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Rating: Once upon a time there was a jam dream and two little bees that were frolicking inside it. In the sugary delirium, they blissfully reveled, similar in this to the drunken bipeds who loved to poke.
"Rather than always making honey," one said while saying nothing. "Oh, this is indeed life!" said the other, licking what she had instead of fingers.
"Lovely little bees," said a passing rabbit, "but a jam dream doesn't seem wise to me..."
Once upon a time I concocted stories like these, painting them with jumbled Barrett-like tunes in my mind. Same with the wind in the willows, Fenoglio's translation.
You don't know it, but maybe the best Barrett albums were made by me. And even the covers, I believe, how many impromptu nursery rhymes on "Terrapin" or "Flaming"!!!
Of course, to create Barrett-like albums in one's mind, one must be far from everything: wives, girlfriends, work, various hassles.
One must be whimsical and dreamy, wonderfully absent/present.
"Whether you set sail or not; whether you reach your destination or elsewhere or don't even arrive, you are always at work and doing nothing in particular; and when you're finished, there's still more to do, and you can do it if you like, but you usually refrain..." (as the mouse says at the beginning of the wind in the willows).
But sure, maybe one must have listened to Syd.
But back to "Long gone". What is it, folk?...blues?...psychedelia sifted through?...
And which sieve, pray?...ah, I wouldn't know...and I'm not even interested in knowing...
Anyway, sieves are beautiful, especially Barrettian ones...even if not perfectly functioning, at least according to what is commonly considered their function, namely, what is not needed shouldn't pass through...
But I even have sympathy for the pebbles in the shoes, so you decide...
And anyway, let's leave grace aside...because here there's something that breaks, a sharp tone that cracks, a fork scratching a pot...
Ah gentlemen, I don't know how to define "Long gone"...I can only say it's a unique piece...not in the sense that it's ultra cool or anything like that...oh no, really not in that sense...
What I mean to say is that the mold used to craft it is in the famous song room, buried under piles of spare parts and similar "Birdie hop"...
Along with other molds of other unique pieces... like "Terrapin"..."Octopus"... "Golden Hair"...
Songs that, taken one by one, are almost a genre by themselves, far, very far from the former Floydian canon...
Of that canon, there are pocket guides everywhere and three-by-two molds...but of "Long gone" no...no and no...
And the only way is to study it well on Madcap...so on a bored and dull voice/guitar duo, including something funereal (as well as a litany on lost love), unexpected and sinister organ notes hover, at first in the distance, then drawing nearer...
Yes, they hover, eventually gripping, overwhelming...and sweeping away...
Until the voice doubles... turning from one into two, a spectral ying and yang in an octave's difference...and in a strange intertwining, I don't know which of the two seems to break...
With everything turning into a discordant and dissonant chamber blues...
And then those verses that bounce between banality and strokes of genius...
"The more they arrived, the bigger her hands were"...but who are "they"?...ghosts, I suppose...
Maybe the same ones that made him "borrow a page from a leopard's cage"...
That this last phrase comes before "I wandered around her place when it was still dark/her head rose to starlight/dawn opened on her face" is part of his genius...
Who else could cross the interstellar beetle with a "Golden Hair"-like romance?...
Ah, to know more about the interstellar beetle, seek in Lulu's reviews...
And anyway, trust me, a piece like this can't be found even after a thousand years...
Trallallà..
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