99% Invisible - 141- Three Records from Sundown

Episode Date: November 19, 2014

This week on the show we’re presenting one of our favorite radio features, “Three Records from Sundown,” about singer Nick Drake. The documentary, by producer Charles Maynes, retraces the roots of Drake’s legend through interviews with Drake’s producer, Joe Boyd. Boyd … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There is one word us radio producers can never seem to let go of. Tape. Our job used to be all about tape. My first Moran's recorder captured sound on cassette tapes. If you're a little bit older than me, you even produced your stories on tape. You'd sit in front of a reel to reel and cut apart someone's voice with a razor blade and then splice the magnetic tape back together with clear adhesive tape.

These days we use digital recorders and computers, but we still use the word tape. If Sam or Katie or Avery goes out and does an interview, the first question I'll ask is, did you get good tape? The raw material that we work with is tape, it just is. There is no alternative. The story we're presenting today is about one artist who is also inextricably linked to tape. Cassette tapes, in this case, had it not been for obsessive fans collecting and copying and passing along his songs in the era of tapes, we might never have come to know his music. Then again, had he lived in a different era. Perhaps he would have gotten the recognition he deserved

within his own lifetime. From radio producer Charles Mayans, this is three records from Sundown. You know, one of the things that I've said a lot, but I'm not sure how much people understand it really, I don't like singer songwriters generally. It's not what I choose to listen to Roots music or to jazz or to, you know, music by, I don't want to exaggerate this, but, you know, music by real people, by people from the earth, people who are not middle class, you know. And I don't think in history you look back, I don't think there's that many examples of the middle class inventing anything, you know, culturally.

So when I put on a tape and I hear, you know, well educated white person strumming a guitar. You know, I'm looking at my watch and I'm saying, okay, I'll give this about another 15 seconds. And then, you know, unless the voice is really startling. And Nick Drake just grabbed me by the throat. And it's one of the great sadness and frustrations of my life in the music business that I wasn't able to figure out a way to get it across to people in his lifetime. Three records from sundown. The early days. In 1966, Joe Boyd, an ambitious young American, arrived to London hoping to make his mark in the thriving music scene. He produces the first Pink Floyd single,

and he discovers the English folk rock pioneers to fairport conventions. But arguably, he makes his greatest find, far from the streets of London, in Cambridge, with Nick Drake. The English have such funny names for class. I would call him an upper middle class boy. The upper middle class always call themselves middle class.

But the lower middle class also call themselves middle class. Anyway, he was definitely going to a boarding school. He spoke with a very refined accent. He was part of a kind of gilded youth generation of well-off upper middle-class kids. And he was very talented in music. He started playing the clarinet, he switched to the guitar, his mother played the piano and wrote songs. And years later I discovered I heard tapes of his mother and they're amazing. You know they have these wonderful chords

in the piano. And you know the style of the song is a bit, you know, very English, very, almost music hall, but upper-class music hall, flanders and swan and roll-coward and kind of thing. And he started playing the guitar. He was just, I don't know where it came from, but he developed a way of reproducing the guitar, the kind of chords that his mother played on piano. I heard him first because one of the Ferepor Convention told me about hearing him at a concert and the roundhouse. It was a Vietnam protest concert. And I followed up the lead and invited him to come in and bring me a tape. He brought me a tape. And I put it on at the end of that day and just immediately knew that this was something completely different.

A lot of retuning of strings so that he played in very unusual tunings. And his articulation of arpeggios on the guitar and the whole way he used the guitar to underpin his songs is completely unique in my view. It's so strong and so central and so devoid of solos. I mean there's nothing about guitar solos in there. It's just a way of orchestrating a song in a complexity that is staggering. stagnant. It's from the city, down to the cave. It's such a master, it's such a sleep. The boy immediately signs Nick Drake to a deal with his witch season imprint on island records. The year is 1968, Drake is 20 years old. But boy's new talent is beyond reticent. His memoirs,

quote rights. In the years to come, I would get used to Nick Drake's way of answering the telephone. As if it never rang before. Here comes the story. He was so shy as a performer when the circumstances were right and the only of the circumstances that I remember most clearly as being right was when the federal convention played the festival hall and it was very dramatic because they'd had a car accident and the drummer had been killed and this was a reconfiguration of the group so everybody was in their seats and respectful.

Nick came out, didn't say anything, played a song, he'd be applauded, and then spent three minutes without speaking, retuning his guitar. Everybody stayed silent. He played again, everybody gave him a big ovation. We got an own court at the end. And I thought, this is gonna work. And then you send him out on his own,

you know, and there's a student union, a full of kids, and there's a bar at the back. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't know jokes. He has no way of chanting. He just took returns to his guitar and takes quite some time. And he just, in those little intervals between songs, he lost everybody. And until we really stopped performing live and there was no other way in England in those days to really break an artist.

The Middle Days. At this point, all efforts to advance Drake's career would center on the recording studio. Boyd Recruit's engineer John Wood at Sound Technique Studio in London for Drake's debut album. The record is called Five Leaves Left. The year is 1969. It's difficult to remember that there wasn't really a template for doing this kind of record in those days.

To record a singer with strings or with a larger orchestral arrangement, but not in a pop way, with a kind of dry-ish sentiment sound on the voice and doing it in a sort of tasteful way. It was not something that had been done much. And we'd already tried one arranger, the guy who worked on the James Taylor record, the first James Taylor record, and just hated what he did with Nick's song. Just didn't work at all. And Nick then said, well, I have this friend in Cambridge, Robert Kirby. And I went up to Cambridge to meet Kirby. And I was a bit freaked out because I thought Nick

is world class. So we want the best. We want the top arranger in London, whoever it is, we'll spend the money. We'll get the guy. And Nick was saying, well, actually, let's try my friend in Cambridge. He's 19 years old, you know. And I think, oh, no, no, no, you know.

But I went up and met him. And I just liked the way they worked together and the way I liked Robert. And he seemed to really, really love Nick and his music. And I just felt, okay, let's just go with this. And so he did this first session, and the first track they did was Way to Blue, which I had never heard, because he didn't have a way to play it to me, in a way.

And I suppose I could have gone down into the room and just listened, but I tended to, you know, let John would be the guy running around moving microphones and messing around in the studio and I sat in the control room. And besides, it was a climb, you know, this control was upstairs and you had to climb all the way down and all the way back up again. So I was just sitting up there reading my paper

and listening to the restraings rehearse. And you'd hear them, John, would focus on one microphone, then another microphone, then another microphone, trying to get that in, he'd go downstairs, move the microphone, move the chairs around. I kept hearing these bits and pieces of this thing, I just sounded amazing, I couldn't figure out what it really did sound like. And then finally, we got everybody in position and John got his sound he wanted on every microphone, every part of this six-piece string ensemble. And then he

just pushed all the faders up. And we listened to this whole thing and I just don't know. A way to find the sun Tell me all that you need Show me what you love to share Once you come and say If you're all the way to me. I thought when we made the record, oh my God, the critics are going to love this. This is so, but we're going to get headlines. You know, Melody Maker said that it was an awkward mixture of folk and cocktail I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The record sells fewer than 5,000 copies. Boyd is discouraged, but Drake is distraught. Seeking to build on what Little Momentum exists, Boyd or just Drake back distraught. Seeking to build on what little momentum exists, the boy just drag back into the studio. This would produce his second record, the album brighter later, the year is 1970. One of the things that influenced my approach to make a lot was the first

Leonard Cohen album, which I thought John Simon did a great job of producing. And one of the songs I love was So Long Mary Anne. And he has these girls mocking his line, sort of singing behind him against him in a kind of contrast in their brassiness to his delicacy. And when he played me poor boy, originally when he played it to me, that chorus line, oh poor boy, so sorry for himself. He sang that. And I said, I just had this idea right away, and she said, Nick, let's get some girls singing to sing that line. You answer at the end of them. Beginning of the chorus, you pick it up to the end of the chorus.

It kind of looked to me funny like, are you sure? I said, yes, I'm sure. OK. So sound and I learned recording it very quickly that you just turn neck off in the monitors. Because an X performance is always great. You know, when we would record neck with strings or rhythm section or whatever, even if it was out in the room and when he recorded with strings he recorded in the room and this is different from what people do today. It tracks like River Man.

That's not an overdub string section. You know, that's Nick singing and playing guitar in the room in the middle of the strings. So you're listening very carefully to everybody else. And you go for their performance. But if you get a great take from strings, or the brass, or rhythm section, or whoever the weakest link is, that's your turn. You don't even have to listen to Nick.

Then you listen back, and you put Nick in, and it just sends me text. Because he was always just fine. It's those complicated guitar parts. He never flubbed them. He just never did. Oh, I'll be come and go Oh, I'll be come and go Despite critical acclaim, writer later sells poorly. The spare Drake leaves London to move home with his parents in Timworth and Arden. His behavior is increasingly erratic and reclusive.

At his family's urgent, Drake seeks psychiatric care. Detail. Around the same time, Boyd leaves London for California, where he accepts a job in the film industry. Nick Drake has a kind of reputation as a very solitary lonely figure. What was it like Oda's with the person you knew? Yeah, I mean he was soft-spoken, he was hesitant, but he knew what he liked and he was at very good ideas and he worked very closely with Robert Kirby and it was incredible fun to work in the studio with Nick just because the material you're working with is so great.

And the fact that it's not a self-contained group, you've got to go out and put a group together to make these records one track at a time. The End Days In 1972 Drake records his third and final album Pink Moon. The record consists mostly of just voiced guitar and Drake does not as boy to participate. Pink Moon sells fewer copies than even its predecessors. Soon thereafter Drake suffers a mental breakdown in his hospitalized. Falling is released, Drake and Boyd agreed to new work on a new album. That album has never finished.

In 1974, Drink has found dead in his bedroom. Due to an overdose in the antidepressant, tripped his own. He was 26 years old. Good-hey. Nobody knows. So I written and I saw you say I've been the moon as I've been say And I know you stand so tall You're a bingo moon, and I get you on the plane Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Is that the end of the story? No. Detail. Boyd eventually sells his label's stake in island records. One of his parting conditions is that Drake's recordings never go out of print. Never? Never. A second detail.

After his death, Drake's recordings begin to find an audience. Fans make pilgrimages to the Drake family home in Timworth and Arden. Drake's parents, Rodney and Molly, touched by the interest in their son, invite these visitors in and allow them to copy cassettes and home recordings of Drake's music. Over time, the Drake legend spreads. A combination of word of mouth and tape to tape. To tape. To tape.

To tape. To tape. To tape. To tape. To tape. To tape. To tape. Is it surprising to you how popular Nick Drake's music has become kind of after his death and sort of that, called Sprung Brown?

No, I mean, I always thought he should be that popular and my view was what took everybody so long. It's such a shame that people didn't recognize it in his lifetime. But, you know, there it deem me so high. You know, I don't know how to deal with questions like it was ahead of its time, because I don't think so, it was very much, you know, it happened in that time and it was a set of influences that, you know. But I do think that, in a way, it's failure at the time has been part of its success now, in the sense that very few people growing up in the 80s,

they didn't have parents who were playing Nick Drake to death at them. There's no films from the 60s with girls dancing around with flowers in their hair. A wist-naked rake has the soundtrack. I mean, it's not identified with that period. It is culturally unanchored. So it's free to be adapted and embraced by people from other generations and people, you know, just to come upon it.

It doesn't sort of say that I am from the 60s. You know, it just says on a drink. Please, give me a second grace. Please, give me a second face. Falling for a heart our first time around I'll wait to sit on the ground in your way So come, come right in my streetcar by the bay For now, I must know how I will find you Are in your way, I must see your eyes She was I But she won't need to cry

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99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Trouffleman, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices of Arksign and Architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, Tumblr, Spotify, we're all on Twitter, but our true home online is 999PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.