(Source
and original title uncertain. Possibly 1967-69 Cheetah Magazine) A
Walk On a High Wire
by
Michael Thomas Whatever
it is that keeps Tim Buckley awake at night, whether it's a fiddler playing in
the street somewhere nearby, or just the memory --
whatever it is that haunts him, makes him laugh or makes him sad, a lover, a beggarman
or a thief, whatever it is, he takes risks to call up all his fantasies, to make
them dance beautiful patterns in the air, which is one way of saying that having
see Tim Buckley sing, it's hard for me to imagine the world without him. When
he walks on stage, he looks like a raggedy kid, dressed in skinny corduroys and
old suede boots, his shirt hanging out, like he's just hitchhiked all the way
from California cuddling his massive twelve-string guitar, and hasn't had the
time to get the crows-nests out of his hair. He hovers, chatting to his musicians:
the impeccable Carter C.C. Collins, who sits before his conga drums as though
he were hiding by the stools in a soda fountain, and bearded guitarist Lee Underwood.
Buckley laughs and dawdles, poking at the microphones, just taking his time getting
comfortable. He's frail, and restless, his face is bony and delicate, all the
time he barely opens his quick black eyes. He looks a little forlorn. I
found a letter On the day it rained When I tore it open There in my hands Only
ash remained All
the same, I'm not sure anybody's ready for Tim Buckley. When he starts to sing,
gently at first, in a soulful athletic counter-tenor, it's alarming. His voice
is as pure and as complicated as cut and polished crystal; it trips and falls
and soars again in a mysterious flowing love-call, and later, when he begins to
thrash his guitar and Carter C.C. Collins tickles and thumps the conga drums,
his whole body starts to shiver and sway, the way Presley might have done, and
he hollers and shouts raunchy rococo blues, kidding with his falsetto, scatting
with Underwood's eerie guitar, sometimes just plain screaming and wailing, full
of hurt, full of tenderness. It's dangerous. One time, Underwood stopped playing
and just stood there, digging it. As
Tim sings, he scowls and pouts, he looks uneasy and then he looks angelic, and
a lot of the time he looks bewildered. He never falters, and yet all the time
you know he's up so high that if he fell there could be no one to catch him. None
of which means that Buckley is engaged in any kind of manic therapy; it's just
that his whole trip is a walk on the high wire, juggling insights, and he tosses
them up and plucks them out of the air, magically, beautifully. You can see him
sweating. The
singer cries for people's lies He will sing for the day to bring him night The
circus burns in carnival flame And for a while you won't know my name at all But
sing and dance and love for pennies and gold Most
of his songs are hallucinations more than they are poems, scattered images, and
his melodies, aptly, are snatches of tunes that only sometimes resolve. They are
made of flashes. Reprinted in somber brown type on his album jacket, the songs
read as prosy and mannered, always youthful and undismayed, and now and then a
little foolish. They are, most of them, love songs, with an occasional passing
shot at the hungup "antique people" still reading yesterday's papers,
and more often than not they are sad songs, wistful, not disenchanted. But
the words, often written in collaboration with poet Larry Beckett, are only Buckley's
point of departure, for when he sings them they become pieces in a rich collage
of sound, fragments, pretty pictures of greeting and farewell. I'd love to hear
him sing at dawn. I
lit my purest candle close to my Window, hoping it would catch the eye, Of
any vagabond who passed it by, And I waited in my fleeting house. At
a concert at Carnegie Hall, a couple of strays called for Pete Seeger during Buckley's
performance. "I'm just a war baby trying to make it," he said, and
shrugged. He
was twenty last Valentine's Day. In
his reflective moments, songs like Morning Glory and Once I Was,
all his contrasting moods, the melancholy and the wonder, come together and melt.
They are beautiful, distilled songs, when I saw him sing them in the Village a
girl threw flowers to him; that's all. Tim
Buckley gives you his opinions of midnight and high noon, and I believe him.
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