Chronicle of a Starsailor- Part Three

At the insistence of his business people, Tim grudgingly dipped back into his past, pulled out eight previously unrecorded songs, including Blue Melody and Café (which he performed until the end), and released the LP Blue Afternoon.

The performances were perfunctory. Tim's heart was not in them, and it showed. As critic Debbie Burr observed, "Buckley never has been known for singing jubilant, bouncy tunes. But Blue Afternoon is ridiculous. It's not even good sulking music..."

Tim liked much of the material, but having to attempt to record a so-called "commercial" LP at this time (late 1969) only interrupted the creative flow he had begun with Lorca.

With the imperfect beginnings of Lorca and the interruptions of Blue Afternoon behind him, Tim now threw himself with a passion into his magnum opus, Starsailor, which he also officially produced.

"When you stand Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy or Roland Kirk up against rock," he said to Sam Bradley, "rock comes out sounding like a complete pre-fabrication.

"The reason I like Miles and those others is because their music comes out of the communication between the men playing it. Everything is so over-rehearsed in rock, that when somebody hits a wrong note, they don't know what to do with it.

"I'll never forget listening to Roland Kirk play a wrong note, hear it, and within a split second integrate that note into the total sound and take it someplace else.

"Then it's not a mistake, really... it's life. I refer to it as 'spiritual' music, because playing music like that takes faith and trust in yourself and the people you're playing with." (From an unpublished interview with Sam Bradley.)

With Starsailor, he knew he stood on tremulous commercial grounds. As he later told Bill Henderson, however, "Sometimes you're writing, and you know you're just not going to fit in. But you do it because it's your heart and your soul, and you gotta say it. It's the foremost thing in your mind... It's hard to play the kind of music that musicians like to play and that the audiences like to hear, too." (Sounds, March 8, 1974.)

With the exception of Moulin Rouge and Song To The Siren, two poetic little gems melodically, harmonically and lyrically reminiscent of his earlier work, Starsailor was a pop monster of odd-time signatures (Come Here, Woman--5/4; Healing Festival--10/4; Jungle Fire--5/4); bizarrely dissonant criss-crossing shrieks, wails and moans; surrealistic overdubbing (the title cut is Buckley singing sixteen tracks with himself); freely improvised instrumental madness (trumpet, saxophone, pipe organ, tympani drums, etc.); and virtually unparalleled exoticism and sensuality in the lyrics: "Gently you tease me/And turn away/Unlike the young ones/Your movements you savor/Like a tango... Give me drunken lands/Where you don't feel pain/Let me smell your thighs/Let me drink down a little rain/While we drift and float/Out beyond the seas/We're with the tide/Into a coil of peace." (Come Here, Woman, © Tim Buckley Music, 1970).

"I was as close to Coltrane as anyone has ever come," Buckley later said in Warners and DiscReet bios. "I even started singing in different languages--Swahili, for instance--just because it sounded better. An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about anything, but people are really geared for hearing only words come out of the mouth... The most shocking thing I've ever seen people come up against--besides a performer taking off his clothes--is dealing with someone who doesn't sing words. I get off on great-sounding words. If I had my way, words wouldn't mean a thing. It shocked the hell out of the people. It was refreshing."

It wasn't Swahili, but it sounded like it. And it may have been "refreshing" to Tim and those few fans who liked it, but it was also an economic disaster.

True, some of the critics perceived and appreciated the music from Buckley's point of view. Michael Bourne gave Starsailor a five-star review in Down Beat, saying, "...he has proven himself a consummate vocal technician..."

Rich Mangelsdorff praised Buckley's willingness to "burst the bounds of even phrasing, strict rhyme and taken-for-granted arrangements." He went on to say, "Buckley employs his voice in instrumental fashion, getting sometimes into contemporary dramatic or operatic atonality and fragmentation, sometimes bending and twisting his notes, changing pitch and timbre abruptly, sometimes getting into non-verbal wails and trills..." (Kaleidoscope, Jan. 8-15, 1971.)

Even Creem, the often viciously scathing rock journal, perceived and empathized with what Buckley had done. "Yet another album by the elliptically rousing Tim Buckley--who I steadfastly maintain is one of the most underrated and misunderstood musicians ever to develop out of the dead-end of rock and roll into the free-form fusion of rock and jazz coupled with his already original sound... Starsailor is yet another lyric-stung, waterfall-rushing-into-the-night's-combing-of-the-stars manifestation of Buckley's thresholding work in the rock/jazz medium. A tricky stance to take, and one with probably doubtful financial success... but for those who care about what a genius can do with lyrics, a 12-string guitar and a windmilling voice, Tim Buckley is to be investigated." (Creem, December, 1970.)

The vast majority of critics and fans, however, detested the new sound. In reviewing live performances of this period, critics almost unanimously said: "Buckley offered a set which was agonizing in its rampant dissonance, and deadly dull in its self-indulgent repetitiveness." (Michael Sherman, L.A. Times, April 2, 1970.)

"Concluding the evening with an eerie trip into vocal distortion, Tim Buckley seemed oblivious to the audience in relating mostly to the mike or his electric 12-string..." (Robin Loggie, Billboard, Nov. 28, 1970.)

Writer William Tusher contemptuously categorized Buckley as a "folk" singer, then said, "Buckley's delivery is more than acceptable--if less than spectacular--until he succumbs, as he does early and often to his addiction to affecting change of pace with a high-pitched tremelo that comes off like a Siamese cat in pre-dawn heat." (Hollywood Reporter, April 2, 1970.)

Immediately prior to recording Starsailor, Buckley married his chic and extraordinarily provocative fantasy woman, Judy, whom he renamed Madam Wu.

Together, they moved to Tim's new dreamhouse in Laguna Beach. There Tim worked on Starsailor, while Judy professionally designed clothes. They regularly walked on the beach in the sunsets; they listened to Olivier Messiaen (especially Quartet For The End of Time), Satie, Penderecki and other notable classicists, many of them introduced to Tim by John Balkin, the bassist and friend who had become one of Tim's closest companions and foremost educators from the earlier days immediately preceding Lorca.

When Starsailor came out and proved to be a terrifying failure, Tim became furious, then profoundly depressed.

His business people took away all control. He could not produce his own records anymore. He could not get booked. For awhile, he booked himself ("under the table") and played obscure clubs like In The Alley in the mountains north of San Diego. Then that too was gone.

He could not record his group (Balkin on bass, Emmett Chapman on ten-string electric stick, Glen Ferris on trombone, Maury Baker on tympani).

The powers that be shut the doors in his face. When he ran out of money, he was told, "Tough, schmuck. You can't eat five stars in Down Beat. Better learn how to drive a truck."

They broke him. He unleashed his anger, his frustration and his fear on himself. He gobbled reds like vitamins, booze like a sailor. When smack was available, he took it. Down... down... He gave up his dreamhouse in Laguna and returned to Venice/Santa Monica. Down.