California Dreamin’, Part II

Goodbye and Hello

Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider. ”Photo: Columbia Pictures / 1969

And I wave goodbye to America
And smile hello to the world

There are many songs that evoke the counterculture 60s, famously for those who’ve learned of the era through historical lore, more personally for those who lived through them. For me, even as I was relishing and surviving those years, none captured their sweet promise and foolish bluster more poignantly than Tim Buckley and Larry Becket’s Goodbye and Hello, with its marriage of folk lyricism to Kurt Weill, Weimar theatricality.

O the new children dance ------ I am young
All around the balloons ------ I will live
Swaying by chance ------ I am strong
To the breeze from the moon ------ I can give
Painting the sky ------ You the strange
With the colors of sun ------ Seed of day
Freely they fly ------ Feel the change
As all become one ------ Know the Way Know the Way

Did Arnie and I feel like new children seated in the dirt listening to Blind Faith among the thousands crowded into th…