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"Buckley
yodelling baffles audience" ran a Rolling Stone
headline. As Herb Cohen says today, "he was changing too drastically, playing
material that audiences weren't necessarily coming to hear and that was beyond
the realm of their capability" ...
"An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about anything, but people
are really geared to something coming out of the mouth being words," a resentful
Buckley said in a subsequent press release. "I use my voice as an instrument
when I'm performing live. The most shocking thing I've ever seen people come up
against, beside a performer taking off his clothes, is dealing with someone who
doesn't sing words. If I had my way, words wouldn't mean a thing." Buckley
was driven into deep depression by Starsailor's failure. Straight wouldn't
provide tour support, the old band had fragmented because there was so little
work for them, and Buckley was reduced to booking his own shows in small clubs.
At last he shared the bitter, neglected status of his jazz idols. Underwood confirms
that in order to take that sting away, Buckley dabbled in barbiturates and heroin.
When Buckley prefaced I Don't Need It To Rain on the Troubadour album by
saying, "This one's called Give Smack A Chance", it was a dangerous
joke. "He was mocking the peace movement, the whole Beatles mentality of
the day," says Underwood. At
least his personal life had improved. He'd re-married, bought a house in upmarket
Laguna Beach (subsequently painted black to outrage the neighbours), and effectively
gone to ground. "I'd been going strong since 1966 and really needed a rest,"
was Buckley's explanation. "I hadn't caught up with any living." He
also inherited his wife Judy's seven-year-old son Taylor. Judy
doesn't recall any drug abuse. Nor does she remember Tim driving a cab, chauffeuring
Sly Stone or studying ethnomusicology at UCLA, as the singer often claimed at
the time. Instead, she recalls Tim reading voraciously, catching up with his favourite
Latin American writers at the UCLA library, and channelling his creative urges
into acting. 
Tim,
Linda Gillen and OJ Simpson |
The
unreleased 1971 cult film Why? starring OJ Simpson was shot during this
period. "It was their first film but both Tim and OJ were incredible actors.
The camera loved them," remembers co-star Linda Gillen. "Tim had this
James Dean quality. He's so handsome in the movie and yet such a mess! You know
those Brat Pack kind of films, where people play prefabricated rebels who see
themselves as kinda bad but they have a PR taking care of business? Well, Tim
was the real deal. He didn't give a fuck how he looked or dressed. He had no hidden
agenda. He had an incredible naivety. "We
used to improvise in the film. Tim's character talks to the effect that you can't
commit suicide. You can't amend your feelings for other people; you have to find
that thing that's good in you and keep that alive. A lot of the group had been
onto my character about taking heroin but Tim would always be the sympathetic
one. But that was Tim. He'd understand where they were coming from, why they would
do what they did. "On
the set, I used to hum to myself to fight off boredom and Tim would pick up on
what I was humming, like Miss Otis Regrets, and we'd end up harmonising
together," she continues. "I loved Fred Neil, and asked if he knew Dolphins,
which he sung for me. He'd say, 'They got to Fred Neil, don't let it happen to
you.' He'd talk in this strange, paranoid, ominous way, about 'the man.' That
night, we went to buy Fred's album and bypassed Tim's on the way! He never hustled
his records to me; he wasn't a self-promoter. "I
wondered why Tim was working on this schleppy movie, because I knew people like
Roger McGuinn who were making millions, and he said, very silently, 'I need the
money.' We were only earning $420 a week on the film, and I said, Is that all
the money you have right now? and he said, 'No, I'm getting a song covered,' which
I think was Gypsy Woman, which Neil Diamond was going to do." Meanwhile,
the comedic plot of his unfilmed screenplay Fully Air-Conditioned Inside
was based on a struggling musician who blows up an audience called for old songs
and makes his escape tucked beneath the wings of a vulture, singing My Way...
When
an album finally emerged in 1972,
Buckley had once again avoided covering familiar ground. Greetings From LA
was a seriously funky amalgam of rock and soul. His youthful verve might have
gone, but his wondrous holler whipped things along. "After Starsailor,
I decided the way to come back was to be funkier than everybody," he boasted.
But would radio stations play a record as shocking lyrically as Starsailor
had been musically? Judy
was the new muse ("An exceptionally beautiful woman, provocative and witty
too," says Underwood) and the album was drenched in lust. In a year when
David Bowie made sex a refrigeratedly alien concept, Buckley wrote a set of linked
songs in a sultry New Orleans populated by a constellation of pimps, whores and
hustlers. "I went down to the meat rack tavern," was the album's opening
line; and it closed on, "I'm looking for a street corner girl/And she's gonna
beat me, whip me, spank me, make it all right again..." Buckley
explained his reasoning to Chrissie Hynde when she interviewed him for the NME
in 1974. "I realized all the sex idols in rock weren't saying anything sexy
-- no Jagger or [Jim] Morrison. Nor had I learned anything sexually from a rock
song. So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious." Producer
Hal Wilner, who subsequently organised the Tribute To Tim Buckley show at St.
Anne's Church, Brooklyn, remembers the singer at this time. "I saw Buckley
live four times, including two of the best performances I've ever seen. He was
everything someone could look for in music, totally transcendent. The first time
took 100 per cent of my attention, like taking some sort of pill. You'd expect
it from guys like Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra, but that's a very rare feeling to
get in rock. "Another
time he opened for Zappa in his Grand Wazoo period, and the audience was incredibly
rude to him, booing and heckling. But he handled it beautifully, just carrying
on, talking sarcastically, trying to get them to blow hot smoke on the stage.
He was genius in every sense. He should be seen on the same level as Edith Piaf
and Miles Davis." "Rock'n'roll
was meant to be body music," Buckley stated in Downbeat magazine.
But diehard fans wanted to know why he was now singing rock'n'roll. "His
last albums were dictated somewhat by business considerations," says Lee
Underwood, "but few understood they were also dictated by major music considerations.
Where else could he go after Starsailor's intellectual heights except to
its opposite, to white funk dance music, rooted in sexuality? "At
least Tim's R&B was honest, unlike the over-rehearsed stuff that pretends
to be spontaneous. Greetings is still one of he best rock'n'roll albums ever to
come down the pike. Throughout his career, he constantly asked and answered a
question that can be terrifying, which is, Where do I go from here? People criticized
him during Lorca and Starsailor and wanted him to play rock'n'roll, but when he
did they said he sold out." True
compromise was far more detectable on 1974's album Sefronia, released by
Cohen and Zappa's new DiscReet label under the Warner Brothers umbrella. "Everyone
was second-guessing where he should go next," says his old friend Donna Young,
"and Tim started listening to what other people thought." Some
new-found literary acumen was displayed on the title track, a ballad as lush as
the album's reading of Fred Neil's Dolphins. But five of the songs were
covers, including the sappy MOR duet I Know I'd Recognise Your Face, while
pale retreads of Greetings honeyed-funk served as filler. Guitarist Joe
Falsia was now in the Tonto role, Underwood having stepped down to deal with his
drug addiction. Herbie Cohen was obviously calling the shots. "Some of those
songs were beautiful, but you have to get through Herb's idea of what is commercial,"
says Underwood. As
commercial compromises go, Sefronia was terrific --
radio-friendly and lyrically approachable -- but Buckley knew the score. "If
I write too much music, it loses, as happened on Sefronia. Y'know, it gets
stale." In reference to the folk-rock era, he observed that "the comradeship
is just not there any more, and it affects the music." His boisterous barrelhouse
sound was showcased at 1974's Knebworth Festival in Britain, where Buckley opened
a bill that included Van Morrison, The Doobie Brothers and The Allman Brothers
Band. It was his first UK show since 1968, and few knew who he was. Photographer
Joe Stevens reacquainted himself with Tim at a DiscReet launch in London : "He
was sitting at a table signing autographs, which I couldn't have imagined him
doing before. When he saw me he said, 'Come on, let's get out of here,' before
they'd even said, 'Ladies'n'gentlemen, Tim Buckley!' We hit the street, took some
photos, then took a taxi back to my place. He spent two days curled around my
TV set, cooing at my girlfriend. We got calls from Warners accusing me of kidnapping
their artist! You could see what had happened to him. The youth had gone out of
his face, and his smile would break into a frown as soon as it had finished."
Look
At The Fool (1975), with its frazzled,
Tijuana-soul feel, was purer Buckley again, but the
songwriting meandered badly -- Wanda Lu remains one of the most ignominious
final songs of any brilliant career. "It just seemed that the more down he
became, the more desperate he sounded," his sister Kathleen told Musician
magazine. "The work of a man desperately trying to connect with an audience
that has deserted him," pronounced Melody Maker. The photo on the
back cover caught Buckley with a quizzical, defeated expression. Look at the fool,
indeed. Honest to the end.
A look at the cover
shows that Tijuana Moon was to be the name of Tim's final studio album |
In
1974, Buckley wrote to Lee Underwood : "You are what you are, you know what
you are, and there are no words for loneliness -- black, bitter, aching loneliness
that gnaws the roots of silence in the night..." "Tim
felt he'd given everything to no avail," says Underwood. "He was even
suicidal for a short while because he felt there was no place left to go, emotionally
speaking. He was gaining new audiences and improving his singing within conventional
song forms, but comments that he'd sold out made him feel terrible. He never understood
his fear of success, and remained divided and tormented to the end. I urged him
to take therapy shortly before his death, when he was feeling very bitter, to
the point of suicide, but he said, 'Lose the anger, lose the music.'" "We
saw a lot of him over the years as disillusionment set in," said Clive Selwood,
who, inspired by Buckley's session for BBC's John Peel Show, later founded the
Strange Fruit label and its Peel Sessions. "When we first met, he
spent his leisure time cycling across Venice Beach, guzzling a six-pack. When
we last met, he was carrying a gun, in fear of the reactionary side of American
life, who despised his long hair. He said, 'If you're carrying a gun, you stand
a chance.'" "He
continually took chances with his life," adds Larry Beckett. "He'd drive
like a maniac, risking accidents. For a couple of years he drank a lot and took
downers to the point where it nearly killed him, but he'd always escape. Then
he got into this romantic heroin-taking thing. Then his luck ran out." Buckley's
most revered idols were Fred Neil -- who chose anonymity rather than exploit the
success of Everybody's Talkin' -- and Miles Davis, both icons and both
junkies. "He lived on the edge, creatively and psychologically," says
Lee Underwood. "He treated drugs as tools, to feel or think things through
in more intense ways. To explore." One
planned exploration was a musical adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel Out Of
The Islands and a screenplay of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again.
Of more immediate consequence, Buckley had won the part of Woody Guthrie in Hal
Ashby's film Bound For Glory. The consciousness as well as financial independence,
but in the end it went instead to David Carradine. Buckley
was still up for playing live. After a short tour culminating in a sold-out show
at an 1800-capacity venue in Dallas, the band partied on the way home, as was
customary. An inebriated Tim proceeded to his good friend Richard Keeling's house
in order to score some heroin. As
Underwood tells it, Keeling, in flagrante delicto and unwilling to be disturbed,
argued with Buckley : "Finally, in frustration, Richard put a quantity of
heroin on a mirror and thrust it at Tim, saying, 'Go ahead, take it all,' like
a challenge. As was his way, Tim sniffed the lot. Whenever he was threatened or
told what to do, he rebelled." Staggering
and lurching around the house, Buckley had to be taken home, where Judy Buckley
laid him on the floor with a pillow. She then put him to bed, thinking he would
recover; when she checked later, he'd turned an ominous shade of blue. The paramedics
were called but it was too late. Tim Buckley was dead. "I
remember Herb saying Tim had died, and we all sat there," recalls Bob Duffy,
Buckley's old tour manager. "It wasn't expected but it was like watching
a movie, and that was its natural ending." "It
was painful to listen to his records after he died," says Linda Gillen. "I
remember how vibrant he was. He had that same lost alienation as friends who had
committed suicide. He was smart, wonderful, mean, nasty, kind, racist, and a loyal
friend, all kinds of contradictions. A true original." "When
he died, I took a week off," remembers Joe Stevens. "He was special
-- an innocent in an animal machine."
In
1983, Ivo Watts-Russell of the 4AD label
had the inspired notion to marry the vaporous drama of the Cocteau Twins to Buckley's
Song To The Siren. Punk's Stalinist purge was over, and the result was
a haunting highlight of post-New Wave rock, launching both This Mortal Coil and
Buckley's posthumous reputation. Before
he died, Buckley had been planning a live LP spanning the various phases of his
career. Sixteen years later Dream Letter was released to great acclaim.
"Nobody would have listened before," reckons Herb Cohen. "Things
have their own cycle, usually close to 20 years. You have to wait." He
knowingly compromised his fierce artistic ideals, but his gut feeling was that
he'd get more freedom later," says Larry Beckett. "If he'd gone into
hiding for ten years, no end of labels would have recorded anything he wanted.
Things do come around." "He
was one of the great ballad singers of all time, up there with Mathis and Sinatra,"
believes Lee Underwood. "He would have pulled out of his youthful confusion,
expanded his musical scope to include great popular and jazz songs. Tim Buckley
didn't say, 'I am this, I am that.' He said, 'I am all of these things.'"
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