Pure,
Sweet, Kinky Honeyman This
album, recorded before a small studio audience in November 1973, proves once and
for all that latter-period live Buckley was, if anything, the best Buckley,
as he ranges - with his head still in the stars but his feet firmly fixed in the
mud - through material both early and late with equal amounts of aplomb, perhaps
in his finest voice ever.The
album opens with a long-time Buckley fave, the elegant ballad Dolphins,
a Fred Neil composition which was featured on his then-current album Sefronia,
but had in fact been in his live repertoire for years (an earlier version appears
on 1990's double-live album, Dream Letter: Live In London 1968) A
sweeping, elegiac number which revolves around the line "this old world will
never change," this version is no great departure from the previous ones,
but it does prove once again that Buckley could have ruled the world as a Sinatra-esque
balladeer if he had ever deigned to do so. If anything, the yearning romanticism
of a number like Dolphins - and the following number, Buzzin' Fly
(from Happy/Sad) - becomes more resonant in the company of some of the
scorching funk-rockers to come: Buckley had simply widened his artistic scope,
and could now encompass light, darkness and all shades in-between in his work. "No
doubt the continuing fact of his obscurity wouldn't surprise Tim Buckley, who
it seems was not only miles ahead of his time, but of ours as well..."
| As
Buckley makes his way through the initial older material here, however, you can
literally hear The Honeyman itching to get loose, this being evident in some of
the hyper vocal inflections and asides which only appeared during the late phase
of his career. Thus, there is literally an explosion of energy as the band (with
an especially smoking Joe Falsia, who joined the band around the time of Greetings
From L.A., replacing longtime Buckley cohort Lee Underwood on lead guitar)
finally head into the incredible Get On Top from Greetings. Punkish
in intensity, and lyrically direct ("Like a bitch dog in heat honey / we
had those bed springs a-squeakin' all night long") The Honeyman immediately
hits his stride here, scatting and yodeling up, down and around the musical scale,
and you can only sit open-mouthed as the band crash on through to the next song,
Devil Eyes, (also from Greetings), and proceed to cut the studio
version to ribbons, Falsia sharply redefining the song's main riff as a thermonuclear
James Brown tribute hovering on the verge of meltdown. Buckley
responds feverishly to the band's challenge, finally taking things down low over
the funky backbeat supplied by Buddy Helm: "I said woman, roll those black
silk stockings down . . . I want to lick those stretch marks honey . . . I got
to talk in tongues, now." And then he does. This is truly delirious music
in every sense of the word. After
the climax of Devil Eyes, things come back down to earth gorgeously with
the afterglow provided by another older number, Pleasant Street, from Goodbye
& Hello. This version beautifully transforms the spacey psych-pop of the
original into a more languid r&b ballad, courtesy of some ace soloing by Falsia
and some added rhythmic juice from the rest of the band. What once seemed a romantic
plea for a kind of hippy utopia now seems far darker, much closer to the junkie's
longing for drug-induced oblivion: "Lord, I can't hesitate / and I can't
wait, for Pleasant Street . . . I love my little Pleasant Street" wails Buckley
desperately. Then
it's off to his downright oily cover of the Jaynettes (an early 60s "girl-group"
a la the Ronnettes) Sally Go Round The Roses, The Honeyman persona back
in full force with a spoken word intro to a song first heard "way back when
you were sniffin' amyl nitrate and sniffin' glue / and climbin' all over that
little girl in the back of your daddy's car / you had one foot in the glove compartment
/ and the other toe was tryin' to change the dial on the radio." Perversely,
The Honeyman shifts the original's innocent lyrical intent to a much kinkier situation,
as he moans that "the saddest thing in the whole wide world / is to find
your baby's been layin' with another girl," before finally resolving to go
downtown and "drink myself blind / because "it's been a long time since
I've had my way . . . I wanna do that drunken belly roll." Perhaps only Lou
Reed's mid-'70s work was ever as emotionally frank as this. Of
the three remaining songs, only the next, Stone In Love (from Sefronia),
prevents Honeyman from being an all-out classic, as it is a fairly pedestrian
(if only by Buckley's standards) funk workout, which, while far from hard on the
ears, is just too easy to ignore, with only an inspired solo by Falsia elevating
things above the merely ordinary. Things
rise back to their usual majestic level, however, on the following title track
(also from Sefronia), Buckley now in full-on white-bluesman mode, taking
his latest persona to the limit: "You can't hold out against a boy / who
is whiskey-faced / and honey slow, alright" he warns the object of his affections.
Again, Falsia, who emerges as the unsung hero here, drives the proceedings to
a higher level with some funkified wah-wah guitar, as Buckley turns in a truly
unhinged segment of blues scatting that truly sounds like the aural emissions
of a man possessed. If
the blues idiom - especially that odd sub-genre known as "white-boy"
blues -has often been guilty of producing uninspired, assembly-line product, Buckley's
performance here once again proves that the form itself is always alive with inherent
possibilities, merely waiting for someone worthy to come and exploit them. The
performance here is pure voodoo, and never mind the "white-boy" tag:
this kind of magic is color-blind. Thematically,
Sweet Surrender provides no false resolution, but only the finally liberating
knowledge of true human motivation: "But now you're gonna go out and get
yourself a reputation" Buckley acknowledges, "But I'm gonna have to
show you where to start / And then you're gonna bring back your little reputation
/ And prove to me what I could not prove to you." The album thus ends on
the highest of its many high notes. Honeyman,
no doubt, won't end up on the Top 10 of '95 lists of many rock critics, dominated
as those usually are by trend-of-the- moment nonentities usually forgotten by
the time of the following year's poll, or by "living legends" usually
far past their prime. No doubt the continuing fact of his obscurity wouldn't surprise
Tim Buckley, who it seems was not only miles ahead of his time, but of ours as
well. Nonetheless, this entry, alone among those released in 95, is in a league
by itself, as everything Buckley did was. And
for those rare but enlightened Buckley fans who have by now memorized every single
lick of Greetings From L.A., Honeyman is surely a dream come true. Far
more than just some thoroughbred cult stud who produced a talented colt, Tim Buckley,
as this album proves, was one of the greatest performers of popular music of any
genre to yet appear on the face of Planet Earth. Last
but certainly not least comes Greetings From L.A.'s Sweet Surrender,
which gets my vote for the best Buckley composition of all time. Lyrically a frank
tale dealing with the confessions of a male adulterer to his partner ("Well
you wanna know the reason / Why I cheated on you / Well I had to be a hunter again
/ This little man had to try /to make love feel new again"), Buckley's impassioned
vocal turn takes this song to new heights, eclipsing even the sterling studio
version. This
is hallowed soul music, the sacred and the profane yoked together, a music whose
power is only equalled in Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, maybe the greatest
record ever made by anybody, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, one of its
main rivals. Falsia once again slightly restructures the song's main riff, until
what we have in tone is the companion piece to Gaye's Inner City Blues:
sublime, sanctified R&B. Johnny
Walker (Black) has been an online reviewer for many years. He was also an
intermediate curator of The Tim Buckley Archives |