You started writing with Tim again on Starsailor.

We only ever wrote some of the material together.  He called up one day and said, you know, let's write together again.  I said, okay.  It was really an easygoing relationship.  We worked on I Woke Up.  He had had some dream, and had some images.  He actually tried to work on the lyrics with me, but it was a disaster, a putrid, surrealistic pile of shit, and not a very good song.  But then at that point, that sort of broke the ice, you might say.  And that point he said, what else do you got?  And I gave him Monterey, and talked him into doing Siren, and so on.  And Moulin Rouge eventuated out of that too, and Starsailor itself.

You know, every single one of the albums that I had anything to do with was titled after a song of mine.  I found out after Tim's death that the last album, Look at the Fool, Tim had it titled Tijuana Moon.  He could no longer make the decisions, so somebody retitled it.  But I thought that was really sweet.

I always wondered about Moulin Rouge, because it sounds so different from anything else on Stairsailor

Like I say, Tim was ready at any point to put out a five-album set.  He loved so many kinds of music, and was so good at it, that limiting him to the two sides of an LP was almost ridiculous.  Even in public, like you see on the live stuff as it starts to come out, he would start to diverge.  And then in private, he would diverge even farther, and play and sing all kinds of stuff, either covers or originals, that had nothing to do with anything.  I mean, they're just out from left field.  All different kinds of music.

This [Moulin Rouge] was his idea completely, doing something, some chanteuse-like song, and he wanted me to write in French.  He did not know French at all, and actually I coached him, I coached him, I wrote it out so that he could just read what I had written, and sound it out.  And he still screwed it up royally.  Although I was there for most of the sessions of Starsailor, I wasn't there for that one, so it got in the can screwed up.

But musically, it's very strange.  All it really is, is him saying, once again, you know, "You don't know me.  I love all kinds of music you never even thought about."

With Stairsailor, Tim got about as far out as he ever did, except maybe for Lorca.

[It was] a watermark of his experimentation.  That was clear to him, and to the record company, and to the buying public.  He was starting to become more alienated from...well, let me put it this way.  He had problems; this is why he could not live beyond the age of 28.  In the old days, he would do, like at the Troubadour, a totally haunting, charismatic set, get off the stage.  Somebody'd come up and say, "God! Magnificent, Tim!"  And he'd say, "Ah, it sucked."  Insulting the person who had complimented him, misreading his own performance, really. 'Cause he was wrong--it didn't suck.  It was good.  But a lot of times he couldn't feel it.  He castigated himself.  There's a whole hour conversation right there.

But that was the early manifestation. The later manifestation of that was where he thought of the audience as a bunch of idiots.  They were nicknamed Lobo--which stands for Lobotomy. Meaning these people, who have paid to see me, who are applauding, have no idea about anything about music, can't follow me, never heard of the name Kristof Penderecki, and couldn't conceive of a 15/17 time signature. 

 So what's the point? He actually conceived this kind of hostility.

In a way, he's right.  In a way, he was getting inspired by John Balkin's interest in contemporary classical music.  He was getting into that music, and Starsailor is actually more like Ligeti than anything else.  But...

Obviously it wasn't going to get played on the radio.

No, it wasn't going to be played on the radio or understood by anybody.  But I don't think that he was crestfallen, exactly.  I think he was, as usual, screwed up in his relationship with the audience.  I mean, he was just in a state of permanent alienation.  That's all I can say.  So this was nothing new, the fact that they didn't understand it.  It's just that, at this point, it started to take on, perhaps egged on by his cohorts in the group, he started to take a more hostile attitude towards the audience.  But he couldn't help changing.

Just so I can mention it, there's a song on--I think the best version is on Live at the Troubadour, called Strange Feelin'--which is, although the melody has been shifted, it actually is All Blue from Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.  It's that little, it's a blues riff in 3/4 time that he wrote a slightly different melody to.  I think it's a conscious bow to Miles.

Tim's whole approach was just different.  He wasn't really an entertainer who cultivates the audience, the kind that becomes beloved in that way.  He put all his effort into being authentic, continuing to grow, and then performing with all of his heart when the time came.  He would hope that the performance of a challenging piece that no one had ever heard would be enough to sway them.  Even Beethoven couldn't hack it.  You know, they would play his last quartets, which are now considered to be maybe the best music ever written, and people would hoot and walk out.  And then Beethoven would go choke the cellist, thinking that he'd screwed up. Some things don't change.