The Tim Buckley Archives

Album Reviews

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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