The Fantastic Voyage Of A Starsailor

Max Bell: Looking Back - Part Four

Buckley prepared for his comeback via his most accessible record to date, the solid sexy funk of ‘Greetings From L.A’ The inside of this album depicts Buckley in sardonic pose clutching a smog-mask in reference to the cover’s post-card of L.A., where the city is seen covered in its customary blanket of automobile exhaust. The singer’s new main-men were strictly soulful black dudes like Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and James Brown, and the resulting artifact is an exact counterpart to ‘Sex Machine’ and ‘Let’s Get It On’, a no-holds-barred fuck album dedicated to the girls who talk in tongues and rattled the bed-springs of his misspent youth.

‘Greetings from L.A’ is one of those rare rock albums that treats the sexual act with respect and affection. There’s no macho posturing or idle boasting and no lying; instead every aspect of Buckley’s desire is stripped open and exposed – from admissions of emotional inadequacy that turn into triumph on ‘Sweet Surrender’, to details of seamier rendezvous with hookers in ‘Hong Kong Bar’. It’s Buckley’s first and last concept record, but as the concept is sexuality it isn’t too difficult to appreciate.

‘Nighthawkin’ even tells the tale of one of Buckley’s cab fares, some old lush who leads him into the red light district….outside a brief reappearance from Carter Collins the personnel was all change. No Lee Underwood, no acoustic bass – it’s all electric funk, expertly produced by War-man Jerry Goldstein and highly flavored by the swirling smooth rhythms of Ed Greene, Chuck Rainey, guitarist Joe Falsia and ex-Byrd Kevin Kelley on keyboards.

Buckley is still playing 12-string guitar but his singing has changed, albeit slightly. In the same way that his voice ‘broke’ for ‘Happy Sad’, it now sounds rougher and older; the range is intact but the edges aren’t quite so pure and sweet. Along with ‘Goodbye and Hello’ and ‘Happy Sad’, this is the only Tim Buckley album still on catalogue in the UK.

Buckley didn’t play in England again until June 1974 when he appeared first on a bill before 1974 when he appeared first on a bill before Alex Harvey, Van Morrison, The Doobie Brothers and The Allman Brothers. His band for the date included a reunion with bassist Jim Fielder, the old school buddy who’d gone on to relative fame and fortune with Buffalo Springfield, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the ubiquitous Mothers. Lunchtime at Knebworth – a storming set to a few early arrivals and die-hards.

The guitarist was a guy with a gammy leg called Art Johnson, Buckley’s constant drinking companion on his last visit. Drummer Buddy Helm and keyboard player Mark Tiernan were featured on ‘Sefronia’ (’74), an album that in retrospect reeks of awful compromise on Buckley’s part. Lumbered with a staff producer called Denny Randell, a whole raft of melodramatic strings and a selection of material that often sounds like somebody else’s choice (probably Herb Cohen’s), the record is too close to diluted product, too redolent of lesser talents cashing in on Buckley’s reputation.

It is possible that by now Buckley was devoting more energy to scriptwriting and acting than to his music. Both ‘Stone in Love’ and ‘Honey Man’ could be ‘Greeting’s’ Outtakes, while the attempted tour-de-force title track ‘Sefronia – After Asklepiades, After Kafka’/’Sefronia – The Kings Chain’ (written with Beckett) is divided perversely and seems unfinished.

Buckley fails to rescue Tom Waits’ (another Cohen charge) feeble ‘Martha’ and never has a chance on Denny Randell’s god-awful ‘I Know I’d Recognize Your Face’ where he duets with some broad called Marcia Waldorf who seems to think she’s advertising washing up liquid. ‘Peanut Man’ (by two rightly unknown wiseacres name of Freeman and Nehls) is pure throwaway by Buckley’s standards, which leaves an admittedly gorgeous reading of ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ and a version of Fred Neils classic ‘Dolphins’

(Neil, a near legendary figure on the Greenwich Village folk scene back in the early 60’s, is an interesting precursor to Buckley. Both his languid phrasing and his style of guitar playing are an obvious influence on the younger man, while Neil’s subtle vocal modulations and facility with simple contortions of language and metaphor must have appealed to the tearaway kid looking out over midnight Manhattan for a bag of his own.)

Tim’s other originals, ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Because Of You’, do pull out some stops, nothing memorable but his vocals make the nut and Joe Falsia stamps some authoritative class into his solos, which keeps them danceable at least. The critics were kind to ‘Sefronia ’leastways if they were old Buckley fans they were. Not so when ‘Look At The Fool’ was released late in 1974: for that one even his most ardent admirers could be heard wringing and washing their hands. Less committed folk chose this moment to whet the nib on and laugh when the ink turned red. Who was this Tim Buckley anyway? Just some washed-up loser juicer on permanent heat.

Maybe they felt threatened, because the fact is that ‘Look At The Fool’ is a good, not great, record that came slightly too early to make it’s deserved impact. Buckley’s slinky scorched torch voice is burnt around the edges, he sings in a gut-wrenching falsetto and seamless soprano more than ever now, wackier than Al Green and more loaded than Curtis but still, could he ever sing.

In the afterglow of ‘young Americans’ or Boz Scaggs ‘Silk Degrees’ it’s possible to groove on ‘Look At The Fool’ for what it is, a backstreet soul-food mess of Buckley’s blues. The man is trapped in the business and feeling the pain of making a comeback (“It has to be a calculated comeback,” he admitted. “It’s not as passionate as it used to be”) but the voice emerges intact in spite of the busy arrangement and the insistence on short songs. Here was one artist who was seldom at his best within any three-minute format.

The album’s original title was to have been ‘An American Souvenir’, an ironic choice partially influenced by a record he had in the back of his mind, Van Dyke Parks’ ‘Rediscover America’. The final title says something about Buckley’s state of mind then, a man who is finding it hard to come to terms with his drinking problem and the facts of the ‘70s rock and roll life. At Elektra Tim Buckley was a star- on DiscReet he had become just another male singer: file under popular.

Listen to ‘Ain’t It Peculiar’ or ‘Down In The Street’ and you hear is a man who is bemused rather than bitter, listen to ‘Freeway Blues’ and you hear the frantic desperation of a man who wants to have a part but no one turns up. It’s hard to accept rejection but Buckley still has standards: “I never swallow that cheap booze/ I keep my distance from straight dudes.”

He has a Mexicali fetish that won’t let go too, lots of songs about getting lost and found in some red light district. The companions of his youth are living the good life – or they’re dead… Jim Morrison had been one of Tim’s more reliable partners in crime. He told Rock magazine: “Jim was a friend…he was greatly misunderstood, especially his humor. His humor was phenomenal in everything he did.”

‘Look At The Fool’ was produced by Joe Falsia, Buckley’s guitarist and latter-day manager/minder. After it, Buckley’s contract with DiscReet was severed and his relationship with Cohen was as bad as the sales and reviews. The playing throughout is excellent however, especially the drumming of Earl Palmer, a ma who had laid down the beat for Taj Mahal and BB King, the piano work of Mike Melvoin and Falsia’s lead. On ‘Who Could Deny Me You’ and the title track k the man soars and scythes over dancing blues and light jazz with his old facility. Being 26 was nothing to get too cut about.

It was nice to imagine that ‘Look At The Fool’ would end Buckley’s love affair with funk. The signs were that it would. He spoke of a definite plan to record a retrospective double live album utilizing the services of all the original musicians from each section of his career. In addition, he had material worked up for a new studio album when a label could be found, and there was a project on hold with Larry Beckett to adapt Joseph Conrad’s early novel An Outcast of the Islands…

Buckley had no luck with his other writing, but that didn’t deter him from planning a screenplay based on Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Tim Buckley never had any illusions about his own great talent, although he didn’t expect success as a right. He was proud of his abilities as a singer and prepared to use the gift as a means to other ends.

Of his voice he remarked, “An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about anything, but people are really geared to something coming out of the mouth being words. I use my voice as an instrument when I’m performing live. I figure if I can do it, why not stick with it? The most shocking thing I’ve ever seen people come up against, besides a performer taking off his clothes, is dealing with someone who doesn’t sing words. This kind of thing also figures into ‘An American Souvenir’ because I get off on great sounding words. If I had my way, words wouldn’t mean a thing, but the rules are different for a single singer than a band – they can get away with it because their life expectancy is only two years.

“If I haven’t done it and I’m capable or old enough and ready, I’ll do it while keeping an eye on communication and not necessarily trends and fads. If I thought a whole album of Hank Williams songs was right, I’d do it even if burlesque was the style. Miles Davis went for 15 years without really selling a lot of albums, but his company kept putting them out because there is only one Miles Davis. Now I’m not equating myself with him, but there isn’t anybody who can sing or write like me, and if I wasn’t allowed to record, then recording wouldn’t be valid.”