My
Fleeting House
by
Tom Useted
For
people who enjoy music, the bounty of long-lost performances
circulating on sites like YouTube
provides an essential missing component of the careers of
any number of musicians.
From
concert footage taken from Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and
Clara to Neil Young’s Harvest-era BBC show,
from clips of Brill Building stars on local teen programs
to outtakes from Woodstock, it’s evident that the pre-MTV
pop music video library hasn’t been served all that well
by the people who own the rights to the footage.
My
Fleeting House is an attempt to correct this problem,
and takes as its subject a performer who wouldn’t show
up on any Behind the Music-style radar: Tim Buckley.
Because
the audience for a Tim Buckley DVD is likely very small, one
might wonder why anyone even bothered with this project. The
proof’s on the underside of the shiny disc, folks: these
clips vary from acceptable to entrancing, there are a lot
of them, and they fill a void that, no matter how tiny, was
still dying to be occupied.
I
mean, we’ve seen all the iconic late-Sixties rock-and-roll
footage we can stand, because the only people who were thought
to warrant being filmed at length were the biggest of the
stars. Everyone else is lucky to have any video evidence of
having existed at all. So when someone like Tim Buckley, who
is the very definition of a cult figure, turns out to have
more than a dozen worthwhile TV performances rotting in archives
on multiple continents, by all means let’s preserve that
stuff!
So
what’s here? Well, for starters, only two performances
previously available on DVD: Song to the Siren from
The Monkees (1967) and The Dolphins from The
Old Grey Whistle Test (1974), the first and last clips
on the disc. The former is of surprisingly sub-par video quality,
but the musical performance itself is stunning, Buckley seated
on an old car with nothing but his twelve-string, and his
tenor at his finest. The latter finds the singer older, less
beautiful as a vocalist but no less passionate (and still
a handsome devil), leading a full band through his favorite
Fred Neil song.
Buckley’s
most adventurous period - which stretched from Happy Sad
through Blue Afternoon and Lorca and culminated
in his personal favorite (and least classifiable) album Starsailor
- was amply documented, and it’s the performances from
this sequence of albums that make My Fleeting House
a necessity for Buckley fans.
Black-and-white clips of Happy Time (twice), Sing
a Song for You and the earlier Morning Glory are
all outstanding, featuring Buckley in intimate, small-band
settings, inching toward the sort of interplay that set Buckley
apart from other singer-songwriters of the time. But two songs
from ‘70 will be enough to sell this music to anyone
with eyes, ears and an open mind.
I
Woke Up and Come Here Woman, both from Starsailor,
are so radically altered from the album versions that they’re
practically different songs. (Buckley was heavily into Miles
Davis, and Starsailor is much closer to jazz than it
is to folk-rock. The band here features Buckley plus electric
guitar, bass, drums and trumpet.)
I
Woke Up is languid and beautiful, with Buckley showing
off the lower end of his vocal range. Come Here Woman,
however, is something of a freak-out. Buckley picks out an
unusually funky figure on his acoustic twelve-string, which
the trumpet follows in an ever-changing melody. The real highlights
of this performance come whenever Buckley attacks his guitar
and unleashes wordless screams, and everything reaches a boiling
point until Buckley cuts it off by returning to the original
guitar line.
It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a rock
performer and, in some ways, the visual element helps make
this difficult music more accessible.
The
other ‘70 clips come from a different source, but it’s
the same band, albeit working in a somewhat calmer fashion.
Blue Melody finds guitarist Lee Underwood in especially
fine form, and although the song is more conventional - it
hails from Blue Afternoon, which is likely his most
consistently strong set of songs - the performance is excellent.
Venice Beach (Music Boats by the Bay) is a wonderful
discovery, as it never appeared on any album. It, too, mines
a quieter but still slightly jazzy vibe. Although these songs
aren’t as fiery as the Starsailor cuts, they do
amply demonstrate the range of this particular group of collaborators.
The
remaining performances are something of a mixed bag. Partial
clips (Pleasant Street, No Man Can Find the War) are
bound to disappoint by virtue of their incompleteness, and
Who Do You Love is a video montage that mostly fails
on a visual level, although the audio is good. Sally Go
Round the Roses, from the rock-oriented final stage of
Buckley’s career, is an interesting revision of the old
hit for the Jaynetts, only slightly marred by the video quality.
But this stuff is pretty easily forgiven considering that
what surrounds it is such a revelation.
The
archival footage is intercut with commentary from David Browne,
the author of Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff
and Tim Buckley; Underwood, Buckley’s longtime guitarist;
and Larry Beckett, Buckley’s on-again-off-again lyricist.
Their contributions help put the clips in context, in terms
of Buckley’s career and the time period. While this is
a welcome bonus on first viewing, Buckley fanatics, who will
surely want to watch this disc multiple times, will be pleased
to know that they have the option of playing only the performances
themselves. (There are also some stray snatches of interviews
that don’t seem as well-integrated into the program,
but since Buckley’s long dead and we won’t hear
him speaking again any time soon, they’re at least interesting
from an historical perspective.)
Hopefully
My Fleeting House will usher in a period of serious
archival releases from performers heretofore relegated to
various artists collections, and if that’s the case,
it would be swell if other DVD producers do such a careful
and thorough job. This is a glorious find, further proving
the depth of the rock video vault and offering compelling
evidence of Tim Buckley’s talent in a long-overdue way.
Extras
include an album-by-album tour of the Buckley discography,
with Underwood and Beckett opining about the relative merits
of each. Underwood is far too charitable with the entire catalogue,
while Beckett is a bit more critical but cancels it out with
every assertion that Buckley was a True Artist, which gets
sort of grating. (Not that he’s wrong, though.)
Additionally,
there are two embarrassingly pretentious clips of Beckett
reading prose and poetry, as well as Beckett telling the story
of Buckley missing out on writing the theme for Midnight
Cowboy. Not the sort of stuff to watch more than once
- if you even make it that far - but better than nothing.
And the booklet actually includes notes by Browne and information
on the source material.)
©
2007 Useted/popmatters.com
|