Tim Buckley : The High FlyerMOJO Magazine: July 1995
By Martin Aston He was blessed with a beautiful face, a voice that sailed into
uncharted regions of the cosmos and a seductive charm that beguiled
everyone he encountered. And a fat lot of good it all did him. Tim Buckley was a man out of time who struggled to make his
extraordinary talents heard. This is the story of that lone ranger. "I was born a blue melody/A little song my mam sang to
me/Such a blue you're never seen" (Blue Melody) IN 1965, THE LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE CHEETAH dubbed three emerging
singer-songwriters -- Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan, and Tim Buckley
-- 'The Orange County Three'. Browne progressed towards a comfortable feted stardom which
endures to this day. Noonan vanished into the ether after one
album. And somewhere between their two paths drifter the late
Tim Buckley. Between rabid adulation and ignoble obscurity, between
legendary status and the loser's list, his is a fixed position,
like a star that shines fiercely in the night sky but in space
was extinguished eons ago. Twenty years after his death on June 29, 1975, diehard disciples
complain of the mismanagement of Tim Buckley's legacy. Here was
a man whose recordings remain extraordinary cross-pollinations
of folk-rock, folk-jazz, the avant-garde and all points in between.
They are, in the words of Lillian Roxon's famed 1969 Rock Encyclopaedia,
"easily the most beautiful music in the new music, beautifully
produced and arranged, always managing to be wildly passionate
and pure at the same time". A shame, then, that they are
still to be posthumously rewarded with a decent CD reissue campaign. "When an artist finally comes through all this mess, you
hear a pure voice," said Tim Buckley three months before
he died. "We're in the habit of emulating those voices when
they're dead." TIMOTHY CHARLES BUCKLEY III WAS BORN IN AMSTERDAM, New York
on Valentine's Day, 1947, his family uprooting westwards a decade
later to Anaheim, home of Disneyland and strip malls. He grew
up with music. Grandma dug Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, mom
adored Sinatra and Garland. Timothy Charles III himself leaned
towards the gnarled country of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams,
the lonesome sound of the singing cowboys. The kid even taught
himself to play the banjo. Larry Beckett, the Loara high school friend who added erudite
lyrics to Buckley melodies over the years, recalls how schoolboy
Tim always wanted to sing. Buckley had learnt how to use his perfect
pitch from crooners like Nat 'King' Cole and Johnny Mathis but
chose to exercise his range by screaming at buses and imitating
the sound of trumpets. His voice set sail for the edge early. Jim Fielder, Tim's other best buddy at school, recalls first
hearing the Buckley voice. "One hesitates to get flowery
but the words 'gift from God' sprung to mind," he says. "He
had an incredible range of four octaves, always in tune, with
a great vibrato he had complete control over. You don't normally
hear that stuff from a 17-year-old." Recruited by C&W combo Princess Ramona & The Cherokee
Riders, Buckley played guitar in a yellow hummingbird shirt and
turquoise hat. The Princess soon saw that Timmy's heart wasn't
in country -- his nascent love of Miles Davis and John Coltrane
testified to that -- so suggested he turn instead to the burgeoning
folk scene. Despite a intuitive gift for its melodic nuances,
'folk-rock' was a tag that would later irk him. Buckley was always
cynical about how that business worked. "You hear what they
want you to play when you're breaking into the business,"
he told Sounds in 1972, "and you show 'em what you've got." With Felder on bass and lyricist Beckett on drums they formed
two bands, the Top 40-oriented Bohemians and the more esoteric,
acoustic Harlequin 3, who would mix in poetry and freely ad-lib
from Ken Nordine's Word Jazz monologues. Buckley quickly won great notices in L.A., and the 'Orange
County Three' accolade only heightened the interest of the music
business. Mothers Of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black was impressed
enough to suggest a meeting with Herb Cohen, a manager with a
curiously dual reputation for unswerving breadheadedness and courageous
work with mavericks from Lenny Bruce and the Mothers to Captain
Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer. Instantly smitten -- "there
was no question that Tim had something unique" -- Cohen sent
a demo to Jac Holzman at Elektra, home of folk-rocking excellence. "I must have listened to it twice a day for a week,"
said Holzman. "Whenever anything was getting me down, I'd
run for Buckley. He was exactly the kind of artist with whom we
wanted to grow -- young and in the process of developing, extraordinarily
gifted and so untyped that there existed no formula or pattern
to which anyone would be committed." Buckley in turn told Zigzag that he respected Holzman because
he believed Jac only signed multi-talented acts who made each
album an individual statement. Yet Buckley's self-titled debut
album (1966) was also his most generic. "I was only 19,"
Buckley later recalled in Changes magazine, "and going into
the studio was like Disneyland. I'd do anything anybody said."
The beat-guitar chime of Lee Underwood and the songs' baroque
dressings were blood-related to The Byrds, par for the folk-rock
course. "Naive, stiff, quaky and innocent, but a ticket into
the marketplace," was Underwood's verdict. But you can discern
what Cohen and Holzman had so clearly appraised : above all, that
soaring counter-tenor voice and remarkable melodic gift. The followup, Goodbye & Hello (1967), was tainted less
by convention than by overambition. Producer Jerry Yester probably
saw the chance to drape Buckley's ravishing voice in all the soft-rock
flourishes at his disposal, while Beckett's convoluted wordplay
was just the wrong side of pretentious. Buckley had radically
outgrown the first album's high-school origins, his vice now adopting
the languid resonances of his Greenwich Village folk idol Fred
Neil on the aching ballads Once I Was and Morning Glory. "Me and Tim hung around in Greenwich Village during the
1960s," recalls the reclusive songsmith of Everybody's Talkin'
and Dolphins. "Tim was completely immersed in the music 24
hours a day. He ate, drank and breathed music. I would not be
at all surprised to learn that Tim worked on chord progressions
and melody lines in his dreams, he was that committed to the art
form. In the Neil vein, Buckley's bristling I Never Asked to To Be
Your Mountain is a six-minute epistle to his already estranged
wife Mary Guibert and son Jeffrey Scott (better known now as Jeff
Buckley). "The marriage was a disaster," says Jim Fielder.
"Mary was full of life and talent, a classical pianist and
Tim's equal. But the pregnancy made it go sour, as neither of
them was ready for it. To Tim it was draining his creative force,
and Mary wasn't willing to take the chance on his career, putting
it to him like, Settle down and raise a baby or we're through.
That kind of showdown." In the climax to I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, Buckley
yelped, pleaded, even shrieked "Baby, pleaEEESSE!), the first
evidence of the places his pain would take him. Honesty was the
key. When Buckley and Beckett played it autobiographical -- exquisitely
vulnerable, naive yet insightful -- the results were stunning.
When they played to the gallery it sounded forced. Of the title
track's anti-Vietnam tract, Buckley said, "I just hate the
motherfucker. It's like, 'OK motherfuckers, you want a protest
song, here it is'. They were bugging the hell out of me so I figured,
just this once, and then I wouldn't have to do it again. "Talking about the war is futile," he reckoned. "What
can you say about it? You want it to end but you know it won't.
Fear is a limited subject but love isn't. I ain't talking about
sunsets 'n' trees, I'm involved with America...but the people
in America, not the politics. All I can see is the injustice." Electra's Jac Holzman, however, felt positive : a poster of
Buckley loomed large over Sunset Strip. "As we got deeper
into 1967 and Vietnam," Holzman observed, "the combined
effect of his words, his music, his passion, his persona struck
a particular resonance. To some extent he was the bright side
of people's tortured souls, and maybe of his own tortured soul.
He could express anguish that wasn't negative." Goodbye & Hello reached 171 on the Billboard chart, but
Buckley wasn't in the mood to consolidate. Instead, when Tonight
Show guest host Alan King made fun of his hair, the singer retorted,
"You know, it's really surprising, I always thought you were
a piece of cardboard." On another outing he refused to lip-synch
to Pleasant Street and walked out. WITH HINDSIGHT, UNDERWOOD TRACES Buckley's depressive tendencies
to his father who "suffered a head injury in the Second World
War, and from then on his insecurities and rage made life miserable
for Tim. He saw Tim's beauty, and called him a faggot and beat
him up. He looked at Tim's talent and said he'd never make it.
His mother didn't help : she'd tell him he'd die young because
that's what poets always did. So he grew up deeply hurt and feeling
inadequate, yet driven by this extraordinary musical talent that
possessed him." The result, Underwood ventures, "gave
Tim a deep-seated fear of success...he wanted people to love him
but, as they did, he pushed them away." "Long after his death," says Beckett, "I realised
that there were very few songs he wrote that didn't have the word
'home' in them. It seemed like he felt homeless, and nothing would
restore it. He seemed OK in high school, maybe a little wild,
but he got increasingly neurotic. He'd almost welcome a negative
comment that would reaffirm his feelings." When, in 1970, Jerry Yester's wife Judy Henske poked fun at
the line "I'm as puzzled as the oyster" in the majestic
Song To The Siren, Buckley instantly dropped the song from the
set. "He took the smallest criticism to heart," says
Larry Beckett, "so that he couldn't even perform a song which
he admitted was one of his all-time favourites!" Another incident stands out from this period. Tim's choirboy
looks and froth of curls had attracted a Love Generation-style
teenybop following. At a show at New York Philharmonic Hall, his
most prestigious to date, various objects were thrown on stage,
a red carnation among them. Buckley stooped down, picked it up
and proceeded to chew the petals and spit them out. "He was very vulnerable and emotional," says Beckett's
ex-wife Manda. "It made him terribly attractive to everybody
of both sexes. People just sort of swooned around him because
he was so sweet. I think that frightened him. He was difficult
to deal with because he was scared of his power over people. He
almost seemed to reject his audiences for loving him so much.
He wasn't mature enough to accept that kind of attention." Tim would also embroider the truth. At school he'd lie about
playing C&W cars, while Larry Beckett remembers dubious boasts
of female conquests. Buckley also claimed to have played guitar
on The Byrds' first album, which Roger McGuinn always denied.
"Tim liked to feed the legend," Beckett recalls with
a wry chuckle. "He was quite amoral -- if a lie gave a laugh
or strengthened his mystique, that was fine. But his music was
always honest." "If someone dared him to do something, he'd do it,"
recalls British bassist Danny Thompson, who accompanied Buckley
on his 1968 UK visit. "This free spirit was what most people
saw, but I also saw a bit of a loner. Unlike most people who get
into drugs, he wasn't a sad junkie figure. He was more of a naughty
boy who said, 'OK, I'll have a go, I'll drink that'." If he admired Hendrix and Hardin and Havens, Buckley frequently
railed against the rock establishment. "All people see is
velvet pants and long, blonde hair," he fumed. "A perfect
person with spangles and flowered shirts -- that's vibrations
to them." "He viewed the blues-orientated rock of the day as white
thievery and emotional sham," says Underwood. "He criticised
musicians who spent three weeks learning Clapton licks, when Mingus
had spent his whole life living his music." Retreating to his home base in Venice, LA, Buckley and Underwood
took time out to immerse themselves in the music of the East Coast
jazz titans. Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus and Ornette Coleman
all provided inspiration as rehearsals slowly metamorphosed into
jam sessions. The day before playing New York's prestigious Fillmore
East theatre, Buckley asked vibraphonist David Friedman to rehearse
for the show. Seven hours without sheet music later, a new sound
was born. With Happy/Sad (1969), Buckley began to arc away from the underground
culture that had launched him. New York photographer Joe Stevens,
a good friend of Buckley's at the time, recalls the singer's suspicious
attitude towards the forthcoming Woodstock festival. "He
said, 'Are you really going? Oh, man, it's going to be awful.'
Yet we used to hang out on a friend's farm which was like a scaled-down
Woodstock, with hippy girls walking around, weird food, drugs,
freedom and trees." Although Jerry Yester was again involved, Happy/Sad was the
polar opposite to Goodbye & Hello's crowded ambition : spacious,
supple, a sea of possibilities. The line-up was just vibraphone,
string bass, acoustic 12-string, and gently rippling electric
guitar. "The Modern Jazz Quartet of Folk," enthused
vibraphonist David Friedman. "Heart music," Buckley
offered, and Elektra used his words in the ads like a manifesto.
Happy/Sad's only real comparison is Astral Weeks, a similarly
symmetrical, fluid work that revels in its lack of boundaries
while possessing a unique tension. "The trick of writing," Buckley felt, "is to
make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. So you
feel it's all happening for the first time. So you feel it's everybody's
idea." Van Morrison, Lauro Nyro and John Martyn were also melting
the walls between rock, blues, folk and jazz; at 22, Buckley was
the youngest of the bunch. He'd also caught the jazz bug the hardest.
Yester revealed that the band resisted second takes, while Strange
Feeling was bravely anchored to the bass line of Miles Davis's
All Blues before Buckley's voice set sail, caressing and cajoling. "Being with Tim was like going out with an English professor,"
recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's tour manager at the time. "He
was very serious and almost stodgy, exactly the opposite of what
you'd think a rock star would be. He wasn't in the music business
to get laid. If one of the guys in the band came up and mentioned
women, 13 of them would run out of the room, except for Tim who
just sat there, guitar in hand, almost like he was teaching himself
the songs again even though he'd played these songs 200 times,
because he wanted the show to be as musically performed as possible.
I saw incredible shows that he got depressed about, and wouldn't
talk to anyone afterwards -- he was very Zappa-like in that demanding
way, but he was one of the sanest people on that level that I
worked with." As its very title acknowledged, despite Happy/Sad's sun-splashed
backdrop, musical invention and lyrical joie de vivre, its mood
was acutely introspective. Critic Simon Reynolds has described
it as "a poignant premonition of loss, of an inevitable autumn..." Lyrics had clearly shifted to a secondary, supportive role.
Larry Beckett says he was politely informed that the singer would
pen the lyrics alone. "He was moving toward a jazz sound,
so to have wild poetry all over the map, you'd miss the jazz.
But it was my feeling too that Tim felt his success was due to
my lyrics rather than his music, so he wanted to see how well
he'd do alone. He tended to believe the worst about himself..." 'It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye &
Hello, because most of the bases were touched," Buckley admitted.
"That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs.
Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it
isn't easy because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac [Holzman]
had set it up you were supposed to move artistically, but the
way the business is you're not. You're supposed to repeat what
you do, so there's a dichotomy there. People like a certain type
of thing at a certain time, and it's very hard to progress." In another interview Tim said, "I can see where I'm heading,
and it will probably be further and further from what people expected
of me." "He was very friendly and open to ideas, not a prima donna
or a hypocrite," recalls John Balkin, who played bass with
Buckley in 1969-70. There was no drugs, sex and rock'n'roll in
relation to him as an artist, not like Joplin and Hendrix, getting
stoned before and during a gig. He felt stifled and frustrated
by the boundaries that be, trying to stretch as an artist but
making a living too. I remember Herbie Cohen saying, "Go
drive a truck then'..." PROGRESSION WAS NOW BUCKLEY'S WATCH-word. Dream Letter, recorded
in 1968 at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, was already more diffuse
than Happy/Sad, lacking the pulse of Carter CC Collins's congas.
The budget couldn't afford him or bassist John Miller, so Pentangle's
Danny Thompson was drafted in to play an intuitively supportive
-- and barely rehearsed -- role. "I got a call asking me to turn up and rehearse everything
at once," recalls Thompson. "He refused to get into
a routine of singing 'the song'. We did a TV show, and when it
came to doing it live Tim said, 'Let's do another song', which
we'd never rehearsed. It was two minutes longer than out time
slot, and the producer was putting his finger across his throat,
and Tim looked at him with a puzzled expression and carried on,
like art and music was far more important than any of this rubbish
that surrounds it. He was fearless." Clive Selwood, who ran the UK branch of Elektra records, recalls
the same episode : "Tim had got a slot on the Julie Felix
Show on BBC. He turned up to rehearsals with Danny Thompson an
hour late; he shuffled in, nodded when introduced to the producer,
unsheathed his guitar, and they launched into an extemporisation
of one of his songs that lasted over an hour. The producer and
Feliz watched open-mouthed, not daring to interrupt. The most
exhaustingly magical performance I have ever witnessed -- and
all to an audience of three. When it was done, Tim slapped his
guitar in the case, said 'OK?' to the producer, and departed." A year later, after a heady bout of touring, including the
Fillmore East's opening night alongside BB King, Buckley's muse
was flying high. In 1968 he'd sounded enraptured, a wayward choirboy
testing the limits of a new-found sound, but the voice of 1969
scatted and scorched, twisting and ascending like a wreath of
smoke. The music mixed blues, jazz and ballads, throwing in calypso,
even cooking on the verge of funk. A key Buckley moment arrived
at the climax of a simmering 14-minute Gypsy Woman (from happy/Sad),
when he yelled, "Oh, cast a spell on Timmy!", like an
exorcism in reverse. Few singers craved possession so hungrily. A little-known artifact from this period is his soundtrack
music for the film Changes, directed by Hall Barlett who later
went on to helm Jonathon Livingston Seagull. A live set from the
Troubadour, finally released two years ago, previewed material
that surfaced on Lorca (1970). The album was named after the murdered
Spanish poet, whose simultaneous violent and tender poetics Buckley
was vocally mirroring. On the song Lorca itself, and on Anonymous
Propostion and Driftin', Buckley floats and stings over a languid
blue-note haze -- crooning and stretching half-tones over shapeless
stanzas. "We never had any music to read from," bassist John
Balkin remembers. "We just noodled through and went for it,
just finding the right note or coming off a note and making it
right," Buckley regarded the title track as "my identity
as a unique singer, as an original voice". The timing wasn't great. Now tuning into such mellow songsmiths
as James Taylor, the Love Generation was in no mood to follow
in Buckley's wayward footsteps, any more than Buckley had kowtowed
to Elektra's craving for old-style troubadour charm. As Holzman
says, "he was making music for himself at that point...which
is fine, except for the problem of finding enough people to listen
to it." "An artist has a responsibility to know what's gone down
and what's going on in his field, not to copy but to be aware,"
the creator responded. "Only that way can he strengthen his
own perception and ability." Around this time Holzman was poised to sell Elektra, which
upset Buckley. Although major label offers were on the table --
"a lot of bread, which makes me feel really good" --
he decided that money wasn't the issue : "That's not where
I'm at. I can live on a low budget." After some deliberation
he signed to Straight, a Warners-distributed label formed by Herb
Cohen and Frank Zappa. "It would be better for me to stay
with one man who had taken care of me," he said. "No
matter what anyone thinks of Herbie, he's a great dude."
But he capitulated to Cohen's demand to record a more accessible
record : aptly named, Blue Afternoon (1969) is a collection of
narcotic folk-torch ballads. "Tim always wrote about love and suffering in all their
manifestations," says Lee Underwood. "He felt that underneath
love was fear, fear of love and success and attention and responsibility."
In the album's centrepiece, Blue Melody, Buckley keens : "There
ain't no wealth that can buy my pride/There ain't no pain that
can cleanse my soul/No, just a blue melody/Sailing far away from
me." In So Lonely, he confessed that "Nobody comes around
here no more". In press material for the album, Buckley said
the songs had been written for Marlene Dietrich. Blue Afternoon beat Lorca to the shops by a month. With two
albums vying for attention, his already diminished sales potential
was halved. (Lorca didn't even chart). Buckley, never commercially-minded,
was still looking forward. "When I did Blue Afternoon, I
had just about finished writing set songs," he told Zigzag.
"I had to stretch out a little bit...the next album is mostly
dealing in time signatures." Has any troubadour ever stretched out quite as Buckley did
on 1970's Starsailor? Buckley's third album in a year, in the
words of bassist John Balkin, was ""a whole different
genre". Balkin, who ran a free improvisation group with Buzz
and Buck Gardner of the Mothers, had introduced Buckley to opera
singer Cathy Berberian's interpretations of songs by Luciano Berio,
inspiring the ever-restless Buckley to new heights. Over throbbing
rhythms and atonal dynamics, the Gardners' blowing was matched
by Buckley's gymnastic yodels and screams : one moment he sounded
like an autistic child, the next like Tarzan. Everything peaked
on the title song, with its 16 tracks of vocal overdubs. Larry
Beckett, recalled to add impressionistic poetry to expressionistic
music, also had a field day : to wit, the likes of "Behold
the healing festival/complete for an instant/the dance figure
pure constellation." Indeed. "For the Starsailor track itself," recalls Balkin,
"we wanted things like Timmy's voice moving and circling
the room, coming over the top like a horn section, like another
instrument, not like five separate voices. His range was incredible.
He could get down with the bass part and be up again in a split
second." Fiercely beautiful, Starsailor is a unique masterpiece. Aside
from Song To The Siren, the album was the epitome of uneasy listening.
"Sometimes you're writing and you know that you're not going
to fit," Buckley responded. "But you do it because it's
your heart and soul and you gotta say it. When you play a chord,
you're dating yourself...the fewer chords you play, the less likely
you are to get conditioned, and the more you can reveal of what
you are." If Starsailor came close to Coltrane's 'sheets of sound', it
was hard not to see it as commercial suicide. Attempts to reproduce
Starsailor live didn't help. "The shows Tim booked himself
after Starsailor were total free improvisation, vocal gymnastics
time," recalls Balkin. "i can still see him onstage,
his head down, snoring. There was one episode of barking at the
audience too. After one show, Frank Zappa said we sounded good,
and he wasn't one who easily handed out compliments." "BUCKLEY YODELLING BAFFLES AUDIENCE," RAN a Rolling
Stone headline. As Herb Cohen says today, "he was changing
to drastically, playing material that audiences weren't necessarily
coming to hear and that was beyond the realm of their capability"
... "An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about
anything, but people are really geared to something coming out
of the mouth being words," a resentful Buckley said in a
subsequent press release. "I use my voice as an instrument
when I'm performing live. The most shocking thing I've ever seen
people come up against, beside a performer taking off his clothes,
is dealing with someone who doesn't sing words. If I had my way,
words wouldn't mean a thing." Buckley was driven into deep depression by Starsailor's failure.
Straight wouldn't provide tour support, the old band had fragmented
because there was so little work for them, and Buckley was reduced
to booking his own shows in small clubs. At last he shared the
bitter, neglected status of his jazz idols. Underwood confirms
that in order to take that sting away, Buckley dabbled in barbituates
and heroin. When Buckley prefaced I Don't Need It To Rain on the
Troubadour album by saying, "This one's called Give Smack
A Chance", it was a dangerous joke. "He was mocking
the peace movement, the whole Beatles mentality of the day,"
says Underwood. At least his personal life had improved. He'd re-married, bought
a house in upmarket Laguna Beach (subsequently painted black to
outrage the neighbours), and effectively gone to ground. "I'd
been going strong since 1966 and really needed a rest," was
Buckley's explanation. "I hadn't caught up with any living."
He also inherited his wife Judy's seven-year-old son Taylor. Judy doesn't recall any drug abuse. Nor does she remember Tim
driving a cab, chaffeuring Sly Stone or studying ethnomusicology
at UCLA, as the singer often claimed at the time. Instead, she
recalls Tim reading voraciously, catching up with his favourite
Latin American writers at the UCLA library, and channelling his
creative urges into acting. The unreleased 1971 cult film Why? starring OJ Simpson was
shot during this period. "It was their first film but both
Tim and OJ were incredible actors. The camera loved them,"
remembers co-star Linda Gillen. "Tim had this James Dean
quality. He's so handsome in the movie and yet such a mess! You
know those Brat Pack kind of films, where people play prefabricated
rebels who see themselves as kinda bad but they have a PR taking
care of business? Well, Tim was the real deal. He didn't give
a fuck how he looked or dressed. He had no hidden agenda. He had
an incredible naivety. "We used to improvise in the film. Tim's character talks
to the effect that you can't commit suicide. You can't amend your
feelings for other people; you have to find that thing that's
good in you and keep that alive. A lot of the group had been onto
my character about taking heroin but Tim would always be the sympathetic
one. But that was Tim. He'd understand where they were coming
from, why they would do what they did. "On the set, I used to hum to myself to fight off boredom
and Tim would pick up on what I was humming, like Miss Otis Regrets,
and we'd end up harmonising together," she continues. "I
loved Fred Neil, and asked if he knew Dolphins, which he sung
for me. He'd say, 'They got to Fred Neil, don't let it happen
to you'. He'd talk in this strange, paranoid, ominous way, about
'the man'. That night, we went to buy Fred's album and bypassed
Tim's on the was! He never hustled his records to me; he wasn't
a self-promoter. "I wondered why Tim was working on this schleppy movie,
because I knew people like Roger McGuinn who were making millions,
and he said, very silently, 'I need the money'. We were only earning
$420 a week on the film, and I said, Is that all the money you
have right now? and he said, 'No, I'm getting a song covered,'
which I think was Gypsy Woman which Neil Diamond was going to
do." Meanwhile, the comedic plot of his unfilmed screenplay Fully
Air-Conditioned Inside was based on a struggling musician who
blows up an audience called for old songs and makes his escape
tucked beneath the wings of a vulture, singing My Way... WHEN AN ALBUM FINALLY EMERGED IN 1972, Buckley had once again
avoided covering familiar ground. Greetings From LA was a seriously
funky amalgam of rock and soul. His youthful verve might have
gone, but his wondrous holler whipped things along. "After
Starsailor, I decided the way to come back was to be funkier than
everybody," he boasted. But would radio stations play a record
as shocking lyrically as Starsailor had been musically? Judy was the new muse ("An exceptionally beautiful woman,
provacative and witty too," says Underwood) and the album
was drenched in lust. In a year when David Bowie made sex a refrigeratedly
alien concept, Buckley wrote a set of linked songs in a sultry
New Orleans populated by a constellation of pimps, whores and
hustlers. "I went down to the meat rack tavern," was
the album's opening line; and it closed on, "I'm looking
for a street corner girl/And she's gonna beat me, whip me, spank
me, make it all right again..." Buckley explained his reasoning to Chrissie Hynde when she
interviewed him for the NME in 1974. "I realised all the
sex idols in rock weren't saying anything sexy -- no Jagger or
[Jim] Morrison. Nor had I learned anything sexually from a rock
song. So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious." Producer Hal Whillner, who subsequently organised the Tribute
To Tim Buckley show at St. Anne's Church, Brooklyn, remembers
the singer at this time. "I saw Buckley live four times,
including two of the best performances I've ever seen. He was
everything someone could look for in music, totally transcendent.
The first time took 100 per cent of my attention, like taking
some sort of pill. You'd expect it from guys like Pharoah Sanders
and Sun Ra, but that's a very rare feeling to get in rock. Another
time he opened for Zappa in his Grand Wazoo period, and the audience
was incredibly rude to him, booing and heckling. But he handled
it beautifully, just carrying on, talking sarcastically, trying
to get them to blow hot smoke on the stage. He was genius in every
sense. He should be seen on the same level as Edith Piaf and Miles
Davis." "Rock'n'roll was meant to be body music," Buckley
stated in Downbeat magazine. But diehard fans wanted to know why
he was know singing rock'n'roll. "his last albums were dictated
somewhat by business considerations," says Lee Underwood,
"but few understood they were also dictacted by major music
considerations. Where else could he go after Starsailor's intellectual
heights except to its opposite, to white funk dance music, rooted
in sexuality? At least Tim's R&B was honest, unlike the over-rehearsed
stuff that pretends to be spontaneous. Greetings is still one
of he best rock'n'roll albums ever to come down the pike. Throughout
his career, he constantly asked and answered a question that can
be terrifying, which is, Where do I go from here? People criticised
him during Lorca and Starsailor and wanted him to play rock/n/roll,
but when he did they said he sold out." True compromise was far more detectable on 1974's album Sefronia,
released by Cohen and Zappa's new DiscReet label under the Warner
Brothers umbrella. "Everyone was second guessing where he
should go next," says his old friend Donna Young, "and
Tim started listening to what other people thought." Some new-found literary acumen was displayed on the title track,
a ballad as lush as the album's reading of Fred Neil's Dolphins.
But five of the songs were covers, including the sappy MOR duet
I Know I'd Recognise Your Face, while pale retreads of Greetings'
honeyed funk served as filler. Guitarist Joe Fasia was now in
the Tonto role, Underwood having stepped down to deal with his
drug addiction. Herbie Cohen was obviously calling the shots.
"Some of those songs were beautiful but you have to get through
Herb's idea of what is commercial," says Underwood. As commercial compromises go, Sefronia was terrific -- radio-friendly
and lyrically approachable -- but Buckley knew the score. "If
I write too much music, it loses, as happened on Sefronia. Y'know,
it gets stale." In reference to the folk-rock era, he observed
that "the comradeship is just not there any more, and it
affects the music." His boisterous barrelhouse sound was
showcased at 1974's Knebworth Festival in Britain, where Buckley
opened a bill that included Van Morrison, The Doobie Brothers
and The Allman Brothers Band. It was his first UK show since 1968,
and few knew who he was. Photographer Joe Stevens reacquainted himself with Tim at a
DiscReet launch in London : "He was sitting at a table signing
autographs, which I couldn't have imagined him doing before. When
he saw me he said, 'Come on, let's get out of here,' before they'd
even said, 'Ladies'n'gentlemen, Tim Buckley!' We hit the street,
took some photos, then took a taxi back to my place. He spent
two days curled around my TV set, cooing at my girlfriend. We
got calls from Warners accusing me of kidnapping their artist!
You could see what had happened to him. The youth had gone out
of his face, and his smile would break into a frown as soon as
it had finished." Look At The Fool (1975), with its frazzled, Tijuana-soul feel,
was purer Buckley again, but the songwriting meandered badly --
Wandu Lu remains one of the most ignominious final songs of any
brilliant career. "It just seemed that the more down he became,
the more desperate he sounded," his sister Kathleen told
Musician magazine. "The work of a man desperately trying
to connect with an audience that has deserted him," pronounced
Melody Maker. The photo on the back cover caught Buckley with
a quizzical, defeated expression. Look at the fool, indeed. Honest
to the end. In 1974, Buckley wrote to Lee Underwood : "You are what
you are, you know what you are, and there are no words for loneliness
-- black, bitter, aching loneliness that gnaws the roots of silence
in the night..." "Tim felt he'd given everything to no avail," says
Underwood. "He was even suicidal for a short while because
he felt there was no place left to go, emotionally speaking. He
was gaining new audiences and improving his singing within conventional
song forms, but comments that he'd sold out made him feel terrible.
He never understood his fear of success, and remained divided
and tormented to the end. I urged him to take therapy shortly
before his death, when he was feeling very bitter, to the point
of suicide, but he said, 'Lose the anger, lose the music'." "We saw a lot of him over the years as disillusionment
set in," said Clive Selwood, who, inspired by Buckley's session
for BBC's John Peel Show, later founded the Strange Fruit label
and its Peel Sessions. "When we first met, he spent his leisure
time cycling across Venice Beach, guzzling a six-pack. When we
last met, he was carrying a gun, in fear of the reactionary side
of American life, who despised his long hair. He said, 'If you're
carrying a gun, you stand a chance'." "He continually took chances with his life," adds
Larry Beckett. "He'd drive like a maniac, risking accidents.
For a couple of years he drank a lot and took downers to the point
where it nearly killed him, but he'd always escape. Then he got
into this romantic heroin-taking thing. Then his luck ran out."
Buckley's most revered idols were Fred Neil -- who chose anonymity
rather than exploit the success of Everybody's Talkin' -- and
Miles Davis, both icons and both junkies. "he lived on the
edge, creatively and psychologically," says Lee Underwood.
"He treated drugs as tools, to feel or think things through
in more intense ways. To explore." One planned exploration was a musical adaptation of Joseph
Conrad's novel Out Of The Islands and a screenplay of Thomas Wolfe's
You Can't Go Home Again. Of more immediate consequence, Buckley
had won the part of Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's film Bound For
Glory. The consciousness as well as financial independence, but
in the end it went instead to David Carradine. Buckley was still up for playing live. After a short tour culminating
in a sold-out show at an 1,800-capacity venue in Dallas, the band
partied on the way home, as was customary. An inebriated Tim proceeded
to his good friend Richard Keeling's house in order to score some
heroin. As Underwood tells it, Keeling, in flagrante delicto and unwilling
to be disturbed, argued with Buckley : "Finally, in frustration,
Richard put a quantity of heroin on a mirror and thrust it at
Tim, saying, 'Go ahead, take it all', like a challenge. As was
his way, Tim sniffed the lot. Whenever he was threatened or told
what to do, he rebelled." Staggering and lurching around the house, Buckley had to be
taken home, where Judy Buckley laid him on the floor with a pillow.
She then put him to bed, thinking he would recover; when she checked
later, he'd turned an ominous shade of blue. The parademics were
called but it was too late. Tim Buckley was dead. "I remember Herb saying Tim had died, and we all sat there,"
recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's old tour manager. "It wasn't
expected but it was like watching a move, and that was its natural
ending." "It was painful to listen to his records after he died,"
says Linda Gillen. "I remember how vibrant he was. He had
that same lost alienation as friends who had committed suicide.
He was smart, wonderful, mean, nasty, kind, racist, and a loyal
friend, all kinds of contradictions. A true original." "When he died, I took a week off," remembers Joe
Stevens. "He was special -- an innocent in an animal machine." IN 1983, IVO WATTS-RUSSELL of the 4AD label had the inspired
notion to marry the vaporous drama of the Cocteau Twins to Buckley's
Song To The Siren. Punk's Stalinist purge was over, and the result
was a haunting highlight of post-New Wave rock, launching both
This Mortal Coil and Buckley's posthumous reputation. Before he died, Buckley had been planning a live LP spanning
the various phases of his career. Sixteen years later Dream Letter
was released to great acclaim. "Nobody would have listened
before," reckons Herb Cohen. "Things have their own
cycle, usually close to 20 years. You have to wait." He knowingly compromised his fierce artistic ideals, but his
gut feeling was that he'd get more freedom later," says Larry
Beckett. "If he'd gone into hiding for 10 years, no end of
labels would have recorded anything he wanted. Things do come
around." "He was one of the great ballad singers of all time, up
there with Mathis and Sinatra," believes Lee Underwood. "He
would have pulled out of his youthful confusion, expanded his
musical scope to include great popular and jazz songs. Tim Buckley
didn't say, 'I am this, I am that'. He said, 'I am all of these
things'." |