Tim Buckley

Tim Buckley is the most brilliant singer in the history of rock music, and perhaps the entire history of music.

Tim Buckley was the first of modern singer-songwriters, the first one to completely alter the model invented by Bob Dylan, and remains one of the greatest of all time; but defining it as a "songwriter" is restrictive. Buckley was not very interested in the lyrics. Buckley's art was all musical, and it was an atmospheric art. Buckley used extraordinary techniques of both singing and arranging to sculpt almost cosmic atmospheres. With psychedelia, music had begun a journey to worlds different from the earthly one of which folk music had always been concerned. Buckley continued that journey to the end, discovering ever more distant and increasingly unusual worlds.

The external path of this "traveler of the stars" (as he defined himself) was in parallel an inner journey, in search of himself. His music was always a psychological excavation music, even when it was linked to the Greenwich Movement's topical song. Unfortunately that path ended in a cemetery.

Buckley was largely a stranger to the fights of the two capitals of youth music, absentmindedly participating in the New York humanitarian protest and vaguely related to the San Francisco hippies. Buckley was certainly son of the same era (so much so that he will die of drugs), but his was always a very isolated career.

The "sound" was the heart of his music. And to get that sound Buckley navigated the space of jazz and oriental traditions, as well as that of folk and rock.

Like  Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa , Buckley also belonged to an alternative concept of music, a concept that in Los Angeles was never expressed in the form of a political movement. Buckley performed from the beginning a rather rare artistic purity in the world of rock music.

The most original element of his records was singing, initially inspired by  Fred Neil , which Buckley continued to refine for years. His achievements in this field are worthy of avant-garde music and certainly of jazz. His singing was really another instrument, more similar to the trumpet and jazz saxophone than to the baritone of pop music. As his collaborator Lee Underwood said, Buckley was for singing what Hendrix was for the guitar.

The virtuoso's acrobatics were only part of the story. The singing experiments served to Buckley to compose a highly psychological narrative, made up of hallucinations and flights, dialogues and silences, confessions and delusions. His intricate game of groans, screams, yelps, ecstatic vowels, neurotic whispers, hysterical jerks, that way of almost crying singing constituted a vocabulary and a grammar of great effect.

Buckley began the songs by making up a story, weighing the words, but then the words lost their meaning and became mere sound, and finally pure delirium. And, as they lost their "earthly" quality, they also became the key to access a "beyond", to another dimension, a dimension of pure spirit.

Singing was but one of the instruments, however. Buckley came to employ a chamber ensemble (percussion, keyboards, horns) for the masterpieces of maturity. In his vocal art flowed the melisma of the spiritual, the shout of the gospel and the austere Tibetan techniques (perhaps the most original proposal of fusion between west and east), but Buckley re-elaborated his sources to reach a unique and personal style.

The rhythm was just as ductile, from time to time an obsessive pulsation that strikes the mind, or a slight trepestation that guides the heart in its titanic efforts, or a tight "jazz" that vibrates without pause coloring the suspended fantasy of a strange frenzy dizzy heights, or even a gentle soul wind that stretches in gentle and impalpable natural backgrounds.

From the fusion of all these revolutionary elements originated songs that are melancholic poems set in a world devastated by a folly so fainter as immense. More than telling Buckley he threw himself into delusions, into streams of consciousness, into free associations. The narrative is extinguished and is rekindled, becomes inflamed and explodes, subsides and collapses, becomes epic and lops off dying. The feeling is really that of a journey among the stars, but it is also that of a psychoanalytic session, of a journey into the unbalanced consciousness of an incurable case. Music photographs a psyche that is spasmodically debated in a murky mixture of dark primordial emotions, poised on the brink of suicide, and occasionally resurfaces, still painfully alive, throbbing.

Buckley opened a new era for songwriters, although no one noticed at the time, not even he who always professed himself as a son of rhythm and blues. On the one hand his singing acrobatics coined an onomatopoeic art infinitely modulated. On the other hand his naive genius architect` increasingly complex and "cultured" arrangements, exploring rudeness so different as free-jazz, the blues-spiritual-gospel-soul genealogical line, Latin-American music, African primitivism.

Buckley's masterpieces are extensive pieces that have little in common with the "song". The performance is free and there is no refrain. The melody is dismembered and distorted, stretched into a slow, creeping structure that is the equivalent of a dream. Lorca and Gypsy Woman are endless pieces in which Buckley opens the doors of perception and bursts into a sidereal void.

The epic step of the first records becomes more and more abstract. The tragic, muted tone will always remain the same, but it will be dyed with ever more gray colors, more and more depressed. The pace, in turn, will become more and more convulsive, hysterically contended between pauses in which he held his breath and feverish showers of emotions, as if the singer was shaken by sudden and atrocious illuminations of a tremendous secret or rushed headlong into abyssal existential hells. Buckley's music pursued an idea, no matter where it went. He often limited himself to falling, without seeing the bottom, in a darkness of barred pupils and outstretched hands, in an eternal orgy of desperate cries and gruesome moans. Buckley wandered in that space of infinite nothingness perhaps searching for an idea that was also about being saved.

His career was a long private nightmare. Buckley spent his life chasing his inner ghosts in labyrinths of sounds and cosmic itineraries, but he was lost from the beginning, and what makes his art great is that he had no hope of finding himself. Buckley's was a nightmare that lasted a lifetime, the nightmare of a shipwrecked man adrift, who will eventually be killed by the horizon he was talking to day and night.

This dreamlike, visionary, hallucinated approach to music was certainly related to Californian acid-rock, sprang from a subculture of drugs intended as liberation and catharsis; but to that approach inclined to probe the depths of the mind, Buckley added an element of introversion and introspection that proceeded almost in the opposite direction to the celebrations of public ecstasy of acid-rock.
This does not mean that Buckley was a more universal character than he wanted to be, but purely by chance: Buckley was a paranoid minstrel of the existential unease of his generation, a marginalized loser in the consumer society , a missionary of intellectual anti-conformism as the beatniks were, succubus and non-protagonist of life. Buckley expressed the intolerance for the values ​​of the "American way of life" in the same way that the beat poets and abstract painters had expressed it.

Tim Buckley was born in Washington in 1947, grew up in New York and moved to California as a child. He trained in the local folk music of Los Angeles, while attending high school together with the apprentice poet Larry Beckett and the apprentice bassist Jim Fielder. At fifteen he played the banjo in a folk ensemble, but he especially admired the vocal power of the blues singers, the creativity of free-jazz and the expressive power of so much world-music. Buckley, Beckett and Fielder first formed the Bohemians and then the Harlquin 3.

By practicing to control the breath and the vocal cords to get the maximum ductility of the song (his great Yma Sumac model), Buckley discovered his true vocation. Leaving his studies and his wife (the result of a last year high school break), Buckley began performing at "Troubadour", where he met with guitarist Lee Underwood. Herb Cohen, the manager of Frank Zappa, discovered that he was just eighteen, but he was already a phenomenon, both for the prodigious vocal extension, and for the different musical styles that he mixed in his songs.

His timid and sensitive personality, sweet and melancholy, shy and modest did not suit the environment of rock music. Buckley was always a lonely boy. However, he was subjected to isolation with a massive dependence on hard drugs.

Buckley recorded the first album, Tim Buckley (Elektra, 1966), over three days in 1966 while his son  Jeff Buckley was born Surrounded by a multitude of prestigious sessionmen recruited by Cohen (Billy Mundi on drums, Van Dyke Parks on keyboards, Jack Nitzsche for string arrangements, as well as Underwood and Fielder), Buckley didn't dare that much. The songs are typical of the style of the time, halfway between Bob Dylan and light music. The album stands out from the many of the era for a more fatalistic and resigned medium tone. The most important novelty is perhaps the jazzy and sometimes orchestral arrangement. Buckley is 19, uncertain and hesitant, especially in the presence of the most savvy co-workers. The fine adolescent sketches like Valentine Melody and Song Of The Magician are good for him , but the voice has no way to hover asSong Slowly Song lets you guess.

The second album, Goodbye And Hello (Elektra, 1967), was inspired by Dylan's Blonde On Blonde , which Buckley, Fielder and Underwood spent months listening to and imitating.
Ambitious and pretentious as Dylan's album, Buckley's album fails to find the same magical balance, but still constitutes a giant leap forward for the author. Buckley, in particular, manages to better blend the strumnets (including percussion and keyboards).
Perhaps also due to the influence of the producer in turn, who wanted to give the album a renaissance sound, Buckley uses an instrumentation that is sumptuous for a folksinger.
Buckley's versatile and eccentric talent has nevertheless a way to fully emerge in touching songs that oscillate between the Leonard Cohen fabulous lyricism (ante litteram), the Dylanian poses of "je accuse", and a spleen of fragile beauty. On the whole they give the feeling of a vast, confused and depressed humanity on the way to a cruel destiny.
A magical atmosphere emanates from Carnival Song , hypnotic and sinister refrain with a background of street organ and circus noises, More gritty Pleasant Street, shrouded in a halo of religiosity, with surges of fervent desperation reminiscent of the gospel, and lugubrious tones of a Gregorian mass rendered by a solemn harmonium, with the voice sinking more and more "down, down, down ... "in abysses of depression to get up suddenly in a demonic shout. Hallucinations , on the other hand , are spooky , with medieval, classicizing and orientalizing counterpoints, whose pure hymn, surrounded by celestial sounds, looks like a whirlpool that tightens around the tremulous image of a vision and finally swallows it up in a water bubble . The atmosphere explodes in the solemn and tribal soul of I Never Asked To Be A Mountain, a guitar and percussion saraband, a fast-paced rhythm that gives no respite, and a high, powerful, psychedelic declamation. Knight Errand is a troubadour miniature for piano and pianola, a perfect evocation of a knight who pursues his "beautiful dames sans merci".
The most tender vortex is that of Phantasmagoria In Two , the most beautiful love song of all time, suspended in a slow and anemic refrain that gradually fades into an eternal and poignant melancholy; it is a delirium of solitude and fear that transcends the courteous pretext and sinks into apocalyptic vertigo of darkness, a void of emptiness that compresses the chest and prevents the scream from exploding.
Gypsy violins, funeral flutes, baroque harpsichords, folk guitars are used to construct the apocalyptic climax of Goodbye And Hello , the guiding passage which, in its solemn and martial gait between medieval visions and through the tragedies of humanity transforms the horrors of Amerika in a circus sketch. Buckley's tender and emotional song is the exact opposite, emotionally, of the severe and monotonous Dylan of apocalyptic songs, and represents the metaphysical alternative to the "je accuse" of the protest song.
This record is a collection of poems about the individual who presents himself helpless in the face of the madness of the world.

Buckley revealed his immense emotional charge with Happy Sad (Elektra, 1969). From here Buckley starts to be himself, and in fact, he writes the lyrics of his songs instead of relying on Beckett.
The album includes six long tracks. A more sparse instrumentation (which preserves Underwood, and has bought the jazz vibraphonist Dave Friedman and the double-bass player Jim Miller), is limited to quietly following the flights of the voice, which is finally the absolute protagonist. At the same time that combo of vibraphone, double bass, congas and guitar (a formation that is the folk-rock equivalent of the Modern Jazz Quartet), improvises a liquid and ethereal background, characterized by an intense acoustic chromatism, which constitutes the natural complement to the song and it is crucial to create that rarefied and velvety climate.
Another important novelty is that Buckley is completely in charge of his songs from this record, no longer having the trusted lyricist at his service. It is not by chance that the disc marks the passage from the speaking song, used both to guide the melody and to recite the verses of the text, to the song understood as the sound of one of the instruments of the ensemble, and the melisma rises to the main process of the singing of Buckley, a melisma infinitely expanded, which fully reveals the voice in its extension not only tonal but also emotional.
As he said himself, the only creative moment is chaos. In observance of this principle, a jazz concept of improvisation and a mystical concept of the symbiosis between musical development and psychic emotion are making their way. The discovery of improvisation (of a decidedly cool mood) and the primitivist appeal of tribal dances represent the musical forms of chaos par excellence, and their singing art is combined with them.
The basic attitude is that of solipsistic abandonment: Buckley, painter of mind and nature, remembers and describes, thinks and speaks, only in the huge amphitheater of life. Buckley's secular asceticism draws on the secret forces of the psyche and it is no coincidence that it is unleashed above all in the gospel registers and renounces to traditional arrangements. Hence the appearance of chamber music for small ensembles, one of the most arduous and "concentrated" of the century, almost Webernian in its severe essentiality.
Strange Feeling , humble and tinkling, reminiscent of the first Miles Davis, is a watercolor of intense spleen in which the guitars dance asynchronous and the vibraphone sways swinging. Buzzing Fly , more masculine and urgent, is funk / blues / jazz fever.
It seems to look at Monet's "Nymphees" when listening to the majestic stasis of Love At Room 109 At The Islander, a long meditation or confabulation with the ocean, pervaded with stillness and a subdued despair that "cancels out" in that quiet, as if searching for an eternal sleep among the endless waves that come and go, in that eternal return of lost echoes. Nostalgia, pain, skepticism, are consumed in the pale beauty of infinity, and only the mute ecstasy of agony remains, Dream Letter in nothingness.
Gypsy Woman, the masterpiece, is a disruptive emotion, a visionary kaleidoscope, a convulsive excitement, a cycle of orgasms, a delirium of irrepressible accelerations and sudden slowdowns that emulate the flare up and extinction of the fire. Prepared by tribal percussion, this erotic ritual begins quietly and slowly rises in an orgy of yelps, incitements and roars, in an uncontrolled exaltation of the irrational epilepsy of madness and the hallucinogenic devastation of the drug; and the voice regains its negritude, with accents of prayer, of supplication, of intense suffering, of ardent desire, of possessed lust. The dance presses on wildly, freeing up the most wild instincts and going to touch the rituals of black magic.

Happy/ Sad is characterized overall by the transfiguration of folk, the emancipation of singing from rhythm and arrangement, contamination with jazz, and liberation from the structures of the song. It is the uninterrupted flow of notes of the song that dictates the progress of the piece, keeping it together and giving it a personality.

Compared to Happy / Sad , the following Blue Afternoon (Straight, 1969) is less a group album and more the singer's album. The battery takes the place of congas and the ensemble is more disciplined (perhaps also because Buckley was also a producer). However, the disc continues the development of a communicative folk-jazz, refined and chiseled to the last note.
The song form (the refrain, the rhythm, the three minutes, etc.) no longer exists, but in its place comes a song form that renews it without indulging in excessive experimentalism: the song flows freely over a random accompaniment made of rhythmic punctuations and colored touches.
The songs are solitary autobiographical confessions, suspended between Freudian oneirism and psychedelic trance. The spectrum of moods is endless, from the gloomy depression of Chase The Blues Away to the lysergic stasis I Must Have Been Blind , to the most banal forms of the soul ( Happy Time ) or jazz ( So Lonely ) song . All over Buckley's voice extends a veil of resigned, helpless sadness.
When ( The River ), the atmosphere is charged with martial tones, the epic and the transcendence merge with the private, and the agony of Buckley flows radiant and universal on a slow instrumental carpet and button. And at times ( Cafe) the music seems to stop completely, and an abnormal dilation of time allows it to transform a fleeting second into an endless fresco.
The Train is a visionary rhythm and blues in which vocal funambulism and tribal syncope obey instead a quivering nervousness that drives them into a rousing jam. Blue Afternoon's
atmospheres are deeply marked by drugs. Not only do Buckley's long vowels reflect the expansions of consciousness that are typical of LSD, but also the musical background often follows the hypnotic and skeletal cadences of the trip.
Buckley's vocal style has now reached technical perfection and can afford any sound: centuries of black vocal tradition have been synthesized into a perfect machine of shout, cry, treble, scat, rap, whoop, fade-out, and all sorts of ups and downs reckless up and down for the tonal scales, with practically unlimited ductility. With the evolutions of singing Buckley builds the dramatic atmospheres of his stories like no one else has ever been able to do.

From folk-jazz we move on to "free-folk" with Lorca (Elektra, February 1970, but actually recorded before Blue Afternoon , which was conceived as the "commercial" album to be preceded by the "experimental" album ). Happy Sad is to an ode to silence as Lorca is to an ode to emptiness. The difference is the one between the human and the metaphysical. If the previous albums had anyway been influenced by collaborators and / or the public, Lorca is an album written for himself.
Friedman and Miller set free, the instrumentation is enriched in the keyboard section. The ensemble now consists of congas, guitar, electric piano. The sound is skeletal. The absence of a rhythm gives it static and imposing, in the image and likeness of eternity.
The intimism changes into dense dark oneirism, the flow / expansion of consciousness probes dark metaphysical abysses. The long and tense passages, sound labyrinths of the lowest depression, are crossed by straggling chills, the result of a sadness that digs deeper chasms; Buckley is adrift in a conscious coma. It is an absolute cry, without return.
The first song, Lorca, it is a ten-minute vertigo (played in 5/4) that opens up in a dark atmosphere of suspense: a continuous, obsessive lament of organ and a lively pianismo swing are the background to a funeral flow of expanded vowels; a "decrescendo" that fades from the asphyxiating initial torment degrading for successive traumas, gradually more subdued, to the exhausted whisper, to the prodigious weariness of that last faded note. Lorca is a dramatic poem, an ode to fear, to anguish, to death; a black mass from which an atrocious sense of powerlessness emanates; the imperceptible cry of a walled phantom for eternity inside a cold star.
Buckley unleashes a more bodily anguish in two long delusions, declaimed muted and painfully blues, divorced from the metaphysical atmosphere of the key-piece, rather triggered by a piercing nervous tension. Driftin' , a long spiritual movement in slow motion, with the voice adrift in a splash of lazy guitars, touches and touches that come and go combining and melting endlessly on an imaginary beach of the mind, is the music of the breath; words flow slowly, break, sink in whirlwinds of bottomless melancholy. (Halfway into the song, Lee Underwood unleashes perhaps his best solo ever).  On a similar theme the icy nihilism of Anonymous Proposition, strident fragments of a stream of consciousness in dissolution, it slips between bristly guitar and bass figures, climbing on the slender and twisted stem of the song: it is perhaps the most "dilated" piece of all time.
Nobody Walking returns to the overwhelming impulse of Gypsy Woman , on the darting notes of the electric piano and on the dense percussive carpet of the congas. Eventually Buckley finds his own inner voices, and in the rhythmic bedlam of this piece he can explain them to the wind, letting himself be dragged into a primitive and purifying dance.
Apart from this atypical episode, the album shows a more calm and intimate Buckley, less aggressive and less naturalist. Both the great rides on the sound and the beautiful watercolors on the seashore have disappeared. The music floats in immense spaces, without boundaries and without form: a nebula of notes that addresses without end in an infinite void.
The trilogy of folk-jazz is complete. In this period Buckley has developed two types of track: the oneiric (the carpet of resigned sounds quilted by expanded vowels) and the demented one (the pollution of rhythms for a charge of flashes and vocal surges).

Starsailor (Straight, November 1970), considered by many to be his masterpiece and one of the greatest records of all time, is the arrival point of Tim Buckley's folk-jazz fusion. It is at the same time his most dreamlike, visionary, psychological, abstract, psychedelic, pictorial and jazz album. Buckley is by now gifted with a perfect mastery of all the shades of the voice and makes use of the reached maturity. The instrumentation includes the wind section of the Mothers of Invention, lower, drums and guitar; while for the texts the collaboration with the poet Beckett is resumed. Everything contributes to giving the feeling of the definitive happening.
The main ingredients of the disc are jazz and psychedelia, which give it a charge of spasmodic energy, the courage needed to make a cosmic crossing that is actually a crossing of the mind. The songs, more concise than usual, are dense and syncopated melodies; the rediscovery of the rhythm accelerates the times of delirium and nightmare; bundles of fast-moving sound mate with the heresies and outrages of a voice that seems to have sold the soul to the devil. Buckley's spooky sound falls victim to an earthly, vital, erotic exasperation.
Among the most experimental exercises, in terms of abuse of the voice and imaginative arrangements (with crooked horns and unkempt woods) there are some pressing and swinging rhythm and blues: Come Here Woman, Monterey and above all Jungle Fire, grim and enthralling, turned upside down in a psychoanalytical nightmare by a game of overlapping voices. More than songs are pretexts for singing acrobatics and incendiary tribalisms.
The hyper-dilated atmospheres of the previous records lead to I Woke Up , wrapped in free wind notes and random percussions, and Song To The Siren (originally written in 1967 and recorded in 1968), for mantric modulations, moving poignant lysergic vision with the echo of a distant voice, shining, elusive, lost horizon. Apart from two bizarre fantasies like Mouline Rouge, a bohemian serenade, and The Healing Festival, scary alchemy of wind instruments and sound effects.
Starsailor, the pivotal track, on cosmic themes most dear to him, is a long sequence of singing, an uninterrupted succession of modulated and distorted vowels along several lines in turn intertwined and superimposed, which give the feeling of emptiness and fear, of a face torn to pieces by the scream that spins in balance on the endless abyss. Exploration of the darkest and most distant stars of the mind, with the ever present obsession with the danger of not being able to return; inter-planetary witches' sabbath, supreme attempt to reach that desperate ecstasy coveted in the great delusions of maturity ( Gypsy Woman and Lorca ), Starsailor completes Tim Buckley's hallucinatory and hallucinating parable.
Star Sailor is also a discontinuous and eclectic album, which marks a clear rethinking of the open structures of Happy Sad and Lorca ; and unfortunately from this ebb to song form the early old age of Buckley will arise.

The stylistic transformation is all the more impressive if we consider that these three albums were recorded in just over a month.

The drug was destroying him, and two years of rest were not enough to detoxify him completely (at that time Buckley worked as chaffeur). Add to this that his depression was exacerbated by general incomprehension.

Greetings From LA  (Warner Bros, 1972), practically an erotic concept, constitutes a sudden and inexplicable turnaround in Buckley's career. The rarefied and fragmented atmospheres of the previous disks are replaced by a vibrant and vibrant funky-soul, the sick and neurotic introspection gives way to a grit and a scream of black screaming. The same vocal virtuosity appears in the new context as gross gestures of histrionics. Even more surprising is the change in theme: if the previous records were dominated by drugs, this is all about eroticism, it is a gigantic sexual nightmare, which winds convulsively and vehemently without restraint, from the wild percussiveness of Get On Top, where the most unrestrained aphrodisiac dances of the primitive tribes are combined with a manic orgasm of alienation, to the lascivious and sprawling song of Devil Eyes , in a deafening pursuit of South American rhythms and syncopic jazz, up to the heartfelt blues of Hong Kong Bar , accompanied by acoustic guitar and clap.

Buckley then recorded two other mediocre and scholastic records of obtuse soul-rock, complete with a choir and string section. Sefronia (Discreet, 1973) contains little worthy of note ( Because Of You , Honey Man ) and Look At The Fool (Discreet, 1974) makes the line to the orchestral soul of Al Green ( Look At The Fool , Who Could Deny You ) .

Tim Buckley died of an overdose in the summer of 1975 in Santa Monica. He was 28 years old. He left a son who had hardly known him, Jeff Buckley.

Rock critics hadn't appreciated him at all or had just mentioned him. The "Encyclopedia", the "History" and the "Album Guide" of Rolling Stone did not dedicate a single line to him, the "Penguin Encyclopedia" dedicated a few absent-minded lines to him. Starsailor had only been reviewed with flying colors by the jazz magazine "Downbeat" and (years later) in Europe.

Aftermath will see the coming of several live concert recordings. Avoid the anthologies, which almost always favor the most banal albums.

On his own, Lee Underwood recorded two solo piano albums, Phantom Light (2003) and Gathering Light (2008).

Buckley's son, Jeff Buckley, will become an impressive singer-songwriter on his own but will also die young.