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2009
Live
at the Folklore Center, NYC - March 6 1967
Buckley
Stripped Bare
by
David Fricke
Tim
Buckley was just twenty and a few months away from making
his second Elektra album, the baroque-pop treasure Goodbye
and Hello, when he gave the stunning raw-folk performance
- just voice and an acoustic guitar, taped with a single mike
on a machine usually reserved for field recordings - on Live
at the Folklore Center, NYC - March 6 1967 (Tompkins Square).
The
intimacy is audible; a few coughs during When Cripple Cry
are a rare break in the hypnotized silence of the audience,
three-dozen strong in a small room.
Buckley
sounds almost emboldened by the setting too, playing mostly
new songs (six of them previously unreleased) with robust
strumming and an aggressive delight in his rippled-glass cries.
A
year after this show, Buckley was deep into the liquid writing
and improvised-vocal reverie of 1968’s Happy Sad
- he never made a studio record this simple and dramatic.
A
closer parallel: the 1993 solo tapes that became his son Jeff’s
debut, Live at Sin-é.
In
both you get a Buckley on the verge, stripped bare and spellbinding
©
2009 Fricke/Rolling
Stone
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