C-G-C-F-C-E

• OVERVIEW •

A resonant Open C variant, with 1str left at E to create a wide-spread Cmaj11 voicing. Used by enigmatic English folkster Nick Drake for Pink Moon, the opening track of his 1972 album of the same name: capoed at 2fr, and slightly sharp of concert pitch (n.b. lower 2str by 5 semitones to play the record’s next track: Place to Be).

 

Gives easy access to mood-ambiguous sus4 chords right up the neck, with the open 1stradding a droning shimmer to Drake’s own shapes. Strengthens the treble side of chords: as the tenser 1+2str will ring out louder than the much-slackened low end (vary the angle of your ‘strumming attack’ to bring out different timbres).

Pattern: 7>5>5>7>4

Harmony: Cmaj(11) | 1-5-1-4-1-3

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

The opening song from the album of the same name, Pink Moon is perhaps Nick Drake‘s most iconic track. Running for just over two minutes, it has only one (repeated) verse, along with a brief interlude-refrain, supported by a strummed steel-string sequence which skips along with surprising bounce, making concise use of the tuning’s harmonic quirks (n.b. he also used CGCFCE on Hazey Jane I (cp.2), Hazey Jane II, and Parasite (cp.3), as well as dropping it down a semitone for Which Will and Hanging on a Star: this may in fact be the ‘true’ transposition of the other tracks too, with capos a fret higher – we’ll likely never know).

 

The track’s skeletal piano riff is the only sound on the Pink Moon album not made by Drake’s own voice or guitar. John Wood – the record’s producer and engineer – recounts the stripped-down nature of the studio sessions: “He arrived at midnight, and we started. It was done very quickly…He came in for another evening, and that was it…Nick was adamant: [he] wanted it to be spare and stark, and…spontaneously recorded“.

 

In a 2005 BBC Radio documentary, Wood adds that: “I just assumed at some point he was gonna say ‘I want to get hold of Robert [Kirkby: the string arranger for his previous albums]…[but] he said ‘I don’t want anything on it‘…We mixed it very quickly, and Nick went off and gave the tapes to Island Records. And that was Pink Moon“.

 

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• Pink Moon – Nick Drake (1972):

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“I saw it written and I saw it say,

Pink moon is on its way,

And none of you’ll stand so tall,

Pink moon gonna get ye all…”

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As one of the most publicity-shy guitarists in history, Nick Drake seems like a singularly unlikely candidate for commercial-derived stardom. However, much of his latter-day resurgence is down to a 1999 advertising campaign for the Volkswagen Cabriolet, which set nighttime driving scenes to a soundtrack of Pink Moon.

 

As per the New York Times in 2001, “The original plan was to use the song Under the Milky Way by the Australian post-punk band The Church. But Lance Jensen and Shane Hutton, the [ad’s] writers, couldn’t get Pink Moon out of their heads. During the edit, they tried it with the film. It clicked. The agency put the ad on the website, with a link for people to buy Nick Drake’s CD. Sales…jumped from 6,000 copies a year to 74,000″.

 

While Drake‘s supposed ‘unknown in his own lifetime’ status is often exaggerated (he did briefly find a following on the British folk scene, including many of its leading lights), the contribution of the ads to his latter-day renown can hardly be overstated. In America, 98% of Pink Moon‘s total sales have come since the VW campaign – and most modern Drake fans probably know about him because of a recommendation chain starting with someone who first heard him there.

 

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• Pink Moon – VW ‘Milky Way’ campaign (1999):

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“Nick came up with this idea of being a computer programmer…So, old Nick went down there and passed the intelligence test, and one of the companies in the group took him on”…”He started on Monday, and the Monday afterwards they sent him to London, and he had to live alone in a hotel and go off by himself. And he walked right off it…” (Nick’s parents Rodney & Molly Drake describe his brief post-breakdown career change, circa 1972-3)

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I detest the concept of corporate advertising in virtually every instance – but do at least have to concede that it can occasionally bring hidden artists like Nick Drake (and José González) to wider public attention – albeit, several decades too late to help his actual career (in his friend John Martyn‘s words: “It’s creepy, ghoulish and strange: this lionisation is too late when you’re dead. If they’d dug [Nick] enough then, he’d still be here now…”).

 

And, as someone who has done dull desk jobs for ethically dubious companies in the past (see my brief appearance in Bullshit Jobs), the fact an industry is soulless doesn’t mean that everyone within it is too. Thus, I was happy to discover that the VW commercial’s directors – Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris – soon escaped from the advertising world to the big screen, co-directing the classic 2006 tragicomic road movie Little Miss Sunshine (…could you imagine if they’d used Pink Moon for the film’s climactic scene instead of Rick James’ Superfreak?).

 

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• Requiem for a Pink Moon – Ensemble Phoenix Munich (2014):

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“Nick was, in some strange way, ‘out-of-time’. When you were with him, you always had a sad feeling of him being born in the wrong century. If he would have lived in the 17th century, at the Elizabethan Court, together with composers like Dowland or William Byrd, he would have been alright. Nick was elegant, honest, a lost romantic – and at the same time so cool…” (Robert Kirby, Drake’s friend and string arranger on his first two albums)

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(Ad-musical oddities through time: check out appearances by – Bing Crosby & Al Jolson (Philco Electronics, 1947: oddly innocent), The Rolling Stones (Rice Krispies, 1964: a manic jingle), Miles Davis (Honda Scooters, 1984: brief and bizarre), Nickleback (DFS, 2008: banned in the UK for using special effects to make the sofas look larger), Iggy Pop (AXA Insurance, 2009: unhinged, and soon replaced by an animated dog), Jon Bon Joni (DIRECTV, 2016: dead on the inside, cosmetically unsettling on the outside – just an absolute carcrash of consumer capitalist nightmares), and The Beatles (Nike shoes, 1987: “the remaining Beatles [sued] both the advertising firm and Nike. The case was dismissed because Yoko Ono had actually signed off on the transaction…”).

 

• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	G	C	F	C	E
Alteration	-4	-2	-2	-2	+1	0
Tension (%)	-37	-21	-21	-21	+12	0
Freq. (Hz)	65	98	131	175	262	330
Pattern (>)	7	5	5	7	4	–
Semitones	0	7	12	17	24	28
Intervals	1	5	1	4	1	3

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• Place to Be (this with 2str -5): the album’s next track
• Road: and the one after that, twisted closer to home
• Dracula (this with 1/2str -2): narrower in the high register

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Nick Drake: for more on his guitar playing, see my Place to Be, Road, and Carnatic (‘Drake’s Drone’) tuning pages (& listing in my Altered-tuned Artists article), as well as Chris Healey’s tab/tunings pages and Josh Turner’s perceptive video lesson – and for more on the man himself, read AltRockChick’s piece on 50 Third & 3rd, listen to a BBC Radio documentary, and hear his sister Gabrielle (herself an acclaimed screen actress) reading out a heart-wrenching letter, written to him three decades after his death (“You’re so much with me still, and so much with so many people – and I feel I owe you, and perhaps everybody who loves you, an explanation…”)
• Pink moons: to see spectacular examples of the phenomenon, see the BBC’s Apr 2021 ‘Pink Supermoon’ gallery – and to find out why they occur, check out explanations from NASA and The Guardian (“there’s a tendency towards using the names that Native Americans have for full moons…the ‘pink‘ moon is named not because it will take on a particular colour, but because of the colour of the flowering phlox…The reason the moon can sometimes appear to glow orange – as we view it closer to the horizon – is because the light has to travel through more of the Earth’s atmosphere, [which] scatters the light, filtering blues and then yellows, and leaving visible oranges and reds…”)

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Header image: Pink Moon’s album art (by Michael Trevithick)