86. Tim Buckley - Goodbye and Hello (August 1967)

1. No Man Can Find the War*

2. Carnival Song

3. Pleasant Street

4. Hallucinations 

5. I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain*

6. Once I Was*

7. Phantasmagoria in Two

8. Knight-Errant

9. Goodbye and Hello

10. Morning Glory

B

More California hippies, with their impenetrable poetry and odd time signatures. I'm a little disappointed with this album, as I don't mind some of Buckley's early 70s work and was looking forward to this. It's not a bad album, but don't expect something like the weirdness of Lorca or the strange beauty of "Song to the Siren".

Instead, this is a wildly uneven mixture of jazz and folk-rock, with Buckley's voice strong but undeveloped throughout. He obviously hadn't come into his own as a vocalist yet, and so while sometimes there are flashes of beauty, more often than not he produces a strained caterwaul that I find slightly annoying (a good example being the high-pitched keening of "Knight-Errant").

Lyrically, the album is something of a mixed bag. Buckley was working in collaboration with friend Larry Beckett at the time, and honestly the songs they collaborate on are some of the weakest. The problem being that this album is the last word in pretentious 1960s poetry - a sort of strange hybrid of Beat nonsense and faux-classical balladry. You only have to listen to the ludicrously overblown title track to appreciate how preposterous this whole project is, a song that makes "The Sound of Silence" seem grounded and subtle.

Still, "No Man Can Find the War" may not make a great deal of sense, but it features strong imagery and is evidently about something (war being bad), so there's that. "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain", another highlight, is an interesting beast. It's about Buckley abandoning his wife and unborn child, and it walks an interesting line between an admission by Buckley of a sense of guilt, and an inability to face up to the strain of being a husband and father, and at the same time being kind of a dickish lament that he, as the title says, never asked to be her mountain. So that's interesting. I guess relationships fail at times, but he didn't need to be a dick about it. 

The one song on this album that I unreservedly like is "Once I Was". It's a lovely piece of folk rock, in which Buckley and Co stop trying to make the Great Art that is so obviously beyond their grasp, and instead just produce a melancholy love song about the end of a relationship. 

I don't want to dump all over this, mind. It's a solid album. I think it's more than the sum of its parts, really. From a musical perspective, I may find some of its excesses grating, but it's obviously influential and ground-breaking in the way it mixes genres and defies conventions of structure. And the lyrical ambition is laudable, even if the poetry ends-up mostly god awful. I think some albums have to be appreciated more for the times in which they were produced, and their impact, than as purely musical experiences. Buckley's music opened up possibilities, and suggested a freedom and boldness in respect to composition and lyrics. 

So, an A for effort and a C for execution makes a B for (not) bad. 

On to the next one!