Nick Drake Appreciation - Album By Album & All Things Nick Drake*

Brilliant! I will put that on my list. I'd also like to take some photos of the album locations which I believe were all in London?

 

Best related book on Nick Drake ?

 

Love this alternate concept for Bryter Layter and that photograph!

 

Essential!!!!!!!

 

Fishponds Road is still there.

 

Remembered For Awhile is a staggering read. So many revations. Amazing to learn the February 1974 session was actually February 1973.

 

This is a beautiful thread. Thank you to everyone for lovingly contributing throughout.

I remember fondly the name and posts by Lemonade Kid from the Nick Drake Forum a decade ago. We were regular contributors to it, and I’m very grateful for him inaugurating this thread.

I do have some things to contribute which I hope will be of some interest to you all. However, having respectfully read through this thread it is now past 4am thus probably, although unlikely, should try to sleep. This is testament to how engrossing your posts have been to me!

Many thanks again from the bottom of my heart for bringing such warmth to a cold dark night; from an obsessed fan of Nick Drake since 2003.

 

Welcome to the forum!!!
Get some shut eye ..anything you want to contribute, any interesting titbit related to Nick Drake will be appreciated no doubt at a later date.

 

Major thoroughfares don’t tend to disappear much.

Nice penmanship from Helen, although her syntax is decidedly odd.

 

Hey, Narcissus,

Good to hear from you! I miss our posts at the Nick Drake forum and was so sad at its demise. I look forward to your posts here.

This Nick Drake appreciation thread has indeed been a labor of love. Thanks for your kind words.

LK

 

What happened to the forum /posts ?

 

So was this a rejected layout for the LP? If the background was in maybe a solid purple it would have made for a powerful design.

 

Within this post I hope to offer up an answer for you to the question of Nick Drake’s guitar. I’m a little anxious about my first large post for you all, however I’m compelled to join you and add to the storyline which has inspired me…

First, if I may establish a genesis for my obsession with Nick Drake, thus you may better understand where I’m coming from.

Like many of you, my introduction to the music of Nick Drake was by way of the sumptuous Way To Blue CD. I felt as though a secret was being presented to me, one of profound significance, yet it was opaque and enveloped in a somber timbre mirroring my own despair. What followed was an entire summer of solitude, listening to his music constantly, and when not exploring his music, learning how to play some of his compositions on my guitar. This was one of the happiest periods of my life.

Since then I have remained dedicated to Nick’s music, his story, and keeping him as close to my heart as possible in order to keep going in life.

Let’s jump forward in ‘time’ to alexpop;

Nick is seen here in a photo taken while in France around 1967 with a Levin LS-18 guitar, often referred to as a Levin Super Goliath. The Levin Factory was located in Sweden and produced a plethora of highly sought-after instruments, including beautiful Violins made from Maple.



Maple Trees and the wood they provide are conserved. Maple is customarily used for the body of high-end Violins. The wood is usually flamed to bring out its unique majestic grain. It is a very dense wood and notoriously hard to work with, so requires highly skilled craft hand. For this reason, it is very rarely to be found on guitars. However, flamed Maple is used as a tone wood for the back and sides of the Levin LS-18 guitar body! – The shear importance of this I shall return to later…

At this juncture I would like to quote Robert Kirby, whom in my opinion is the most reliable source in this mystery of Nick’s guitar. Not only was Robert a first-hand source, he was a dear friend of Nick Drake’s from his Cambridge years, is known to have observed closely each note Nick was playing on his guitar in order to transpose them for arrangements, and worked closely for long hours alongside him in the studio on his first two records. Thus, when Robert is saying;
“I never saw Nick play anything other than a Martin D-28" we can read into this differently…

 

From my research, the Martin Guitar Company (CF Martin) were not best pleased when Levin broke the American market in the late 60’s with their Goya guitar range. The guitars which Sweden’s Levin factory produced were deemed to be of superior craftsmanship and sound quality to Martin Guitars and were quite the pioneers with use of X-bracing. Levin were already lauded in Europe and such a reputation propelled them into a class of their own. So, Martin pounced and ‘merged’ with Levin before completely absorbing the company. While doing so eliminated the use of Maple wood on the guitars. The reason I mention this is due to a 1974 poster I found from around said ‘merger’ period, depicting a Martin D-18 alongside a Levin Super Goliath;



Although the image above does not depict the exact guitar models in question, to me it is not inconceivable for these closely tied guitar manufacturers, producing the LS-18 and D-28 respectively, to be mistaken for the other, especially under the climate of mergers and dissolution that followed. The similarity of the two guitar models is astonishing.

I hope you come to understand that I mean no disrespect to Robert Kirby’s memory, in fact I feel his memory of Nick’s guitar to the most accurate of all disparate recollections I have read or heard. Perhaps while on the subject of memory it would be proper to quote from another of Nick Drake’s close friends to address this;

“The first pitfall that presents itself is the risk of conflating bona fide details of occasional meetings and aspects of character, with received assumptions based on fragments of recovered memory which might have been suggested by others within their own written or recorded assessments. These chimerical mistakes can filter down into the record of the individual and become part of the established version of the recollected image. All that one can hope to extract, from even the most thorough piece of biographical research, on a person as highly reclusive in their own thoughts as Nick Drake, will be an impressionistic pastiche, containing certain glittering pointers of factual experience to light the path forward.” David, Earl of Dudley. NICK DRAKE, Remembered For A While - pg.103.


Tracing through time and piecing things together can become obsessive.
Yet, however far reaching my interest goes, it is the primary and first-hand evidence that I love most of all in this enthralling mystery.
The next reliable source for me has been Nick’s father Rodney Drake, and from his diary entries upon his son’s return home, we read of the destruction of two guitars and the purchasing of a new one post Pink Moon;

"Friday 25 May 1973

Nick down at a reasonable hour and went out for a short time during the morning arriving back in time for lunch. Having heard from Naw that he had broken a guitar, went to inspect and found that he had broken both. Obviously in a fit of frustration and despair. He now only has his electric guitar. This is bad…"

"Tuesday 16 April 1974

I had a bonfire day today and found to my surprise that yesterday evening Nick had taken his two old broken guitars and thrown them on the heap ready for burning. Duly cremated them." NICK DRAKE, 'Remembered For A While' pg344 & pg351.

From these entries we can deduced the Levin LS-18 was one of the two guitars Nick destroyed, leaving his Levin Deluxe electric as his sole guitar, before purchasing a Martin 000-28 sometime between the two diary entries, and recording his final five songs. The second of the guitars Nick destroyed may have been his classical guitar, alas I’m speculating.

An unfortunate time in my life led to the destruction of all my worldly belongings in 2018. But from the loss of guitars, records and all else, comes an opportunity to start anew…

In January of this year I purchased a 1962, Levin LS-18. The maple wood back had come away from the body so needed work, hence I found the guitar to be rather affordable. By the end of February, it was repaired…

What is unusual about this dreadnought sized guitar is its single-ply Maple wood back and sides. Maple is a very dense hardwood as mentioned, and this physical characteristic results in a relatively quick note decay. It is well known for making an instrument sound bright and loud, and generates a tight, focused tone with little overtone presence. Levin coupled this tone wood with a four-ply (laminated) spruce top. By doing so, each string sings distinctly from one-another, almost to the point of sounding dry or ‘dead’ in comparison to a mahogany/spruce counterpart.

Nick’s choice of guitar strings for his first two records were Medium Gauge Nickle strings. While on Pink Moon he experimented exclusively with Heavy and Light gauge Nickle strings.
However, the fascinating thing with the LS-18 is, once the initial shine of a new set of Nickle strings has worn off after several days of good use, there is the distinctive sound and character of the tone-woods, ‘deadening’ the tone to such a gradation, so to speak, where one would assume they were as much as a year or two old.

It may well be true that Nick loved to keep his strings on his guitar for a while, yet with his excessive retuning for upwards of 14 alternate tunings and his well-documented obsessive playing, keeping various strings from snapping for a more than four months wouldn't be possible.

What is also distinctive in Nick Drake’s oeuvre, when he strikes the 6th string with his thumb nail for his anchoring bass notes, there is a popping sound unlike anything else heard on a record. This is present throughout the three records, I find, but maybe most evident on Bryter Layter, in songs such as ‘Introduction’ and 'Hazey Jane I' where the bass notes from the 6th string make a ‘Clopp’ or ‘Pock’ type of sound representative of this distinguished bass timbre. Has anyone else found this?

 

Lastly, I had spent the summer and autumn recording some of Nick’s compositions on the Levin LS-18 at various locations. Although a little self-conscious about this, I offer up some of the clearest sounding of these recordings for you to listen to if you wish, of just the guitar parts. I hope you enjoy the surroundings too!;

Time of No Reply

 

Introduction

 

I hope there was something of interest here for you and I haven’t sent you all to sleep zzz Thank you all!

 

Hi thx for the info regarding the Levon ( LS 18) .. well spotted.

Wonder if that was the same instrument he used bumming about France ..also met Rolling Stones ..in Morocco ( I’d imagine Brian Jones liked his guitar skill).

Robert Kirby?

To be fair maybe that’s the guitar he remembers from the recording sessions.

Aside .. what was the Guild ( 1950s?) guitar Nick used?

 

I remember the Levin guitar from the early seventies a friend of mine had one. Don’t know if it was the same model, memory a little hazy. It was heavy( weight ) not like a Yamaha acoustic. Guitar fret board not to my liking.
Only guitar from that period I have is a Eko 12 string ( now that is very heavy weight wise ...Formica).

 

It's been suggested various places that the small Guild on Bryter Layter cover was a prop for the shoot and actually belonged to another artist.

 

Interesting to read about your Nick Drake discovery. Nick Drake - -obsession? Your not alone!!!!

“Levon LS- 18 sheer importance I shall return to later”

Yes! Please do.

 

Believe that’s the story. I’m sure he tried the instrument out( At least at the photo session ).

I tried a Guild out in a gtr shop about twenty years not the BL model, easy action fantastic tone .. not that heavy( and not that expensive), early 1950s. Wish I bought it now.

 

Where did N i c k get the money for the Martin 000-28?

Also, you mention string gauge. Any idea brand ?