Your concept of putting words to music. Seeing the lyrics you would write for Tim on paper, but then Tim singing them would be a whole different story

The thing is, and it's kind of a sad story, at that point I thought of poetry and song as two different things. Song, as some lightweight genre. Even though I had the magnificent example of Dylan turning songs into literature in front of me, and I was aware of that, but I still didn't understand what he was doing either, and couldn't do it myself.

So what I did, was work real hard in the background on poetry that you never heard, and then when I went to write songs I would just kind of knock them out and not really work very hard at them. So it had the vice of being not worked on hard enough, or cared for, and then on the other hand, I would bring this sort of literary sensibility to it which is fairly obtuse in its understanding of what a song actually is. So between those two, in my view, I wrote a lot of clunky songs that are just plain clumsy and don't deserve to live on!...Then Tim would sing them. He could sing anything, and they would come alive, that's true.

In other words, these songs were written on the spur of the moment...

It's hard to imagine Goodbye And Hello as being spur of the moment, but I tell you, I didn't work very hard on it. There are exceptions to this like Song to the Siren and Starsailor-- those are much better. The problem with Tim was that he was ten times better a singer than I was a songwriter at that point. I did later catch up but he was already dead.

Do you think none of this would have happened-- Tim dying, Jeff dying-- if you two hadn't met or collaborated?

No, I don't think that's true at all. I think what happened would've happened in any event.

You stayed the same behind the scenes, though. Survived.

I still continued to be devoted to writing poetry and songs. Their shape has changed through the years.

Did you feel the innocence the two of you had on the debut was almost... imposed by fame on all that was to come?

His fame was pretty limited compared to other people in the sixties. I think the only deleterious effect it had was that he had extreme neurosis, and being carefully taken care of by his manager and adored by his fans, I think he got the impression he didn't have to work on himself at all-- that he was being approved of. People were clapping, people were loving, he could go to bed with anybody he wanted, just about. And so what happened, his neurosis, instead of getting better or helped, got worse.

I mean, between the teenager that I met, and the guy that was running around L.A. by Goodbye And Hello, it was dramatic how worse it was mentally. He never did get any help... from anybody his whole short life. And I think that would've extended his life. And maybe if he hadn't been famous-- hadn't had all this approval-- he would've thought, you know, hey, I really need to get better in my head... We were always close, and always talked.

I would actually try to be a force for good in his mind, but you know... I'm almost too close to the situation to say anything. There really wasn't any fame; the only critical part came after Starsailor where the record company was concerned about him not selling any records. But really, neither did Tim or I ever think for a minute about selling records or charts or popularity or anything, except pure art. That's what we thought about all the time.

The L.A. scene-- it seemed like Tim didn't like the term folk or rock, and wanted to shy away from that.

Well, that's the journalistic scene. The L.A. scene was very exciting; so was Greenwich Village, in terms of music. We hung out with lots of musicians, ran up and down Sunset Strip. We were definitely part of the scene.

Ever perform on stage?

Yeah. Actually in 1970, I opened the show for Tim doing some of my poetry with a cellist backing me up. Also, when we were first starting out our band performed at the Troubadour one time.

How close was your poetry to what you would write for Tim?

It was very far apart. The poetry was much more ambitious and worked much harder on.

The Zappa connection? Obviously I know Jim Carl Black discovered him performing. Was there ever talk about joining?

No, though both were managed by Herb Cohen. The only Zappa connection I know is that Tim opened for him in New York in the late '60's, and actually performed Goodbye And Hello onstage-- I think it would be the one and only time, and Zappa {laughing} was most impressed. We of course really admired Zappa.

Jesus, I heard you were in the Army during Happy Sad.

I was drafted. I did try to get out and worked really hard on that, and got out a year later. I was only in the U.S. Mostly in jail. That's a strange story because we missed a golden opportunity to become famous.{John} Schlesinger was making the movie Midnight Cowboy and wanted a theme song. First they went to Dylan and said, can you do me a theme song? He said sure and went and wrote Lay Lady Lay-- a really beautiful song. Perfect. And Schlesinger heard it and said, Nah, nah, it's no good.

Somehow he ran into Cohen and he said, 'Oh yeah, my guys will write it.' He was talking about Tim and I. We would've done a good job, too. But, I was in the Army, and absolutely out of communication with everybody. Tim said, 'I don't wanna do it by myself!' So Herb went and dug out this song already recorded by Fred Neil and gave that to Schlesinger and he said that's perfect. So there's the Dylan, Neil, Buckley connection to Midnight Cowboy! {Laughs} I only heard about it until after it was all over. We would've done some gritty song that would have been great.

What did you think of Happy Sad? A big transition.

A lot of people enjoy that one... I'm one of them. The looser jazzier feel than the folk-rock that proceeded it. To me, the lyrics, in most cases, are actually silly. You kind of have to ignore them. For that, Blue Afternoon, and Lorca for a matter of fact. Some of the music is really memorable, especially a song like Sing a Song for You is very beautiful and one of his greatest melodies.I would think for some of the stuff that was out at the time they are some of the more beautiful lyrics.

Really? I find them to be deeply confused. It depends on what you're talking about lyrics. I mean, if you're gonna talk about lyrics that are going to be seriously looked at; like if you're gonna look at a song like Buzzin' Fly, it's just ridiculous. If you start to try to figure out what is his relationship with this person-- has he just met them? Had they had a long relationship? Did they just break up?-- you can't figure it out from line to line! It's completely meaningless. And at the end he's saying sometimes I think about you, after this real passionate song. Well, thanks a lot, sometimes I give you a passing thought too! It's ridiculous... But it's a very charming song, he opened almost every set this way.

Did you express your thoughts to Tim about this?

{Laughs} No! I didn't wanna bum him out. He's trying to write lyrics; that's OK.

Did you feel this was his equinox? Where everything that came after, went down?

No... He just had a steady Miles Davis-like progression of styles. He was very restless and would always be on the growing edge. Here's something that I just thought of last week, and it's kind of an insight into Tim that no one's quite noticed. And that is, he's always going to the next level, the next phase of music. Always pushing to the edge of himself as a composer, and a singer.

For example, he got invited to do that little spot on The Monkees TV show at the end, where they'd have some musician they liked come in and do a piece-- sort of pad out the show. On the very last episode they had Buckley come in, and I was there. Now here he is-- he's going to be on TV, it's like the first time, national TV, millions and millions of people are going to hear him sing, and he'll have a much wider audience than any of his albums had ever sold. They say, 'You can sing whatever you want.'

So what does he do? Does he do anything from his bestselling albums? Does he do one of the singles that were released through the years? Anything that could promote his product? No. He does Song to the Siren, a song we had written a couple of weeks earlier which was the growing edge, the latest and most experimental piece we had. That's what he sat down and sang because... that's who he was. Nobody quite heard songs that beautiful.

People would recall seeing him into two different intervals. When he first started out singing very melodious, and later when he would be wailing onstage. A big transition. Was he changing like this as a person as well?

{Pause} I don't think the two things are connected. He had his own mental life, which proceeded to get slowly worse and worse, and he had his own creative life, which had all kinds of ups and downs, but was always trying for the next big thing. One of the things about Lorca that I've often thought, is that I think it's pretty much a failure as an album. But... that's actually a really good thing.

Strictly speaking, you don't want to have failures, but a lot of people, they never fail. They get some sort of style down pat, and they just redo it their whole career. And they never fail, they always do something that's competent in their style to their limits. But they never fail! That's because they're not really artists. Sure, they might have been an artist on the first one, but every subsequent one is just cashing in.

Where as Tim would actually try something and fail, and that was a sign that he was really experimenting. You're not experimenting if you never fail. Right after that, you know, comes Starsailor, which is a magnificent success. {I say ask about clarifying success} It was an artistic success. To this day, I don't really know the numbers of the sales.

Of course there's always the theory of Elektra sort of dying at this time. What about the sixties?

Well, Jac Holzman did give him a huge amount of artistic freedom...{About after the sixties} There was a lot of money between Dylan and The Beatles. Tim... they'd take somebody like him and say, 'go in the studio, do your thing, we're not going to tell you what to do, here's all this money by the way-- you can produce your own album.' That was nice, because a whole lot of good people emerged out of that. But when sales dropped off and things tightened up, then a lot of artists never got a chance to emerge.