kung fu grippe

“I Saw Nick Drake”

Nick Drake

Nick Drake, c. 1969. No footage of the adult Drake exists; he was only ever captured in still photographs and in home footage from his childhood.

Watched a bit of Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake last night, and that fact cited above is now kind of obsessing me.

Drake was never a blockbuster commercial success in his time, and his personal and professional demons do strike me as echoing the problems of fellow cult washouts like Syd Barrett and Big Star.

Still. The man had some powerful boosters and did release three full-length albums between 1969 and 1972.

Yet, there’s not one frame of moving footage of an adult Nick Drake — neither performing, in interviews, nor just hanging around. Which I find astounding.

Drake was 26 at the time of his death — today’s equivalent being someone born in June of 1983.

And I’ll bet you that today’s average 26-year-old anybody has dozens of hours of footage of themselves. Opening a Cabbage Patch doll at 2, backyard wrestling at 14, the horrifying Vanilla Ice stripes at the 1991 BMX rally.

And if today’s 26-year-old were a musician? Forget it. There’d be VHS footage of the first guitar chord, HandiCam shots of the first gig, and — at the point of anything approaching half Drake’s modest success — there’d be professional promotional videos and thousands of shitty concert grabs, courtesy of the cell phones of drunken fans.

I realize 35 years is a long time — unbelievably, if he were alive today, Drake would now be a ripe 61 — but it’s still remarkable to think about how consumer and pro technology, celebrity and fame, and the entertainment industry itself have all been reinvented in my lifetime. Crazy. Just crazy.

Today, I can easily find 20 cumulative hours of a dim sorority girl trying to conceal her meatbeard, while, by comparison, there’s hardly a trace of one of the most gifted artists of the 1970s.

Something about that disconnect seems both incredibly promising and inconsolably depressing.

Like Nick Drake, I suppose.

Nick Drake - “Pink Moon”

Robyn Hitchcock - “I Saw Nick Drake”