Winamp Wednesday: I Saw It Written
"Pink Moon" is on its way...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Nick Drake, “Pink Moon”
Some songs feel like you’ve known them forever.
The first few months of the 2000s felt strangely uncertain. The world hadn’t ended. Now what? We had spent the entire last year partying under the closing credits of that thing we called civilization, and we didn’t know if this was something brand new or a very weird after-credits scene. Oh, we still have to have a presidential election? We still have to run the world, make art, care about technological advancements? Should we keep saying Y2K about everything? I was fifteen-turning-sixteen, an age so precarious and unreal that Hollywood made a whole TV series about it back in the 70s. It was a feeling in my heart but nothing I could name, but everything felt different. I was in love until I suddenly wasn’t (and then was again) and I was old enough to look grown up and old enough to think I was even older than that but in all of this still essentially a child.
When you’re fifteen you don’t think to ask your friends if they’re feeling the same way. You pose and posture and try to be cool and hope that you’re awesome and you listen just enough to be hip. Years later—if you ask the right questions and if you’re lucky—you realize that the people around you were just as scared, just as unreal in their own skin. I’m understanding now, over two decades in, that I didn’t have the same thought process to the year 2000 as my fellow sophomores. It didn’t matter. Pink Moon was gonna get us all.
Nick Drake had been dead for a quarter-century when we all discovered him. And really we all did discover him at the same time, a shared Millennium memory the likes of which will never come again. There’s every chance that you haven’t thought of this one in years, but here’s that Volkswagen commercial:
This was as much of the lingua franca of the Year 2000 as “Napster Baaaaad!” or the sideways-warp guitar of Vertical Horizon or Tom Cruise throwing his exploding sunglasses at the camera. For a few months everyone knew this minute note for note. One day after school my friends and I decided to catch a movie, and before Todo Sobre Mi Madre we were treated to a 35mm print of this commercial. (The Worldwide was a great place to see movies, and as much as I appreciated New World Stages for what it did afterward my broke teen self missed super cheap screenings.) Television advertisements had become somewhat of an intrusion on the moviegoing experience, most of us unwilling to accept anything more than the omnipresent 777-FILM promotions.
But this felt different. This felt like an oasis of calm, a short film regardless of its corporate origins. The directors, Dayton & Faris, would eventually give us Little Miss Sunshine and had already given us Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” video along with the glut of Red Hot Chili Peppers videos from this year, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they were able to build a perfect emotional moment in these sixty seconds. In those personally-uncertain days I split my time between school in Manhattan and weekends and holidays and every spare second in the ski towns of the Catskills; I still feel my best and myself on a pair of snowshoes. Each moment of this commercial reminded me of those days, from the winding roads flanked with ancient trees to the point of finally getting to the party only to realize there’s no reason to be at a house party.
It was the music that hit the hardest. That piano, really. Those few moments of echoing notes sounded like a perfect crisp January day felt like. In my fifteen and three-quarters years walking around this world I had never heard anything that so perfectly articulated what it was like to be alone in the snow, blankets of white smothering out all but the strongest of sensation, a deep and comforting quiet as far as I could see. It was possibility I saw in the snow, the world frozen in time on the precipice of a spring rebirth. One can’t speak that into the world, not without treading on many iconographies that are too closely tied to religions that can’t quite grasp the concept. It turns out that words were never the vehicle. Melody was.
Music magazines and the nascent internet exploded with profiles of the great songwriter Nick Drake, dead from an antidepressant overdose all the way back in 1974. (His sister was Lt. Gay Ellis, don’t ya know?) I’m sure that his tragic end, combined with a few horrible personal asides later in the year, assisted in my decision to avoid seeking treatment for years. You can only go by the stories you are told and the things that happen directly to you, and if Elavil did that to Drake and Haldol did that to my friend group, I wasn’t going to chance even so much as talk therapy. I was fine.
I was fine the way all fifteen year olds are fine. Waiting for artifice to disappear. Waiting for the world to hit back. Pink Moon’s gonna get you all.
But that’s for another Wednesday. For now it’s still June of 2000 and I’ve got a stomachache that I’m sure won’t turn into much else, and I’m down on 50th Street with my girlfriend and our friends as we flip a coin to see if we’re going to watch the new Almodovar or Final Destination. And when I get home tonight I’ll listen to this song that’s on everybody’s mind but which feels like it can read mine completely. I don’t know what a pink moon is supposed to be and I won’t grasp the utter despair of both the song or the album until years later.
Even saying “the year 2000” sounds weird. We weren’t supposed to be this far into the future. Everything is changing and the worst sorts of people seem to be pushing back against that. I’m just a kid and even I can see this center won’t hold. But today my future feels right. The world seems secure. I can close my eyes and as the song plays I feel that comfort from the coming rebirth. Years ago a man wrote a song that feels so much of the past and of its time and of the future that I can feel everything at once. I am so glad I can speak with its melody.
I saw it written and I saw it say…