The Fantastic Voyage Of A Starsailor

Max Bell: Looking Back - Part Two

1967’s ‘Goodbye and Hello’ marked Buckley’s potential star-status in the Elektra family. It took a month to record and employed a larger cast of musicians, plus name producer Jerry Yester. It’s a full-blown artistic failure, bedeviled by ambition and Beckett and Buckley’s preoccupation with courtly love and secondhand moralizing about the Vietnam war.

As a product of it’s time the resulting artifact is fascinating, painfully sincere, bloated with over-wrought metaphors and quaint images. The title track itself (with an uncredited arrangement pinched from Joshua Rifkin) embraces childlike wonder and unashamed hedonism and rejects the toils of labor and its reward entirely.

Still, you can gain pleasure from the pitting of Buckley’s fractured high notes against the creamy, dramatic scores. ‘Pleasant Street’, (an anti-drug number he retained until the end), ‘Morning Glory’ and the Fred Neil influenced ‘Once I Was’ benefit from a simplicity in arrangement missing on the attempted epic cuts, where Yester overshadows Buckley.

‘Goodbye And Hello’ dug behind the debut album for lyrical inspiration; here are the protest numbers that the first album eschewed. Its maker referred to the specters of Keats and Shelley and saw it as the end of his writing apprenticeship. As Buckley told Andy Childs of Zig Zag: “Whatever I wrote after that wasn’t adolescent.”

‘Goodbye And Hello’, despite its failings, found Buckley modulating his tenor to an alto and above, below, anywhere, with a casual flair that surpassed the self-conscious stance of the lyrics. ‘Morning Glory’ became a minor hit, the album’s sales outstripped it’s predecessor and Buckley enjoyed a live popularity at such venues as the Balloon Farm (with The Mother of Invention) and prestige dates in the Café Au Go Go that went far beyond any notion of the cult figure. He arrived with the worst album he would ever record but that didn’t matter – he was a golden boy.

The influential rock critic Lillian Roxon put it most astutely in her oft-quoted observation: “Nothing in rock, folk-rock, or anything else prepares you for a Tim Buckley album, and it’s funny to hear his work described as blues, modified rock’n’roll and raga rock when, in fact, there is no name yet for the places he and his voice can go.”

Buckley’s star was in the ascendant throughout 1968. He could afford to take a year out of the studio, to write and to assimilate the classic period of East Coast jazz improvisation. His energies were dived between the pleasures of the mind and the flesh (especially the flesh). There were stormy liaisons with Linda Eastman (who could usually be seen crouched in the aisles of the Fillmore East – camera pointed up) and a longer romance with Hope Ruff, a singer-writer whose main claim to fame (and a legit one at that) was to have transposed the music for Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs.

He also had the respect of his peers. Everyone from Paul Butterfield to Frank Zappa to Lou Reed gave credit to the twenty-year-old boy with the gymnastic throat while the girls could not resist that frothy face and the promise of some new experience .Tim Buckley was big on oral communication. The roadside trail look in England for the first time, a concert with label-mates The Incredible String Band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where the singer was backed up by Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, Pentangle’s rhythm section.

‘Happy Sad’, released early ’69, bore out the virtues of transition. It is his first essential record and right up in the vanguard of controlled experimental recordings that emerged in the post-psychedelic haze. ‘Happy Sad’ was produced by Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky (Lovin’ Spoonful fame) but the former’s keyboard saturations are absent and the band is pared down to a jazz flavored basic with bassist John Miller often leading the melody, leaving Buckley and Underwood to battle out gentle cool blue note chords.

The contributions of vibes and bass marimba player David Friedman (who later worked with Weather Report) finally kissed off Tim’s folksy roots, letting the music flow in one direction, into the ether. Prior to making the album he and the band spent weeks listening to Miles Davis’ ‘Kind Of Blue’, Bill Evans’ ‘Nirvana’, ‘Intermodulation’ and ‘Town Hall’, any recordings by Monk, Mulligan, Mingus that came to hand.

Buckley is now in control of his destiny, Larry Beckett doesn’t contribute, and the lyrics are almost incidental to the atmosphere that Buckley vocal creates. Underwood too has found his niche, concentrating on harmonies and rhythm and leaving the weird stuff to the architect.

Buckley arrives at the places his voices can go, stays awhile and then takes off for somewhere else. The initial blues of ‘Strange Feelin’ and ‘Buzzin’ Fly’ are transformed by the new freedom into something honestly experimental that doesn’t quite rattle the gates of the avant garde until the fine textures of ‘Gypsy Woman’ where Buckley gives his Don Juan persona its full head. Now he is prepared to take his time with a song and the feeling of unlimited space becomes a reality.

The courtly face reappears on a semi-madrigal, ‘Dream Letter’, but it’s a territory that has absolutely no common ground with rock and roll – though Richard Dyer Bennet and Lotte Lenye would have approved. 1969 was a period of intense activity for the singer, one which was to produce ‘Blue Afternoon’, a set of songs that Buckley had been working on and off since 1966, followed by a sign-off album for Elektra – ‘Lorca’ – which coincided with Holzman’s selling of the company to WEA, and finally the miasmic pinnacle of Buckley’s experimental phase, ‘Starsailor’.

Cohen had the kid solidly on the road in between times and the boozing was becoming an obsession. Buckley’s flirtation with hard drugs was not over. He took heroin if it was available – got right on the edge. Tim had a road manager name of Barry ‘The Bear’ Schultz who was employed to try and keep him in order – a thankless task at times, though Buckley soon numbered Schultz amongst his tiny circle of friends.