Rock - Richard Cook on the frustrating legacy of the singer Tim Buckley
The small and melancholy cult of doomed singer-songwriters has been making an unlikely comeback of late. Sandy Denny (d 1978) has had some posthumous live recordings released to freshen up her rather dour, autumnal discography. Nick Drake (d 1974) has never been more popular: once as obscure as any minor Elizabethan poet, he's been rather mysteriously upgraded to laureate status by a rash of Sunday supplement retrospectives. Both those players were archetypal English rock-folkies, too pale for blues or soul, but affecting in a kind of dark-faery way. Tim Buckley (d 1975), though he divided his time between California and New York, had some affinity with the same style and he was at least as popular here as he was in America, where he never sold many records. Though he affected a bluesy howl and his music often had vague leanings towards jazz, Buckley was another folkie at heart. Once I Was (Strange Fruit), a new round-up of some forgotten live tracks, begs the old question about him: artless genius or pretentious rambler?
A bit of both, naturally, and sometimes in the course of one track. The primness of English bards was pretty alien to Buckley, though. Much of his music has a hungry, erotic edge to it, which again may strike some as ridiculous: metaphors such as "Honey Man" are straight out of blues mythology, and the sweet high tenor in which he sang them has nothing earthy about it at all. He wants to swoop and swoon around the highest notes of the root chord, and his melodies are like an improvised spiral.
It was a difficult muse to handle, or place: none of his studio albums manage a consistent strike rate (his son, Jeff, whose own small legacy has also been tarnished by a pointless early death, was a lot luckier with finding a soundstage that worked for him). Either the music turns to a muddle, or Buckley has disappeared off into a world of his own making. Starsailor (Straight) is his most interesting failure, and I got it off the shelf for the first time in years to see if it still doesn't work. Straight, which was Frank Zappa's label and included fellow pilgrims of the bizarre such as Captain Beefheart, may not have been Buckley's spiritual home, but nobody else would have released a record like Starsailor, which has the singer mewling and crooning over the strangest of backings by some then-members of the Mothers of Invention. Yes, it still doesn't work. Buckley's best original album is probably Blue Afternoon, also released by Straight, which has, in "Blue Melody", his defining moment, and a track that makes all the frustrations of his other records seem ever more exasperating.
Buckley was dispirited by his lack of success, and his later records found him even further lost, in lumpen funk grooves that suit him not at all well. We get something like all of his various worlds on Once I Was, and it's an excellent sampler of what he could do. Five tracks come from a session he did for John Peel in 1968, and here the folk singer with the itch to get soulfully sexy stands up. Pretty, light, made when he was barely 21, this is charming music, and the extended ramble called "Hallucinations/Troubadour" is guilefully sustained. Two tracks are from a TV appearance six years later, and though Buckley's voice is still very limber, the music is congealing into any old rock.
The eeriest piece, though, is a musty tape of a 1968 Copenhagen concert, where Buckley sings what was his warm-up vocal piece, "I Don't Need it to Rain". For 12 minutes, over acoustic bass, vibes and two guitars, the young man tests his range and, as he goes, the sound seems to fade very slowly around him. As the piece nears the finish, it's as if he has slipped into darkness. Which, in the end, is what he did.
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