Chronicle of a Starsailor - Part Two

After Goodbye And Hello, Buckley began moving away from the "literary" world of Beckett and ever-more into the personal world he was developing on his own (although Beckett often contributed later on),

He began to shun politics and social movements. ("Christ--either the government slaughters you with Vietnam, or the hippies drown you with love and Patchouli oil.") He resented being set up as a rock 'n' roll savior, insisting that people should learn how to do their own living instead of propping up musicians as "easy gods" who did the living for them.

While Goodbye And Hello had placed him solidly in the center of t he rock movement of the times, he refused to remain there, to turn that style into a goldmine gimmick, and to capitalize on it until the locked-in lode ran out. Change, evolution and commitment to his own abilities were his watchwords. He had come to regard the blues-oriented rock of the day as white thievery, emotional sham and high-decibel masturbation. He became an outlaw roving the very underground culture that embraced him.

He also began his war with the business world. Once in Buffalo, we went to a television studio where they asked him to lip-sync the words to Pleasant Street. "You believe this turkey? He wants to play the record and have me pretend to sing. T'hell with 'em." He walked out.

As he later told Anne Marie Micklo in one of his best interviews, "You see, it's like weird. America is a business. And if you have to be an American, no matter what you do, you are supposed to first of all be a businessman.

"So any show that I go on, they ask me, 'Well, you make albums, so you must make them for money. And I got to go through the whole thing, gotta tell them, 'Man, you are the same people who, when Monet or Modigliani were starving for 40 years and finally sold a painting, you said they sold out.'

"I said, 'Like, man, what have you got to worry about? You got all the money you want, all the fine suits--why do you have to pull me down to where you are, man? Because you can't do what I'm doing? I said. 'Why do you have to make me the way you are--'cause I'm not, see?

"'I live in a hundred dollar a month house in Venice, California, and I don't need anything. You could take all the money away from me, and I could make it anyway. I did it before, and I can do it again. All I'm doing is paying for airplanes...'" (Changes, Vol. 1, No. 7, 1969).

Tim was an intellectual vacuum-cleaner. He inhaled personalities, he inhaled ideas, he inhaled knowledge. In Thomas Mann's phrase, he was truly "one on whom nothing is lost." Because of this exceptional ability, which enabled him to quickly acquire and utilize whatever knowledge he needed at any given time, he demanded the people around him to be constant inputs for his voracious intellectual and creative appetites. Those who ran out of informational fuel became useless to him. He dropped them quickly, often cruelly.

After completing Goodbye And Hello, he turned to me: "Jazz. The rockers think it's cocktail music. Christ. They put a perfect pretty boy up there, spray him all over with glitter-paint and makeup, plug his guitar into Hoover Dam, tell him to Play De Blooes Man, and think they got Reality. Play me some music."

We listened to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Bill Evans' Nirvana, Intermodulation (with guitarist Jim Hall) and Town Hall. We also listened extensively to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Gabor Szabo, Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Milt Jackson...

Happy/Sad, recorded in 1968, was the resultant album, with David Friedman on vibes, John Miller on acoustic bass, Carter Collins on congas and myself on guitar. This time, all of the lyrics and music were Tim's.

The influences about--Strange Feelin', for example, is directly after Miles' All Blues. At the same time, Tim's compositional abilities had grown immensely. The ballad Love From Room 109 in itself consists of five movements: the sea-effects were recorded live; the melodies are some of the finest he ever composed. It was not a revolutionary album, but it was definitely a significant step in Tim's personal evolution.

He was learning how to select words not only for their content, but for their round, harsh or voluptuous sounds. He searched for content and sensuality.

(At dinner tables, he tinkled with his fork on every glass, plate and bowl; at garage sales or junk shops, he "played" old pipes, glassware, fixtures, anything that rang, chimed or crackled. "My business is sound," he said. "If you use it right, it's all music.")

Buzzin' Fly, one of the most popular Happy/Sad songs, remained in his repertoire until the end, as did the earthy Gypsy Woman. Because the rhythms never jelled, the dynamics were poor, the performances were constricted and the piece was too long, Gypsy Woman failed on the record. However, it remained an indispensable vehicle in live performances for Buckley's increasingly more extended vocal extravaganzas. The beautiful ballad, Dream Letter, was specifically for his son, Jeffrey Scott, by his first wife, Mary.

Tim Buckley, Goodbye And Hello and Happy/Sad--these first three albums were the ones that the majority of Buckley fans embrace to this day as their own.

After these records, life became increasingly more difficult for Tim. His sales dropped; his dwindling audiences demanded the old material and resented the new. To them, Buckley's new "vocal gymnastics," as the critics called them, were not dazzling at all--they were jarring, upsetting, demanding.

At concerts Tim began to freely improvise at exhausting length. We no longer rehearsed. We followed wherever Tim wherever he took it. When he brought new material to the stage, he simply presented it. We found our own way as quickly and as well as we could.

"I don't want it to be a thing. A thing is dead. I want it alive, I want it present, I want it always growing and changing. Just be you. Stay close to your instincts. That'll make it fine."

He felt strongly about instincts. As he told Anne Marie Micklo, "That's why animals are so great, because they're just pure instinct. And when you really get into them, you see that birds are even better than animals, because they have nothing. They're not even like a cat or a dog--they just fly."

Goodbye And Hello ended Buckley's apprenticeship as a writer. Because he did not wish to repeat himself, writing no longer came easily. But even as he worked at being fresh and original, an unanticipated problem arose.

"The way Jac (Holzman of Elektra Records) had set it up," he told ZigZag 44 (Vol. 5, No. 4), "you were supposed to move on artistically, but the way the business is, you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you did before, so there's a dichotomy there.

"It's a problem, and I don't think there's anybody you can talk to who doesn't face it. People like a certain type of thing at a certain time. It's very hard to progress."

Having done his "folk" thing, his "rock" thing, and his "jazz" thing, he now wanted to delve into vocal areas that were virtually uncharted. "An artist has a responsibility to know what has gone down and what is going down in his field," he said, "not to copy, but to learn and be aware. Only that way can he strengthen his own perception and ability."

We visited a record store and selected albums by Luciano Berio, Xenakis, John Cage, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Stockhausen, Subotnick, etc. I researched them. The next day I said, "You've got to hear this singer, Cathy Berberian. She sings two Berio pieces--Thema (Omaggio A Joyce) and Visage.

"She clucks, gurgles, sighs, yowls, sputters, screams, cries, weeps, wails--you don't know it yet, but in her you've got the musical friend you've been looking for."

He didn't care very much for the electronic music itself--"just doesn't touch my heart, I guess"--but he loved Berberian. After hearing her sing, he no longer doubted himself. He regarded the title cut of Lorca, recorded in 1969, to be his debut as an identity, as a unique singer, as an original force.

He held notes longer and stronger than anyone else in pop had ever done: he explored a wide, comparatively bizarre range of vocal sounds, which in pop contexts were revolutionary: having composed Lorca in 5/4, he began his odyssey into odd-time signatures, which at that time and in that context was unheard of. In the second cut on side one, Anonymous Proposition, he composed and sang one of the most voluptuous and demanding personal ballads any singer had ever recorded.

He also bombed.

By any standards, the record was far from perfect. The songs were too long (Lorca alone was 9:53; Proposition was 7:43). The tunes on the second side, two of which are lyrically strong and musically intimate, were nevertheless basically fillers (although for an encore at Carnegie Hall he stood on stage alone, no band, no guitar, and sang Anonymous Proposition a capella).

Most of the critics regarded the body of the music as being morbid, "weird," and decidedly uncommercial. And the fans didn't like the album any more than they had liked the live performances leading up to it.

"Why don't you play Buzzin' Fly? cried one dismayed early-Buckley fan at a concert in Philadelphia. "Why don't I play horseshit," Buckley angrily retorted. The critics called the music self-indulgent noise. Elektra dropped him.