Birdie hop (he do). He hop along...
[YOUTUBE]
First time I heard this I was peaking. Dissociated from the world, my body, reality, awash in a flood of subconscious material, lost but still somewhow "losing it" when I heard a voice sing-songing in broken stream of consciousness, this madcap
e e cummings icaro: broken and fragile nonsense carrying on and nonetheless: "he hop along..."
"Who the hell is this?" I was appalled. Somehow I was able to make words.
I'm me... that's me talking.
I'm hearing this. This is from a real recording...? Jesus, someone is singing this? I found myself laughing; really laughing. What I was hearing was so strange (and so familiar) that it brought me back from the schizophrenic nether reaches like being woken up from a nightmare about malevolent bells to the salvation of a real-life fire alarm. Out of dissolution, awoken by an oddness beyond my oddness and now laughing in jags—
did James Joyce write nursery rhymes, who would set them to music? Pieces of the consensus world came back: the fact of music, albums, being on drugs, what is typical and atypical human behavior, each one only raising more and more hard facts to address the situation, genres, the singer-songwriter 70s, transcendentalism, free-verse, the effects of LSD... nothing would contextualize the novelty away until I—as there was enough to call "I" by then—concluded this was truly, objectively strange.
Who would sing this, and most of all who would record this? How did this happen?
The question was not just
how did someone think of this song (as unlikely as that is to begin with, we'll get back to that later), rather how in the world did this stuff make it down on paper... then record?... Honestly did someone lose their everloving mind then inexplicably pause to take song notes before continuing about their psychotic break, quick delusion before meeting with your agent and EMI execs for Koreanopian fusion and renegotiating appearances fees? What I was hearing was not the kind of crazy you could turn on and off like that or take a break from. This was a formal thought disorder, not a walking tour of St. Peters'; you can't just take a gelato break to look for the secret passages to DaVinci's growroom, or practice your Latin with some cute Jesuit, then meet back up with the tour group under the apotheosis of Christ. Nah, that's permanent: "I see the flies..." He did.
Seriously how am I hearing this? It was so crazy beautiful raw ridiculous and... private like
twin languages or babytalk. It was like something that perhaps we shouldn't be listening to, something privileged like patient notes of a psychologist, a found sketchbook or someone's journal; this was private information. This wasn't just crazy; this was vulnerable and profane, superhuman and helpless. This was great.
My mate: "This is Syd Barret."
And
that was even funnier. I laughed (something incomprehensible in the depersonalized shellshock I had been feeling just before). I laughed, because it was funny. I lost my breath, this was just too much. I had forgotten how things could be so funny, downright hilarious: "...aloney bird upon the window..." the crazy diamond intoned.
"
This..." by now I could hardly speak,"this is Sid Barrett?"
I'd been a Pink Floyd fan for years; the first album I ever bought as a kid was Dark Side but this... My mate joined in laughing not only from the medicine of the song but my own sudden recovery from existential "situation mode" into gleeful hysterics. The voice of someone straddling madness and genius had guided me back to myself from myself, and I was grateful for the laugh. Still am.
Syd Barret: "...he 'hee.'"
sbg: wtf lololollolollolol:lol: