrics and Cale's organ strokes produce a heartbreaking combination of childlike faith and crippling doubt. But even when Drake seems to be singing to a departed lover -- and the lovers in his songs are nearly always departed -- it is less the lover he is addressing than the nature of loss itself. "Do you feel like a remnant/Of something that's past," he asks the subject of "Hazey Jane I." "Do you find things are moving/Just a little too fast." Given this, it is not surprising that Boyd's upbeat arrangements often sound forced, a calculated attempt at wider recognition rather than a sympathetic setting. As it happened, Bryter Layter met neither critical nor commercial expectations. A dispirited Drake retreated from music for the next two years.

By 1972, Drake had become depressed and reclusive, with neither friends nor medication able to help. The man who, as his friend Linda Thompson put it, "made monosyllabic seem quite chatty," was now fully isolated, walled in. Friends remember him showing up at their homes and sitting in the corner for hours, unable to utter a word. His last album, Pink Moon, is a 25-minute cry from the depths; terms like "withdrawn" and "introspective" don't begin to do it justice. The songs are short, the lyrics spare. Unlike Bryter Layter, it features no strings or jazz arrangements, only Drake's solitary guitar and, once, overdubbed piano. The result is bleak, frightening, and nearly excruciating in its intensity, like John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band (which it followed by two years), but without the relief of electronics, or like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (which it predated by a decade), but with the murderous intent turned quietly inward. Pink Moon shows Nick Drake naked, with neither sensuous mystery nor self-deprecating irony to hide behind, and I suspect the kids who bought it because they thought the song made Volkswagens look cool were in for the shock of their lives when they brought it home. The instrumental "Horn," played on a single guitar string, seems so defeated that a sigh could blow it away. And on the album's most haunting piece, "Parasite," he tells us to "Take a look, you may see me on the ground/For I am the parasite of this town." The accompanying guitar chords, with their relentless one-two rhythm and descending bass, ring in the ear like a funeral knell.

After Pink Moon, Drake suffered a complete breakdown and spent a month in a psychiatric hospital. He moved back to his parents' home in Warwickshire, quit recording, and began a regimen of antidepressants. He accepted a job as a computer programmer but left after two days, and mainly spent the next eighteen months in long night drives and even longer silences. In 1974, however, he took up writing again, and even planned another album. At moments the new work suggested a return to the wistful hopefulness of Five Leaves Left, as in this chorus from "Tow the Line," the one true discovery on Made to Love Magic and, as it would turn out, the last song Drake ever recorded: "If you call, we will follow/If you show us we can tow the line." But the hellhound was still on his trail, and in most of these songs he seems to be addressing not so much a person, however elusive, as the unfathomable expanse of his own self-doubt: "Why leave me hanging on a star/When you deem me so high?" ("Hanging on a Star"). In one of his last songs, "Black Eyed Dog," the effect of his spare, raga-like guitar and high-pitched wail is positively eerie; no one had recorded sounds like those since the early Skip James. More than anything, these pieces suggest, as Drake had put it in one of his earliest songs, that the magic was lost many years ago.

Drake seems to have been disappointed with his new material, and reportedly lamented to friends at around this time, "You remember me. You remember me how I was. Tell me how I was. I used to have a brain. I used to be somebody. What happened to me? What happened to me?" The question was to remain unanswered and the album unfinished, for on November 25 Drake was found in bed in his small boyhood room, having overdosed on Tryptizol. He was twenty-six.

It is, of course, not this sad death that makes Nick Drake worth listening to today, nor the angst that preceded it, nor the cult following that sprang up in its wake. It is the music, bittersweet, lyrical, sometimes harrowing, powerful both despite and because of the singer's inner trials. Drake's depressions, however they helped inform his dark and strange imagery, never supplanted his attempts to express an often magical, always arresting vision of life. Although his body of work might stand as the record of an artist's private season in Hell, its overall effect is to inspire not sorrow or pity, but the wonder of epiphany.

Mark Polizzotti

first published on blogcritics.org

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