DB's Song of the Day (day 210): "PLEASANT STREET" (1967) Tim Buckley

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.

DB's Song of the Day (day 45):"THE RIVER" (1969) Tim Buckley

Today is Valentine’s Day. It’s also the birthday of Tim Buckley. Which is fitting since Tim Buckley provided significant sounds for the soundtrack of my first experience of love. I mean real, enduring love, not the early teen and preteen crushes. In a way, his album Blue Afternoon (1969) was the benediction for falling in love, when, in 1978, shortly before my 19th birthday, I gave it a close listen.

It’s a very romantic album, especially the first side. The album was praised to me by a friend who had married in 1969, so I think the album was part of his feelgood era. By 1978, the marriage was not doing well, but the album became an incentive for my own feelgood era. So, here’s to Tim Buckley on Valentine’s Day.

The song I’ve chosen, “The River,” ends the first side of the album. On that first listening the song that most spoke to me was “I Must’ve Been Blind”—a song which admits that, before finding out what love is really like, the singer “must’ve been blind.” It’s the kind of song that says, in essence, that before you know romantic love you don’t really know nothing. You think you’ve got it sussed, that you know what the world is all about—money? art? being popular? being good?—but you’re missing the key factor that will change you utterly. That’s how I see it because there was a big change in my 19th year. “So few know what it means to fall in love / And so few know how hard it is to go on livin' that way.” Like, it's easy to fall in love, but can you keep it up? Can you go the distance?

But the time when today's song takes over is the following summer, 1979, turning 20. That’s when I really found the time, for a season, to concentrate on love and loving. The woman in that story already knew this LP, so maybe she didn’t identify it with me the way I identify it, particularly this song, with her and that summer.  More than a realization about “what it means to fall in love,” what that summer showed me was what happens when someone falls in love with you . . . or with me, I mean. I guess I don’t really know what happens when someone falls in love with you. Does it matter to you? What’s it do to you? Work that out for yourselves, and get back to me.

Here’s what Buckley says: “Oh, if you come to love me, you’ll stay forever / Inside my heart, inside my dreams / And time will fade / In time we’ll love.”  The way this is sung, with that very deep tone on “come to love me” and the high moans on “will fade,” “we’ll love” gets me right where I live. It touches my heart like nobody’s business. Buckley had a great range, and a great voice for the expressive moan. He also did some notable scat singing, but I’ll get to that another time.

That “time will fade” part may be wishful thinking but there is truth to it too. Like looking up one day and realizing you’ve been five years, ten years . . . more than thirty with the same person. Where did that time go? “It’s the truth of life that chains us in between,” Buckley says and it’s a good figure, vague enough (what is “the truth of life”? Kids? Money? Art? Work?) but also clear. The truth of our love chains us to life. This is the hard part. The hard lesson behind all that lovey-dovey stuff. Otherwise, we could float away. A choice between the unbearable lightness of being or its unbearable chain.

The sweeping drums on this song, and those little vibraphone sounds make for a percussive experience that I love too—a vibraphone solo! . . . if you asked me what will always remain with me from that summer, maybe it’s the sound of the vibraphone on this song, and Buckley’s deep purr and drawn-out notes. The other thing is that great opening, with the paced strum of Buckley’s guitar met by those slow-rolling drums like a tide beneath: “I live by the river and I hide my house away.” That world-enough-unto-ourselves feeling—that’s what I associate with the summer of 1979, my own little summer of love, not that it ever quite happens that way. It was more a dream supplied by drifting away on this song, and the search for “those lost moments we steal to keep our love alive / And our prize, so tired after all the pain.”

There was a lot of pain too. Intense and long-lasting, that summer. I don’t want to go into all that but it wasn’t just about not making a clean break with other loves, it was also about real mourning for someone gone far too soon. And Tim Buckley was already gone before I ever listened to him. He died in 1975, in a bit of a creative tailspin and due to a bad run-in with heroin (another “damage done” scenario), but from 1967 to 1970 he was incredible, though not a commercial success, which makes him one of those burning lodestars from that period that was still exerting a big influence on me as late as 1979, my last summer in Delaware, for a time. Then I would move and things would start to change. Something about gaining contemporaries, I guess, after hiding my house away. I’ll always remember that house, that woman, this song.

1979

Happy Valentine's Day!