ZigZag Magazine - 1975: Andy Childs

A Happy Sad Starsailor from Washington D.C.

Blue Afternoon (Straight SIS 1060)

Alright, where were we? Oh yes, Blue Afternoon. But first of all apologies for the delay in getting this second part to you. Any of you at all familiar with Buckley's work will realize that the latter half of his total recorded material is by far the more complex and demanding, and it took about twenty plays each of Lorca and Starsailor before I could gather my own thoughts together in any coherent form, and even now, they're both nearly as hard and jagged on the ear as when I first heard them some four years ago.

Still, more of that later. We'll continue where we left off with an appraisal of Blue Afternoon, Buckley's fourth album, and his first for Straight Records. The personnel listing is the same as for Happy Sad, except for the addition of a drummer, Jimmy Madison, and the general theme and feel of the album is equally similar.

As Buckley has said, Blue Afternoon comprised a lot of songs that he didn't have finished from the first three albums, and he probably needed to get them out of his system before embarking on the style of music exhibited on Lorca and Starsailor.

"When I did Blue Afternoon, I had just about finished writing set songs. I was just writing differently and I had to stretch out a little bit."

The one obvious indication of things to come, on Blue Afternoon, is a track called The Train, which has a very loose, jazzy structure with lots of atonal staccato guitar work and an imaginative, but by this time not totally surprising, exhibition of Buckley's vocal abilities.

The rest of the album is, as mentioned though, very much like Happy Sad, which means it's great. The opening track is Happy Time which has a beautifully straightforward melody and lightness of touch that he unfortunately seems to have sacrificed to some extent as of late, and the other three tracks on side one, Chase the Blues Away, I Must Have Been Blind, and The River are all in the same class.

The vibes playing of David Friedman deserves special mention for its taste and imagination throughout. Listen to his work, and Madison's dramatic use of cymbals, on The River and marvel at the tension created with such simple but effective use of instrumentation. the first side of this album is, if the truth be known, as good as some of the finest moments, on Happy Sad.

Side two is musically very similar, but lyrically it has more than an edge of sadness and despondency to it, exhibited in titles like So Lonely and Blue Melody. A gem of a record though, and one I know I'll keep playing even when I've finished this article and the music of Tim Buckley is dripping out of my ears.

As Dick Lawson said in an old issue of Friends: "Albums of such gentleness, beauty and profound sadness are impossible to write about, to put down in words. You go with it, or you don't... each cut is a hymn to a number of different shades and depths of Buckley's mood." How very true.

Lorca (Elektra EKS-74074)

Buckley didn't have an awful lot to say about this album, which he owed Elektra and was his last for them, and it may or may not be some indication as to the way he feels about it. Released in 1970, it was probably deemed "years ahead of its time," such is its wayward, uncomformist [sic] structure.

Again the album features Lee Underwood on electric guitar and piano, and Carter C.C. Collins on congas, but John Miller is replaced by John Balkin on bass, and both David Friedman and Jimmy Madison are absent. Lorca is really an album of two basic styles which often overlap and sometimes collide, providing results which range from inspired to confusing.

There are only five tracks, none of them under five minutes in length. Side one contains the title track, nearly ten minutes of it, opening with a doomy, menacing organ sound and featuring a lot of fast, jazzy keyboard work and vocal acrobatics. The other track on side one is Anonymous Proposition, which is deathly slow with Buckley singing his deepest, most resonant voice over some adventurous and at times frantic bass and guitar work.

A truly weird side that demonstrates the free-form, avant-garde jazz style that contrasts quite sharply with parts of side two like the first cut, I Had a Talk With My Woman, which is a comparatively simple, melodious song with a lot of very tasty guitar work, and neat conga playing giving it a constant rhythm-- something in short supply on this album. Driftin' does just what the title suggests-- slow and relaxed, capturing the feel of his earlier records on one or two occasions. And then there's the concluding track, Nobody Walkin', which is very up-tempo highlighting Lee Underwood's keyboard work and Buckley himself on strident rhythm guitar.

Overall, not a completely satisfying album I would venture, but an important one for him nonetheless, as it leaves behind one style and commences on another in a way that jars and provokes nearly as much as it soothes and pacifies. I think only devoted Buckley fans would be able to take that.

Starsailor (Straight STS 1064)

The least comprehensible and most demanding Tim Buckley album to date. Most of it is so strange, both lyrically and musically, that I prefer not to exercise my confused critical faculties lest I get too wrapped up in its many complications. By now, Buckley is working very much in the seemingly limitless confines of jazz, although he admits that on Starsailor he went about as far as he could as a singer in that syndrome.

Certainly, I think if he went any further he'd do permanent damage to his voice, such is the way he tortures it here. Many people, at the time of its release, and in retrospect, have said that it's an "important' and "innovative" album, and I'll probably cause a lot of anger and startled expressions of disbelief when I say that to me it sounds erratic, forced, disjointed, and very, very difficult to listen to all the way through.

The first three tracks, Come Here Woman, I Woke Up, and Monterey demonstrate the physical limits of Buckley's voice-- often painful to comprehend, backed by frenetic, formless bass and guitar that would do the original Mahavishnu Orchestra credit, although the playing here is nowhere near as loud or intense.

There then follows [sic] two tracks which are almost totally dissimilar in structure to each other and the rest of he album--Moulin Rouge, a comparatively conventional song, almost attractive in its simple European flavor, and partly sung in French. And then there's Song To The Siren, my favourite track, mostly because it bears the greatest resemblance to his earlier work. A prejudiced and probably unfair judgment (I'm sure Buckley himself would think so), but then that's just my own personal opinion.

The whole of the second side is total weirdness. At various times I can hear snatches of the Magic Band, John Coltrane, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and several other artists from both rock and jazz and areas in between, but I honestly don't feel prepared to unreservedly recommend it to anyone but the most open-minded and patient listened[sic].

It requires a fair amount of effort and concentration, and as I said at the beginning, it's taken me at least twenty plays to be able to keep up with it and understand fully what's going on all the time. I think Starsailor is my least favorite Buckley album, but I can appreciate the thought and motivation behind it, which, for me, makes it far from dismissible.

The musicians on the album are the same as on Lorca except the conga-playing of Carter C.C. Collins is absent and instead there's Buzz Gardner on trumpet and flugelhorn, Bunk Gardner on alto flute and tenor sax, and Maury Baker on tympani. Incidentally, the songwriting credits feature Larry Beckett for the first time since Goodbye and Hello, and he had a hand in four compositions on Starsailor.