Let’s complete this little Sixties trio with another “hot
fun in the summertime” kind of song, sorta. Tim Buckley’s major track “Pleasant Street” from his most lyrically adventurous LP, Goodbye and Hello, has long been one of those songs that put its
stamp on certain things. It’s rather the antithesis of a feel-good song, but,
when put to its proper use, can become rather ecstatic.
And that’s because of Buckley’s vocal which borders on
unhinged but is always in control. It’s a song where he shows off his
commanding range, but, unlike with some of his other vocal explorations, he
never goes overboard. It’s all in service to the song. And the song is about
addiction, and the desperation that goes with it. Buckley, like so many musicians
before and since, used heroin and if you want an easy explanation that’s what
the song is “about.” Fine. But even Lou Reed’s majestic song “Heroin” isn’t “only”
about the drug.
I have to say though that there are certain songs that make “trying
drugs” seem de rigueur. This might be one of them, as is “Heroin,” maybe even “Strawberry
Fields Forever,” or, hell, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” The ones that have
that kind of solicitation encoded in them are the ones that generally make it
out as a challenge. You think you know something, but you don’t. And maybe you
should. “Everybody must get stoned!”
Me, I don’t advocate it. And you don’t really need to know
drugs to get what this song is getting at. In fact, Buckley and lyricist Larry
Beckett put it all in terms of that other great bodily need: sex. And there I
will say that if you don’t know the jonesing “I want it, gotta have it” of sex,
you’re probably better off as well—but it could be you won’t really get this
song. It’s not a love song. It’s a main line song.
You wheel, you steal,
you feel, you kneel . . . down, down, down.
There’s the moment of submission to a need that brings you to your
knees, then comes that great wind-up into Buckley’s banshee wail: All the stony people walking ‘round / In
Christian licorice clothes / I can’t hesitate / And I can’t wait for Pleasant
Street.
There’s the mainline effect right there—that rush from the
needful, prayerful, beseeching kneeling to shrieking in an ecstatic rending of
the garments, so to speak. It’s a compressed explosion, fueled by all those “stony
people”—which isn’t to say “stoned” so much as the beaten gray faces of no joy,
no exultation. It’s to escape that state of the frozen nowhere—“the sunshine
reminds you of concreted skies”—that one desires so palpably Pleasant Street. And Buckley gives us both the top of his
range and that down low “down, down, down.” You always come down sooner or later
and need it all over again.
But the verse I always liked best—for words and delivery—was
the one that put this all in terms of that person who knows how to unlock the
pent-up passion, to make you wail along with Buckley: At twilight your lover / Comes to your room / He’ll spin you, he’ll
weave you / ‘Round his emerald loom / And softly you’ll whisper / All around
his ear / “Sweet lover, I love / Pleasant Street.” (And there’s so much
pent-up agony of anticipation in that “swee-eet lover”).
Maybe I’ve just always liked those songs that suggest—in an
address to a woman, generally—that our bodies betray us. The power someone like
this lover here has over “you” has to do with you giving him that power. We can
say it’s a manifestation of weakness, but what a song like “Pleasant Street” wants
us to consider is the power of need. When you’re overwhelmed by lust and
addiction, when you’re desperate for what can relieve your craving—and I guess
it could be booze or sweets or what-have-you, maybe even baby flesh for you addicted
moms out there—you don’t succumb to someone else, really, you succumb to the
strength of your own desire. It’s amazing to feel things so deeply and so, dare
I say it, religiously. It becomes a faith, indeed, that lust for the liberating
miracle. Which is where I think the “Christian licorice clothes” comes from.
That kind of palliative—the hocus pocus of religious panaceas (a Host, a piece
of licorice)—doesn’t work in the short run. Maybe, ultimately, it will. But
right now, “I love—Pleasant Street, O I wheel, I steal, I feel my way down to
kneel, down, down … dowwwwwwn.”
As William Burroughs used to say, in his knowing, canny
voice, “Wouldn’t you?”
You don’t remember who
to choose.
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