Rhino -- Tim Buckley

Time is brutal in its capacity to erase people. So many gifted artists approach the edge of immortality, only to miss the mark and disappear. Take Tim Buckley, for instance. You probably didn't know this, but during the 1960s Buckley was a contender for the New Bob Dylan crown. It was a crown he had no interest in wearing, however, and if you'd given it to him he would've stomped on it. Buckley's considerable talent was matched by a compulsion to alienate anyone in a position to help his music find a wider audience, and that tendency, paired with his early death at the age 28 from an accidental overdose, has relegated his work to the margins of music history.

That's a shame because Buckley made some extraordinary music prior to his death in 1975. Central to all of Buckley's work was his startlingly wide vocal range, which was marked by a rich falsetto and a fearlessness in terms of what he was willing to attempt with his voice. That voice caused quite a stir when people first heard it on Buckley's self-titled debut album of 1966, a lavishly produced collection of slightly morose folk songs that was released to considerable fanfare. Buckley's label (Elektra) was grooming him to be a user-friendly singer-songwriter along the lines of Jackson Browne; apparently they'd failed to notice that every note he sang, from the very beginning of his career to the end, was ethereal, haunted and freighted with profound sadness. Some people are built to spill and Tim Buckley was one of them.

Buckley's second album, Goodbye And Hello, included what's possibly his best known song, "Morning Glory." Blood Sweat & Tears included a cover of this ineffably lovely song on their brilliant debut album, Child Is The Father To The Man, which was released in 1967 and introduced a lot of people to Buckley as a writer. (I know it's hard to believe, but Blood Sweat & Tears were really good when they started out). Buckley's version of the tune is the definitive one, however; he infuses the song with a tone of wistfulness and regret that's inexplicably downbeat and weary for a young man of 20.

With his third record, Happy Sad, Buckley added vibes to the mix. Paired with Buckley's 12-string guitar, those vibes created a rich, filigreed sound that's nothing short of perfection on tunes like "Buzzin' Fly," one of the most light-hearted love songs he ever wrote. More often, however, the lyrical beauty of the instrumentation operated in counterpoint to the increasingly gloomy lyrics he was writing. This combination of opposites reached a crescendo on Blue Afternoon, which is arguably Buckley's bleakest album, and certainly his most magnificent. You could summarize it as his "sadder but wiser record," and it has a broken beauty evocative of the patron saint of doomed musicians, Nick Drake. It's a frightening record—you get the sense that Buckley was gazing at his own demise as he sang such songs as "Chase The Blues Away" and "Blue Melody." I can remember being in the eighth grade and hearing my older sister's copy of Blue Afternoon floating through the house; it was as if a bird with a broken wing was trapped in a distant room.

Buckley had a nice little singer-songwriter career laid out for him following the release of his first record, but he was incapable of doing things the easy way and insisted on following his muse to freeform jazz. Within months of releasing Blue Afternoon he unveiled another record, Lorca, which was an expression of his infatuation with the Spanish poet, and his determination to develop himself as a jazz artist. Reviews of the record evoked comparisons to Coltrane, which must have pleased Buckley, but Lorca was a commercial disaster.

Lorca's failure seemed to make Buckley even more hell-bent on turning his back on the kind of music that had won him an audience at the beginning of his career. With the release of his sixth album, Starsailor, out in 1970, you can hear songs dissolving into jams and his career as a commercial artist evaporating completely. His vocals grew increasingly experimental—he seems to be channeling Yoko Ono on the song "Monterey"—and it became more and more difficult to decipher his lyrics. The record was trashed by the critics, his fans didn't seem to get it either, and Buckley's contempt for his audience and the music industry deepened. "Now a concert consists of 13-year-olds passing coffee cans of pills around and listening to Deep Purple," he grumbled to New Musical Express.

Next was Sefronia—deemed at the time to be a sell-out record by his hardcore fans, as Buckley was supposedly making a concerted effort to stay in the recording industry by making a more accessible album. Needless to say, Buckley's idea of accessible was a far cry from what the marketplace demanded. The record was released and championed by none other than Frank Zappa, co-owner of Buckley's label, DiscReet, and you know that if Zappa was into it, it was not a conventional pop record.

Buckley's last studio album, Look At The Fool, was an attempt at white-boy funk, a genre his voice was ill-suited for. It was the nadir of his recording career and an ignoble finale for a musician with Buckley's native gifts. How did things go so wrong? The answer can be found in Dream Brother, David Browne's exhaustively researched biography of Buckley, and his equally star-crossed son Jeff, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1994. Both had difficult childhoods; Tim's father was a mentally and emotionally impaired World War II vet, and the unhappy house he grew up in marked him for life. Tim, in turn, was an absentee father who had little time for his son Jeff. In light of the fact that both of them were chronically lost and clinically depressed from the start, it's amazing that they accomplished as much as they did.

At its best, Tim Buckley's music has a magical, sparkling mystery that's utterly unique and irresistibly beautiful. His best songs feel as though they were snatched out of the sky and are destined to dissolve like a passing cloud. It's fragile music, but it's very special too, and it deserves to be protected, preserved, and heard.

Kristine McKenna’s work as a journalist began in the late ’70s, when she covered the Los Angeles punk scene for various domestic and international publications. During the ’80s and ’90s she wrote art, film, and music criticism, and profiled directors, musicians, and visual artists for a variety of publications, including New York Rocker, Artforum, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles and is presently working on a biography of the artist Wallace Berman. She wrote the liner notes to Rhino’s expanded X releases Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under The Big Black Sun, More Fun In The New World, Ain’t Love Grand, and See How We Are. Two collections of her interviews, Book Of Changes (2001) and Talk To Her (2004), have been published by Fantagraphics. She is presently co-curating Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & his Circle, an exhibition that begins a tour of six U.S. museums in September of 2005. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by D.A.P.

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Comments:

Dear Kristine

Thank you for your nice and well-meaning piece on "The Lord Buckley" - you do however seem to overlook the fact, that we at the die-hard fan-base never really deserted him nor he us.

Here in Denmark he made it big with serious jazz-people and music critics, so he actually had a (serious though small) public for masterpieces such as Star Sailor.

I have, still, all of his records and have rebought all reissued on CD. - And I really hope that a final box will be put out, including radio-performances etc..

What you don't seem to get or want to communicate comes here: This young man sang over a minimum of 5 octaves and a lot of 'singers' in pop music must have felt be-littled by this 'real' singer.

Look at other such top-pros including falsetto: R.Orbison & F.Mercury, Tiny Tim and several other real singers: died before their time!

Williamson (of the Incredible Stringband) only survieved joining the Scientologist crew & Frankie Lane - well, his alive still ... gotta a friend or two, methinks.

So, yes he turned strange (as seen from the world of pop) but he turned better and better as seen from the world of avantgarde jazz and extreme peak-performance.

But - as you state he did turn his back on the main-stream, what about this refrain that he jammed up, playing here in Denmark with our best jazz-people and as recorded by Danish Radio:

"You gotta get up late & masturbate!"

No wonder that the speaker spoke of 'the best singer around', 'the best musicians' too, and a 'very, very controversial personality.'

Thanks for keeping his memory alive. May Lord Buckley live on 4-ever.

P. A. Olsen. Denmark

Tim Buckley

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