How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners

In 1999, Volk­swa­gen aired a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Deal­er­ships were soon inun­dat­ed with calls, as pop­u­lar cul­ture his­to­ry remem­bers it, but not from peo­ple inquir­ing about the car. Rather, they were des­per­ate to know the name of the song sound­track­ing the ad’s footage of a top-down night dri­ve to a house par­ty. For all they knew, it was a new sin­gle from an up-and-com­ing young man with an acoustic gui­tar and sen­si­tiv­i­ty exquis­ite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure Eng­lish singer-song­writer Nick Drake’s belat­ed ascent to star­dom.

“Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replace­ment for The Church’s eight­ies hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a record­ing career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If lis­ten­ers of the late nineties curi­ous enough to pick it up — or, as had just become pos­si­ble, down­load it from file-shar­ing net­works — could hard­ly have been dis­ap­point­ed, they still would­n’t have been pre­pared for its sec­ond track, “Riv­er Man.”

Described by Ian Mac­Don­ald as “one of the sky-high clas­sics of post-war Eng­lish pop­u­lar music,” the song com­bines Drake’s haunt­ing­ly evoca­tive lyri­cism and uncon­ven­tion­al gui­tar tun­ing with a rich lay­er of orches­trat­ed strings that stops just short of cloy­ing, all in jazzy 5/4 time.

As music YouTu­ber Charles Cor­nell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt rec­og­nize that time sig­na­ture from Dave Brubeck­’s “Take Five,” which makes that high­ly unusu­al rhythm feel nat­ur­al. So does “Riv­er Man,” though the more close­ly you lis­ten to it, the more musi­cal­ly dar­ing it sounds, even if you don’t have the the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage to explain it as Cor­nell does. There is, for exam­ple, no cho­rus, which could­n’t have helped its chances of radio air­play at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflec­tive mood. “The coun­ter­cul­ture was car­ni­va­lesque, its opti­mism com­pul­so­ry,” Mac­Don­ald writes. “Drake saw deep­er.” It’s hard­ly implau­si­ble, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Bud­dhis­tic alle­go­ry of an indi­vid­ual faced with a choice between the con­crete, cycli­cal real­i­ty of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.

Drake com­posed “Riv­er Man” dur­ing his brief time at Cam­bridge, and the books writ­ten about him quote acquain­tances from that peri­od describ­ing it as a remark­able step for­ward in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. Dur­ing the Five Leaves Left ses­sions, he sang and played gui­tar live with the orches­tra, whose arrange­ments (by the band­leader Har­ry Robin­son, then known on British TV for his nov­el­ty band Lord Rock­ing­ham’s XI) filled space Drake had delib­er­ate­ly left in the com­po­si­tion. The strings, in oth­er words, weren’t an incon­gru­ous attempt at sweet­en­ing, as Phil Spec­tor would per­form on the Bea­t­les’ “The Long and Wind­ing Road” the fol­low­ing year, but an inte­gral part of the song. Drake’s solo per­for­mance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broad­cast host­ed by none oth­er than John Peel) sounds cap­ti­vat­ing, but incom­plete. On the Five Leaves Left ver­sion, every ele­ment works togeth­er to make “Riv­er Man” endur­ing — and, in every sense, tran­scen­dent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rab­bit”: The 1960s Clas­sic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Car­roll, Miles Davis’ Sketch­es of Spain, and Hyp­o­crit­i­cal Par­ents

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

How a Fake Car­toon Band Made “Sug­ar Sug­ar” the Biggest Sell­ing Hit Sin­gle of 1969

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.