Part Four

Buckley was firmly on his own, and not just figuratively. In late 1968 Larry Beckett was drafted; he spent a harrowing year in Army mental wards, boot camp and AWOL before getting the "unsuitable" discharge he so richly deserved. Although he and Buckley had stopped writing together, his absence deeply affected the singer. Buckley's anti-war The Earth Is Broken addresses "my brother" who's "been taken away." Recorded in concert during a second visit to England in October 1968, it finally appeared on Dream Letter, released in 1990. Beckett had never heard it before.

Other Buckley cronies disappeared. Miller was developing a New York-based freelance career; he and Buckley parted amicably. Not so vibist Friedman: "I was starting to make suggestions," he says, "about musical directions. I think Tim felt a little bit threatened by that. Next thing I knew he was playing in Boston without vibes."

Before leaving Buckley, both Miller and Friedman contributed to his next album. Blue Afternoon was Buckley's first self-production. Friedman doesn't dislike it, but calls it a "rush job" that lacked the "group feeling" of Happy/Sad.

The second half of 1969 was a productive period for Buckley. No sooner had he finished Blue Afternoon than he launched into another album, Lorca, named after the Spanish poet. Since Happy/Sad Buckley had been moving away from standard song structure; Lorca exploded with musical daring. The shortest track is almost six minutes long. The title cut is in an unsettling 5/4 meter. Anonymous Proposition dispenses with rhythm entirely, spotlighting Buckley's tightly recorded voice as he draws out the syllables of a winding romantic declamation (beginning "Love me/As if someday you'd hate me").

Buckley's friend Daniella Sapriel went over to his house to hear Lorca the day Buckley received the advance tapes. "He was really excited," she says. "It was a big step for him. He really liked it and he really felt he had pushed through something from the last album to Lorca. It was great, but it was also clear that this wasn't what the public was going to find if they were looking for a three-minute hit single for radio!"

"He was really making music for himself at that point," Holzman says. "Which is fine, except to find enough people to listen to it."

Lorca was Buckley's last album for Elektra. It appeared in February 1970--one month after Blue Afternoon's release on manager Cohen's Straight label. Such a dual release could only hurt both records, which were hardly Top 40 fodder to begin with. The comparatively easier-sounding Blue Afternoon peaked at #192. Lorca never had a chance, and was remaindered with almost indecent haste.

Like a good soldier, Buckley toured college venues to promote these new albums. He faced increasingly bewildered audiences. "People expected of Tim whatever his last album was," Dan Gordon says, "and Tim didn't take requests! He was there to play what he was into at that time, not where he was six months ago. The audience should have been flattered. He expected better of them." When a well-meaning Philadelphia fan yelled out "How about Buzzin' Fly?" Buckley's immediate riposte was "How about horseshit?"

One day Buckley phoned Beckett, suggesting they start writing again. "He was thinking of a project that came out to be Starsailor," Beckett says. For their new collaboration, I Woke Up, they broke precedent by working on the lyrics together--"testing each other line by line," Beckett says. "I think he was happy enough with that that he said, 'Okay, let's just let it rip. What else have you got?'"

Beckett had Monterey, "about being in the Army and separated from my lover." He also suggested Buckley finally record Song to the Siren, which they had written in late 1967--and which Buckley had performed on The Monkees' TV show. (Buckley was friends with Monkee Mickey Dolenz.) Although the solo spot on The Monkees is breathtaking, Buckley had dropped the song from his repertoire. The reason? Some ribbing from Judy Henske.

"Buckley always took everything she said to heart," Beckett explains. "One day she was teasing us about the lyrics to Song to the Siren, specifically the line, 'I am puzzled as the oyster.' Buckley didn't defend himself and I just laughed. And after that he stopped singing the song altogether. I noticed and I said, 'What's the deal, Tim? It's one of my best songs.' He said, 'Well, wow, everything she said about that line--I just can't do it!' Once again, taking a small amount of criticism so profoundly to heart that he can't even perform a song! As the years went by it became clear to us independently that this was our favorite collaboration. So in 1970 he agreed to put it on an album only if we rewrote the 'oyster' line."

Straight/Warner Bros. released Starsailor in November 1970. That same month The New York Times printed a Buckley essay on Beethoven as part of the bicentennial honoring the composer's birth. The essay says more about Buckley than Beethoven. Buckley wonders "if music is really relevant to people or if it just supports a fashionable movement...I think of our culture like I think of bacteria. Rock 'n' roll keeps the traffic moving to an adolescent pulse."

When Buckley entered his Starsailor phase, Cohen says he told his client "that this is not what the record companies are going to want; this will not be endearing to your audience. Maybe other musicians, maybe some people will understand it, but it's the wrong stuff for the wrong people at the wrong time. There would be problems with audiences, with club owners, with record companies. He said, 'That's what I want to do.'"

"Warner Bros. hated it," bassist John Balkin says of Starsailor. Emmett Chapman--who considers it Buckley's best album--says the singer received no tour support. The band broke up for lack of work, but Buckley organized a new group with drummer Maury Baker, Chapman and trombonist Glen Ferris. They rehearsed a few times a week, Chapman says, played clubs "maybe once a month," and "couldn't get an agreement to record."

Buckley was now booking his own gigs in small clubs, but he was in high spirits. "The music was extremely creative," Chapman says, "and he had an extreme amount of energy, and fluency within his energy. He would get up on his tip-toes and almost float in the air while he was singing." Also helping his state of mind was his domestic situation: Buckley was again a married man.

One of the best Buckley performances Dan Gordon ever saw--and he saw many--"was in a little roadhouse somewhere south of LA. He matched Emmett note-for-note with his voice. His artistry as an improvisational musician was boundless. I think he got 200 bucks for the gig. He just wanted to play the music in front of an audience."

"Tim was at his best when a small audience came to hear him," Underwood says. "The honesty he brought to improvisational music was one of his great strengths. What's the point of distancing oneself? Self-preservation? But there's a greater aspiration: creating honest music. And that takes great courage."

His profile was no longer national. Buckley was proud of Downbeat's five-star vindication of Starsailor, but he had little else to show for it. Scared about an ebbing musical career, he started writing film scripts with Gordon. The first was a barely fictional black comedy about a struggling musician--to be played by Buckley--and his friend, a (literal) vulture--to be played by an animated cartoon.

The script included a scene of Buckley blowing up a theater full of fans calling for old songs; the finale had the vulture carrying Buckley away from earthly care while the singer belted out My Way. (How did Sid Vicious know...?). Buckley called it "a million-dollar comedy which nobody will finance."

"Tim didn't care about money or fame," Daniella Sapriel says. "He could just about put everything he owned into a duffel bag. But it must have been very difficult for him not to have that reception by the public anymore." On a more mundane level, Buckley now had two sons to support; his wife Judy had an eight-year-old from a former marriage.

"We couldn't make it happen on any kind of well-organized plan," Chapman says. "He would tell me of arguments he would have with the record people, and how frustrating it was, and with Herb Cohen as well. He had a strange kind of pride. Even though he wasn't a very large person, he would insist on carrying heavy things. He didn't complain a lot and he had a certain heroic quality about him. He had a whole different set of values."

At some point, though, he caved in. He was prevented from recording the music he was playing live. He lost his house at Laguna Beach and moved back to Santa Monica. "There are two aspects in the music business," Balkin says. "One is being a musician, the other is being an artist. A musician works for a living. And that's what he needed to do."

"They said, 'You have to play rock 'n' roll," Kathleen Buckley says. "So he said, 'Okay, man, I'll play rock 'n' roll. But fuck you! I'll make you wish I didn't!'"

Two years after Starsailor, Greetings from LA came out. From the opening line of Move with Me's sex scenario ("I went down to the meat rack tavern") through the concluding Make It Right--with its "beat me whip me spank me" chorus--Greetings from LA has just one thing on its mind. The churning music matches the lyrics' over-the-top sleaze. Beckett calls the album "violently erotic," Kathleen Buckley "total camp"; either way, it was shockingly X-rated for 1972.

"He loved the fact that Greetings from LA pleased Judy Buckley," Underwood says. For all Buckley's supposed capitulation, Greetings is a damn good album. But it still didn't put him back on the charts. "It occurred to me," Buckley said, "that all of the rock 'n' roll sex symbols, like Jagger, Jim Morrison, had never actually said anything sexy. So"--he paused--"I decided to do it."

Beckett was initially appalled by Greetings. Then he appreciated it for what it was: a smoking set of songs. Then he got depressed again. "I thought, 'They fucking got him! He'd always said he was gonna deliver bread if they tried to take his art away. We were dedicated to total creative control and freedom and experimentation. Here they were putting pressure on him, and instead of saying, 'Hey! I don't need you people,' he knuckles under."

There were no more two-year waits between albums. Sefronia came out exactly a year after Greetings from LA. The label was now DiscReet, Cohen's new venture in partnership with Zappa. One dubious first was that five of Sefronia's eleven selections came from neither Buckley nor Beckett. The press bio accompanying Sefronia's release included quotes that sound strikingly ambivalent. "I don't think they'll ever happen again," Buckley says of the folk-boom years. "The comradeship is just not there anymore, and it affects the music." Several months later he commented, "A lot of people prefer the older-type songs, and I'm happy to do them, as long as I can continue to experiment simultaneously." The difference now was that the public didn't get to hear his "experiments."

The Tim Buckley audiences did see and hear was ferocious, grafting powerful and usually expansive vocals atop an equally excessive rock band. In July 1974 he had the thankless task of kicking off a mammoth outdoors British concert for the Allman Brothers, Doobie Brothers and three other acts. He turned in a searing performance whose intensity rarely let up.

A week later he was back at New York City's Central Park summer concert series--where he had once headlined--as an opening act. Compounding the irony, Jim Fielder had rejoined Buckley and the headliner was Fielder's previous employer Blood, Sweat and Tears. Buckley played a good hour and a quarter, to the delight of his fans--who were very much in the minority.

Fielder hadn't worked with Buckley for seven years, but he saw little change in his friend. "If anything, he was happier. He was with Judy...he'd settled down a bit." Fielder also cut a few tracks for Buckley's 1974 album Look at the Fool.

Buckley was back in charge of writing. The lyrics, though, are casual to the point of parody. Wanda Lu is a blatant Louie Louie retread; even one of the Beckett-Buckley collaborations, Freeway Blues, sounds like an Elton John spoof. "That was a ridiculous album," Kathleen Buckley says. "It just seem that the more down he became, the more desperate" Buckley got.

"The Tim who felt so incredibly exhilarated by Starsailor," Sapriel says, "was not the same Tim who was singing 'Wanda Lu, woo-woo-woo.'"

"I don't think his heart was in it," Elaine Buckley says of her son's '70s recordings. "A few times he told me he wasn't satisfied with the music that he was doing."

"When the artist finally comes through all this mess, you hear a pure voice," Buckley said in April 1975. "We're in the habit of emulating those pure voices when they're dead."