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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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