How the Nick Drake bootleg craze was started by his dad back in 1957
Bootleg records have been part and parcel of the musical realm since the dawn of recording itself, and while the bootleg industry might be the ire of the traditional music industry, and indeed the artists that those bootlegs are stealing royalties from, there is no telling just how much essential material has only been released onto the airwaves thanks to bootlegging.
After all, bootlegs aren’t always just dodgy LPs bought off your local market; in many cases, fan-made bootlegs have been essential in cataloguing an artist’s live performances, sharing their unreleased demos with fellow fans or even, in the case of the USSR’s magnitizdat industry, smuggling music into authoritarian regimes without raising suspicion. Some artists are, of course, bootlegged more than others, and Nick Drake must be among the most heavily bootlegged in the folk realm.
There is a cruel irony to the extensive number of bootlegged Nick Drake records out there in the world, given that exceedingly few people bought his official records during his lifetime. It does, however, speak to the enduring intensity with which his body of work is lauded that fans of the underappreciated folk hero continue to covet any scrap of material that they can find surrounding Drake’s output.
While bootlegs are often made by either well-meaning fans or money-eyed shady businessmen, in the case of Nick Drake, his most prominent bootleg recordings actually came from much closer to home.
As sound engineer John Wood, who worked on all three of Drake’s records, once recalled to Uncut, “Nick’s father was a bit of a gadget freak. He made tapes of Nick at home. He recorded all sorts of things. He recorded Nick when he was about nine or ten, did fake interviews with Nick and his friends.”
“The family was very musical,” he continued, “so he would record them together: Molly at the piano, Nick playing the clarinet.” In essence, these home recordings formed the basis of many future bootleg records. “Later, [Drake’s father] Rodney did do some compiling of Nick’s home recordings,” Wood shared. “People would make the pilgrimage to Tanworth-in- Arden, and he would give the tapes away to people who would subsequently bootleg them out.”
All of a sudden, these home recordings, never intended to be heard by anybody outside of the immediate family, became sought-after records for Nick Drake fans on the bootleg market. After all, they were about as close to ‘new’ material as fans could get, even if they long pre-dated Five Leaves Left.
Eventually, that body of bootlegs became official releases, with Wood overseeing the release of both the Family Tree compilation and Molly Drake, the latter of which focused on recordings of the folk singer’s mother, and has since amassed a cult audience in its own right. Without the demand for those bootleg records, though, those recordings might have sat rotting away in an attic forevermore, never to be heard by the masses.
So, not only do we have to thank the creators of bootleg records for uncovering that lost Nick Drake material, but we also have to thank the singer’s father, Rodney, for his eagerness to share his son’s work with anybody who showed enough of an interest.
