Tim Buckley

“I'm moving beyond, and it will probably be much, much further than people expect. But I know where I'm going, I can see the road.” With these prophetic words, taken from an interview, Tim Buckley was about to embark on the most fascinating and perilous musical journey of his career. Born in '47, with an angelic, curly-haired face, he had for some time been one of the most gifted minstrels on the American scene, the author of a handful of works suspended between folk, jazz and psychedelia. Unfortunately his albums (with Fred Neil, Tim Hardin and Miles Davis as guiding spirits) failed to shake up the charts, relegating the young man to cult-artist status despite the label's promotional efforts.
1970: the scenario changed drastically. By now the failures, the possible commercial flops, no longer mattered: there was a need to go further, to break down every barrier of song form and explore a truly unknown dimension.
Already with the previous album, “Lorca”, the Californian singer-songwriter had given a taste of that alienating, raw sonic feast: songs stripped to the bone, spectral and dramatic as in a nightmare. The great, chant-like voice covered much of the instrumental fabric, entrusted to pipe organ and electric guitar, with occasional acoustic touches for support.
“Starsailor”, his third album in the space of a year, made those sinister litanies sound like harmless folk songs by comparison.

Buckley recorded his masterpiece in just a few sessions (10-21 September 1970) with an entirely new band. Herb Cohen, his manager and head of the Straight label (founded with Frank Zappa), decided to back him once again, despite the very poor chart returns. Tim thus reunited with his old friend and lyricist Larry Beckett, by his side since the beginning but later sidelined. He kept Lee Underwood, another key collaborator, on electric guitar, and John Balkin on double bass. The painful loss of former bandmates Carter C.C. Collins (percussion) and David Friedman (vibraphone) was offset by the arrival of Maury Baker (drums, timpani) and brothers “Buzz” and “Bunk” Gardner (trumpet and sax respectively), horn players with a background in Zappa's ranks.

With just a few but crystal-clear ideas firmly in mind, this new line-up of musicians gathered in the studio. As always, Tim relied on instinct, giving no written instructions on arrangements or possible solos. The musicians simply had to listen to the bandleader's cues: improvising over a guitar ostinato, weaving textures around a soaring vocal line. That's how “Come Here Woman” came about, the opening track: repeated electric guitar chords followed by virtuoso bass runs. The drums burst in and shake up the atmosphere, setting the stage for Buckley's entrance, as he delivers the first verse with theatrical flair. The vibrations in the air are restless, the tide keeps shifting shape, crashing against the rocks. Just as a hint of melody seems to sync guitar and rhythm section, the voice launches into a series of experimental flourishes, slowing down and speeding up the sound of the words, astonishing with impossible high notes.

For anyone who still hadn't grasped it, Tim Buckley proved to the world that he was the greatest singer on the planet, capable of a vocal range and interpretive skill that were truly out of the ordinary. So “I Woke Up” also proceeds along the same trackless railway. The arpeggiated guitar mimics the wail of whales beached on the shore, while trumpet and voice conjure a slow, suspended melancholy. Tim bites down and vanishes, roars then flees. “Monterey” is nothing but one long, endless electric guitar figure, with crackling bass and drums in tow. The voice mimics grunts and sudden shrieks, as if we were in the jungle. The visions it conjures stir unease, nervousness, tension. It's not rock, nor folk, nor pop by any stretch. At this point Buckley was drawn more to the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Coleman and Coltrane, and to the classical music of bold figures like Pierre Boulez, Messiaen and Penderecki. An evident inspiration can also be traced to the work of Luciano Berio with singer Cathy Berberian: explorations of vocality and the relationships between sound and word, timbre and movement, semantics and the psychology of music.

A momentary sigh of relief comes with the naive nursery-rhyme feel of “Moulin Rouge”, this time crafted as a standard song. The muted trumpet skips along through music-hall territory, vaguely circus-like or cabaret in flavour. This track was nonetheless included by Buckley as filler, once it became clear the record wasn't long enough and the sessions had wrapped. A different story applies to the following “Song To The Siren”, written by Larry Beckett more than three years earlier and then shelved: the original acoustic folk ballad here has its tempo slowed down and its arrangement changed. Tim reworks the lyrics slightly and delivers it profoundly transformed: the placid, harmless gait is turned into electric pathos, icy choirs and a vocal performance more anguished and spectral than ever. What emerges is the album's masterpiece, one of the great unsung gems of the American songbook.

The minutes go by, but the mood never shifts nor offers the listener any easy foothold: just try approaching “Jungle Fire”, a poetic arabesque split into two parts, one declamatory and suspended, the other jagged and stirred by the usual electric guitar ostinatos. Or take the controversial title track, the sum of all its avant-garde experimentation: devised on paper by Tim and John Balkin from a poem by Beckett, “Starsailor” is a fearless exercise for voice alone. Sixteen overdubbed vocal parts with altered tape speeds: a symphony in which the sole instrument seems possessed by ancestral spirits. An ocean of screams, whispers, laments, moans. The material is stripped down to the bare minimum and reveals itself in all its forbidding beauty. Sailor Buckley's starship finally reaches that long-desired point of no return, brushes against the unknown for a moment, dares, burns, explodes. And survives.

With “The Healing Festival” we return to earth, trying to give that delirium an instrumental follow-up, stirring up fresh chaos.
It's no use: the zenith has already been reached. Not even the gorgeous trumpet opening of the closing “Down By The Borderline” manages to push the discourse any further. Icarus's flight is over: the sun has burned Tim's wings.

“Starsailor” came out in November '70 and, unsurprisingly, met with no success whatsoever. It stands as the most complicated and disorienting album in rock history: an unwitting forerunner of the more “ethereal” strain of new wave (4AD) that would pay it tribute in the Eighties. At the time many critics wrote glowing reviews (the famous five stars from jazz magazine “Down Beat” among them), but none of it did anything to boost Buckley's standing.
The provocation staged by the twenty-three-year-old was embraced by only a very few brave souls. Old admirers of his folk madrigals recoiled in horror at that orgy of sound: those who loved songs like “Once I Was” and “Phantasmagoria In Two” struggled to recognize the angelic songwriter in this starsailor.

Buckley, for his part, could only return to the margins of the scene, frustrated and full of barely concealed bitterness toward the music business.
No longer a rising star, he found himself playing third-rate venues, festivals where his once-glorious name was now relegated to the bottom of the bill. Pride and stubbornness eventually gave way to compromise: three albums of mediocre folk-pop, arranged by talentless session men. Yesterday's poetry was replaced by shabby lyrics steeped in violence or eroticism.
He even gave some thought to the world of film: the long list of shelved screenplays, failed musical adaptations and collaborations that never materialized speaks for itself, though. All the support and love of a new partner weren't enough. Tim Buckley no longer believed in music, and had given up aiming for anything meaningful. He sought refuge one last time in drugs and found death through a combination of heroin (and consequently morphine in his bloodstream) and alcohol. It was 29 June 1975: he was 28 years old.
His journey dissolved into the eternal silence of the planets.

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27/10/2006