“When it’s true, man, it’s true for a long time.” - Tim Buckley

I toured and recorded and played lead guitar with Tim on seven of the nine albums released while he was alive and on numerous posthumous CDs that continue growing in number. From the time we met until the time he died, we remained the closest of friends.

He was a boy when I met him. He became a man through his music and his work and play—in studios, on the road, in bar rooms, bedrooms, executive offices, con­cert halls. Every step of the way he displayed exceptional creative abilities, although, to be sure, he did not always make wise or even pragmatic decisions.

Not only did he possess an astonishing voice—approximately 3 1/2 octaves (he enjoyed boasting of 5)—but he also taught himself how to use it. On the one hand, his voice was an aurally pleasing vehicle that carried words, concepts, and verbal imagery in conventional popular music fashion. However, he also came to utilize it as a nonverbal instrument that was as multifaceted and expressive as any I have ever heard.

Transcending words, moving into pure vocal sound, he could coo and whisper, he could charm and seduce, he could rage, bark, shriek, and rant. Intimacy, sorrow, pain, love, humor—Buckley felt it all, and could sing it all both verbally and nonverbally with unparalleled intensity. Eventually with Buckley, music was no longer an exclusive matter of repeatable hummable melodies and communally shared verbal images.

He became quintessentially contemporary when music also became a much broader palette for him—not just the 12 tones of a piano octave, or Harry Partch’s forty-plus tones, but also the control of sound in its full range of colors and permutations.

While a majority of musicians seek and then commercially exploit a single successful style until it runs dry, Buckley joined the ranks of those few artists who dare to evolve, like Picasso in painting or Miles Davis in jazz. In fact, Buckley’s creativity led him through no fewer than five conceptual/aesthetic periods—through the early folk orientation of Tim Buckley. Through the hippie-flavored folk-rock influences of Goodbye and Hello. Through the mellow jazz impressions of Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon.

Through the surrealistic, darkly hued, contemporary exploratory innovations of Lorca, which phased into Starsailor—the ferocious, gentle, intellectually complex avant-garde album that he told me he regarded as his masterpiece. Finally, his journey took him into the impassioned rhythm and blues sensuality of his last three albums, Greetings from L.A., Sefronia, and Look at the Fool. Nine years, nine albums, a vast spectrum of songs, styles, emotional levels, and intellectual dimensions.

Throughout his amazing creative journey, he enjoyed those times when his concepts and songs happened to match and mirror the public’s ways of thinking and feeling, as they did with Goodbye and Hello and Happy Sad. But he did not sell out or abandon his creativity when new directions beckoned, even when they carried him far away from the securities of conceptual repetition and commercially successful pop forms, as did Lorca and Starsailor.

Like a starsailor, indeed, Tim Buckley maintained his integrity, refused to buckle under in the face of commercial disaster, followed inspired new musical dreams with courage, fire and, to my way of thinking, stupendous strength. He was a rebel with a cause, a fighter and hero with a musical purpose, an uncompromising visionary with a dream, unafraid to go against the grain of crippling commercial pressures and popular rejection.

There were times when he was forced to walk in the rain. But rain or shine, damned or adored, he walked his own path and did so with conviction, even when he staggered in pain along the way. He was not a showbiz entertainer. He was a dedicated artist who reaped creative rewards even as he paid a severe price for innovation.

With his struggles, aspirations, triumphs, and failures, he became the kind of man his World War II warrior father might have been proud of, although Tim never received that satisfaction. Tim’s father, and the relationship Tim had with him, is very much a part of this story. The reactions Tim had to his father’s influence greatly contributed to Tim’s fiery artistic ascension—and to his personal downfall.

Tim had impressive physical grace and beauty, dazzling intelligence, sparkling and often scathing wit, an inventiveness in music, humor, and life that nobody else in my life has matched. For all of his talent, charisma, and productivity, he was also a lad whose soul had been fractured—by his father’s confusion and rage; by the demands of a ruthless commercial system that avariciously insists that art be subservient to the idols of greed and profit; and to some extent by a spoiled, fickle and occasionally vicious public.

Whether as artist or listener, it takes courage and imagination to sail beyond comfortable familiarity into the unknown, to explore the new and, in so doing, to challenge and expand the core of one’s deepest self. Tim had the courage, but he paid an exorbitant toll for it.

Even as Tim aspired to great artistic heights, he sometimes fell into the darkest psychological valleys, in which frustration, anger and disappointment turned into self-destruction. Inwardly divided, and riddled with doubts, he sometimes desperately needed to assuage his demons with the comforts of oblivion, or savagely lash out at others with caustic sarcasm. He was not always a nice guy. I know the pain he felt. I understand what he needed and why. I wish he had made it through to the other side. He almost did.

But almost is not quite.

Obviously, we all die. The question is not death. The question has to do with quality—with how we live and die. Tim lived well, as a cerulean blue melody that served music with every breath and created some of the most moving albums of his day. He also lived sloppily, damaging his talent while attempting to mollify emotional pain. He died sadly, poignantly, wastefully—tripped up on the comeback trail, even as bright new success beckoned.

When all is said and done, we can witness how Tim Buckley ascended the mountain. In spite of certain demeaning judgments by some of his critics, he did not compromise his integrity, his musical visions, or his life—including the final period in which he played white-funk rock ‘n’ roll. Everything he sang and wrote came from the heart. Near the end, it also came from pragmatic desperation fueled with heartfelt aspiration. He wrote and sang his own music with integrity, even when those who did not care for it deemed him either an obnoxious elitist avant-garde purist or a rock ‘n’ roll sell-out.

For nine short years, he performed live on stages across America, Canada, and Europe, vocally improvising at a level of brilliant creativity, technical sophistication, and raw emotional intensity that normally only instrumentalists attain. As I said in my 1977 Down Beat article about him, he did for the voice what Miles did for the trumpet, Coltrane did for the sax, Cecil Taylor did for the piano, and Hendrix did for the guitar.

On his journey to the heights, he recorded but a small portion of what he envisioned and performed. We have only a handful of albums to listen to—but there’s magic and mystery in those works. In every musical period—from folk, across the rainbow spectrum to funk-rock—we can hear the pain, beauty, passion, intensity, integrity, and enormous love that fueled his life and brought vitality into the lives of his listeners.

He signed with Elektra in 1966, over three decades ago. While others appeared and disappeared, Tim Buckley remains.

Your blue melodies sing on, Starsailor.
God bless, old friend.
I am with you always.

A BRIEF EXPLANATION

Shortly before press time, the publisher that handles the songs that Judy Buckley controls refused to grant permission to use Tim’s song lyrics in this book. I went through the text, eliminated all lyrics controlled by her, and worked my way through the obstacle course as deftly as I could. I ask you to join me in sailing up and beyond these obstructions into the open skies above, where Tim’s blue melodies enliven one’s ears, touch the heart, clear the eyes, cleanse the soul, and make everything all right again. I am sure that is the way he would want it.

Lee Underwood
Oakhurst, CA

Seminal concepts, 1977
Initial Effort, 1997
Second Effort, 1999
First Manuscript, 1999
Placement, 2001
Publication, 2002