A Fleeting House

The Music of Tim Buckley: A Retrospective

by Dave Downing

Folk-rocker, acoustic poet, starsailor through a jazzed ether, and, finally, rhythm'n'grinder on a bouncing mattress. Few rock artists have followed such a chaotic course through the musical possibilities opened up by the sixties. Even few have left behind a novel ready for publication and a half-finished concept album built around Conrad's novel Outcasts Of The Islands.

There was vision in the chaos. Whatever he sang there was something in his voice, some feeling of boundaries being tested or broken down. And whatever the style of music, his and Larry Beckett's lyrics pursued the grail they shared, right through from the bitter idealism of Goodbye And Hello to the sex-centered acrobatics of the last three albums.

The grail concerned the gaping whole left between physical and mental realities, by everything from science's assault on religion to the sixties' own particular demolition job on Hollywood romance. Somewhere in that hole was a notion of sensuality that could tie together mind and body, sex and love; that offered more for music than the one-sided offerings of West Coast stone a-sexuality or an orgy of heavy metal repressed sexual aggression.

Way back in 1967 Buckley was writing:

Once I was a soldier
And I fought on foreign sands for you
Once I was a hunter
And I brought home fresh meat for you

Society has moved on from such direct relationships. But all the advances made since then have cut into the domain of sensual contact, until all that is left is an isolated caricature -- two people in a bedroom. Buckley's music gravitated towards sex because it was the last remaining place where seventies humanity could find, sometimes, their minds and bodies moving together as one. The last place where thoughts had some emotional power.

Making love to you darling
Was like the tide clawing at the shore
And when I dream about you darling
Lord, I long to be the sand

In Sweet Surrender you're in the room with the two of them trying to work it out. The guitar bubbles and the strings rumble along through the vicious circles, and then somehow Buckley's voice soars out like some giant bird taking wing into the wide blue yonder. At one point he does a cascading wail that could be pain and could be laughter, and is doubtless both.

There's reality for you. It's no coincidence that his music drew on the whole range of American musics. Traces of folk and jazz in a rock-soul setting. Rhythms straight out of any soul catalogue; even with the soul chorus floating along above. Yet Joe Falsia's guitar work, on a song like Make It Right, was pure California, cutting blue-ocean lines across a tenement cauldron.

A lot of rock since the dream OD'd on ideology has scurried back to the shelter of its roots in the maternity homes of American music. What made Tim Buckley, and the obvious parallel -- Gram Parsons, so special, was that they brought their roots into a seventies sensibility, rather than taking their sensibilities back through the fifties and beyond. An album like Grievous Angel transcended both country and rock. It possessed an awareness of the past and its sustaining power, yet still looked to the future with an awareness of what the rise and fall of rock culture has implied for us all. Buckley has done likewise.

A song like I Know I'd Recognise Your Face, the perfect soul duet on Sefronia, while a match for any hot hundred smash in the obvious ways, possessed something more -- a seventies sensibility, an overt consciousness of the situation in which it was being made. In the last albums, Buckley, a child of the sixties if ever there was one, was reaching for a seventies version of that blend that made sixties music so powerful -- accessibility, musical invention around simple melodic and rhythmic structures, and a consciousness that came from both the head and the heart.

What Buckley and Parsons might have achieved serves as an inspiration to any continuing relevance music might have in the darkness outside the discos. Two masters of excess, talent skating down a high wire, not getting enough applause. If Gram Parsons' death seems in retrospect sadly inevitable, the shock of Tim Buckley's is a testament to the vibrancy of his music. The voice, the rhythms, the words ... they all seemed so incredibly alive. A sense of exploration, of motion, of new possibilities. Music you can touch and see and hear and smell. It's hard to believe he'll never sing again.

© 1975 Downing/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.