A Fleeting House

Tim Buckley's music existed in a highly personalised isolation, but with a tangible wider context, and throughout the cycle of albums completed by Sefronia offered a special glimpse of a rare talent unfolding. It's not difficult to discover the context -- folk, rock, jazz, funk -- but when Tim Buckley brought his extraordinary gifts to bear he reduced all previous propagators to hackneyed levels, by his own degree of style and sense of purpose.

Nothing in rock so succinctly divulges the development of such a truly innovative and keen intelligence at work. Of such a flowering artistry. And one blessed with a complementary unique voice and musical understanding.

"When I sing I can bring/ Everything on the wing/ Flying down from dizzy air/ To the ground because I care." He could. And did.

In the days before they were dubbed singer/songwriters those of Tim Buckley's ilk were pure and simple folk singers. Tim Buckley was lumped together with all the other Tims and Toms -- Rush, Rose, Hardin, Paxton et al. Were they all one and the same working a tax fiddle? Tim Buckley's first album, Tim Buckley, stands apart from the other efforts by folk singers dabbling with electric backings. It remains one of the most fully realised group albums/rock albums to come out of the west coast we were so obsessed by in 1966 and 1967. It was with Goodbye And Hello that he stepped back into the folk métier. And then only partly. He was seeking a direction. There's much that might have found its way onto Tim Buckley. There's "Goodbye And Hello," a poetic masterstroke, a near overblown/overdramatic hymn to youth and innocence. There's the mysterious metaphysical "Morning Glory" and the haunting love song "Once I Was." They posit the mood and spirit of the next two albums. Goodbye And Hello is an in-between album, overshadowed by his first, hinting at what was to be. His albums continued to fall into pairs: Happy Sad/Blue Afternoon, Lorca/Starsailor, Greetings From LA/Look At The Fool and Sefronia, back to the beginning. The rock end of folk again -- the full turn of the circle.

Tim Buckley contained the seeds of a lot of what was to come. On "Understand Your Man" Buckley yelps and hollers in the later style of Greetings From LA, though without the overt lyrical sexual expressionism, and with Byrd-like jangling electric rock in place of the James Brown rhythmic funk backings.

"Song Slowly Song" is simplicity itself. The prototype for the lingering love songs of the Happy Sad/Blue Afternoon period. Spaced out music. The spaces are as important as the notes that surround them. There's a wider context in the early music of Country Joe and the Fish ("Section 43") or in the acoustic meanderings of John Fahey's music. All later created marvelous sound collages using elemental or mechanical effects. Buckley -- "Love Song From Room 109 At The Islander"; Country Joe -- "Grace," "Magoo"; John Fahey -- "The Last Steam Engine Train," "The Singing Bridge Of Memphis Tennessee." They all evoke the same mood.

Elsewhere the context is outward-looking and crystallising in LA rock. "It Happens Every Time" opens like vintage Byrds of Fifth Dimension playing English traditional songs. The Byrds are only twice removed in the typically Love guitar phrases that mark the intro to "She Is" and the slow stuttering close to "Song Of The Magician." And it isn't just an Elektra logo that couples early Tim Buckley and pre-Strange Days Doors. There's a curious affinity to the Doors on tracks like "Strange Street Affair Under Blue" or "Pleasant Street" from Goodbye And Hello, particularly in the internal musical dynamics.

Remember Tim Buckley was released in 1966. Pre-Da Capo, The Doors, and Electric Music For The Mind and Body. A folk album? Never. And the group: Lee Underwood, guitar; James Fielder, bass; Billy Mundi, drums; Van Dyke Parks, keyboards, and Tim's voice and guitar -- resplendent throughout the album -- could have been a real blockbuster.

It wasn't to be. And Tim Buckley himself is no more either. It hardly seems possible when he was so alive in his music. But it is true and the loss of potential is quite tragic. We can scarcely begin to imagine where he might have taken us in the future. And there was nothing fatalistic about his death, as he sang on one of his most beautiful early songs: "On wings of chance we fly."

by
Mike Houghton

Life and death are becoming indistinguishable. New biologies are beginning to prove that Death is just a change of state in the cycle of life. Funereal rites, across the globe, are based on the idea of transition and yet our society insists that Death is instantaneous and easily defined.

New biologies also -- life fields, acupuncture, etc. -- tell us that Personality seems to carry some strange physical independence from the body. A dualist separation between body and "soul" is slowly emerging as biologically feasible.

Out-of-body experiences are similar to what we have called Death. They have similar biological symptoms.

The evidence for some kind of survival after Death is piling up.

It might just be possible that -- at the biological frontier -- Tim Buckley, or something or other that used to carry that name, is out there somewhere.
Even still

It's just that the music on bits of Lorca and most of Starsailor makes you think of that place.

That "somewhere out there." Some nebulous, gassy environment where souls continue beyond death, where things become a little more timeless, where ...

How about: At his Santa Monica apartment on Sunday June 19 1975, Tim Buckley, largely unknown, much maligned singer/good guy, made a transition of consequence to those around him.

Tim Buckley was born (a similar transition) with a unique voice. His was the one and only.

It did weird things.

It sounded, at times, like a soundtrack for the moon.

But he had had a bad start. His early career was spent smouldering in the suburbs of the singer/songwriter down on his following.

Moving gently into a late-nite, slowest songs in the world, ebbing and flowing kind of jazz (Happy Sad, Blue Afternoon), Buckley, all of a sudden, shelled out Lorca and Starsailor.

He was bitter by then. But it was these albums, more than any other, that pushed the extremities of his extraordinary voice deep into the vortex of Voice As Pure Sound (Noise If You Like).

He had arrived somewhere original. He was, it appears, well pleased to get there.

But they bombed.

So he quit, became a chauffeur for Sly Stone, got married, took up a teaching gig at California University (into Ethnomusicology).

He had left what audience he had way behind. People couldn't it seemed, keep up with him.

In retrospect, Lorca and Starsailor were the musics that were his greatest contribution.

Here was, after all, a fusion of jazz, abstraction, rock, vocalese, noise, chaos and order. Here was, after all, a musical description of the outer reaches of anywhere.

Tim Buckley had pulled off something totally new from the solo singer archetype.

Tim Buckley was in orbit.

With his voice for an engine.

Playing Starsailor over now, it sounds even more like the places he is likely to be, the nether regions out-of-body, a place called oblivion.

Whereas, before he split, it was one of those amazing albums you could only come to your own conclusions about. The kind you'd play to clear the air.

He was to abandon the direction for further experiments in heavy sexy rock, but Lorca, and Starsailor in particular, remain as testimony to a tantalising possibility. If this stuff had sold they'd be teaching telepathy in primary schools in no time.

Unless you can imagine Stockhausen writing songs for Jimmy Savile there is no earthly comparison.

Unless you can imagine a cartload of cybernetic scorpions hammering on your door there is no lunar comparison.

But Buckley was held on a framed-up charged of being a singer/songwriter. And singer/songwriters aren't supposed to sing like this.

Starsailor is an anarchic rush of music. It is for sweeping away clichés with. A guitar/bass bottom crystallises a veritable cacophony of applied chaos. Buckley's voice seems to cut through it all like a laser beam. Head-on, the effect is at once scary, spacey, alarming, surreal, rootless. On closer inspection it is intricate, finely woven, gracious, graceful, precision stuff.

It is a music with presence.

Especially now.

A rare intelligence was at work on Starsailor, a fine madness. To all intents and purposes indescribable, Starsailor was a horizon for rock.

But, predictably, rock decided to ignore it. It has choirs, organs, Tijuana brass. In places there are phonetics instead of vocals. There are sirens. Sustained onomatopoetics. And lines like "Oblivion carries me on its shoulder" poking up through the sound. For all the world like voices from the dead.

More than anyone, Tim Buckley was the character who took the rock vocal where it has never been before or since. With Starsailor, he covered uncharted ground with incredible skill. He was nudging oblivion.

And this was the guy they put on at lunchtime at Knebworth! Hardly the time or the place to nudge oblivion.

"It's just that Starsailor sounds more real now. As though he sang it from where he is now."

For more information as to where Tim Buckley is now, try The Romeo Error by Lyall Watson (Hodder & Stoughton. 3.75lbs. Hard back).

The music that began with Lorca (re: Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet, dead, murdered), and exploded into Starsailor, is disfigured, shapeless, asymmetrical, distorted music.

Buckled steel, charred remains.

Landscape in horror, a brave new music.

A genre to itself.

Rock vocals have never stretched so far. Tim Buckley, vagrant in the void, has a new career set up. He is perfect for the job.

To sit on the roof of a Trans-Galactic Police Ship and make noises, turning around and around, flashing on and off.

Starsailor, multioctave drifter in the oblivionosphere.

by
Idris Walters

Folk-rocker, acoustic poet, starsailor through a jazzed ether, and, finally, rhythm'n'grinder on a bouncing mattress. Few rock artists have followed such a chaotic course through the musical possibilities opened up by the sixties. Even few have left behind a novel ready for publication and a half-finished concept album built around Conrad's novel Outcasts Of The Islands.

There was vision in the chaos. Whatever he sang there was something in his voice, some feeling of boundaries being tested or broken down. And whatever the style of music, his and Larry Beckett's lyrics pursued the grail they shared, right through from the bitter idealism of Goodbye And Hello to the sex-centered acrobatics of the last three albums.

The grail concerned the gaping whole left between physical and mental realities, by everything from science's assault on religion to the sixties' own particular demolition job on Hollywood romance. Somewhere in that hole was a notion of sensuality that could tie together mind and body, sex and love; that offered more for music than the one-sided offerings of West Coast stone a-sexuality or an orgy of heavy metal repressed sexual aggression.

Way back in 1967 Buckley was writing:

Once I was a soldier
And I fought on foreign sands for you
Once I was a hunter
And I brought home fresh meat for you

Society has moved on from such direct relationships.

But all the advances made since then have cut into the domain of sensual contact, until all that is left is an isolated caricature -- two people in a bedroom. Buckley's music gravitated towards sex because it was the last remaining place where seventies humanity could find, sometimes, their minds and bodies moving together as one. The last place where thoughts had some emotional power.

Making Love to you darling
Was like the tide clawing at the shore
And when I dream about you darling
Lord, I long to be the sand

In "Sweet Surrender" you're in the room with the two of them trying to work it out. The guitar bubbles and the strings rumble along through the vicious circles, and then somehow Buckley's voice soars out like some giant bird taking wing into the wide blue yonder. At one point he does a cascading wail that could be pain and could be laughter, and is doubtless both. There's reality for you.

It's no coincidence that his music drew on the whole range of American musics. Traces of folk and jazz in a rock-soul setting. Rhythms straight out of any soul catalogue; even with the soul chorus floating along above. Yet Joe Falsia's guitar work, on a song like "Make It Right," was pure California, cutting blue-ocean lines across a tenement cauldron.

A lot of rock since the dream OD'd on ideology has scurried back to the shelter of its roots in the maternity homes of American music. What made Tim Buckley, and the obvious parallel -- Gram Parsons, so special, was that they brought their roots into a seventies sensibility, rather than taking their sensibilities back through the fifties and beyond. An album like Grievous Angel transcended both country and rock. It possessed an awareness of the past and its sustaining power, yet still looked to the future with an awareness of what the rise and fall of rock culture has implied for us all. Buckley has done likewise. A song like "I Know I'd Recognise Your Face," the perfect soul duet on Sefronia, while a match for any hot hundred smash in the obvious ways, possessed something more -- a seventies sensibility, an overt consciousness of the situation in which it was being made. In the last albums, Buckley, a child of the sixties if ever there was one, was reaching for a seventies version of that blend that made sixties music so powerful -- accessibility, musical invention around simple melodic and rhythmic structures, and a consciousness that came from both the head and the heart.

What Buckley and Parsons might have achieved serves as an inspiration to any continuing relevance music might have in the darkness outside the discos. Two masters of excess, talent skating down a high wire, not getting enough applause. If Gram Parsons's death seems in retrospect sadly inevitable, the shock of Tim Buckley's is a testament to the vibrancy of his music. The voice, the rhythms, the words ... they all seemed so incredibly alive. A sense of exploration, of motion, of new possibilities. Music you can touch and see and hear and smell. It's hard to believe he'll never sing again.

by
Dave Downing

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