Dreaming, driven and dangerous - Part Three

Impressive as Goodbye And Hello was, before people could begin to digest it Buckley was headed in another direction. His touring trio that included Lee Underwood on guitar and Carter Collins on congas had expanded to include upright bassist John Miller. When Underwood left the group for a spell, Miller recommended his friend and vibraphonist David Friedman.

Thus was born what Friedman liked to call "The Modern Jazz Quartet of folk". In keeping with the jazz background of his players, an interest Buckley always possessed but now accelerated, the arrangements were opened up to accommodate improvisation on the part of all, including the vocalist.

The material changed as well. The first two albums had been split between Buckley and Beckett-Buckley compositions, but the singer now informed the lyricist that he would be going it alone this time out.

"For years I wondered if that was because he attributed the success of Goodbye And Hello to my lyrics and wanted to see if he could do it all on his own," Beckett says. "Tim genuinely cared so little for acclaim, though, that I no longer think this theory holds water. I can see how he might have felt that my more literary approach was not gonna work with the jazzy, melancholic feeling he was going for, where his voice was another instrument.”

David Friedman: "I loved the quality of his voice, of course. But I wasn't into singers much at that time; I was a jazz instrumentalist. What I loved most about him was his ability to improvise vocally. He was a little like Miles Davis: uncompromising as a musician, and one who could tell the difference between playing and really playing. He would sometimes scream at you on-stage if he didn't think you were giving everything. When you consider how young the guy was, it was incredible what an intuitive, spontaneous sense of music he had.

“One day John and I were passing time with the changes to the Miles tune All Blues. Tim came in, picked up his guitar and began to play along, jamming instrumentally and vocally until eventually it turned into the song he called Strange Feelin'. We fine-tuned it before it was recorded for Happy Sad, but as I recall the words didn't change too much from the ones he'd improvised on the spot. If you listen to the way he sings them, you'll understand that those lyrics are as much jazz as any of my solos."

"It didn't always work, and it was dangerous, that's true - sometimes it went on too long, or bombed with people who wanted reruns of Once I Was. But often it did work, and Tim's genius set the stage on fire..." Lee Underwood

Musicians loved playing with Tim. "His concern was always what was on the horizon and how to get there," according to Bunk Gardner, the former Mother whose tenor sax would be a big, part of Buckley's later Starsailor band. "He couldn't have been more unlike Frank Zappa, who had such a critical eye that you lived in fear of making a mistake. It was no holds barred. He was genuinely interested in seeing what you could add to the mix and liked it when you surprised him."

Lee Underwood: "During the years of the first two albums, we created, memorized, rehearsed, repeated and recorded the arrangements. After Goodbye And Hello he dropped rehearsals, eschewed memorized arrangements, and began creating living music based upon spontaneity and improvisation.

“He left the realm of show business, served music instead of mammon, and gave listeners the real thing, some of the most exciting, deeply moving, thrilling, heartfelt, living, breathing music that mainstream popular music has ever known.

“Don't get me wrong. It didn't always work, and it was dangerous, that's true - sometimes it went on too long, or bombed with people who wanted reruns of Once I Was. But often it did work, and Tim's genius set the stage on fire."

The sessions for Happy Sad were recorded in late '68 at Elektra's new Los Angeles studios, Jerry Yester back in the producer's chair accompanied by his partner, former Lovin' Spoonful guitarist Zal Yanovsky. Yester hadn't seen Buckley almost since the Goodbye And Hello sessions and found the singer dramatically changed, not necessarily for the better.

"He was tight with his band to the exclusion of everyone else," the producer says. "His musicians couldn't have been snottier. 'Adversarial' is the word that best describes them. I guess I represented the corporate ogre or something.

“Which was completely silly, because Elektra never gave Tim Buckley anything short of carte blanche artistically. They'd say, 'This is it, man. This take is it. There are no others.' That's not necessarily a bad idea, but in their snotty way they took it to an extreme. Charlie Parker did more than one take, for Christ's sake. They were an excellent band; I won't contest that. But certain members were really shitty to Zally and me, and it made for an unnecessarily uncomfortable atmosphere."

"I'm sorry Jerry Yester feels this way," responds guitarist Lee Underwood, who'd rejoined prior to the Happy Sad sessions. "I'm not sure why Yester's views are given credibility. He had virtually nothing to do in the studio - Tim and the band knew the music. Yester was a peripheral functionary who could have had a wonderful time, but clearly he missed.

“I suppose it's because he thrived in the realm of orthodox song-forms, conventional musical concepts and standard attitudes about recording. In the radio-music domain, he has always done well as a musician and producer. As a corporate representative, he had little patience with our efforts to create something thrilling and spontaneous in the studio. I can understand his discomfort and confusion, although I see no reason to get nasty about it."

Happy Sad sits comfortably at the fork in his artistic road, balancing the surefire songwriting structures of his past with the flights of an increasingly improvised future that would test his hardiest listeners...

Yester earned his producer's stripes when engineer Botnick made a gaffe before a crucial take. "Dolby is a noise reduction system," Yester explains, "but if it's not engaged properly it can actually add noise to the tape. I knew we had a problem when I heard Bruce say, 'Oops.' You couldn't tell until you played it back, but there it was: this whoosh going all the way through Love From Room 109. Tim had a total snit about it. This was the performance he wanted, didn't want to do another.

“We listened back, and it was wonderful. I had a brainstorm. The song was about the Pacific Coast Highway, and I got the idea that the sound of surf might be in the same frequency as the hiss. So we set up two microphones under Tim's house in Malibu where the tide washed in. We wound up with a half-hour of great stereo surf, and laid it in under the track. It masked the hiss and, best of all, suited the mood of the piece perfectly."

Lee Underwood: "With Dream Letter on Happy Sad, I for the first time created some original, innovative techniques on guitar that I developed more fully as we evolved into the avant-garde musics of Lorca and Starsailor. During this period, I played with both hands on the fretboard, rubbing strings to create sustained melodic lines, tapping chords in arrhythmic patterns, holding chords with the left hand while lightly brushing my right hand index finger over the strings, creating harmonic overtones that generated beautiful textures and moods. Sometimes these fit well within orthodox harmonic progressions. Other times they moved into purely atmospheric enharmonics. I had no outside influences, but simply followed my own explorations."

Having played an extended engagement at the Troubadour with Underwood back on board, the modern jazz quintet was ready to seize the studio moment. Whatever was happening in terms of personal frictions, the musicians nailed it on their side of the glass as did the production team.

Happy Sad is a triumph of small group communication and discrete, song-sensitive jazz improvisation. It's a favorite among Buckley fans because it sits comfortably at the fork in his artistic road, balancing the surefire songwriting structures of his past with the flights of an increasingly improvised future that would test his hardiest listeners.

The conventional wisdom about Tim Buckley is that you have the “safe” folk-oriented period of these early years, followed by the "adventurous" excursions into out-jazz and the avant-garde. A closer listen to these albums, and the entire Buckley catalogue, says otherwise. In truth, all his records, with the possible exception of the unfortunate curtain-closer Look At The Fool, are driven by their sense of adventure. Goodbye And Hello is not one iota less uncompromising than Starsailor.

Folk-rock, art-rock, jazz-rock - Tim Buckley had slipped all these skins with his first three albums, and with them his adolescence. He was now a mature artist, with a universe of possibilities spread open before him. With characteristic bravery he chose to fling himself headfirst into the unknown, soaring into the avant-garde jetstream with Starsailor (1970) before dive-bombing the rock'n'roll gutter with Greetings From L.A. (1972).

In these and the other recordings he made after our slice of the story ends, he explored a maturity his son Jeffrey was robbed of. Yet for all he achieved in his nine albums and countless performances, the future Tim Buckley's death robbed him of was no less overflowing with promise than his son's.