When Nick Drake died in November of 1974, at age 26, he left behind just three albums—less than two hours of music. Largely unloved during his lifetime, that scant body of work’s reputation has grown immensely over the past 40 years, inspiring deluxe reissue campaigns, countless cover versions, a host of “best of” collections and even a feature-length documentary.
Drake’s posthumous popularity has also caused various vaults to be raided in search of more releasable music from the mysterious and melancholy bard. Time Of No Reply came first in the 1980s, gathering together outtakes and alternates. Made To Love Magic, released in 2004, offered mostly cleaned-up (occasionally overdubbed) versions of Time of No Reply’s tracks, alongside a genuinely unheard song, “Tow The Line”. One might assume that the bottom of the barrel had been well and truly scraped when Drake’s estate put out Family Tree, a collection of lo-fi home recordings, in 2007. But just last week, a London auction house announced the planned sale of a 1968 master tape containing unreleased performances. We can’t hear that tape just yet, but there's some excellent, still-unreleased material floating around the internet in unofficial guises (intrepid Googlers should seek out the A Day Gone By bootleg compilation). Admittedly, some of it is for die-hards only. But with an artist like Nick Drake, every note feels precious.
Drake’s earliest home recordings have been bootlegged for decades now. Much of it is standard coffeehouse fare: Bob Dylan and Bert Jansch covers along with other well-worn folk/blues chestnuts. It’s juvenilia, to be sure (Drake was still a teenager when he made these tapes), but there are hints of the genius that would emerge shortly in the singer’s hushed vocals and deftly fingerpicked guitar. Check out his reading of the Youngbloods’ Summer of Love favorite “Get Together”; it’s a song whose sentiment may have devolved into cliche in the 21st century, but in Drake’s hands it sounds fresh and uplifting.
There’s even a snippet of young Nick delivering an early-morning monologue to no one in particular. For three minutes, the mist dissolves and the tragic songwriter is revealed as a sensitive kid who had a pretty good time at a party the night before. A phantom made flesh.
One of the biggest missing puzzle pieces, though, is any evidence of his career as a live performer. The painfully shy Drake only made it onstage a handful of times and apparently hated the experience. The closest we may ever get to a live tape is a BBC session recorded for John Peel’s show in the summer of 1969, a fragment of which survives. The brooding solo rendition of “Three Hours” suggests that, with the right audience and situation, Drake might have been a captivating onstage presence. You can imagine the powerful precision of his guitar quieting even the rowdiest of crowds. Alas, it was not to be.
The studio is where Nick really flourished. But even then, there were false starts and hiccups. A handful of outtakes let us listen in on what were probably Drake’s very first professional recording sessions in 1968. The music laid down here was rejected, and with hindsight, it’s easy to see why. The syrupy arrangements by Richard Hewson on “Day Is Done” and “The Thoughts Of Mary Jane” tilt things in the easy listening, almost Bacharachian direction, often leaving the key ingredient of Drake’s guitar out of the mix entirely. As opposed to the otherworldly string settings (mostly created by Robert Kirby) that would grace Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, Drake’s songs sound less sharp in this setting. But as an early step towards the making of a masterpiece, these are fascinating documents.
Our final Nick Drake rarity isn’t a piece of music at all, but rather a 12-second clip filmed at an unknown British festival in the early 1970s that some claim is the only existing footage of the songwriter. We’ll probably never know if this is actually him; the tall figure is walking away from the camera, his face hidden. It’s a bit like watching those shaky, out-of-focus films of Bigfoot. But as of this writing, more than 180,000 people have clicked through, hoping to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of Nick Drake.