Nick Haeffner
The Great Indoors

Perhaps he is stretched out on the fresh grass, there in the distance, secluded. The boy is quite reclusive, like Drake.

He dismissed the Tea Service saying he was going to get a coffee. At the counter, while the dark beverage cools, freeing his nails from embarrassing fragments of earth and grass, he thought and realized the masterpiece. Thus, with the same surreal and alien unconsciousness of one who does a great thing without realizing it. Then nothing. He never returned to the porcelain, nor to the bar, nowhere. Disappeared.

Not like Drake, not forever, but still forever.

Cocteau claimed that a literary masterpiece is nothing more than a dictionary in disorder. "The Great Indoors" is a disordered dictionary with extraordinary order. And Haeffner is a brilliant tightrope walker balanced on a taut rope dominating the orderly disorder from above; a jumble of grotesque characters, circus jugglers, and ladies from another era to rival the triptych of Bosch and all the cheerful souls that stand out in the lush nature like those of a Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande-Jatte. All sealed and confirmed by lettering from a Danish butter cookie box.

Time has listed many researchers/revisers of psychedelia. A crowded and well-attended place. Long corridors with illustrious nameplates on the doors: Barrett, Hendrix, Erickson, the Airplane, the Gong, and many others, including Nick Saloman, who found accommodation in the closet.

Haeffner added his personal tea, the scent of coffee-stained fingers, and the aroma of dew-soaked shoes with the sweet fragrance of trampled grass. He dirtied psychedelia with echoes of the current time (they call it new wave but it really means anything).

Sounds, nature, and psychedelia. Nature and psychedelia. Psychedelia. In his own way. Because there is only one Barrett. Only one Haeffner.

Yes, indeed, only a sharp and sardonic individual can conceive a hymn to nature (he seems to have spent his youth confined at home due to serious health problems) with the title "You Know I Hate Nature". The atmosphere is delicate and lively, with evanescent assonances to Syd's friends' picnic around "Grantchester Meadows".

Confident steps on an imperceptible rope, away from the spotlight and armed with a brilliant, lucid madness. Haeffner moves through a naive universe colored like rice paper.

Throughout the cool psychedelic pop dipped in folk sauce of "The Sneaky Mothers", chronologically far yet incredibly close to the distant pink and gray lands of the Caravan, a couple of nights and a handful of chords away from "The Master", with its latent Barrett-esque nature, tinged with vintage paisley (slow down the range, stretch the notes, and tell me if you can glimpse the devil Sam) and equidistant from the diluted psychobilly of "The Earth Movers". Like Carroll's enchanted world, everything disappears and reappears seemingly without sense, but there is always a meaning.

The jugglers chuckle amusedly, following with their eyes the ladies strolling in the Parrish-esque, dreamlike gardens so dear to the Dalis Car ("Furious Table", "Breaths"). Syd's shadow is always vigilant ("Back In Time For Tea"), lurking around the corner, the moment before the spotlight welcomes the wind instruments.

This is the grotesque universe of the introverted Haeffner.

A small old world suspended between baroque and Victorian, with the specter of Drake by the window, basked in the last ray of sun and vanished in the vapors of the 5 PM tea ("Steel Grey", "The Great Indoors", "Don't Be Late").

Clap until your hands are raw and don't spare on superlatives, deserved praises, and accolades. The little jewel is consecrated by critics, there's only to stand up and pay tribute.

However, the limelight hiccups at its most beautiful, at the moment when, after many solid approvals, a good dose of solid approvals was also needed.

The radios do not play the album. The label Bam-Caruso Records soon closes its doors. Haeffner, frustrated, quits music. The end.

Today, good Nick is a university lecturer in London, takes photos as a hobby, and sometimes walks in the tall, fresh grass.

Forever suspended like a tightrope walker between ordinariness and genius.