But there’s a
useful Latin phrase here: res ipsa loquitur, which means “the
thing speaks for itself.” This week, Capitol Records, whose reissue
department is on a serious roll (the entire Blondie back catalogue!
All those records by The Band! Completely awesome!), releases
“Wouldn’t You Miss Me? The Best of Syd Barrett,” an
indispensible 22-song CD of Barrett’s post-Floyd solo material.
Barrett enthusiasts like your humble obsessives here at Last Plane
to Jakarta already have most of these songs, either on the two albums
Barrett made before retreating permanently to his parents’ house
in Cambridge or on the excellent 1988 collection “Opel,”
and so the compilers have gone to great pains in extracting the rumored-to-exist-for-years
“Bob Dylan Blues” from David Gilmour, who owns the master
tapes to a number of Barrett’s post-1968 recording sessions.
It pains us to report that “Bob Dylan Blues” is enjoyable
but unremarkable, but even if there weren’t an unreleased Syd
Barrett song here (which is, for some of us, like saying “a fifth
gospel of Jesus written by an eyewitness”), “Wouldn’t
You Miss Me?” would be completely essential. Barrett’s sense
of songcraft was that rarest of jewels: utterly anomalous, completely
original, entirely without peer. It’s true that Barrett’s
coherence is audibly slipping away from him in some of these recordings;
his guitar, which at its best had a jagged, stuttering quality as
expressive and readily identifiable as that of any other guitarist
of his generation, is by turns brilliant and clumsy. You can hear
the point at which he inexplicably loses interest in going on in the
magnificently panicked “Wolfpack” (whose chorus, less a
chorus than a recurring cry for assistance, never fails to frighten
me: “Howling, the pack in formation appears:/In formation!”),
at which point the backing musicians, whose contributions were recorded
separately, take over, their entrance quite fitting but no less clearly
an attempt to make the recording less disquieting than it would otherwise
be. They’re great musicians, and what they do would be neat if
it weren’t window-dressing; their jazz-rock rave-up is an attempt
to soften the blow of the jarringly sudden end-stop of a song that
had seemed just a second ago on the verge of some revelatory and explosive
conclusion.
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