A Fleeting House

The Music of Tim Buckley: A Retrospective

by Idris Walters

Life and death are becoming indistinguishable. New biologies are beginning to prove that Death is just a change of state in the cycle of life. Funereal rites, across the globe, are based on the idea of transition and yet our society insists that Death is instantaneous and easily defined.

New biologies also -- life fields, acupuncture, etc. -- tell us that Personality seems to carry some strange physical independence from the body. A dualist separation between body and "soul" is slowly emerging as biologically feasible.

Out-of-body experiences are similar to what we have called Death. They have similar biological symptoms.

The evidence for some kind of survival after Death is piling up.

It might just be possible that -- at the biological frontier -- Tim Buckley, or something or other that used to carry that name, is out there somewhere.
Even still

It's just that the music on bits of Lorca and most of Starsailor makes you think of that place.

That "somewhere out there." Some nebulous, gassy environment where souls continue beyond death, where things become a little more timeless, where ...

How about: At his Santa Monica apartment on Sunday, June 19 1975, Tim Buckley, largely unknown, much maligned singer/good guy, made a transition of consequence to those around him.

Tim Buckley was born (a similar transition) with a unique voice. His was the one and only.

It did weird things.

It sounded, at times, like a soundtrack for the moon.

But he had had a bad start. His early career was spent smoldering in the suburbs of the singer/songwriter down on his following.

Moving gently into a late-nite, slowest songs in the world, ebbing and flowing kind of jazz (Happy Sad, Blue Afternoon), Buckley, all of a sudden, shelled out Lorca and Starsailor.

He was bitter by then. But it was these albums, more than any other, that pushed the extremities of his extraordinary voice deep into the vortex of Voice As Pure Sound (Noise If You Like).

He had arrived somewhere original. He was, it appears, well pleased to get there.

But they bombed.

Rock vocals have never stretched so far. Tim Buckley, vagrant in the void, has a new career set up. He is perfect for the job. To sit on the roof of a Trans-Galactic Police Ship and make noises, turning around and around, flashing on and off.

So he quit, became a chauffeur for Sly Stone, got married, took up a teaching gig at California University (into Ethnomusicology).

He had left what audience he had way behind. People couldn't it seemed, keep up with him.

In retrospect, Lorca and Starsailor were the musics that were his greatest contribution.

Here was, after all, a fusion of jazz, abstraction, rock, vocalese, noise, chaos and order. Here was, after all, a musical description of the outer reaches of anywhere.

Tim Buckley had pulled off something totally new from the solo singer archetype.

Tim Buckley was in orbit.

With his voice for an engine.

Playing Starsailor over now, it sounds even more like the places he is likely to be, the nether regions out-of-body, a place called oblivion.

Whereas, before he split, it was one of those amazing albums you could only come to your own conclusions about. The kind you'd play to clear the air.

He was to abandon the direction for further experiments in heavy sexy rock, but Lorca, and Starsailor in particular, remain as testimony to a tantalizing possibility. If this stuff had sold they'd be teaching telepathy in primary schools in no time.

Unless you can imagine Stockhausen writing songs for Jimmy Savile there is no earthly comparison.

Unless you can imagine a cartload of cybernetic scorpions hammering on your door there is no lunar comparison.

But Buckley was held on a framed-up charged of being a singer/songwriter. And singer/songwriters aren't supposed to sing like this.

Starsailor is an anarchic rush of music. It is for sweeping away clichés with. A guitar/bass bottom crystallizes a veritable cacophony of applied chaos. Buckley's voice seems to cut through it all like a laser beam. Head-on, the effect is at once scary, spacey, alarming, surreal, rootless. On closer inspection it is intricate, finely woven, gracious, graceful, precision stuff.

It is a music with presence.

Especially now.

A rare intelligence was at work on Starsailor, a fine madness. To all intents and purposes indescribable, Starsailor was a horizon for rock.

But, predictably, rock decided to ignore it. It has choirs, organs, Tijuana brass. In places there are phonetics instead of vocals. There are sirens. Sustained onomatopoetics. And lines like Oblivion carries me on its shoulder poking up through the sound. For all the world like voices from the dead.

More than anyone, Tim Buckley was the character who took the rock vocal where it has never been before or since. With Starsailor, he covered uncharted ground with incredible skill. He was nudging oblivion.

And this was the guy they put on at lunchtime at Knebworth! Hardly the time or the place to nudge oblivion.

"It's just that Starsailor sounds more real now. As though he sang it from where he is now."

For more information as to where Tim Buckley is now, try The Romeo Error by Lyall Watson (Hodder & Stoughton. 3.75lbs. Hard back).

The music that began with Lorca (re: Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet, dead, murdered), and exploded into Starsailor, is disfigured, shapeless, asymmetrical, distorted music.

Buckled steel, charred remains.

Landscape in horror, a brave new music.

A genre to itself.

Rock vocals have never stretched so far. Tim Buckley, vagrant in the void, has a new career set up. He is perfect for the job.

To sit on the roof of a Trans-Galactic Police Ship and make noises, turning around and around, flashing on and off.

Starsailor, multi-octave drifter in the oblivionosphere.

© 1975 Walters/Let it Rock

Let It Rock was a British magazine; #1-35 (Oct 1972 – Dec 1975) that provided historical analysis and critical comment on the contemporary rock scene, and gave more than a passing nod to traditions stretching back to the early days of rock'n'roll.