Tim Buckley
Goodbye and Hello

1)

“Carnival song” is a skipping lullaby of street organs, childish tambourines, trembling dissonances...

It's a Fellinian number, with Nino Rota carrying a psychedelic monkey on his shoulders.

It evokes itinerant magic, dressing it in a timeless melancholy and gifting us, psychic children, with the ultimate music box effect.

Oh yes, for once I begin in media res, diving straight into the music.

And I start with a Cinderella song...like, consider starting a discussion on the banana album with “I'll be your mirror” and not with one of the many heavy hitters.

I begin in media res, because I've always wanted to write a review of this record. You have no idea how many times I’ve wondered how to start without ever starting.

So yes, let's dive in... let’s dive in...

2)

But why “Goodbye and hello”?

It's because there are albums that have been your friends forever, the ones you listened to at fifteen and never stopped.

You didn’t stop when the gnu vuev was reigning, and you supposedly only had to listen to gnu wuev.

You didn't stop when rock wore you out, and you sought other lights in unusual and bizarre places.

Or when, you know, you only listened to Paolo Conte or Pinco Pallino, the new bastard folk or whatever. And you always found room for those records (pieces of your heart).

Few are those albums, as it's not just about listening to them at fifteen. It’s about never having stopped. And so yes, there are few. Very few indeed.

Let me think, the first of the Doors, the first of the Velvet, “Hunky dory”, “Piper” by Floyd

And this “Goodbye and hello”, my first Tim Buckley along with “Starsailor”.

“Starsailor”, however, with Tim's voice that had almost entirely lost its female side and grunted gutturally and manfully in the chaos, was perhaps a bit too much for a youngster.

It was absolute avant-garde and the avant-garde, although feminine in grammar, is not a girl, and above all, not a little girl.

“Starsailor” is a masterpiece, no doubt. But then, the emotion, the uncertain and feverish sensitivity, and the emotional fibrillation were for me in that goodbye and hello.

Moreover, I still think so today.

3)

“Goodbye and hello” is one of those records that you also remember where you were the first time you heard it, in this case, the living room of Orsetto, a soul place with crazy orange carpet and black sofas and on the walls, a large circle (black too) full of holes.

Into those holes slid other metal circles of different sizes making up an infinity of possibilities...

And for us, poor peasants who usually roamed in “Mercatone one” furnished rooms, those circles were a kind of mystical revelation or the crystallization of a world we didn’t think existed.

Then even Pascià, the enormous Newfoundland, made his own effect. Not to mention the two bathrooms (two bathrooms!!!)...

But it was mainly Orsetto's sister, endowed with enormous breasts, blonde hair, and warm blue eyes, who won hearts. She didn’t really pay much attention to us, but if we were listening to Tim Buckley, maybe she’d stop and chat a bit.

And so, one day, excited by her presence, I said something remarkably stupid.

I said, knowing well that I was about to venture into a speech with no way out, that the songs of “Goodbye and hello” had something mystical.

Luckily, Loris, a fabulous subject who was there almost by chance that day, saved me from the not-so-convinced blue gaze of the girl and that of everyone else.

“Who's the mystic?” he suddenly asked...

“This guy who sings”

“Oh”

“I didn’t say he was a mystic, I said his songs have something mystical”

“If they have something mystical, he’s a mystic too”

And he thought for a moment...

“A mystic...”

“You know what a mystic is, right?”

“Yes, yes, a mystic...” (very short pause) “a pain in the butt!!” (another slightly longer pause) “besides, he has a faggot's voice”...

We started laughing like mad and Loris with his fabulous and incredible blunder saved me from the one I was about to make.

Blunder, oh yes... he wasn’t joking...it’s not obligatory at fifteen to know what mystical means...

The story is rough, but it serves to show we were just kids, hormonal chaos without direction, but with an extra chance thanks to the music.

In the end, it’s a miracle all that poetry managed to touch us.

Almost like seeing peasants sitting in Orsetto’s living room staring at those circles

4)

Going back to the album, I was so taken that for the first time I began translating the lyrics.

Oh, it was necessary. Because if with Morrison, Bowie, Reed you found something, if my friend Marco translated Hammill, with Tim I had to manage on my own.

I still keep a little notebook with my clumsy attempts to grasp the magic and melancholy of those words.

Oh, I didn’t understand much, but I held tightly to crimson paths of wine, magical lands that don’t reach our shores, and that everywhere there’s rain, everywhere there's fear...

Sure, I couldn't compete with Hammill’s great poetry, but while waiting to understand better, those sparks/glimmers of blues sensitivity were enough for me...

5)

“Goodbye and hello” stands between a rather raw debut album and the subsequent works of extraordinary expressive freedom

Our curly-haired elf had drunk from the folk/rock source of Fred Neik and Tim Hardin, folks who could create from nothing moments of magic, small slender folk miracles...

Slender, yes, but as if hooked to a star...

The curly-haired elf also had this gift and after a brief apprenticeship, he too learned to capture those moments. They were watercolors, dime-store melodies, mirror games, fragments of blues truth.

But soon he was able to do much more and the new gift was navigating within moments, those that he previously just captured.

In “Goodbye and hello” you don’t navigate, except occasionally and barely.

Because “Goodbye and hello” is still an album of songs.

But what songs!!! Consider the blue and pink Picasso compared to the young ladies of Avignon.

6)

But let’s come to the heavy hitters...

“Pleasent street”, all arrangement elegance, shows something discordant and offbeat right from the start.

It suffers, and at the same time enjoys, a sort of hyper-production (or wonderful incongruity) that like a breeze pushes it effortlessly into the psychedelic elsewhere.

Divided between melancholic regression (read addiction) and anger, with a voice that switches from one to the other with a prodigious naturalness.

With the downiest down ever and the up of a voice so sharp and grating that it manages to overshadow, along with who knows what studio devilry, the hiss of an incredibly acid and sinister guitar

7)

“Hallucinations” has a delicacy half avant-garde, half transcendent vision... and a mirror-game rhythm, white fog on a white road...

Free from any idea of traditional melody, it is all infinitesimal reflections, tinklings, glows...

The lyrics, perhaps the most successful among those by friend Larry Beckett, evoke a constantly elusive female figure.

8)

“Phantasmagoria in two” has the pale enchantment of a childish love request.

And childish is the melody.

It creates, with an almost magic lantern illusion, a world where everything is sweet, trembling, and uncertain.

The voice seems almost to cry and, at the same time, a step away from happiness.

But that step seems impossible and all the ifs of the song remain ifs.

Happy/unhappy, it has “the serene expression that can almost seem sad” of certain childhood book heroes (my childhood)...

Happy/unhappy, but more unhappy...

9)

“Carnival song”, “Pleasent street”, “Hallucinations”, “Phantasmagoria in two” are some of my favorite songs of all time (and pieces of my heart).

They have an almost inexplicable luminous quality that resembles a gentle phantasmagoria. And, maybe, beyond the fact that that day I wanted to look cool, that’s what I wanted to tell Orsetto's sister.

And the voice then... in the fabulous ying/yang polarity of Tim Buckley's singing here we have the feminine side, the color more than the drawing.

Many tubes of soft watercolors squeezed to the limit.

And maybe, surely without realizing it, this was what Loris meant that day with that nonsense about the faggot's voice.

Maybe...

10)

But “Goodbye and hello” is not just those four songs.

Listen here:

“Tim’s guitar thundered. The rhythm was fierce, urgent, and much more intense than anything I had heard before. His voice rose into the air with a completely new force, grace, and power. Everything was assertive, free, full of pathos, unity, transcendent emotion”

These are the words of Lee Underwood, Tim Buckley's guitarist and brotherly friend

And they refer to “I never asked to be your mountain”, a furious tribal patchwork where, among broken guitar strings, furious percussion, and a magically misplaced vibraphone, the struggle between the chaos of feelings and the desire for freedom is staged, really as best as it could be.

The result leaves you breathless and yes, that time Tim's guitar thundered. Oh yes yes, a fabulous prelude to many things to come, it thundered.

Here there’s no more folk, nor rock, nor soul, nor blues...and what’s truly there I can’t say...

11)

In 1991, a still unknown Jeff Buckley participates in a tribute concert in honor of his father.

Initially, he didn’t want to do it, but in the end, he agrees provided his name would not be on the poster.

He takes the stage twice. The first time to sing “I never ask to be your mountain”, a song that concerns him personally. (No small matter, just his father speaking to his mother).

Later he performs “Once I was”, another masterpiece from “Goodbye and hello”... one of those simple ballads that if your name is Buckley, you can do with just a voice and a guitar...

The audience goes silent...

A string breaks... and Jeff finishes a cappella... with the last words of the song saying: “sometimes I wonder if, even for a moment, you will remember me”.

I don't know about you, but I would have wanted to be there...