I Saw Nick Drake: A Note on My Fifth Dispatch

I titled my fifth McSweeney’s dispatch on the Tunisian revolution “Ways of Seeing,” after the Jon Berger’s slender collection of art criticism.

I was either paying tribute to Berger’s book, or stealing its title, I’m not sure which. But I spent a lot of time wondering whether I should find a way to acknowledge that it was Berger’s title, not mine. I decided not to, because I thought readers would catch the reference. Later I decided I probably should have, although I’m still not sure exactly how I would have done it. Maybe an asterisk and a note at the bottom of the text?

Robyn Hitchcock’s wonderful elegy for Nick Drake, “I Saw Nick Drake,” at the 18-minute mark in this recent NPR Tiny Desk Concert, suffers from no such hesitations. I was really moved by this, maybe because I love “Pink Moon” so much, because Drake is the perfect character for this kind of song, and because Hitchcock’s tribute is so perfect and complete: