temporaneità

I’ve just read the short book that is shipped with Family Tree, the CD whose tracks are a selection of the amateur tapes that Nick Drake recorded in Tanworth-in-Arden and Aix-en-Provence.

In the first part of the book, his sister tells us what made her decide to release them: to make a stand against the bootlegs.

to do something to rectify (…) this discordant situation.

That’s a bit strange because a new bootleg is not released every year and it was just her family that unintentionally made the bootlegs possible, giving copies of her brother’s tapes to the followers who visited his home during the first few years after his death!

She has also written that

(…) the power of your music to touch and comfort - particularly those who were going through similar depressions to your own.

It is very easy to believe that there is a link between his music and the great effect that it has on depressed people but I don’t think that we can describe it as comforting, not in the common meaning at least.

Anyhow, there is something of what she has written that I liked: a line about their parents…

(…) inadvertently, they created a bond of love that was so strong, it was impossible not to feel guilty about breaking away from it.

I think that, avoiding judgments and prejudices, we should all make up our own minds on this general subject.

The second part of the book is written by Robin Frederick and it was fun to discover that

The guitar style Nick favoured - blues licks on the treble strings played over a solid beat on the bass strings - is called Piedmont Blues.

As I’ve previously written, I’m not a musician and I wasn’t aware of this kind of blues and, living in the “original” Piedmont, it was a nice thing to learn.

The third part is written by Andrew Hicks, a childhood friend: his memories are honest and full of love.

(…) do not play up the mistery of the shadowy tragic figure who nobody ever knew. This is all rubbish. I knew Nick and so did many others; he was sociable in a quiet way, a pleasure to know and very real and substantial.

About the CD, what I can say is that it does not contain many unreleased tracks (excluding the bootlegs, of course): they are recorded in their original low fidelity quality and sometimes this is annoying. “Time Piece”, the third track, is surprising: just the voice and the rhythm of a metronome.

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