What do you think Tim would have done if he had gotten better response to Starsailor and was allowed to experiment and record as he wished?

The best, most realistic way I can answer this is by saying that, well, first of all, that in my view, is that the record company eventually said, Starsailor, whatever else its value is, it's just not something that we can afford to produce.  So either you come up with a completely different, more accessible sound, or you can't even record at all.  Now Tim had always told me that it that ever happened, he was going to walk away and drive a milk truck.  Or actually, I think he said bread truck. 

My dream for the past is that he had done so, is that he had walked away, driven a bread truck, and then now all these years later, alive, you could be talking to him first, and then me second.  That's what should have happened.  But that's not what happened.

I'm not saying that they drove him to suicide or anything like that.  But I think that he caved in after showing such integrity, a la Miles as an artist, that when they threatened to take away his contract, then he switched to a sound to a more accessible...I mean, he did it his way, of course.  But still, I don't think it was at all comparable, singing that kind of stuff, or playing with those people.  It was against his will, it was not his natural direction.

And what happened is that--to try to answer your question realistically--in the last month before his death, he and I were engaged in creating new music, a new piece together, which was going to be a song cycle, something we'd kicked around since the beginning.  An actual set of songs that tied together narratively.  It was going to be called The Outcast of the Islands, based on Joseph Conrad's second novel.  And it was going to have music that you couldn't--the closest sound to it, I think, I would say, is [on] Sefronia: The King's Chain, which is not the real title of that song. 

That's the kind of sound, where you can't even really categorize it.  What is it?  I mean, it's not pop or jazz or classical or anything, but some kind of fusion of everything.  That's the direction he was going, in some even more ambitious, even more inclusive kind of music.  And I felt that had the record company not intervened, that that would have happened immediately, not been postponed by these rock'em sock'em albums.

Not that Honeyman is bad.  It's a fuckin' rock and roll masterpiece, whether live--I have some live tapes of it that go on for twenty minutes--or the studio version.  He did a version of that on The Tonight Show.

When that all happened, I was living in Oregon by that time, and he was living in L.A., so we weren't in constant contact.  It was hard for me to know what was really the direction, what was the cause of it.  But I later figured that, from everything, that it was them threatening to pull the contract.

What do you know about the soundtrack he did for a film called Changes around 1970?

He did do a soundtrack for a film called Changes, and I have a dub of like three songs.  It was, like, a couple of instrumentals, and two or three songs with lyrics. Changes I wasn't really aware of till it was done, but a fan later sent me a bootleg of the soundtrack.  It was only about twenty minutes long, the soundtrack.  Not a big deal.  But he did record it to the movie.  They didn't just take pieces that he'd done.  He sat in there and tried to compose music that was appropriate.

What would Tim have thought about how his music is appreciated today?

Like I say, my dream that never came true is that he dropped into complete obscurity, and then this sort of groundswell with your book and the Rhino project brings him back into the public ear, and he's appreciated for the great artist and unbelievable singer that he was.  And not only that, but to my mind, I always, I guess I'm the only one, but I think of him as a great composer.  It's the melody to Hallucinations that I think is so extraordinary. 

Everybody listens to his voice, which is very charismatic and wonderful.  And his career is intriguing, as it goes through its changes. But to me, how do you write a melody like Troubadour or Hallucinations or Siren or Morning Glory?  It's only by being a magnificent lyrical composer.  That's the way I thought of him when I first heard him write a song, and that's the way I think of him now.

So it would have been nice if he could have somehow made it through to see this adulation.  Although, deep inside, if you'd ever known him, if you just walked in on him eating breakfast, you would think, my God, this guy's heart is broken.  So you sort of had this feeling that feeling, he's just not going to make it.  Now in those days we didn't think it would end in death, because we were all so young.  But sure enough it did.

How did Fred Neil influence Tim?

If you listen to that Troubadour one I was telling you about, like Strange Feelin' or Driftin', listen to how deep...Tim had a tenor voice.  And one of the marks of his perversity was to immediately take the one thing that he was good at, and throw it out.  You know what I'm saying?  Like, what possesses somebody to do this?  As soon as he's out on his own after...you know, he throws my lyrics out, then he throws his tenor voice out, and then he goes into Happy Sad and starts trying to reach down for low notes, just like his idol, Fred Neil. 

You know?  That's okay...in a way, in the long run, he's really trying to expand his range, literally his vocal range, an octave.  We used to kid around about Yma Sumac, who supposedly had like a five-octave range, and Tim was trying to meet her or beat her.  You can hear that, kind of.  He recaptures the tenor and does the low notes and the high notes and everything on a piece like Starsailor, he's like everywhere.

But I think that change started to happen with Freddy...we walked in [to a session] because Herbie was managing both people, we got to visit his session.  We just walked into the booth.  It was a huge room in darkness.  And way off there, with like just a tiny light, was Fred, John Sebastian, unrecognizable playing harmonica, and Cyrus Faryar and the rest of the guys doing a version of The Dolphins completely unlike what wound up on the album.  Then he would stop and change it and do something, again, reconceive it. 

The sense of Fred's magnificent voice and total authenticity and commitment to creativity...you know, if Tim didn't have it already, he got it that afternoon.  The album that came out of it, Fred Neil, he and I and all of our friends think of as like one of the four or five albums of the sixties.  I don't care what-all lists or sales charts anybody wants to throw up.  To me, it's like the Kind of Blue of the '60s.  Kind of Blue is a disc that you can listen to over and over, and you never get tired of it.  It's eternally fresh.  And so is that Fred Neil album.

So, between that experience and then the final achieved version, how magnificent, how loose, how poetic, how authentic it was, that become a profound influence on Tim, and on myself, actually.  The way he worked folk phrases into original compositions was just an inspiration.

Anything else you want to add I didn't ask about?

I've done my best, over the decades, to come anywhere to be as good a writer as he was a singer and composer.

Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators & Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock, was published in 2000 and currently available through Hal Leonard publishers.

Used with Permission © 2000 Unterberger
Visit richieunterberger.com