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Singing
the Sixties Tim
Buckley Evolved from a Hippie Minstrel
to a Man Not Embarrassed by Erotic
Longings by
Leon Wieseltier It
is old-folks season. The Stones and the Who and other '60s pterodactyls are back,
trying with limited success to be new without not being old. What a perfect time
to congratulate Enigma/Retro, a small label in Culver City, California, for having
returned to the record stores almost all of the work of the most gifted singer
and songwriter not to have survived the '60s (he died in 1974, along with the
'60s). Tim
Buckley released his first record, Goodbye and Hello, in 1967, when he
was nineteen. His last record, Look at the Fool, was released posthumously,
after Buckley died of drugs and booze. The nine albums that Buckley made during
those seven years constitute the record of the most interesting musical and emotional
maturation of that generally puerile and derivative period. Buckley
began as a hippie minstrel. His early songs on Goodbye and Hello are lovely,
poetically made, but they rather groan beneath the symbolism of their earnest
words. Still, even on his first time out, Buckley was capable of Pleasant Street,
an angry song about abjection, about edgy submission to a totemic woman: a flower
of evil of the kind that Buckley would perfect with almost fearful swiftness in
the short time he lived. Then
the hippie vanished. In his place there appeared, on Happy Sad, a more
deep and durable creature, who brooded musically upon themes beyond his years.
The only record of the time comparable to Happy Sad was Astral Weeks:
utterly unexpected, obviously original, almost private, looking away from rock
to jazz, fascinated by the mysterious and the obscure. Where
Van Morrison used harpsichord, Tim Buckley used vibes (and guitar, and bass, and
congas, that was all); but in both instances the effect was one of lyrical obsession.
Happy Sad was aptly named, It is a long inquiry into melancholy, now light,
now dark, conceived in a philosophical frame of mind but at the beck and call
of rhythm. And on this record, too, there was a sample of Buckley's rage, called
Gypsy Woman, that introduced his special gift for sounding like a supremely
fallen man. In
1970 Buckley released Blue Afternoon, a sophisticated collection of bluesy
ballads that is almost early-twentieth-century French in its feeling of smoky
languor. Then, two years later, he broke through. Greetings from LA is
certainly the fiercest and most sexually exciting record that the "country
culture" produced. It
is an extended exercise in heterosexual fury. It is noisy, Buckley's most rockish
record; it narrates without embarrassment the exploits of a man with powerful
erotic longings and almost no erotic pride; it is a musical document of unrelieved
and delectable pain. I know of nothing like it. It still scorches the ears. (Springsteen's
Greetings from Asbury Park was a homage to Buckley's record in its title
and in its design. In its music, though, it owed Buckley nothing at all.) There
followed Sefronia in 1973, which has everything from The Dolphins
(who remembers Fred Neil's manful, lovely song? Or Fred Neil?) to what can only
be called art songs; and in 1974, Look at the Fool, the record that Buckley
never lived to see, a record that is almost too subtle for its own good, the work
of a man in full possession of his powers, whose standards of excellence were
clearly his own. I
remember Buckley well. He was a pale, wiry Baudelairean boy. He would appear on
the stage, which felt only like a large table in the front, at Max's Kansas City
in New York, in a Hawaiian shirt and chinos, with a twelve-string guitar. The
first time I saw him was at the Bitter End, where a young duo called Hall &
Oates opened for him. That was sometime in the early sixteenth century. When Buckley
talked, his voice was thin. When he sang, he was a shaman. He would begin slow,
but he was always building, building, building; and then, all of a sudden, the
riffs on his guitar were intoxicating, perilous, huge. When he swayed with his
music, when he sang the love songs of the damned, he looked possessed. You hid
your wives and daughters. I
confess that in the case of Tim Buckley I am completely helpless. I cannot remember
my youth without him; I learned many difficult and emboldening things from him;
I never expected to hear him unscratched again. Now there are CDs in the shops.
There is justice. Now, if only Enigma/Retro would reissue Lorca, the one
from 1970, the earthshaking record in which Buckley... ©
1989 Wieseltier/Washingtonian
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