Dreaming,
driven and dangerous - Part Two "I
wish I could freeze that moment in time," Yester says today. "Tim
and Larry Beckett were a creative partnership back then; there was an artistic
intimacy between them. Their absolute idealism was just a kick in the ass, in
the most pleasant sense. They came to me and said, 'Elektra wants to do a single,
so we decided to sell out. We've written these crass, commercial songs, and they're
gonna be smashes!' If commerciality was to be considered, it was gonna be on their
own terms, which was endearing. Really sincere idealism is always a pleasure to
be around." Larry
Beckett: "Once we got the project in our heads, we decided, in sort of a
mock-way, that we were going to mock-record a mock-single. We lay around my apartment
in Venice and actually listened to the radio for about 24 hours straight, alternating
between AM Top 40 and more adventurous FM programming. We decided that the A-side,
the AM radio side, was going to be a fairy tale, and that the B-side, the FM side,
had to have discreet allusions to drugs and sex. At the end of the 24 hours we
tossed off two songs." "We
saw ourselves as sailing along in the direction that Bob Dylan was taking lyrics
and The Beatles were taking instrumentation - making rock'n'roll into art songs..."
Larry
Beckett |
Once
Upon A Time was the AM fairy tale. It did feature a cracker-jack guitar solo
by John Forsha, and all kinds of Beatlesque overdubs "to make it nice and
mock-psychedelic" - including, according to Yester, a music box playing Pop
Goes The Weasel hand-cranked in time with the track. "But it was a woefully
lame song, and we really didn't believe in it. However,
the other tossed-off song, Lady Give Me Your Key, turned out great. Tim
couldn't help but give it a completely and utterly haunting melody, and the words
were poetically elusive in a nice way. When we played it for people, their eyes
would always start to shine. I always assumed that single had been released, but
I'm now told it wasn't. So Lady Give Me Your Key is a lost masterpiece
of early Tim Buckley music." (As we went to press, Rhino was scouring Elektra's
vaults for the track, hoping to add it to a planned Buckley anthology.) It
was during this time that another lost Buckley tape was recorded. Herb Cohen took
Buckley, Beckett and bassist Jim Fielder into a cheap studio to demo "every
song you've ever written" for publishing purposes. "It went on for hours,"
Beckett recalls, "me holding up lyric sheets as Tim ran through volumes of
songs. There were several songs that are the equal of anything on the first two
albums." Among
the titles he can recall are Six Face ("Based on six different ways
of looking at a girlfriend"), Found At The Scene Of A Rendezvous That
Failed, Land Of Lie, Rainbow Blues ("Where I go through a different colour
of the rainbow in each verse"), Long Tide, Cripples Cry ("Mary
McCaslin sang this for years; she probably still knows the words and music")
and Birth Day. The tape is reportedly buried somewhere in the Cohen archives
but a copy has yet to surface. Beckett:
"We saw ourselves as sailing along in the direction that Bob Dylan was taking
lyrics and The Beatles were taking instrumentation - making rock'n'roll into art
songs." Though
it has been called "folk music's Sgt. Pepper" for its album-size
canvas and summer of '67 studio fairydust, Goodbye And Hello was pretty
well in the can by the time The Beatles' broadside was issued in June. And for
that matter, though he played acoustic twelve-string guitar, what Tim Buckley
did bore only a passing resemblance to folk music. If
there is a comparison to be drawn, it is with his hero Fred Neil, another utterly
uncompromising artist with an amazing voice and an acoustic twelve-string who
was also no folkie. (Buckley believed that Neil's eponymously titled album, released
earlier in 1967, was miles better than both his album and The Beatles'.) "When
Buckley and Beckett came to me," Yester recalls, "the only idea they
had was that the album would be free of restraint or commercial consideration.
Working with Tim was like an open field of imagination - a stretch, a joy. When
someone says you can do anything you want, it's a little intimidating at first,
then it's totally exciting." "
When we got to take seventeen of I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain I didn't
see how it could possibly get any better, but he wanted to do it again..."
Jerry Yester | Though
all ten songs can be reduced to Buckley and his acoustic guitar, Goodbye And
Hello is the most richly textured of all Buckley's albums, a richness achieved
with only minimal shifts of instrumentation. Underwood is back on lead guitar,
Jim Fielder alternates with Jimmy Bond on bass, Eddie Hoh performs supportive
wonders on drums, while the congas of Carter Collins would also become a fixture
of Buckley music. Keyboards were by Yester or Don Randi, and there were guest
appearances by guitarist John Forsha, Bohemians lead guitarist Brian Hartzler,
MFQ member Henry Diltz on harmonica, and Kingston Trio founder Dave Guard. The
real richness is in the diversity of material: the Saigon Coney Island of the
mind that is No Man Can Find The War, the rejection of druggie desperation
in Pleasant Street, and the riveting catharsis of I Never Asked To Be
Your Mountain (addressed in part to ex-wife Mary Guibert and son Jeffrey Scott).
Once
I Was nods toward Fred Neil's Dolphins (which Tim performed regularly),
and has elevated the emotional impact of scenes in three major films: the Oscar-winning
Coming Home, Hal Bartlett's Changes and the Emmy-winning Dear
America: Letters Home From Vietnam. Morning Glory ("Write me a
song about a hobo," was the singer's entire instruction to his lyricist)
is Buckley's most covered song. What
holds it all together, and animates its occasionally bombastic artistic conceits,
are a string of vocal performances of staggering authority for a young man not
yet 21. Beckett: "Jerry used to refer to Tim as 'Mr First Take'. It's an
attitude that goes back even before the first album. Tim hated any take past number
one. He would do it if something wasn't coming together to his satisfaction, but
it seldom had anything to do with his vocal performance. As far as he was concerned,
the passion dissipated with each succeeding take." Yester:
"He was ideal in the studio. He always wanted to nail it with the earliest
possible take, but he'd bear down until he was satisfied. When we got to take
seventeen of I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain I didn't see how it could
possibly get any better, but he wanted to do it again. My job was just to provide
an atmosphere that would free him to go for it." The
nearly nine-minute title track contains all that is best and worst about the album.
Time has been not at all kind to Beckett's verses, their stilted, student rants
against "antique people" dripping with the self- righteousness particular
to young men not yet 21 in the late 1960s. The
lyricist had devised dual choruses which he envisioned Buckley singing on top
of each other, but Tim decided to weave the two choruses together with a gorgeous
melody that transcended the petulant topicality of the verses and dignified the
entire enterprise. The different sections of this kaleidoscope were stitched together
and given to Yester to score, with the mandate that each section be orchestrated
differently. Beckett:
"Lee Underwood had come back from some weird gig in Las Vegas or somewhere.
He was totally exhausted, but he was booked to overdub the lead guitar parts onto
all the sections of Goodbye And Hello. I've since noticed that musicians
tend to play better when they're tired; they achieve some weird breakthrough.
Lee
played like I never heard him play before or since. He played magnificent, inspired
lines to all of these pieces that were stylistically diverse. The sound of his
guitar was also magnificent; instead of his electric he was playing a rich acoustic
12-string. His motific ideas were so brilliant that when Jerry Yester took the
tape home to write the orchestrations, he found himself drawn to Lee's counter-melodies.
In
fact, he based many of his charts on them, and as a result some of the arrangements
lie right over some of Lee's best guitar parts. So you can almost consider Lee
Underwood the secret composer of Goodbye And Hello. Morning
Glory was the final track recorded. "The choir of angelic voices that
wells up is actually all Tim and Jerry overdubbed on top of themselves,"
the lyricist remembers. "Listening to them build those voices was inspiring.
When they finally played it back completed, it was so powerful that as we listened
we forgot for a moment that we were the ones who'd made it."
Bruce
Botnick was called in to mix Goodbye And Hello. Though
he'd engineered the first album, Botnick had heard nothing
from the new sessions. "I was astonished when I heard
what they'd gotten down on the multi-tracks," he says.
"Each song different, and every one of them great. This
was the kind of album that fulfilled the promise so apparent
when you first heard Tim Buckley sing."
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