"Pink Moon - Appendix

On a day in 1991 some members of school were playing The Doors’ Roadhouse Blues from the album Morrison Hotel (1970). I have never been a huge Doors’ fan, but the thing that struck me was the similarity between the riff of Roadhouse Blues and the one on Nick Drake’s song Know from his third album, Pink Moon. In the meantime I wrote an analysis of PM more or less forgetting the comparison I’d made with the Drake song; at least, only mentioning it in passing. During the summer of 2004 I took a walk through the grounds of an old abbey near Killarney in Southern Ireland. I’ve no idea what triggered my thought processes that day but I began to piece together the possible missing pieces in the PM puzzle. I will simply offer one or two of these thoughts as an appendix to the previous analysis. I can’t be sure theory fits fact, but it is offered to complete the analysis.

My argument in the PM analysis was that archetypes lie beneath the surface of the work: in particular, the archetype of death. I stand by that, but started to think that another might exist which hadn’t previously caught my attention. This is love, and I add it as another level to the polysemanticism of the work. I have often observed that a powerful force is conveyed by certain musics often absent from others. Other music may be technically proficient but is more superficial. Jung called the former ‘visionary’, the latter ‘psychological’. Like the music of Judee Sill, which also involves archetypes borne from an emotional encounter, part of PM’s success lies in the musical structure, part in the coding and part in the performance. It might be that PM is shot-through with an event centred on a real, love-inspired encounter that, for one reason or another didn’t work out. This is certainly conveyed by some of the lyrics. The further Drake went into himself, either though artistic sensibility or for whatever other reasons, and away from the everyday world, the more likely it is that he distanced himself from the object of his affections. There is nothing new in love songs. Composers from John Dowland to The Beatles and beyond have always been inspired by the subject. However, Nick Drake seems to evoke the subject through symbols guiding us to the mystery surrounding his untimely demise.

Of the eleven songs that make up the structure of PM, as far as we know three were written sometime before the concept of the album took shape. These are Place to Be, Things Behind the Sun, and Parasite. The remaining eight – Pink Moon, Road, Which Will (which certainly sounds like an earlier song), Horn, Know, Free Ride, Harvest Breed and From the Morning – are all marked by their brevity and strippedness. Structurally, the older songs often partition the newer songs one from the other.

Some of the coding of the album bears a similarity to The Doors’ Morrison Hotel. Both albums include eleven songs, although this is most likely incidental. I have already mentioned the connection with Roadhouse Blues. They are both in E and the rhythm of the riffs is close; certainly the pitches: 0-5-6-7 (E = 0). The title track of Pink Moon may be a feminising of Blue Sunday, the fifth song on Morrison Hotel. Although musically there isn’t a correspondence, lyrically Blue Sunday deals with the discovery that true love was found on a blue Sunday. This, like Pink Moon, is short at only 2:07. It states quite simply all it has to say within two verses (one minus lyrics) with falling lines on the post-verse, and triplet rhythms that also connect with the later Road. Much of PM is based on simple repetition and brevity, partly because of the absence of musical arrangements, but more so because Drake wanted listeners to hear the message delivered by what the ‘60’s Protest generation referred to as musical authenticism. It has been documented that Drake wanted ‘no frills’ for this final album. Sun and summer are prevalent in Morrison Hotel as a kind of bitter-sweet memory. The feeling of impending pessimism is never far from its surface possibly as a fading memory of the utopian ideals of the counter-culture. It is contemporary with Bryter Layter, Drake’s second album, and may well have been included in Drake’s record collection. He is likely to have known Jim Morrison’s work, particularly the Lizard King, and well as Morrison’s interest in the work of William Blake. I have discussed the themes of innocence and experience for the late ‘60’s generation elsewhere, but they function, symbolically, as a longed-for past or, in part, a counter-cultural utopia that would have been central for Drake with his upper middle-class/Cambridge educated/rural upbringing and outlook. Sun and summer almost certainly seem to be used as metaphors for this aspect in Drake’s work. On the other hand ‘moon’ – the sun’s opposite in symbolic terms – points to a darker definition: the realisation of maturation, the loss of utopian ideals or the dawning, for Drake, that his adolescence was fast disappearing and adult responsibilities, such as marriage and family, lay just around the corner.

‘Roads’ crop up several times on PM. The third song is called Road and, in terms of its title, connects to Roadhouse Blues. Both songs deal with travel, a symbol for energy, but in Drake’s comes the symbols of sun and moon: for him, the moon seems clear; for the ‘you’ of the song, the sun shines; for Drake the future looks dark; for the other, optimistic; for him the road sees him through; for the other it leads to the stars, prosperity and success. Roads also appear in Free Ride. Like the alchemists who would probably have been familiar with Gnosticism and sometimes worshipped the moon as goddess, it is likely Drake would have known the more clandestine symbolism employed by poets connected to the tradition such as Robert Graves, probably through his academic connections at Cambridge. Free Ride also connects in a very clear way to Know which introduces the second side of the album:

Ride – line 1 – I know you
Know – line 1 – Know that I love you
Ride – line 2 – I care too
Know – line 2 – Know I don’t care
Ride – line 3 – I see through
Know – line 3 – Know that I see you

These lines seem to be in the style of a letter: he wants someone to know that he loves her; he cares yet doesn’t care; he sees and yet doesn’t see. All the time the music is metaphorically travelling along the road in rhythm of the guitar part. Clearly, there is much energy being directed towards the desired object. Drake sounds as if he wanting to clarify the situation, even though he conveys it symbolically. It is well known that communication was difficult for him at this point in time, and music seemed to be the only means by which he could say what he wanted. He also sees through other objects mentioned in the song: pictures on the wall; people who come to the ball; cattle passing by the door, which all point to objects known personally and perhaps the other’s possessions. The further Drake fell into his shadow (the inside-sleeve of PM is apposite with its negative image) the greater he might have both distanced himself from people round him, in turn feeling a sense of rejection and alienation.

The songs held back from Bryter Layter become points of climax by dividing it up and providing points of focus within the overriding atmosphere of despair and developing cynicism. They also provide clear messages of how he sees himself and, at the same time, offer words of counsel. If the album is about lost love then the more impact these songs have. It may have been that if rejection impacted upon Drake, the other songs and the overall concept took shape in his mind. Perhaps, as he began to face the fact that his musical career was proving problematic, he sensed he had lost all hope of happiness that a stable relationship may provide.

Which Will is a series of questions stated simply, ‘which will you choose if you won’t choose me?’ The following instrumental, Horn, recalls the legend of King Horn, a hero who disguised himself as a pilgrim/beggar to win the love of the beautiful Rymenhild. Only after proving himself and overcoming the evil Fikenhild could he win Rymenhild and eventually marry her. In the legend, Horn is a musician and music was the means by which he overcame Fikenhild. The lines of Which Will may be implied through this: ‘Which will you choose from, from the stars above/Which will you love the best’. The tale of Horn might provide the key for understanding this small-scale instrumental. The pilgrim/beggar persona taken by Horn is revealed in the simple repeated bisectional metaphor of the piece and the limited pitch range of 0-4-5-7-11 (D = 0). It might have been that Drake was appealing to the other person through authenticity and myth: honesty by musical means. In this way it might be possible to regard PM as a Romance, a work in the medieval courtly love tradition, sung by the Troubadours.

From the Morning continues the sequence of binary opposites – the strong/weak of Place to Be and the sun/moon of Road – but here they become day/night. The inclusion of opposites often brings about reconciliation by unconscious means. From the Morning also includes the lines ‘go play the game’. For the counter-culture the game was usually taken to mean establishment conventions such as career and economics, and the reason why Blake’s paradigms of innocence and experience were so important to Jim Morrison. The lines ‘play the game that you learnt from the morning’ also connects with the ‘seeing through’ imagery of Free Ride. The writer is focussing on pretence with a knowing eye. In the light of the five last songs, here is a defeated artist who sounds profoundly disappointed by personal and professional experiences. We hear this clearly in Rider on the Wheel: ‘And now you know my name/And I don’t feel the same/But I ain’t gonna blame/The rider on the wheel.’ He doesn’t blame destiny, that which propels the karmic wheel, but proclaims a half-hearted acceptance. He also realises he has to tow the line but, in the end, the ‘Black Eyed Dog’ came around Drake’s door and overtook his fragility. I suspect knowledge such as this would have come a crippling blow to any sensitive young man or woman living in the late ‘60’, especially for someone with a musical vocation who saw through game playing as part of establishment, collective posturing. Also, he had literally nothing to aspire to with his upper middle-class sensibility; unlike other working-class musicians he was already ‘there’ in social circles. Coming from a family who had instilled Christian values within him didn’t necessarily mean he would have been thick-skinned enough to cope with the ruthlessness of contemporary society: a collective despised by a generation who saw their music was less about notoriety, technics and economics and more about making the world an better place.

Paradoxically, Drake uses moon symbolism to provide the listener with irresistible, unknown knowledge of a much older, more ancient type: a matriarchal order that resonates deep within the unconscious psyche through the more subjective connection projected onto another and with whom he may have been emotionally involved. Drake harnesses the macrocosm through this encounter. Arnold Schoenberg utilised the symbol of the moon in his song-cycle Pierrot Lunaire which sets twenty-one poems of Stefan George written at a time of emotional turmoil. Judee Sill was also well aware, through her reading of Jung and occult literature, she had successfully connected with the energy of her interior male – the animus. We do not know for sure that Drake did the same, but we feel this may well have been the case because of power of the music itself.

Sadly – perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not – Nick Drake died just before dawn on a Monday morning. Monday is the day of the moon. The fading light of Sunday – the masculine day of communion with the risen god – gives way to the dark mystery of Monday – the feminine day of goddess – reflecting the meaning ‘(She’s) gonna get ye all.’ In this way the myth has fuelled the enigma of PM. Interestingly, Jung has written more than once that it is the anima’s intention to draw a man out into life. It is sad to think that Drake, whilst getting there, in the end turned back and yet, at the same time the anima drew out of him a work of extraordinary resonance. It tells us one thing: if the love connection is real then it draws Drake into the realm of the human, connecting us to otherness at the same time.

(Copyright – Andrew Keeling. Feb. 14, 2005)

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