Tim Buckley Never Asked To Be Your Mountain
- Abigail Devoe
- 1 hour ago
- 17 min read
Goodbye and Hello is my favorite Tim Buckley album - and one of his least "Tim Buckley" albums.
Tim Buckley: vocals, guitar, slide, kalimba, vibraphone
Larry Beckett: co-writer, vocals on “Morning Glory”
Lee Underwood: lead guitar
John Farsha, Brian Hartzler: guitar
Jerry Yester: piano, organ, harmonium
Jim Fielder: bass
Jimmy Bond: double bass
Don Randi: piano
Jim Gordon, Eddie Hoh: drums
Carter Collins: congas, various percussion
Special guests: Dave Guard, kalimba; Henry Diltz, harmonica on “Once I Was”
Produced by Jerry Yester with Jac Holzman, with arrangements by Joshua Rifkin
art by Guy Webster, Bruce Botnik
You ever come across an artist so talented that, as you listen through their record, you just sit there repeatedly saying to yourself, "You've gotta be fucking kidding me." That's Tim Buckley.
Like most in my generation, I discovered son before father. My relationship with Buckley the Elder’s music is a lot lighter than my relationship with the Younger’s. The synchronicity of Tim’s first album being released twodays after Jeff’s birth isn’t lost on me. Father and son’s legacies cast long shadows on each other; though one inarguably grew to eclipse the other in stature. Grace is consistently hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time. You usually only get to listening to Goodbye and Hello a., through Jeff, or b., after that obnoxious Name Three Songs Guy at your local record store's all like, "Yeah, Jeff's great, but have you heard his dad?" (Insert terribly long ramble about Starsailor here.)
I do hope That Guy didn't spoil Tim for you! His artistic evolution is fascinating.
In his book Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered, his lead guitarist and off-stage friend Lee Underwood identifies five phases Tim went through in a career lasting just ten years: folk, psychedelic, jazz/sophistopop, avant-garde, and whatever the hell “sex funk” is. His sophomore effort, Goodbye and Hello, plays right into my taste for psychedelic folk music: see my longtime patronage of Donovan. It makes so much sense that Tim was listening to Donovan while writing this. Where Donny made his name on the medieval trend, Tim stretched it out to what author David Browne calls “acidera.”
Goodbye and Hello was released in July of 1967, amidst one of the most active years in pop culture history. What sets it apart?
It’s hard to ignore its massive production. Strings, sound effects, all manners of instruments including harmonium, kalimba, and congas. I appreciate its creative use of percussion, and reverb on reverb on reverb. It gives Tim’s voice the space to do some frankly stupid things. Fuck you mean, this man can sing things women can’t? Through all his delightfully baffling genre changes, his greatest asset was always his voice; androgynous, nimble, and pure. I’m also fascinated by his playing style. He didn’t do the open tunings thing like a lot of people think he did, but he also didn’t use many crazy chords. Why? He couldn't! He broke his hand in high school and couldn’t make a bar chord! (Tim told differing stories about this and just about everything else in his life. As put by Lee, he was a “whimsically creative inventor.”)
After one of many trips to New York on Elektra’s dime, in which he met Carter Collins, manager Herbie Cohen calls up Jerry Yester of the Modern Folk Quartet for Tim’s second LP. A relative newbie to producing, he was the perfect match for Tim’s ambitious ideas. It was 1966, and Tim was influenced by some of the biggest records of the year before: the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the Beatles’ Revolver, and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.Donovan and the Jefferson Airplane were also on his radar. He wanted big, open production, lots of bells and whistles, and an overall psychedelic sound. Him and Larry even had the sequencing laid out before anything was recorded! Social commentary songs were to start each side of the LP.
Goodbye and Hello opens with its most explicit protest song, No Man Can Find The War. The sound effects on the LP, including “No Man”’s nuclear blast, were pulled from Elektra’s library. Larry’s lyrics tell a story in snapshots, like news reels would: “Photographs of guns and flame,” “Bayonet and jungle grin,” “Lookouts tremble on the shore” He splices these images together with the psychological; urging you to imagine the chaos. “Tape recorder echoes scream, orders fly like bullet stream/Drums and cannons laugh aloud…” “No Man” is marked by the war’s physical absence, but psychological presence. Larry said this song is about bystanders idly watching war on their TVs, Lee likened it to the old adage, “If your mind is on fire, the rest of your world is on fire.” I thought of the Cold War. The constant threat of nuclear annihilation and a whole lot of propaganda. “Is the war across the sea? Is the war behind the sky? Have you each and all gone blind? Is the war inside your mind?”
Carnival Song begins with Dave Guard’s kalimba and more pulls from Elektra’s library. The instrumentation mimics a fair; the clangs of the ride bells and big-top keys made to sound like an organ or accordion. If you listen hard, you can hear “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” buried in the verses! For one brilliant moment as Tim begins to sing, the carnival music pulls away from the key Tim and the guys are in; adding stomach-churning tension, like being turned upside down on a fairground ride. The song is in a marionette puppet-waltz; loose-jointed, jerky, and bouncy. The effects layer into a disorienting collage at the end, not unlike a funhouse mirror warps your perception. It’s all reminiscent of another circus song from that year, the Beatles’ “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”
“Carnival”’s lyrics tell of the down-and-out characters carnivals bring out of the shadows. “The nighttime comes to bring the bums/From Bowery street to crimson streets of wine…” Kids don’t know to fear or pity these people, they’re just part of the carnival. “Your children smile in single file/They learn mistakes that others make/They see, although they cannot know/The needs they’ll need to have their greed grow wild.” This song is the first time Tim really gets to show off his insane falsetto. It’s like a watching skilled tightrope walker under the big top; holding your breath all the way.
Goodbye and Hello starts to come into focus with Pleasant Street. It’s about a drug, but no one can agree which drug it is! Jerry Yester insisted it was heroin, speed was an option, I personally think it’s LSD.
This whole album is weed and LSD.
“Pleasant Street”’s narrator lives a double-life; stuck between the straight people wearing suits – or “Christian licorice clothes” as Tim calls them – and the Pleasant Street kids chasing oblivion down, down, down. One can imagine how Tim might’ve related to this: he spent his high school years piling into cars and making the hour drive to hang out on the Sunset Strip. The song is insistent in tone, driven by piano and fuzzed guitars. The organ lifts the song up, while the forever-descending chord progression pulls down; creating fabulous tension and a nice big space in the middle for Tim to do vocal acrobatics in. “Pleasant Street” displays Tim’s keen understandings of phrasing, pacing, and dynamics. His ability to emote leaves me in awe. He packs a lot into just one chorus. Hear how he almost murmurs, “You wheel, and you steal/But you feel when you kneel/Down...” before unleashing himself upon the next lines. He puts a bit of growl in “But I can’t wait” before ecstasy on “Pleasant Street!”
Yet he always leaves room to do more. He won’t give it all to the first verse or chorus. He tumbles out of a line breathless or drops a note so he can make it back to a mumble, then bring it back to full volume again. Like a true showman, he knows how to keep us on our toes.
You’d think Hallucinations would be the song about acid, but no, it’s about a breakup Larry was going through! The “hallucinations” he speaks of are his girl – the one he tried to win back with several of Tim’s songs including “Song to the Siren” and a poem in the gatefold of Goodbye and Hello.
Tracy, whoever you are, you’re stronger than me! If a man wrote “Siren” for me, I’d have caved like a house of cards!!
“I felt you breathing as you fell asleep/When I reached to touch you/No one was there and the night was deep…”This love burned too fast and hot: “The candle died, now you are gone/For the flame was too bright…” The song begins woozy, but gradually comes to the swaying groove set by the bass. It’s as if coming upon a sweet-smelling oasis in the middle of a desert. Carter Collins finally gets to take center stage, he was integral to Goodbye and Hello’s sound. His congas mingle with the kalimba and take a dip in reverb to create these ethereal waterfalls of percussion. (You know I’m a sucker for textural recordings like this!)
Limitation breeds innovation, and the guitars in “Hallucinations” lead me to believe Tim wanted a sitar on this song, but none of his buddies could play. It makes so much sense that Tim was listening to Donovan at this time. He’d just come out with Sunshine Superman the year before and that album has sitar on almost every single track. It’s that east-meets-west sound that took pop music by storm from the end of 1965 through ’66. It soundslike the guitar strings are being detuned as they’re being played to create the “dips” a sitar would. With flourishes of electric guitar, it all whirls together, making it hard to separate what’s what. Tim’s jazz influence shines through in “Hallucinations”’s tricky syncopated lines. His voice is soft and lilting, intimate; like a little candle flame on the edge of being blown out. You just want to cup your hands around it to shield it from the wind, or hear it right in your ear.
“Hallucinations” was gorgeous, it’s always been one of my favorite tracks on the album. But brace yourselves, listeners, for three of the greatest songs ever written, all in a row: “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” “Once I Was,” and “Phantasmagoria in Two.” If they were all on the same side of the LP, they’d be OP!
About seeing Tim at the Troubadour, author and groupie Pamela Des Barres said: “He was so inspiring and so cute. He had a real tenderness and vulnerability. You just wanted to hold him and comfort him.”
Lee Underwood said:
“Back in those days, Tim had a way of doing a passive little-boy poet thing that thrilled the girls. They yearned to cuddle him, hold him, protect him. He loved it...but he also had a mind as quick as a cobra. Sometimes he could be lethal...Most of the girls who adored him also bored him.”
quoted from: Lee Underwood, Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered (2002)
Ralph Beckett said:
“A lot of (Tim’s) power over women was his vulnerability, projecting a sense of weakness. They felt they could mother him, help him, elevate him, set him on the right path, help him fulfill his promise. He was a great-looking, curly-haired singer-songwriter. Gimme a break.”
quoted from: David Browne, Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley (2001)
On any given YouTube upload, 88-90% of my viewerbase is men. To those men: this is the female gaze.
It’s the guy who wanders around wearing the same clothes as yesterday, but he’s so talented and just so cute that his unkempt looks aren’t slovenly. Tim’s persona was worldly, romantic, non-threatening – I’m taller than he was – and whimsical. He feels “safe” to us. And I’ll say it: he’s a tragic figure. A woman looks at a guy like Tim and easily convinces herself, “I can fix him!” Not so much my type, but I understand the appeal.
You know who else had this aura and still has a legion of female fans? Syd Barrett. Just as I read hundreds of pages about Syd, I read these biographies on Tim and learned he could be such a jerk. But he got away with it because he was ungodly talented and women found him pretty! This way about him is no doubt part of I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain’s appeal. It’s a song you love, but would never want to be on the other side of.
As far as the music goes: rounding out side one, it’s the biggest of the big. Jerry Yester really said, “What if I did what Phil Spector did but with folk?” I know there’s bass somewhere in there. There’s six-string guitar tracks on twelve-string guitar tracks on congas on drums on kalimba on harmonium. I say “tracks” because I doubt there’s just one of each! There’s gotta be so much overdubbing to yield this sound. It’s a chaotic symphony for Tim to spew venom over. When you look at the lyrics, “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” is one of the meanest songs ever recorded.
I’ve deliberately left a pretty big chapter of Tim’s life out until now. It’s more relevant to this specific song than anywhere else.
In 1965, Tim married his high school sweetheart; in part so she could escape her home situation, in part because she was pregnant...or so she thought she was. Then she was actually pregnant, and Tim realized, “Oh shit! I have nothing in common with this girl!” And he split. He said he’d been coerced into marriage – again, Tim told some tall tales so we’ll never truly know. He had a girlfriend on the side, she had a lot less real-life responsibilities like, I don’t know, a child. He was nineteen years old, scared shitless I’m sure. And he’d just landed his deal with Elektra. As put by Lee Underwood:
“Tim left, not because he didn’t care about his soon-to-be-born child but because his musical life was just beginning, and, in addition, he couldn’t stand Mary. He did not abandon Jeff; he abandoned Mary.”
quoted from: David Browne, Dream Brother: The Lives and of Jeff and Tim Buckley (2001)
“The flying Pisces sails for time/And tells me of my child.” Later, “the flying fish.” Pisces is the sign of the fish. Mary was a Pisces. There’s no doubt in my mind this song is to/about his ex-wife. The root of the song states hefelt both smothered and put on a pedestal: “I never asked to be your mountain, I never asked to fly.” Tim paints Mary as bitter, imagining the things she says about him to Jeff. “She says ‘your scoundrel father flies/With a dancer called a queen,” (his girlfriend was a go-go dancer) “And with her stolen cards he plays/And laughs, but never wins.” We saw this same gambling imagery used for cheating in Joni Mitchell’s “That Song About The Midway.”
But you know what? Maybe Mary was right to be bitter. She was sixteen years old, and a promising musician herself, but had to drop out of high school because they didn’t allow pregnant students. As a single mom, she never had enough money to stay in one place for too long, frequently having to uproot Jeff. That resentment will inevitably spill over into the child. Children are very perceptive.
Tim then imagines Jeff now being Mary’s pillar to lean on: “He never asked to be her mountain, He never asked to fly/And through his eye he comes his love/And tells her not to cry.” Amidst all that, for a moment, Tim pleads for Mary to hear him out – “O flying flying fish, please flutter to my door,” – even if he’s not being entirelyforthcoming. “Yes you can drink my lies, if first you read my eyes.” With my favorite line on the entire album, it appears they’ve reached an impasse. “I can’t swim your waters and you can’t walk my lands.” In doing so, Tim isvindicated. “I’m sailing all my sins, and I’m climbing all my fears/And soon now I’ll fly…” He throws his voice up to the rafters on “fly” and his pristine voice cracks. With the treatment on his vocals, it sounds like he’s falling; Icarus has flown too close to the sun.
With the bite Tim sings the choruses with, the tremendous vibrato, buried moans, and rapturous “oh, please!” It’s almost manic. “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” is ultimate catharsis, but at a cost.
Jeff Buckley’s first public performance under the name Jeff Buckley was at a tribute concert for his father. Hechose to perform “Once I Was” and this song. With his “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” Jeff took his father’s lyrics and turned them right back around on him – and back on those who hailed him as the second coming of Christ simply for being Tim Buckley’s son. As a whole, I don’t think father and son sounded alike. Jeff was more influenced by rock singers like Robert Plant and Morrissey. He said it himself: “We were born with the same parts but I sing like me.”
Except for the “oh, please!” That was a choice to sound like Tim. As a child who grew up bearing the weight of a distant, fraught relationship with her father, and saddled with many similarities to him, I felt that note choice deep in my soul, and I know exactly what Jeff said with it.
Opening up side two of Goodbye and Hello is Once I Was. I was surprised to learn this is supposed to be an anti-war song, it reads like a wistful song of lost love. The narrator yearns to return to a past life; a hunter, a lover, any one besides this one in the trenches, steppe, jungle, or desert he’s in. Henry Diltz’s harmonica invokes the lonely cowboy, wandering endlessly with a guitar strapped to his back. Our imagines his fate: his lady gets impatient for his return and leaves. “And soon there’ll be another/To tell you I was just a lie.” Later, “And though you have forgotten all of our rubbish dreams/I find myself searching through the ashes of our ruins.” Even now, she’s all he has to think about. “Sometimes I wonder just for a while/Will you ever remember me?” isa lowkey reference to Fred Neil’s song “Dolphins.” In one of those rock-and-roll full-circle moments I love, Tim would later cover “Dolphins” on Sefronia!
Tim’s gorgeous vibrato is on full display on “Once I Was.” It was like a birds’ wings; so soft and fragile. He wouldn’t ever let his voice go anemic, he was able to stand up to booming drums. Yet he was careful not to overpower the delicate twelve-string guitar.
Hearing Tim sing is like watching a tightrope act that’s also the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. You imagine this lonely guy with his hands in his pockets, kicking rocks as he drags his feet, until he sees you! He’s so overcome by love at first sight that this impossibly beautiful voice comes out. But then he has to leave. As Larry Beckett wrote for the back cover: "He will sing you his ten tales and then wander til spring."
For three minutes and change, you’re the center of Tim’s world. He could make you believe every word he sang, even if the words were written by someone else.
Phantasmagoria in Two is another fantastic performance – no pun intended. Tim spends pretty much the whole song in his falsetto. Goodbye and Hello’s best songs all have him in common. If the lyrics pertain to love and the arrangement does him justice, it’s sure to be a winner. “Phantasmagoria”’s swirling instrumentation compliments Tim’s airy voice. It mixes in with limber, skilled work by Lee, moody piano, and playful tambourine. The song is about two lovers (phantasmagoria in two) who are unable to reconcile. “I can plainly see that our parts have changed/Our sands are shifting around/Need I beg to you for one more day to find our lonely love?”
On the other hand, Larry said Knight-Errant is a two-minute ditty about…
"'My lady’s chamber' is supposed to be her cunt, not to mince words."
quoted from: David Browne,
“Cut away her childhood strings” indeed.
It disguises salacious subject with a super done-up midcentury-medieval arrangement. Tim’s gone full medieval troubadour, to the point where it’s funny. “O whither has my lady wandered?” Yeah, this coy, cutesy cover-up method doesn’t last much longer!
Goodbye and Hello’s title track is another Larry-penned tune. It’s his grand statement on the steep generational divide between boomers and their parents. This gap only got wider as America got more involved in Vietnam through the late ’60s. Half of Goodbye and Hello is from the parents’ generation, weighted by grandiose brass. The other half from the child’s point of view. These verses are a little more naturalistic, and a lot less dramatic:“Freedom and violence, the acrobat clowns, do a balancing act on the graves of our sons while the tap-dancing emperor sings ‘war is peace~’”
Tag yourself, I’m a godless and sexless directionless loon.
According to Dream Brother, most of the studio time was used assembling this song, and they spent a lot of money making it...I don’t know if it worked.
Not even Tim liked this song! Herbie Cohen made him and the rest of his trio memorize it and play it in full once at the Garrick Theater. After that, he never played it again!
Don’t get me wrong, there is good stuff in here. The solo violin part is great, I think there’s a bass clarinet in there? I’ll give credit where credit is due, “Goodbye and Hello” is totally original. But the end product is unfocused, overblown, and overdone. This song does not have to be almost nine minutes long. The concept might’ve come across better had this been slightly shorter. What could some of that run time have gone to? “Song to the Siren.”
Not putting the May 1967 recording of “Siren” on Goodbye and Hello, or at the very least not putting it out as a non-album single, was the biggest mistake of Tim’s career. Or maybe it was made to stay in the vault until the end of the millennium. Who knows? In any way, we got an almost nine-minute title track instead. It almost works, but not quite.
Tim once asked Larry to write about “a hobo.” He never said why, but as the story goes, Tim’s childhood home wasn’t far from a camp of homeless people. The outcome was one of Tim’s most covered songs, Morning Glory. Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Chrissie Hynde, and Linda Ronstadt all took their shot at it (Tim and his girlfriend Jainie can be seen on the back cover of The Stone Poneys Vol. 3!)
The arrangement is breathtaking. The flutes are sweet, the haunting choir invokes images of a church; one of very few sanctuaries left in the world. I was amazed to learn this “choir” was just Tim and Larry’s voices. Reading through “Morning Glory”’s lyrics, I think it’s about a crisis of faith.
“I lit my purest candle close to my
Window, hoping it would catch the eye
Of any vagabond who passed it by,
And I waited in my fleeting house.”
People light candles to send a prayer. Transience is worked into many stories from the Bible as life path or punishment; several saints spent their lives wandering. The idea of sanctuary, too, the fleeting house, has been around as long as humans have been persecuting each other. Whatever it is, this narrator is going through something. When they ask for stories, an answer for their pain, the hobo replies: “Don’t ask me how to wash away the grime/I can’t come in, it’s just too high a climb.” The narrator curses this traveler, forsaken by them.
“‘Then you be damned!’ I screamed to the hobo
‘Turn into stone’ I wept to the hobo
‘Leave me alone,’ I knelt to the hobo
But he walked away from my fleeting house.”
Faith is more than simply inviting god into your life. It’s unconditional devotion, even when the path isn’t clear or you feel betrayed.
Tim was never thrilled with his first self-titled album. It was too run-of-the-mill for him, no concept to expand upon. It’s a collection of good songs, but aside from that unmistakable voice singing them, there’s nothing that made it distinctly Tim. Goodbye and Hello is the introduction to what made Tim Tim. Jerry Yester formed a solid group to back him; this ensemble sensibility would play to Tim’s hand moving forward. He’s showing off one of his greatest assets, his voice. The material he wrote with Larry invoked his other great strength: his ability to connect. He can yearn, he can pine, he can sigh just as well as he can cry out or lash out. He’s reaching for something big here.
This is a psychedelic statement piece influenced by all the biggest albums of the year before. For other folk artists of the time, a project like Goodbye and Hello would be the summation of what they could do. For Tim, it was just one stop on his journey – keep in mind he was just twenty when this came out. He’s pulling back the arrow to shoot for something far beyond singer-songwriter. Where that arrow would land, nobody in 1967 could’ve possibly guessed! We didn't understand his love, we don't know why he tried. Tim Buckley promptly took any commercial potential he had and threw it out the window by jumping ship from Elektra Records and calling Tonight Show guest host Alan King "a piece of cardboard."
Right here was a sweet spot for sure. It’s just opulent enough to fit in with its time, but with a heartfelt, forlorn, intimate, and raw feel that often got lost in psychedelia. Popular music may have waved goodbye to those “acidera” elements within the year, but this album is a proper hello to Tim Buckley the artist. Adventurous for sure, sensitive when he wanted to be, completely singular.
Personal favorites: “Hallucinations,” “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” “Once I Was,” “Morning Glory”
– AD ☆
Watch the full episode above!
Browne, David. Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley. London: Fourth Estate, 2001.
Underwood, Lee. Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered. Kindle Edition. San Fransisco: Backbeat, 2002.
“Signings” Billboard, 10/8/1966. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/60s/1966/Billboard%201966-10-08.pdf