The Fantastic Voyage Of A Starsailor

Max Bell: Looking Back - Part Three

Prior to the Lincoln show, Joe recalls, Buckley had been ill in bed for some time with a bad cold but had refused all medicaments save the inevitable quart of Jack Daniels Black. The day before the headliner Tim is to be found crashed out in Bear’s studio (Hole Hog Productions) on 6th Ave., sprawled senseless across a kilo sack of finest Columbian pot (a drug he abhorred). On the big day, when soundcheck call came, Buckley had vanished altogether but was eventually found with a laundry bag headed for the wash-a-teria. This was supposed to be a major star, about to play an important gig, and he was doing his laundry!

Another good friend from this period, John King, had a secluded farm in the upstate New York where Timmy and co. were often to be found screwing other chicks from nearby Bard College, picking guitar and getting outside plenty of Tennessee’s finest sour mash whisky.

Musically Buckley’s prolific output was tinged with a reflective, wistful accentuation. ‘Blue Afternoon’ attempts to do for the voice what Miles Davis was doing with the trumpet in his late-50’s melodic hat. The singer is able to stretch half-tones and harmonic crescendo over entire verses. Again the lyrics are all his; and again the details, erotic bluesy exhortations to the fair sex, are secondary to the style. On ‘The Train’ or ‘Blue Melody’, the entire band is moving across unknown edges, sparking off each other in the heat of creation. The sound is entirely live and acoustically powerful, heady natural noises.

‘Blue Afternoon’ was Buckley’s first release on Straight. He knew Elektra was folding, losing its identity along with the spectrum of classic ‘60s music that was being absorbed into big business. Buckley bitterly regretted the phasing out of the label. As he remarked “You weren’t afraid to buy an album from Jac Holzman.”

Buckley’s first 1970 album was dedicated to the murdered Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca – and it shared his fascination with baroque mannerism. Tim’s pipes twist and meander across plateaus of basso warbling and shattering, pitch perfect dynamics. ‘Lorca’ finally sealed Buckley’s talents; he was beyond limits, the only competition in a field of one. ‘Anonymous Proposition’ and ‘Nobody Walkin’ bear a closer resemblance to the tonal directions of Coltrane’s quartet or the silent screaming of Albert Ayler than to the more usual comparison points of the Mothers and Beefheart.

On ‘Starsailor’ Buckley and Beckett are writing together again for the first time since ‘Goodbye and Hello’. In the interim Beckett had failed to find a publisher for this eighty-page epic tribute o the seventeenth century American religious essayist Paul Bunyan; the experience seems to have matured him considerably.

Whatever the reason for the reunion, ‘Starsailor’ was/is as far off the rock wall as it’s possible to get. For the first time Buckley incorporates reeds into the ensemble, in the guise of Mothers brothers Buzz and Bunk Gardner who contribute trumpet, flugelhorn, alto flute and tenor sax through Buckley frequently outstrips and eclipses their magnificent blowing with a series of the most outrageous yelps, squeals and body-shaking scat singing ever committed to vinyl.

And unlike Annette Peacocks ‘I’m The One’ – in some ways a comparable record – Buckley doesn’t resort to electronic treatment to obtain his effects. The ‘Starsailor’ band toured America in 1970; Buckley often spent entire shows barking at the audience while the Gardners improvised fractured scales for him to soar above…

Lee Underwood had broadened his contributions to include electric piano and pipe organ, the traditional guitar chording of Buckley’s earlier numbers had become rapidly outmoded. Underwood was partially responsible for the change. After playing with Buckley on seven albums the guitarist quit professional music to take up jazz writing on Down Beat magazine. His article Chronicle of a Starsailor remains the definitive insight into the singer’s art and influences.

Before ‘Lorca’ Underwood had introduced Buckley to the talents of Cathy Berberian singing Berio to electronic backings. Buckley won no new friends with ‘Lorca’ but always rated it above ‘Blue Afternoon’; contractual obligations interrupted his creative flow and he was itching to escape from the boundaries of the medium.

“In rock when somebody hits a wrong note, they don’t know what to do with it. Rock music is so over-rehearsed… I’ve seen Roland Kirk make a mistake and integrate it, elevate the music.”

Whole choirs of distortion battle out the melodies with the back-line, but there is nothing po-faced about it. On ‘Jungle Fire’, he singer ascends through a ludicrous Tarzan yodel into a crushingly frenetic assault on the senses that gives new meaning to the cliché “it has to be heard to be believed.”

The title track indicated that Buckley wasn’t glossing his newfound interest in the electronic work of Stockhausen and the free jazz model onomatopoeia of Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler. The number travels through outposts of solar activity and comes to rest as ‘The Healing Festival’, where Buckley breaks with his folk-hippy roots for good. ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘Down by the Borderline’ are asides to the ball-busting phonetic strangulation, the former a street café croon to some Parisian belle dame, the latter the album’s one indication of a straighter search for soul which would be continued on ‘Greetings From L.A’

‘Starsailor’ is the kind of accomplishment that takes years rather than months to appreciate, and for Buckley the effort of backing it up on a stage that became too much. During recording, Buckley was at an emotional and physical peak. He had re-married, to his fantasy woman, Judy, and moved into a house on Laguna Beach. Tim and Judy (who he nicknamed ‘Madam Wu’) spent hours by the sea listening to Penderecki, Satie, Oliver Messiaen and always the great jazz horn players – a consuming passion.

When ‘Starsailor’ was finished and had been generally slaughtered by the press, rejected by the fans, Buckley could still hold his head up proud and insist that “I came as close to Coltrane as anyone has ever done. I even started singing in foreign languages – Swahili for instance – just because it sounded better.”

Discouraged at the album’s poor sales, frustrated and alienated by the ‘70s crop of volume-orientated blues crucifiers, he lay low in Venice with his family, drove a cab in Los Angeles and even took up employment as Sly Stone’s chauffeur for a while. He found it futile trying to get any work on the old circuits. His deal with Straight was over and only small, out of the way clubs accepted independent bookings.

The singer was desperate to tour with his band: John Balkin, the bassist who had become a mentor, Maury Baker, the timpanist, trombonist Glen Ferris, and ten-string electric stick (!) specialist Emmett Chapman. It was impossible to pay their wages; Buckley was a financial has-been and would never recover his initial market.

In an interview he gave to the Changes periodical in 1969, he reacted to the status of the musician who is governed by the age-old relationship of the artist and the patron. The papers said he’d sold out…..”You are the same people who, when Monet or Modigliani were starving for 40 years and finally sold a painting, you said they sold out… I live in a hundred dollar a month house in Venice, California, and I don’t need anything. You could take away all the money from me, and I could make it anyway. I did it before, and I can do it again. All I’m paying for is airplanes.”

He also enrolled in the Music Department of UCLA, where he studied the ethnic origins Japanese and Balinese music, lectured occasionally, and started writing two film scripts – one a comedy, the other called Fully Air-Conditioned Inside, a work influenced by futurist Buckminster Fuller. This script was eventually turned into an unpublished book; “a kind of ‘Fear and Loathing’ in Dallas” was how he described it. Buckley explained himself to Rock magazine in 1972.

“See I was spawned into singing through Nat ‘King’ Cole and John Coltrane. It was a logical progression when you’re learning….everything matters. I’m still learning now. My peers don’t matter to me as far as my learning process goes….I have no affinity with it at all….I’m not trying to be abstract, but it’s like I’m on standby most of the time.”

When Buckley wasn’t waiting to be called he acted some, appearing in a professional productions of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit in the same small theatre group in L.A. that Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger worked for.