2016

Lady, Give Me Your Key: The Unissued 1967 Solo Acoustic Sessions

by Andy Beta

A collection of stripped-down and unreleased tracks from the infamous folk singer's early days offers little clarity to his mercurial career, but these demos remain striking and emotional.

While their recorded output was inversely proportional, the earthly fates for father and son Tim and Jeff Buckley were eerily similar. Whereas Tim released nine studio albums in his lifetime before a heroin overdose at the age of 28, his son Jeff released but one studio LP before drowning in the Mississippi River at the age of 30. And after their too young deaths, their posthumous fates have also been parallel, with a plethora of live recordings and outtakes swelling both Buckleys’ legacies. Since he had less material to draw upon, Jeff's discography and cult have sadly become the definition of barrel-scraping: a 2CD set of demos, a deluxe edition of Grace, three live albums, a live DVD, another album of soundboard tapes and demos, not to mention this year’s cash-in of covers. Jeff’s aura is lit by his unfulfilled potential, while Tim’s is shaped by the cautionary arc of an artist: from young fledgling to fully-realized artist to a man broken by the end of his life.

Father Tim’s legacy continues to fly under-the-radar, in part because he recorded and released records at a clip, toured constantly, and never amassed a big fanbase. From his baroque-pop self-titled debut in 1966 through his astonishing avant-garde primal scream Starsailor in 1970 to the B&D r&b of Greetings From L.A., Buckley evolved and molted so quickly that even the most dedicated fan wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.

Part of what makes Key a lukewarm listen is its relation to one of Buckley’s heavy-handed early albums, 1967’s Goodbye and Hello, right before he matured with his expert fusion of folk and improvised jazz on 1969’s spellbinding Happy Sad. While the excellent 1999 set Works in Progress found him making leaps and bounds towards his breakthrough with every take, Key finds him still on the other side of that discovery, near the cul-de-sac of an exclusively “folk” artist. Bob Dylan was pushing at every boundary of the genre with each new album, but Buckley’s own breakthrough was still a year off.

The unreleased title track is a sly play on the dual meanings of “key,” though it might be a red flag to begin a romantic relationship with anyone stashing a kilo of a controlled substance in their home. The demos of “Knight-Errant” and “Carnival Song” will land on modern ears like Ren Faire throwbacks, the heavy crackle of the acetate making them more of historical interest than listening pleasure. “Sixface,” another one of five unreleased songs included here, features the kind of lyrics that drastically age this particular era of Buckley’s songs with gobbledygook lines like, “Your seven seas and contraband on bluebird sun.” That said, you can hear how he trashed the rest of that quickly-strummed song, kept the opening plea of “Come here woman,” and later recast it as the central howl on Starsailor’s kinked and manic opening assault just a few years on.

Some of Goodbye and Hello’s better moments are presented here in stripped-down acoustic versions, peeling away some of their studio trappings. “Once I Was” gets pared back and slowed to a crawl, the lonesome prairie harmonica line that hounded the released version nowhere to be found. The powerful “Pleasant Street” retains its power even in this crackly version, before Buckley decided to soar into a higher key at the chorus. The driving congas are missing on “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” leaving just Buckley’s furious 12-string guitar and voice. It’s a striking early song, even if it reads now as a haphazard defense of being a deadbeat dad to his son: “The Flying Pisces sails for time/And tells me of my child/Wrapped in bitter tales and heartache/He begs for just a smile/O he never asked to be her mountain.”

When there was a concert paying tribute to his father in 1991, “Mountain” was the song that Jeff Buckley decided to tackle and make his own. For a man who was all but abandoned by his father during his lifetime, there’s a latent rage and rightful sense of indignation when Jeff recasts his father’s voice as his own. It’s a bittersweet irony that in taking on his father’s song, it became his own coming out party, establishing Jeff as an iconic new voice and setting him on a path that would tragically echo that of his father. But while Jeff didn’t live long enough to scale those same heights, just beyond the scope of Key, we can hear just how high Tim climbed.

Andy Beta, November 9th, 2016

© 2016 Andy Beta/Pitchfork