Book Review: Amanda Petrusich’s Pink Moon (33 1/3 Series)

reviewed by dave heaton

Nick Drake’s Pink Moon album is surrounded by stories to be told. There’s the basic story of Drake himself, the talented, internally conflicted young singer who killed himself in 1974, at age 25. There’s the story of the time-stopping, enigmatic folk-pop music he created, and the deep impression it’s been quietly making on musicians and music fans in the years since. And then there’s the “Pink Moon” story, of how the song’s use in a Volkswagen TV ad gave Drake a commercially successful afterlife, decades later.

In her book on Pink Moon, Amanda Petrusich tells all of these stories, with a more journalistic approach to writing about an album than perhaps any of the other entries in the 33 1/3 Series. She doesn’t seem too interested in pontificating on what the music sounds like, or the ideas contained within the songs themselves. Interested or capable, actually, as the few pages she devotes to describing the music are the least successful in the book. Instead she tells each of these inter-related stories, and a few others. She recaps who Drake was, as best we know; where he came from; when he started playing music and where that took him. She allows musicians to explain what effect Pink Moon the album had on them, using their words to bridge between chapters.

And then, somewhere between halfway and three-fourths of the way through the book, she shifts the focus over to the 200 Volkswagen commercial and its impact. Petrusich’s magazine-article writing style and her extended focus on the “Pink Moon” ad does make it seem like she took a previously written article on the Drake Volkswagen ad and blew it up into a book on Drake. She seems almost more fascinated by the phenomenon of a TV ad making an obscure talent into a bigger star than she does by Drake and his music. The reason I’m Ok with that is simple: the story of the TV ad, as she tells it, is an interesting one. She gives a lot of space over to conversations with the advertising professionals and the directors behind the ad; it’s fascinating. While her background section on musicians’ relationships to commercials strikes me as both incomplete and one-sided – making an argument in complete favor of the practice (and unconvincingly “debunking the myth of Do-It-Yourself”) while writing in the journalistic style of someone not making an argument – it’s rare to find such detailed consideation given to the creation and impact of one ad.

While her position on the ad is clear, she at the same time does a good job defining the conflicts that emerge from such an intersection between commercial interests and a work of art that so many people hold dear to their arts. That is ultimately the story Petrucisch really tells above the others in her book on Pink Moon. My first reaction to that was, “what does this have to do with Pink Moon, really?”. But the truth is each album has many stories attached to it, and writing about an album always involves choosing which story to tell. This is not the book I would have written on Pink Moon, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless.

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