Footage From Heath Ledger's Nick Drake Video Surfaces

Parts of the Nick Drake music video that actor Heath Ledger shot and starred in months before his untimely death have surfaced. The video, for Drake's posthumously released song "Black Eyed Dog," was filmed by the actor in late 2007 and included in a multimedia installment about Drake called "A Place to Be." The project was only screened publicly twice before the actor's death, and the Ledger family said the "Black Eyed Dog" video would not be released.

The video, a "pet project" of the actor's, shows a despondent Ledger cast within a stark black-and-white environment filled with somber images. It's soundtracked by Drake's song about depression ("Black dog" was Winston Churchill's term for depression), which was reportedly the last track Drake ever wrote. Ledger was admittedly "obsessed" with Drake, and the video draws further parallels between the two men's lives (Drake died from a drug overdose at twenty-six). At the video's end, Ledger drowns himself in a bathtub; that scene is not included in the footage that has hit the Web, which is not complete.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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