Product Description

The reverse of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of an English parish church graveyard, reads: "Now we rise and we are everywhere." The words were penned by Drake in 1974: Thirty years later, they are jarringly prophetic. Like nearly all prematurely buried cult figures, Nick Drake is reinvented each time he is rediscovered. In 2000, the sheepish, astral musings of Pink Moon became synonymous with backing a Volkswagen Cabrio convertible away from a raucous house party, as VW boldly sold American drivers on the notion of eschewing red plastic cups and bro-hugs for moonbeams and tree trunks (and a cute German car - sort of).The Cabrio ad inadvertently sparked an unlikely boost in record sales, propelling the album towards platinum status nearly 28 years after its release. But with each well-intentioned revival of interest, Nick Drake slips further and further out of reach, martyred and codified, superceded and consumed by his own tragic context. Since his controversial death in 1974, Nick Drake has been heralded as a 26-year-old prophet, the diffident enigma, the tortured precursor to Kurt Cobain, the fallen hero, the folksinger-as-folksymbol, the self-sacrificing patron saint of lonely, disaffected teenagers - the One who died for our sins.This book explores how a tiny acoustic record has puttered and purred its way into a new millennium. Amanda Petrusich interviews producer Joe Boyd, string arranger Robert Kirby, and even the marketing team behind the VW commercial."Thirty-Three and a Third" is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125436 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

About the Author
Amanda Petrusich is a Contributing Editor for Paste magazine and also writes regularly for Spin and the Village Voice. Her first book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, will be published by Faber/FSG. She lives in Brooklyn, USA.

Customer Reviews

Shockingly bad
I won't be saying anything new here, but just had to add my voice to dissuading anyone even remotely considering this book. It is a protracted extract from someone's journalism dissertation on how the Drake Family Trust sold a Nick Drake song to advertise Volksvagen with - I kid you not - extensive quotes from the ad agency explaining their motivation for choosing the title. WHO CARES?? Who on earth remembers this ad, only a decade later? Of what interest is it to anyone while likes the music?

But that's not the real problem. While most fans of Nick will probably find the commercial exploitation of this quiet, personal music somewhat crass, the author of this book aknowledges no such sentiments, taking it for granted that art can be pillaged and devalued to serve the needs of corporations.
It probably isn't fair to blame Amanda Petrusich for the woeful hack job she did on this book. She probably did it for pittance and the series editor probably didn't care much about what went into the books anyway.

Nick Drakes Pink Mood
A disapointing and frustarating addition to what is, generally, a great series of books fromm 33 1/3. Ms Petrusich is clearly a big Drake fan but her take on Pink Moon offers little thats not already been covered in Patrick Humphries book or, even better, Ian MacDonalds essay in his anthology, The Peoples Music. Petrusich gives a very persoanl account of her love of Pink Moon without bringing any new insights or understanding re the creative process which shaped Drakes dark masterpiece. Too much of this book focusses on the use of the song 'Pink Moon' in a car advert back in the 90's ( which I always felt diluted the power of this beautiful song although it did bring Drakes music to the attention of an audiance denied him during his life ). Maybe it's an impossible task writing about Nick Drake given how little is really known about his life and indeed his death. I'd advise Nick Drake fans to approach this book with limited expections but they'll undoubtedly share the affection and devotion that the author clearly has for this album.

Always interesting to read about Nick Drake, but this is sloppily written and half-baked
Nick Drake (1948-1974) has a devoted following nowadays and, as so often in such cases, there are people who feel proprietorial about his music and feverishly protective of his reputation. Expectations run high when - it happens relatively rarely - a CD with new or remastered tracks comes out or, as is the case here, a new book is published.

In such situations it is all the more important for a new author wanting to publish on the subject to research well and report on their thoughts or findings with sensitivity and care. Being an admirer of Drake's brilliantly individual, poetic music and his ability to use a deep-seated sensitivity to creative ends, I always enjoy reading about him. However, this time that pleasure was tempered by five key gripes:

1) I consider myself a relatively patient reader who is willing to overlook turgid writing if a subject is interesting. But Petrusich really takes the biscuit with her sloppy, narcissistic prose: We don't need a three-page oratory on her trip to work and the enlightening fact that sometimes when listening to Pink Moon, she - I kid you not - "think[s] about maybe making a peanut butter sandwich". The album itself is described as "so perfect, it makes my teeth hurt, my face crumple, my toes curl" - a description that would be more at home in a gushy, prep-school magazine than here.

2) Petrusich endorses a rather lazy mythologisation of Drake as a brooding romantic. Having begun with an intimate recounting of his death at 26 - and why begin with the presumed suicide? Why can't we begin with the music, which is after all why we are here, reading about Nick Drake? - she imagines her Byronic hero "haunting the doorways of Far Leys, sad and wispy, maybe holding a candle, or a half-smoked joint, or a battered brown notebook...".

3) She regurgitates the much-quoted notion that Drake was "asexual" when there are other possibilities that could be exlored: The line from Northern Sky "come blow your horn on high" and the fact that his band in school was called The Perfumed Gardeners suggest in their sexual overtones that he did in fact have a sexual consciousness and curiosity.

4) The ethics of selling music to corporations for use in advertising is an interesting topic, but instead of really going into it, Petrusich gives over a third of the book (as others have noted) to an advertising exec at some pretentious automobile corporation who used the album's title track in a commercial in 2000. Without irony, she calls this "groundbreaking advertising" and faithfully records the advertising exec's inspiring and heartwarming words on the sales of Nick Drake's music ("It went from zero to a s!?$load").

5) Finally, Bert Jansch's name is misspelt repeatedly throughout the book (as "Burt"). Jansch is a well-known musician and in the age of the internet, where verification can be accessed in a nanosecond, it is almost inexcusable for such a mistake to have gone unnoticed and unchecked (this 118-page volume wasn't proofread, it seems).

Instead of this book, I'd recommend trying any of the following if you haven't already>
* Ian MacDonald's fascinating essay 'Exiled from Heaven' collected in The People's Music (2003)
* Patrick Humphries' Nick Drake: The Biography (1997) and Trevor Dann's Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake (2005) - the two biographies
* 'A Skin Too Few' and 'Nick Drake: Under Review' - two documentaries on the man and his music
* Family Tree - CD including earlier songs as well as a composition by his mother and a song sung by Drake and his sister