Nick Drake: why???

That's the point at which you need to have a chatty, relaxed rapport with the audience. I have a feeling that might have been a problem for Nick Drake.

"Hello, I'm Nick Drake. Please don't look at me."

I saw a Steve Earle/Shawn Colvin show last year, and as she was tuning she told a story about opening for Sting. She said something along the lines of every folk singer needs to know how to talk while tuning, to keep people engaged, and how she stuck to that even while playing arenas opening for Sting. She would stand there and talk and tune. Then one day she got off stage and there was Sting, who just sort of frowned at her at said "you know, you can just buy a better tuner and get it over with faster."

those are my least favorite folk singer moments. for example, the stuff neil young says tends to not be very funny. but everyone laughs, and it's just awkward!

... it's how Billy Connolly (and numerous other less stellar and talented folkie turned comedians) got started!

That's the point at which you need to have a chatty, relaxed rapport with the audience. I have a feeling that might have been a problem for Nick Drake.

Did you ever see Bert Jansch live? Chatty and relaxed he most certainly wasn't!

whereas john martyn had more rabbit on him than chas and dave's pet rescue

He (usually) had Danny Thompson with him also.

xposts: i saw jansch play an outdoor mini-folk festival type thing when he toured nz in the nineties, think his only comment was that the rain and surrounding terrain reminded him of scotland!

what a dumb thread concept

"drake fans have provided no satisfactory arguments" like wtf, it's pretty folk songs

yeah it's like he or she is reviewing a technical manuscript

feels like you rarely hear the "the boy was smoking mountains and mountains of weed" angle when people talk about why Nick Drake was so hopelessly withdrawn and depressed and anxious around people

i mean he must have brought at least 2 joints with him on each of his night drives across Great Britain right

are you suggesting he had been smoking too long?

The 'smoked too much weed' angle is central to Trevor Dann's biography 'Darker than the Deepest Sea' (which I haven't read). A review of it here mentions heroin use too:

Dann reveals that Drake was such a good customer that his Cockney heroin dealer bought him a car ("he's gotta 'av wheels"). Catastrophically, in terms of his mental health, he smoked "industrial quantities of cannabis", and Dann unpicks the details of Drake's disputed "suicide", pointing out that he could have taken only slightly more than double his customary dose of antidepressants; it's not hard to imagine someone in his state of mind doing that by accident.

Reminds me of the Billy Fury documentary where people kept saying he was sort of vague and not quite there a lot of the time, oh and that's right he'd been smoking shitloads of weed since the early 60s.

That Tristran Lowther "Folk Weekly" article above is brilliant, and obv bogus but hey.

played "WAy to Blue" for the first time in eons tonight and it broke me. especially:

"Look through time and find your rhyme
Tell us what you find
We will wait at your gate
Hoping like the blind"

I hadn't listened to Andy Bey's version of River Man in ages and it kind of snuck up on me this morning. Easily the best Drake cover I've heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SlN_hP3kYc

Wow, that's a superb version

i'm honestly very fond of r. stevie moore's version of "river man"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIKkI9IcSms

I hadn't listened to Andy Bey's version of River Man in ages and it kind of snuck up on me this morning. Easily the best Drake cover I've heard.

I am a megafan of the guy who played guitar on that track btw.

http://www.paulmeyers.info/no_flash.php

Yup. Refraining from going full-on street team for now.

I brought up the Andy Bey version of "River Man" the other day when Paul Meyers posted a picture of him and Andy on social media. I listened to it and noticed that the arrangement was exactly the same as the original. Paul told me yes, he learned the guitar part off the original record and a really talented guy named Andy Stein transcribed the strings, overdubbing the violin and viola and giving the other parts to a cellist and bassist. Turned out to be Andy Stein of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (#OneThread), who has had a really interesting career over the years. So now I am kind of obsessed by how good it is because I think this kind of thing is amazing but hard to pull off, covering the original exactly as it was done but singing it convincingly enough that it is still its own thing and not just a copy.

Thanks for sharing.

"I think this kind of thing is amazing but hard to pull off, covering the original exactly as it was done but singing it convincingly enough that it is still its own thing and not just a copy."

- exactly. Not all cover versions have to be radically different in order to be credible.

I enjoyed that cover.

I'm intrigued by that Andy bey cover mentioned. I have one of his early 70s lps Experience and judgment so it initially sounds as unlikely as Millie's Drake cover . But maybe makes more sense since it comes from the late 90s. Assume Millie got given the song because she was on Island. Bey had 25+ years to come across the song, or was it who he was working with in the late 90s.

Just looked at the dates. Shades of Bey came out in 1998. The Pink Moon Volkswagen commercial was 1999. So while people were still talking about and listening to Nick Drake at the time, he was a still a bit underground.

Yes, and it's still a bit of an outlier in his work.

Millie must've been given Mayfair as a demo, I don't think Drake's recording was released until the 90s(?).

Various things on the interweb say the song was brought to his attention by "the producer Herb Jordan." I found this interesting article which confirms this, although it seems to ignore the existence of some prior Bey albums which is weird.

To compare: I usually like Natacha Atlas, but her cover of "RIver Man" is neither here nor there for me, at least upon first listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlMNMmojhI

But maybe it's growing on me the second time.

Heh, you can buy a t-shirt or a hoodie with a picture of Andy Bey and Herb Jordan on it.

Seems to be more here, but I can't listen right now: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/24/773110485/andy-bey-at-80-a-love-letter-to-a-jazz-legend

Heh, you can buy a t-shirt or a hoodie with a picture of Andy Bey and Herb Jordan on it.

Bey's version of Sting's Fragile is a favourite of mine too. Ron Carter on bass, I think.