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A number of people in rock have been gifted with unique and unmistakable
voices. Elvis Presley comes immediately to mind. Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney
gained distinction through their uncontested vocal originality. Rod Stewart has
a streamlined set of personalized pipes, as do Robert Plant and Eric Burdon.
But one extraordinary white rock vocalist tends too often to be overlooked.
Although he was relatively small, Tim Buckley had a voice that reached peaks
rarely touched by others. Through a recording career that only seemed to lead
from one frustration to another, Buckley's voice just got better and better.
Shortly after his Washington, D.C., birth on St. Valentine's Day, 1947, his
family moved to Amsterdam, N.Y., where they lived for the next 10 years before
moving to Bell Gardens, CA. Around age 12, Buckley discovered a Miles Davis
record in his mother's collection. He was fascinated by some of the trumpet
player's high notes. Before that, Buckley's musical affections tended toward
such music artists as Johnny Cash, Hank Thompson and Hank Williams. Those early
influences had prompted him to learn to play the banjo. But after hearing the
upper reaches of the trumpet, Buckley began trying to duplicate some of those
brassy high notes vocally. He'd heard Little Richard get up there, so he knew it
was possible.
Riding his bicycle through traffic around his home he would practice
stretching his vocal chords with full-toned shrieks and screams. Later, when he
heard the low notes of the baritone saxophone, he started working his voice in
the opposite direction. Buckley's self-disciplined voice lessons didn't resemble
any sort of formal training, but through more attention to trumpet and sax
records, and through more bicycle-pedaling practice sessions, he was firmly
absorbed in the early development of what came to be a five-and-a-half-octave
vocal range, practically unheard of in pop music.
By the time he was 15, Buckley was playing in local bands which he later
called "those 'Louie, Louie,' carburetor soul bands." In high school
he also found himself serving as quarterback on the varsity football team.
During his gridiron tenure he broke the fingers of his left hand, leaving him
permanently unable to play barre chords on the guitar. In time, though, the
handicap was overcome somewhat by adapting a system of open chording that
contributed greatly to his compositional style.
Not even halfway through high school, Buckley had had enough of football, let
alone classes. Recalling those days in a 1969 New York Times interview he
said, "I was playing and studying music all the way through the morning,
then it was time to go to school and I'd go and couldn't relate to
anything."
When country'n'western bands such as the Cherokee Riders came to the area,
Buckley would sometimes gig with them. His music obsession quickened as he got
to know some of the musicians and hear their stories of the road. Solo gigs were
soon coming more frequently and he did some traveling along a southwestern
roadhouse circuit in Arizona and New Mexico.
The repertoire he developed and stuck to was straight blues and country. But
on periodic truant officer-inspired returns to high school, Buckley befriended a
young poet named Larry Beckett. Before long the two were writing songs, Buckley
putting music to Beckett's words. Buckley was also writing lyrics of his own,
though the association with Beckett as contributing lyricist lasted throughout
his career.
With original songs steadily added to his club sets, a bass player was added
to make the act a duo. The bassist was Jim Fielder, who became a charter member
of Blood, Sweat And Tears. The duo worked places such as the "It's
Boss" club in Los Angeles county.
While working as a music teacher in a Santa Ana music shop, Buckley met Jimmy
Carl Black, an instructor at the shop by day and by night, drummer with Frank
Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention.
One night in early 1966 Black caught Buckley's act at a club and was
impressed by what he heard. He suggested that Buckley get in touch with Mothers'
manager Herb Cohen. Impressed by the singer's versatile voice and by the quality
of the original material, Cohen signed Buckley and booked him into the Nite Owl
Cafe in New York City. During Buckley's Nite Owl debut in summer 1966, Cohen
assembled a six-song demonstration record and presented it to Jac Holzman, then
president of Elektra Records.
"I didn't have to play the demo more than once," Holzman was quoted
as saying, "but I think I must have listened to it at least two times a day
for the next week. Whenever anything was bringing me down, I'd run for
Buckley."
Identification as a folk singer was something Buckley never cared for, but
his first two albums for Elektra set him in that mold. The first, recorded in
Los Angeles with Van Dyke Parks on keyboards and Jack Nitzsche adding string
arrangements, was a 12-string guitar-led set perfect for the times. It was
released in October 1966 and Buckley seemed to have all the trimmings of
electrified folk rocker.
The second album, Goodbye and Hello, released a year later, is
Buckley's most commercially successful. Ironically, it also is his only disc to
now sound dated. Some of the wistfulness, and dreamy, almost oriental flavor of
a few of the songs on the first album carried over to the second.
"Hallucinations" and "Phantasmagoria In Two" hinted at what
Buckley's sound was to become. Most of Goodbye and Hello, however, was
mired in big, gimmicky production. The overblown peak came in the 8-minute,
38-second title song. The large string section and pretentious horns of Joshua
Rifkin's uncredited arrangement surrounding Beckett's voluminous lyrics had
their striking moments, and Buckley gives it all a good reading. But it is
mostly Rifkin's and Beckett's show. The album closed with what is probably
Buckley's best-known song. "Morning Glory" was a touching way to end
the record. It is also one of the best marriages of Buckley's music to Beckett's
words.
Buckley came to regard his first album as "a naive first effort; a
ticket into the marketplace." But it was the second album that put his name
in lights. He was asked to score a film called Changes and he put
together a subtle set of tracks employing vibes, guitar and conga. But the score
was eventually canned. He was also chosen for a film role in Raoul Coutard's Wild
Orange, playing the part of an Indian named "Fender Guitar." But
that project, also never came off.
At the end of a Monkees TV episode, Buckley sang a haunting, skeletal version
of his "Song Of The Siren." The song wasn't to appear on record for
another two years; Buckley was working ahead of himself.
The popularity he had found after Goodbye and Hello only led to
disenchantment. He didn't want to be a rock star. Lee Underwood's influence as a
proficient and unorthodox lead guitarist had been felt on the fist two albums.
Underwood's roots were in jazz. He played with Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans.
Later, in the '70s he became west coast editor of downbeat magazine.
Turning to Underwood for inspiration, Buckley listened intensively and
extensively to jazz recordings. His third album, Happy Sad, was the first
product of his study.
David Friedman on vibes, and an upright bass, gave the album a sound
reminiscent of that of the Modern Jazz Quartet, a stripped-down, improvisational
sound worlds away from that of Goodbye and Hello. The wide plangent range
of Buckley's voice, that had only been suggested earlier, came through loud and
clear on Happy Sad. It emerged atop a strange hybrid of folk and jazz
that played off of soft riffs and delicate balances between Buckley's 12-string
and the moody improvisation of the other musicians.
The result of Happy Sad was more than a pop star merely exhibiting
jazz tendencies. Buckley's new sound was rich and convincing in its influences.
"Strange Feeling," the album's opening cut, for instance, was directly
inspired by the recurring riff in Miles Davis' "All Blues."
Happy Sad, Buckley's journey into experimentation, was well-received.
But the critics lambasted Lorca, Buckley's next release. There were no
lilting melodies, such as "Buzzin' Fly" that kept the feet tapping on Happy
Sad. It appeared Buckley had overreached in what he called "delving
into the deepest depths of human emotion." Lorca's title song ran
9-minutes, 53-seconds; the album's opening cut, it was led by a big ominous
organ that sounded right out of Phantom Of The Opera. Buckley's dark
emotionalism on Lorca is at times staggering, but the audience he
established with the previous records couldn't accept the strange
experimentations. Some critics called the album morbid, and at times even the
band seemed to fall flat. His music had by then become almost completely
improvisational, but on Lorca the freedom just didn't work. Commercially,
critically and artistically Lorca was a failure. With its eerie din
ringing in their ears, Elektra dropped Buckley.
Meanwhile, Herb Cohen had formed an independent publishing and recording
company with Frank Zappa, Bizarre/Straight. Buckley's business people suggested
that he do something quick to regain some public favor. There was little choice,
so he dipped into his bag of older songs and released Blue Afternoon on
the Cohen/Zappa label. The album brought back some of the fans Lorca had
scared off but Buckley viewed it only as a temporary detour on the creative
journey he had begun with the two earlier albums.
Concession made, Buckley went full speed ahead on producing and recording the
album Lee Underwood later described as his "magnum opus." All
influences and experiments led to Starsailor, the tour de force of
Buckley's career. Few artists have come close to doing with vocals what Buckley
accomplished on Starsailor. In a Warner Bros. biography he spoke about
his technique: "I even started singing in foreign languages -- Swahili, for
instance -- just because it sounded better. An instrument can be understood
doing just about anything, but people are really geared for hearing words come
out of the mouth ..."
He wasn't actually singing in Swahili, but the vocal swoops, flutters,
grunts, and screaming tongue trills he sails through on Starsailor sound
right out of the jungle dawn. Many of the songs were written in odd time
signatures. "Healing Festival" was in 10/4, for instance. And the
title song, with Buckley's pipes overdubbed on all 16 tracks, is all voice, one
layered upon another to rise and fall and soak through into the next.
Exposure to avant-garde composers such as Luciano Berio and John Cage,
especially his discovery of Cathy Berberian, had been quite an inspiration. Like
Berberian, Buckley was using his voice to explore every nuance of emotion. The
sheer vocal thrust of Starsailor is astonishing. No one has equaled such
an exuberant exhibition of one man's voice in a recording studio. Even the
usually cynical Creem magazine said: "... for those who care about
what a genius can do with lyrics, a 12-string guitar, and a wind-milling voice,
Tim Buckley is to be investigated." The highly regarded downbeat
gave Starsailor a five-star rating.
Buckley had finally received some of the recognition he needed in the
identity he struggled for as a unique artist working outside the boundaries of
standard rock form. There was only one problem. Starsailor sat in the
record-store bins like a dead fish, a commercial disaster. This financial
failure was the last straw. His management and the record company took away all
creative control in the production of his own records. Initially the setback
made Buckley angry. But the anger was soon replaced by depression. And as all
too often happens with creative people, Buckley tried to dim the pain with
alcohol and drugs.
In the two years following Starsailor, Buckley was forced to sell his
"dream house" in Laguna Beach, Calif. He was going broke. The door to
the recording studio remained closed to him ... unless, of course, he could
agree to do things the way the record company deemed constructive; unless he
played rock 'n' roll.
"I went down to the meat rack tavern, and I found myself a big old
healthy girl." Those lines begins side one of Greetings From L.A..
In a sense they ironically describe Buckley's re-emergence as a recording
artist. The new Tim Buckley was playing straight rock, firmly set in a
foundation of steamy funk.
Buckley's voice is in remarkable shape on Greetings From L.A. as he
taunts and teases through a wide array of lyrical vamps and asides. In fact, the
voice never sounded better squeezing buckets of erotic passion out of the strong
sexual content of his and Beckett's lyrics.
Because of its riveting rock 'n' roll, some see Greetings From L.A. as
the most desirable Buckley album. For visceral, no-holds-barred white funk, with
what often amounts to very frank subject matter, this is the album to have.
There were certainly many ideas Buckley had for musical exploration outside
rock. But the fluid power of his voice on this compelling set does not sound
like one who is compromising. Buckley totally triumphs within what he saw as the
constraints of standard rock 'n' roll song structure. It goes to show how
justifiably frustrated he must have been when one considers for a moment that he
was actually creatively limiting himself on Greetings From L.A.
Underwood described Buckley during the final years as living in a
"controlled schizophrenia." He was doing what he had to do to continue
recording and acted as if he'd learned to live with it. But it ate him up
inside.
Sefronia was released a year after Greetings From L.A. and an
obvious attempt at being commercial; it sold no better or worse than the
previous one. Spread throughout the record are brief flashes of Buckley's former
self. But mostly the songs, including for the first time four composed by
others, are mired in sentimental production. The jazz is gone, the experiments
are long gone, even the funk is gone.
Buckley wanted to call his last album "Tijuana Moon," after a
different song on the set. The final title of Look At The Fool, coupled
with the weary and forlorn look on Buckley's face on the cover painting was an
awful idea. The entire album is a ghastly failure, filled with mediocre funk
exercises and disturbingly anguished vocals. It's sad that Look At The Fool,
with its glaring weaknesses and subliminally mocking packaging, had to be
Buckley's final statement.
It seems ironic that what came to be the last song on the last album was a
direct rewrite of "Louie Louie." "Wanda Lou" is a
Buckley-written three-chord throwaway about a Mexican girl that he wants to
"watch do the pony and the boogaloo." The song cops its melody from
"Louie Louie" right down to the guitar break. In a way Buckley had
gone full circle, back to the simple structures of his "carburetor soul
bands" of the early days.
In a 1968 interview in Eye magazine, Buckley expressed a desire to
someday return to his first love, country music. Perhaps fate was in the process
of completing that circle. A year after the release of Look At The Fool,
Buckley was dead. At the conclusion of a booking in Dallas, Texas, he overdosed
on a combination of heroin and alcohol his system couldn't handle. He had been
completely off drugs and drink for some time before his death on June 29, 1975.
The dose he took that day was comparable to what he'd taken countless times
before. But perhaps due to his being clean for so long, his tolerance wasn't
what it had been. (Ed. note: Some sources report that Buckley thought he
was taking cocaine, not heroin, till it was too late.) At first his death was
attributed to a heart attack. Only later was it determined that he was the
victim of an overdose. He was in debt when he died; his guitar and an amplifier
were his only possessions.
In nine albums in just under nine years, Buckley went on an odyssey of
musical styles virtually unparalleled in pop music. From folk rock to jazz to
rock he traveled, retaining, at times discovering, a sound uniquely his own. His
was the voice of a visionary, and one of the most flexibly lucid vocal
instruments pop music has ever produced.
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