(Advertising is the) Place to Be

The only box of jams I have in my house anymore is a newish Sony. We put it in my son’s room so he can listen to music when he’s playing. Here’s a list of what we’re currently exposing him to:

• Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue
• Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak
• Big Star – #1 Record / Radio City
• Outkast – Speakerboxx / The Love Below
• Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street
• Tom Petty – Damn the Torpedoes
• Ben Folds Five – S/T
• Kanye West – Graduation
• Nick Drake – Pink Moon

For much of the last month, Nick Drake is what we’ve listened to when I get Patrick dressed in the morning. I can’t say whether he likes it all that much, because he dances to everything. And smiles huge smiles no matter what music we put on. But I do know he’s remembering some of what he hears, thanks to this commercial.

We’ve been watching a lot of World Cup matches, and this commercial’s aired quite a bit during the telecast. Whenever it comes on, Patrick’s ears perk up and he looks at me in a way that’s different from his normal fascination with music on TV. Seeing him cock his head in recognition has been a pleasure.

I first heard about Nick Drake from a 1992 Guitar Magazine interview with the Black Crowes’ Rich Robinson. They were asking him about how the Black Crowes frequently played in Open E and Open G tunings and whether that was Keith Richards’s heavy influence on him:

“I didn’t get into open tunings because of the Stones,” he insists. “Keith didn’t even invent that tuning. He got it from Ry Cooder, I think. The rumor in the industry is that that opening riff on ‘Honky Tonk Women’ is actually Ry playing. I got into open G because I heard Nick Drake, this English songwriter, singing ‘Pink Moon.’ He always seemed to have a place to go lower, and you couldn’t do that in regular tuning.”

Shortly after reading that, I headed to Vinal Edge and asked about Drake. The clerk (an older guy who passed away a while back—can’t remember his name) helped me and got kind of excited. He said something like, “I wish more people were into him.” They didn’t have any, as it turned out. But took down my number and called me the next week, when someone traded in the Bryter Layer and Five Leaves Left on CD, both of which I still have. Over the next few years, I bought damn near everything I could find, including, of course, Pink Moon and also the difficult to find Tanworth in Arden.

All of this was several years before Drake became famous via a Volkswagen commercial that featured the title track from Pink Moon. An ad that one blogger calls “commercial of the Decade:”

You’ve probably seen the commercial I’ve described above. If you’re a fan of Nick Drake’s music, it’s probably because of this Cabrio ad that featured his song “Pink Moon.” Drake lingered in obscurity during his brief, three-album career and for decades after his untimely, depression-related death by overdose in 1974. In the late 1990s, he slowly began to move into the public consciousness, as Rykodisc released a new Best Of collection and more and more artists began to cite Drake as an influence. Then, the Cabrio ad and a well-nigh meteoric rise to posthumous fame.

So that’s one reason why I feel compelled to argue that the “Pink Moon” Cabrio ad is the Commercial of the Decade. Without it, thousands if not millions fewer people would know that Nick Drake made some of the most beautiful, haunting music of the twentieth century.

Another important Commercial of the Decade justification related to the use of music is how thoroughly this commercial upended old notions of “selling out” one’s music to corporations and ad agencies. Let’s be clear here: the corporate radio paradigm, firmly in place in 2000 when this commercial debuted, had already commodified popular music. The days when radio DJs were music obsessives who chose records they liked and could help a great but unknown band “make it big” were already long gone when we began this decade (if they ever existed in the first place). Songs on pop radio playlists were market-tested and heavily publicized to the hilt. Not art but commerce.

So adding TV cameras and a car nameplate did nothing to further commodify Nick Drake’s song. In fact, its choice for inclusion in the commercial was actually closer to that mostly mythical image of the bygone-era DJ championing music he or she liked. Somewhere along the way, some music obsessive in the creative division of Volkswagen’s advertising firm listened to “Pink Moon” and heard its potential. The rest of the commercial obviously sprang to life after the song choice. The public heard the song because someone championed it as a commercially and artistically sensible choice.

I’m not sure if I agree the commercial was revolutionary beyond the obvious popularization of Drake’s music. But I am sure that the AT&T commercial I mentioned at the top is as bankrupt as the Volkswagen commercial was brilliant.

AT&T isn’t breaking any new/unknown artist the way Apple frequently does. They’re not linking the lyrics to their product in a meaningful way. They’re not even appealing to our collective familiarity with Drake’s work. Instead, the commercial simply rips off two ideas. First, they’re hoping they can capture Drake’s lightning in a bottle again, since he remains relatively obscure. They were hoping to get a lot of questions like “Who Sings The Song In The At&t Commercial With The Orange Sheets?” And so they are.

Speaking of the orange sheets, they’re the second bit of thievery. So blatant is the reference to Christo and Jean Claude’s The Gates that they have to disclaim it near the end of the ad.

AT&T’s lack of creativity notwithstanding, it is a significant compliment to Nick Drake and his commercial appeal. AT&T clearly thought Drake’s guitar and voice would prove to be attention grabbing. And that’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Unlike, say, Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Paul Simon, advertisers in both of Drake’s spots assumed he’d be compelling even if you’d never heard of him. I’m trying to think of another commercial featuring only guitar and voice to have had such an effect.

I can’t. It’s funny that Drake, who openly yearned for and never achieved commercial success—even writing songs about that quest—has found it through commercials that feature his least commercial record.

Place to Be
When I was young, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I’m older see it face to face
And now I’m older gotta get up clean the place.

And I was green, greener than a hill
Where flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be.

And I was strong, strong in the sun
I thought I’d see when day is done
Now I’m weaker than the palest blue
Oh, so weak in this need for you.