Goodbye and Hello (Elektra EKS 7318)

In June 1967 Buckley was back in LA recording a second album that was to leave the first one miles behind, and pave the way for perhaps the finest and most delicate "soft-rock" album to emerge from California-- Happy/ Sad.

Anyway, this was Buckley's second album, released in September 1967, with Jerry Yester credited as Recording Director and Jac Holzman as Production Supervisor. To quote yet again from Elektra's very informative press release of the day: "One will never forget the colossal exhilaration at the Elektra offices when the tapes came in, .

Holzman, who heard them first, knew instantly that the time for Buckley's real emergence was now at hand, but rather than simply announce this as a fact, he played the tapes for each department director in turn, and each in turn also knew instantly that "this is it." A massive promotion was launched, the only goal being what the album and artist merited."

The album is, sure enough, quite remarkable. Buckley's voice is just superb with a range and power that defies [sic] description, and the songs are consistently good... three of them brilliant, and one a pure classic. Carnival Song, Hallucinations, and I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain are the sort of tracks you don't forget in a hurry, and Morning Glory, Buckley's most covered song, is a rock classic in every sense of the word.

"It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye and Hello because most of the bases were touched. That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it wasn't easy to write after that because you can't repeat yourself.

“The way Jac had it set up, you were supposed to move on artistically, but the way the business is, you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there. It's a problem, and I don't think there's anybody who you can talk to who doesn't face it. People like a certain type of thing at a certain time and it's very hard to progress."

The personnel listing for Goodbye and Hello is quite lengthy and, I think worth a brief discussion. Lee Underwood and Jim Fielder remain from the first album, and Carter C.C. Collins on congas and percussion, who is featured on four of Buckley's albums, appears for the first time. "He's from Boston, that's where I met him. He's now playing with Stevie Wonder."

Then there's Dave Guard (kalimba, tambourine). "Dave's from the Kingston Trio Like all of these guys, he's a working musician of the road which is what I like to work with -- they know what people hear as opposed to what a producer hears. Working with Dave Guard was really a great thing... he played banjo for the Kingston Trio and he was a terrific fellow. On the album he played kalimba, which is an African finger piano and is now very popular-- but at the time it wasn't. He was also writing a book for deaf and dumb kids. Great guy. I don't know where he is now, although I think he moved to Australia."

The other musicians are Brian Hartzler (guitar), John Forsha (Guitar), Jimmy Bond (bass), Eddie Hoh (drums), Don Randi (piano, harmonium, harpsichord), and Jerry Yester (organ, piano, harmonium).

Being released in late '67, Goodbye and Hello coincided with the "love, peace, flowers, beads and acid-rock" movement that had reached its peak in San Francisco. How much Tim Buckley associated or was influenced by what was going on there seems a fairly relevant point, as this album and the next two, captured that spirit in the purest and most musically valid sense, exposing most effectively, some of the shambolic pretensions that surfaced in the name of West Coast rock music.

"I'm not really too influenced by what's going on. I'm not a reporter. I go on energy and spirit and not anything metaphysical or religious or anything like that. I feel in fact that sometimes that's dangerous, because it gets in the way of the one-to-one thing with people. You start seeing and feeling that you see an all-knowing force in the universe, when you should be dealing with getting it on with your old lady or neighbor or something... mowing the lawn and drinking at week-ends... you get away from the simple things. Trying to solve the problems of the universe is a bunch of nonsense a lot of the time."

"It was really a very tragic period in San Francisco at that time because of the acid casualties, and I know you had them here because I played a club somewhere in the bowels of London, and the tragedies of the drug scene were pretty apparent even when it was beautiful. And as a performer you see it pretty quickly because that's your audience most of the time. There were a lot of people who had no business doing drugs.

In Goodbye and Hello it was very adolescent-- I took sides whereas now I can't. I said the establishment was wrong... Okay it's wrong, but I didn't have an answer. All I was really doing was stating points of view, which is cool... It's a good song [the title track] and it was very important at the time. I felt very strongly about all the things happening. The actual title of the album... It's a little difficult to remember exactly how we arrived at that... something like you say goodbye to bad things and hello to good things."

The critical and relative financial success that the album enjoyed was, all the time, being matched by his popularity and respect as a performing artist. For the first time, Buckley was headlining such places as the Cafe Au Go-Go and the Troubadour, and he was reaching as wide and receptive an audience as is possible for a solo artist.

1968 saw him working on the road almost continually, until at the end of the year he recorded Happy Sad. Before that was released here though, he made a fleeting visit to these shores (early 1969) to play a concert on the same bill as the Incredible String Band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I didn't see him, but a couple of people I know who did, say he was stunning, and I can well believe it.

Happy Sad (Elektra EKS 74045)

Produced by Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky (of Spoonful fame of course), Happy Sad was released early in 1969 to overwhelming critical acclaim and to an audience who had rightly come to love and trust anything with Buckley's name to it. My feelings about this record have been laid down before, but I'll repeat them here because, for me, they still hold true. Happy Sad is the classic Buckley album... dream-like, evocative, and musically adventurous and complex... a record that identifies totally with the spirit of the Elektra label in the late sixties.

The second cut on side one, Buzzin'' Fly is a near-perfect piece of music in every way. A simple guitar introduction, an emphatic chord sequence on vibes overlaid, and then everything stumbles beautifully into time as the song rolls along with Buckley's voice soaring and diving in amazing fashion. That track, and indeed the whole album, is just magic.

The musicians are Lee Underwood and Carter C. C. Collins again, John Miller (acoustic bass), and vibes player David Friedman, who's now working with Wayne Shorter and Weather Report.

"I really loved doing that album, I'll tell ya. It was really a break-out period of time for me musically. Yeah, Love from Room 109 at the Islander, Buzzin' Fly, Sing a Song for You, Dream Letter... I was writing, I'll tell ya that. We had a ball doing that. Love from Room 109 at the Islander was recorded in a hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and it was quite simple.

I arranged it for harp and vibes and I couldn't find a harp player in a studio that could cut it... I didn't know about Alice Coltrane at the time, she hadn't come on the scene. She was playing somewhere in Michigan but I hadn't heard her. And after I recorded it, I saw her on the Today show, and I said "damn!"... because I wanted that thing that the ocean gave."

One of the remarkable qualities of Happy Sad is the incongruous feeling that it sounds loose enough to be totally improvised, but tight enough to make you think that it's arranged.

"The trick of writing is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time-- that's what it's all about, so that you feel it's everybody's idea. It took a long time for me to write that album, and then to teach the people in the band, but they were all great people so it was really a labor of love, the way it should be."

And that's just what it sounds like. At the time of its release, Pete Frame wrote what I consider to be a very sympathetic and perceptive review of Happy Sad in ZigZag, but he just about threatened to hurl me in the North Marston phlegm vats if I dared to print it, so pretentious and embarrassing did it now seem to him.

However, if you've got that particular copy, it's well worth reading while listening to the record. And if you haven't got the record... what are you, some kind of lunatic or something?!?

Buckley's fourth album, released late in 1969, and produced by himself. "I recorded Blue Afternoon, Lorca, and parts of Starsailor in the same month. I was hot. Blue Afternoon was a lot of songs that I didn't have finished from the first, second, and third albums. And I knew Jac Holzman was going to sell his company, which really upset me, so I figured well, I'm going to do what I think is best and get a contract so that I can continue at the rate I was going, which was approximately one album a year. So I finished up all those songs for Blue Afternoon in New York City and now I still do Cafe and Blue Melody every once in a while, and The River... they're just good songs, they just work and they're fun to play."

[More on Blue Afternoon and the rest of Tim Buckley's work next month.--ANDY]