Part Three

At an Ann Arbor club sound check Buckley met upright bassist John Miller, who was only too happy to accept the singer's invitation to sit in--or stand up, in this case--with Underwood and percussionist Carter C.C. Collins. Several months later Buckley offered Miller a spot in the group.

By the spring of 1968 Underwood's drinking had become uncontrollable--"I just couldn't handle it," the guitarist admits--and Buckley had to let him go. His replacement wasn't another guitarist but New York-based vibraphonist David Friedman, a friend of Miller. "Tim called me," Friedman says, "and said he'd like to get together and rehearse for a Fillmore East concert the next day! We rehearsed for seven hours; I had to learn about sixteen tunes with no [written] music. That night we went into the Fillmore East and played. It was great."

Friedman, a Juilliard student, brought out the implicitly jazzy direction of Buckley's music. With just vibes, string bass, congas and Buckley's mammoth acoustic 12-string, his group was becoming, as Friedman puts it, "the Modern Jazz Quartet of Folk!" For Buckley, his still-new album was already history. Live, he was playing loosely constructed music that wouldn't be in record stores for a year, even two.

The new songs were written by Buckley alone. "He decided to write everything on his own," Beckett says. "My feeling was--and this is just my stupid opinion--that he was afraid that the success of Goodbye and Hello was due to my lyrics. See where he's coming from? He respects me and tends to believe the worst about himself."

Underwood remembers telling Buckley, during the Goodbye and Hello sessions, that he should write more of his own lyrics. "His lyrics were so much more natural and flowing than these intellectually stilted, European-oriented works of Larry Beckett. Tim was intimidated by Larry's literary way of doing things."

The new songs were more improvisational, commonly centering on one chord while Buckley took vocal flight. As released on Happy Sad, the third album, they marked another striking change in direction.

Once again, Yester produced. (He shares credit with his then-partner Zal Yanovsky, but the latter admits having nothing to do with the record.) Unlike the preceding album, Yester contributed little; Buckley's band, with Underwood reinstated, was now a self-contained unit. Yester's memories of the week of sessions aren't so pleasant:

"His band was saying, 'Now we gotta get this in one take. If you don't get it in one take, that's it. The performance is gone!' I said, 'Let's keep it open, okay?' I love the spirit of jazz, but it's possible that the second take is better sometimes."

Yester feels Buckley was under the influence of his backing musicians. "It was as if someone said, 'You know, that stuff you do is really uncool, man.' And he said, 'Okay,' and dropped it. It was like he felt embarrassed about himself." It didn't help Yester's relationship with the band that he was also producing Pat Boone at the time. (The Boone album included such musicians as Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Clarence White.) "They were like, 'Oh man, what are you doing with Pat Boone's producer?!' I just said, who are these guys? They're good, but this kind of shit is a pain in the ass."

For all the tension, the result is a remarkably seamless dreamscape. Happy/Sad consists of six Buckley compositions, ranging from the floating Strange Feelin', which Underwood has written was indebted to Miles Davis' 1959 All Blues; to the melting changes of Buzzin' Fly; through Gypsy Woman, a live tour de force; and alighting with the tender Sing a Song for You.

"I never heard anyone play electric guitar the way Lee did," Miller states. "It fit in such a weird way with what Tim was doing." Add pointillistic vibes and bass, and Happy/Sad is chamber music from a Magritte painting. Buckley's voice simmers over it all, guiding the listener through this aural impressionism. It is a fully realized work. Buckley was 21 years old.

In the best tradition of accidental art, one of the album's most hypnotic effects--the pounding surf on Love from Room 109 at the Islander (on Pacific Coast Highway)--was unintended. "Bruce Botnick, the engineer, had forgotten to put the Dolbys back into the record mode," Yester says. "It was the old-fashioned Dolbys; you had to operate them mechanically. It was a great take. We said, okay, let's listen to it. Bruce looked over at the Dolbys and went, 'Oops! Oh God,'" he mumbled, "'we've got a problem here.'

"Bruce played it with the Dolbys off and it was real hissy. Buckley liked it. I said, 'Well, there's a problem with the take, Tim. The Dolbys weren't in record mode, so there's a lot of this noise.' And Tim," Yester laughs, "had a shrieking fit. His voice went up about four octaves. I could understand it; he loved the performance. He went outside and was comforted by his cronies for a little while. Then he came back in and said, 'Is there anything we can do with it?' I said, 'I'll tell you what: I think it's a great take. You're talking about out on [Pacific Coast Highway] anyway. Let's put some surf in the background; it's the same frequency range as the hiss. Chances are it'll cover it right up.'"

Yester's hunch worked. A couple of microphones were strung up outside Buckley's house--now in Malibu, indeed on Pacific Coast Highway--to "record an hour of incredibly good surf environment. We just laid it in there and it covers up the Dolby problem."

Manda Beckett must have been surprised the first time she heard Love from Room 109: Buckley took some of his lyrics from letters exchanged between the two. "I think it was written to a lot of people, me being one of them," she says. "That was the thing: He would just start playing, and in a couple of hours he would be singing a song. Sometimes it would take weeks; you would hear little pieces, and then a few weeks later there would be more pieces added. Sometimes they would come out just like that."

Pullman feels the wistful Buzzin' Fly is about Guibert, while Strange Feelin' and the despairing Sing a Song for You are about her: "It was right at that time that we were splitting up." She didn't revel in the role of "old lady." She had accompanied him on tours--at Buckley's insistence, and to budget-minded Cohen's consternation--but life on the road was not for her: "It was his movie." So she stayed home while he toured and they grew apart. During one of Buckley's absences a lonely Pullman started seeing someone else. After Buckley returned from the tour Pullman moved out.

Not that he was a model of domestic faithfulness. For his age and occupation, Buckley would have to have been lobbying for saint-hood to resist the temptations in his path. There's little evidence that he did. "He had girlfriends everywhere," Manda Beckett says. "People were so attracted to him that he would just fall helplessly into these various relationships. He wasn't really using people. He just didn't have any control."

In New York he had met Hope Ruff, a friend of Danny Fields who wrote out lead sheets for less skilled musicians. "I went over some of his stuff with him but it really intimidated him," Ruff says. "He always thought that I would be better at everything than him. And he really couldn't deal with it."

They became friends, however, and then--after his break-up with Pullman, or so Buckley told Ruff--more than friends. "I was always very wary of getting involved with him," Ruff says. "First, he was living with somebody else. Second, I knew he needed a woman who was subservient, which I certainly wasn't. And he messed around with everybody. It was really stupid of me in a lot of ways, but there's one in everybody's life, and he was definitely it."

Happy/Sad appeared in April 1969, the year of Buckley's peak popularity. Goodbye and Hello may have accumulated the most sales of any of his albums, but Happy/Sad made the biggest immediate impact, lingering in the pop charts for three months. Elektra's ads quoted the artist: "I play heart music." As for his lyrics: "If people want poems they should read Dylan Thomas."

Buckley's paradoxical appeal continued unabated. Happy/Sad is striking, even challenging music--"I guess it's pretty demanding," Buckley admitted--but he kept his young female following. In March he headlined Philharmonic Hall in New York's Lincoln Center. Among various love objects rendered to the stage, a woman presented him with a red carnation. Buckley picked it up, chewed the petals and spat them out.

"I can see where I'm headed," Buckley stated in an interview a few weeks after that concert, "and it will probably get farther and farther from what people expect of me." Happy/Sad marked a fortuitous confluence of art and merchandising. But Buckley's implacable muse was about to lead him away from mainstream success.

Pullman says Elektra had complained about the length and/or wordiness of some of Goodbye and Hello's songs. Compared to Happy/Sad, though, Goodbye and Hello was bubblegum--albeit countercultural bubblegum. "Elektra was very good to him, and very flexible; but they applied pressure, just like any record company, to write songs that are going to be accepted by DJs. He really resented that. He was using music as a form of self-expression, and that was the most important thing."

"They kept asking him to make rock records," Manda Beckett says, "and he really wasn't interested in that anymore."