NP [ish]: Nick Drake, Exiled From Heaven, Ian McDonald

[Robin Landseadel]

Long, very good article about Nick Drake by the very talented [and  
ultimately tragic] Ian McDonald*. It's as much a meditation on  
perception and consciousness as a critique/history of the talented,  
tragic singer/songwriter. The following passage echos similar passages  
in Pynchon, particularly passages found in The Crying of Lot 49,  
Vineland and Inherent Vice.

	Drake's interest in drugs is well documented but less well
	understood. Nowadays associated with pure pleasure, drugs
	meant something different in the Sixties, being often linked with
	the mysterious Eastern quest for "enlightenment". Taking a
	mind- expanding drug then bore little comparison with taking
	Ecstasy during the Second Summer of Love of 1988. The goal
	of the counter- culture's use of psychedelics was peaceful inner
	exploration, the very opposite of the "shooming" communal
	body-rush of Dance Culture. (The average Sixties LSD dose
	was 5-10 times purer and more powerful than today's
	equivalent.) Drake, of course, smoked dope for fun like
	everyone else, but we'd be getting him very wrong indeed if we
	supposed that, even at its mildest and most casual, his drug-
	use did not constantly involve a fascination with perception and
	reality - the countercultural focus on quality of consciousness.
     	
	Paul Wheeler recalls Nick describing a party at which someone
	showed him a blackberry, saying, "Look, a bunch of grapes".
	"The amazing thing," Drake laughed, "was that there was no
	question: it was a bunch of grapes." Told to anyone else, this
	might be shrugged off as a typical drug anecdote. Confided to a
	close friend, it carries a different weight: an allusion to the
	contemporary interest in drugs and perception. To infer this
	would be less reliable if Drake hadn't been demonstrably
	absorbed in the way we perceive things and what they mean to
	us. As often as not, guitarists together will talk about guitars;
	Drake and Wheeler never conversed in those terms. "We used
	to talk about ... well, phenomena. Nick would point out a tree,
	and it'd be like: 'What d'you think of that?' It was very oblique,
	we never explicitly discussed it." While naturally reluctant to be
	pinned down on things so long past, Wheeler confirms that Nick
	was intrigued by perception in relation to the intrinsic reality (the
	"is-ness") of what we see. He's also sure that Drake "had a
	thing" about trees.

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/exiled1.html

*  http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/115775-revolution-in-my-head-the-beatles-records-and-the-sixties-by-ian-mac/