Chronicle
of a Starsailor- Part Four After
two years, he was strapped in every way. He needed money. He desperately needed
the adulatory recognition of his long-vanished public. He needed to record. He
needed to feel like a man again. He needed to come back. "Gotta
play rock 'n' roll, kid." "All
right. I'll do it your way." He
came back with three rock albums: Greetings From L.A. (produced by Jerry
Goldstein), Sefronia (produced by Denny Randell), and Look At The Fool
(which Tim wanted to be entitled Tijuana Moon; produced by Joe Falsia,
who also arranged and played lead guitar). He
did it "their way," but it didn't work, primarily because he despised
the conventional R&B/rock format, the clichés, the thin, canned arrangements
and the necessity of recording other peoples' songs (exception: Fred Neil's Dolphins,
which Tim dearly loved and regularly performed live). He
hated enduring the pitifully pedestrian, inadequate and unfulfilling context with
which he had to surround himself, especially on those few excellent songs that
were deep and true and honest and often achingly impassioned, notably Sweet
Surrender, Because Of You, Look At The Fool, and Who Could Deny You. Although
he despised the limitations of the format, he did love the earthy rhythms and
the spirit of the "monkey-rub, belly-to-belly, walkin' like a skinned
cat, talk in tongues, smell the way you walk, listen to those walls a-talkin'
that voodoo song." Pure sex--nasty, raw and elegant, all in one. Ironically,
his voice never sounded fuller, more varied, or more technically controlled and
emotionally capable than during these last three years. The context was an empty
sham to him; but as an improvisational vocalist in live performance, he had become
a master. During
this final period, and especially during the last year, he lived a life of what
I think of as "controlled schizophrenia," figuratively speaking. He
was nice to his loyal, well-meaning musicians; he was nice to his producers; he
was nice to his managerial and record company people (until he had contracts with
neither); he was nice to the press. He was nice to everybody who counted. But
he hated himself for it. His sense of isolation became excruciating. "So
what is there to say?" he wrote in a "story letter" to me,
postmarked Sept. 13, 1974, less than a year before his death. "You are
what you are, you know what you know, and there are no words for loneliness, black,
bitter, aching loneliness, that gnaws the roots of silence in the night... "There
has been life enough, and power, grandeur, joy enough, and there has also been
beauty enough, and, God knows, there has been squalor and filth and misery and
madness and despair enough, and loneliness enough to fill your bowels with the
substance of gray horror, and to crust your lips with its hard and acrid taste
of desolation... "...
and we are lying there, blind atoms in our cellar-depths, gray voiceless atoms
in the man-swarm desolation of the earth, and our fame is lost, our names forgotten,
our powers are wasting from us like mined earth, while we lie here at evening
and the river flows... and dark time is feeding like a vulture on our entrails,
and we know that we are lost, and cannot stir..." In
his effort to come back, he had made effective and constructive strides in controlling
the alcohol and drugs. He ate well, he took vitamins, he exercised. Before going
on the road, and during the extensive periods of rehearsals, and while touring,
he remained completely straight. There were binges in between, but, next to the
sustained extravagances of the two years following Starsailor, his life had become
comparatively healthy. On
the weekend of June 28, 1975, he returned from a road-gig in Dallas. As was his
custom after final performances, he got drunk, this time starting in the afternoon.
Instead of returning home immediately, he went to the house of a close, long-time
friend, where he sniffed some heroin. Buckley's
system had been clean. The combined dosage of alcohol and heroin proved to be
too much for him. Thinking
that he was only drunk and obnoxious--on many previous occasions Buckley had ingested
considerably more alcohol and drugs than this--the friend took him home. As his
friend discussed the situation with Judy, Tim lay on the living room floor, his
head resting on a pillow. When
his friend knelt down to ask him if he were all right, Tim almost inaudibly whispered
his last words, "Bye, bye, baby," he said. Tim
died, in debt, owning only his guitar and his amp, and he was cremated. Memory
is a wicked lover, foxy and disloyal, always a treacherous temptress. There are
perhaps those who will disagree with my perspective; perhaps there are others
who will recognize the events, the insights, and/or the interpretation s that
have been omitted either by choice, necessity or ignorance. Much
remains to be done--people talked to, interviews and reviews collected, stray
tapes gathered etc. With your help, perhaps it can be accomplished. Tim
Buckley held hands with the world for awhile. He gave in fire and fury and perverse
humor the totality of his life's experience, which was vast far beyond his mere
28 years. He courageously stood on the arena-stages of our barrooms and auditoriums,
ultimately alone, singing from within his own flames like a demon possessed. He
had a beauty of spirit, a beauty of song and a beauty of personage that re-etched
the face of the lives of all who knew him, and of all who ever truly heard him
sing. He
burned with a very special flame, one of a kind. No doubt about that. Bye, bye,
baby....
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