Why did you and Tim stop writing together for a while before Happy Sad?

[He thought that maybe the] rather startling success of Goodbye and Hello, and in fact maybe his entire career, was perhaps due to my lyrics.  Which was something that he never expressed to me, and is in retrospect ludicrous.  But knowing Tim and the depth of the self-doubt into which he could fall, totally believable.  And that he then decided that he would try to do an album all on his own, just to see if it was his magic.  We were really incommunicado for that entire year.  That would be mid-'68 to mid-'69, while he was doing his lost album and Happy Sad.

It's a shame, because as you know, the totally gonzo story of the Midnight Cowboy theme is that they went to Dylan and asked him to the theme to Midnight Cowboy.  He came up with Lay, Lady, Lay.  I think they turned it down?! And then, somehow, Herbie got in on it, and said, oh, I got just the guys that can write the perfect song for Midnight Cowboy--Buckley and Beckett.  But I was in the Army, so we couldn't really collaborate.  So they fished something out of Fred Neil's catalog, and that wound up on the soundtrack, in Nilsson's version.  I could have wrote a good title track to Midnight Cowboy.

Though the idea of not collaborating was a bit of a blow, and depressing to me, and frustrating, it in absolutely no way changed our personal relationship, in that we were absolutely best friends, and remained so, and hung out together at all times, whenever possible.  I fully respected whatever it was that he wanted to do.

"If you listen to 'Political World 'on Dylan's 'Oh Mercy,' listen to the first thirty seconds of that, and then listen to the first 30 seconds of 'Hallucinations'.  And tell me if Bob doesn't listen to Tim... "

Tim did a lot of live stuff at that time that's pretty different from anything on his studio records.
There's a live tape from the New York Folklore Center, of about maybe twenty songs, about half of which have never seen the light of day.  That may be coming out if all the right parties get together.  So yeah, Tim was being very prolific on his own part, once he started writing on his own.

The thing is that he was, how can I put this?  He was almost too unprofessional to care about reproducing the sound on the album of anything--the arrangements, or anything.  He actually was just born to recreate whatever material he was singing in the moment.  Now we've come to respect that kind of thing, and think that it's rare.  That was just his standard procedure.  To me, I'm almost spoiled.  We think it's a big deal if Dylan does something with a reggae beat.  Tim couldn't really...it just made no sense for him to even bother to try to do something the same way twice.  What would be the point of that?  Unless it was some musical vision that he was pursuing, some sound.  And that changed all the time.

How did it happen that Lorca and Blue Afternoon came out at almost the same time?

All I know is that there was--the bottom line is, the schism where he leaves Elektra and joins Bizarre.  I actually think that Blue Afternoon came out after Lorca, is that even humanly possible?  But it was recorded before.  So here are these people at war with each other, with their little Tim Buckley albums.  So they're not considering each other, they're just getting their sessions out on the market.  That's why they're uncoordinated.  The artist and the manager have nothing to say about it.  They could have held on to Lorca.

With Lorca, it seemed that he was almost intentionally trying to drive listeners away, especially by putting the most difficult track first.

I totally agree (laughs).  That's totally like him, and I'm sure the programming was his idea.  He was calling the shots.  Herbie had nothing to say about programming.  So yeah, I think that's true. In those days, in like the late sixties, we were really inspired by like Bitches Brew and Miles Davis.  And Miles' entire career, his complete integrity to himself and his vision.  I think Tim really wanted to model himself after that in some way.  Just write even austere, forbidding music that he heard, and not really care about his accessibility, and even confront people with that, and have it lead off.  That makes total sense.

Miles Davis used to turn his back on the audience and only play a few notes in a seventeen-minute piece.  'Cause he wasn't interested in soloing; he'd been soloing for thirty years.  Now he wanted to create a musical environment, and that's what he was doing.  And he wasn't just some jive-ass trumpet player anymore, you know?  And people just couldn't handle it.  They thought he was insolent.  But all he was doing was being utterly faithful to his vision.  And nowadays, everybody loves Bitches Brew and thinks it's a masterpiece.  Well, in those days they hated it. (laughs)  But Tim saw--and I did--saw Miles' integrity, and wished to mirror it.

On Goodbye and Hello, what was behind the song No Man Can Find the War?

The whole country was obsessed, and especially our idealistic generation that was really honestly against war, and then having it thrust on us.  The sound at the beginning of the track is an atomic blast played backwards.  I think that the imagery has a kind of quick-cut quality, like you would see on network TV portrayals of the war.  But my idea behind it was that everybody always thinks when they're in a war...like, even now!  Are we going to beat Belgrade down or not?  But that's not the real war. 

The real war is, where does this stuff come from?  Where do these people come from that can treat other people so?  That's the real war, inside, that nobody even addresses.  They never talk about it on the network news.  All they talk about is how many people were killed on each side, and those numbers are usually falsified anyway.  So it was part of my frustration that now, and back then, that people are end the war and cure the symptom, and the disease flourishes.

What about Hallucinations?

And that one, what happened was, he had like the world's weirdest, shittiest record collection.  He would pick things up and then listen to them and then just give them to somebody else.  It was always astonishing to me that somebody that was in music could be so little an archivist of anything.  One record I saw him with at some party was like this Moroccan street music.  He was saying, oh yeah, it's really fantastic. 

He went away, listened to this album, and then came back like three days later and played me the melody of Hallucinations.  I could not believe my ears!  So sophisticated was the time changes and the phrasing of the whole thing.  So then I wrote words to that about a real-life love affair that I had had for the last two years.  So I think that song actually...and as a matter of fact, there's a funny thing...that song is, for me, a triumph for us.  It really retains its freshness.

One interesting thing about it is, if you listen to Political World on Dylan's Oh Mercy, listen to the first thirty seconds of that, and then listen to the first 30 seconds of Hallucinations.  And tell me if Bob doesn't listen to Tim.  It's the same thing! (laughs)

Jerry Yester told me the poem on the inside cover is an acrostic, where if you take the first letter of each line, it spells I Love Tracy.

Tracy is the lost girl in Hallucinations.

Do you know anything about the unreleased stuff between the second and third albums?

That was the exact time that I went into the Army under the draft.  So I had no knowledge of these sessions until last month.  The latest song that we did before we stopped collaborating was what both he and I independently concluded many years later was the best thing he or I had ever done, and that was Song to a Siren, and he had did two versions of that on this tape.  So it's like a trial run for Happy Sad, but it certainly isn't Jerry Yester.  Nobody's been able to ID the producer yet, although his voice is on the tape.

It has a few unreleased songs.  It has Sing a Song for You, but it also studio versions of Hi-Lily Hi-Lily Hi-Lo and Wayfaring Stranger, and it has three versions of Love From Room 109.  And it has the original version of Buzzin' Fly, which would be great.  Some new song called Danang, which I have no knowledge of.  And then Happy Time,Tastier Blues(?), and like that.