Rock - what are you listening to?

[cybot]

Wow! That was truly magnificent Paul. It's one of the latter albums that I don't have despite coming across it many times over the years. Something always got in the way. I have that book though and I still haven't read it. My excuse is, it's upstairs somewhere! Thanks for taking the time to do this. Easy knowing you're passionate about music.....all kinds. Has nobody here anything to add :(

[mcq]

Thanks, Dermot, that's very kind. Sometimes you listen to music and it has a profound effect on you and you have to get the words down when they're still fresh in your mind. That happened tonight and I think I found the right words. I must have listened to Starsailor hundreds of times but it really hit me hard tonight.

[Fran]

Sunday morning listening:

[jonnyone]

I've just been listening to Tim Buckley's greatest and bravest work, Starsailor. I vividly remember buying this as an expensive import CD in Dublin in Virgin in the late Eighties. I had previously heard Lorca at this stage so I was somewhat prepared, but still, this was different. Some albums can be absorbed easily in a few listens whilst others can be more challenging. This was one of those pivotal albums which were initially difficult to absorb, but, over time, I learned so much about music by staying up late night after night with this CD on repeat. It is a breathless listen. Despite the adventurous arrangements and showcasing of his quite staggering vocal ability, it's amazing just how much this music swaggers and swings. Just like the best free music, when you get to its inner pulse, you realise that, far from being a cerebral experience, this is music of the heart which connects with you deeply on a very emotional level. Songs like Monterey, The Healing Festival and Starsailor itself is music on the very emotional brink and some of the most sheerly alive music I have ever heard. And then there is Song to the Siren, which is one of the most beautiful things I have ever been privileged to hear.

One of the best articles I've read about Tim's life and music is this one, written by longtime friend and collaborator, Lee Underwood: http://www.leeunderwood.net/Interviews/ ... ailor.html.

In particular, it is astonishing to read the account of the preparation for and recording of Starsailor and heartbreaking to read about the album's reception and how the record label responded and how they broke his spirit.

"His business people took away all control. He could not produce his own records anymore. He could not get booked. For awhile, he booked himself ("under the table") and played obscure clubs like In The Alley in the mountains north of San Diego. Then that too was gone. He could not record his group (Balkin on bass, Emmett Chapman on 10-string electric stick, Glen Ferris on trombone, Maury Baker on tympani). The powers that be shut the doors in his face. They broke him. He unleashed his anger, his frustration and his fear on himself. He gobbled reds like vitamins, booze like a sailor. When smack was available, he took it. Down... down... He gave up his dreamhouse in Laguna and returned to Venice/Santa Monica. Down."

And then returning to the music producing three albums that his record company could more readily digest and sell, but becoming more and more isolated from himself. As he explained to Underwood in a letter in 1974:

"You are what you are, you know what you know, and there are no words for loneliness, black, bitter, aching loneliness, that gnaws the roots of silence in the night" ... "There has been life enough, and power, grandeur, joy enough, and there has also been beauty enough, and, God knows, there has been squalor and filth and misery and madness and despair enough, and loneliness enough to fill your bowels with the substance of gray horror, and to crust your lips with its hard and acrid taste of desolation" ... "and we are lying there, blind atoms in our cellar-depths, gray voiceless atoms in the manswarm desolation of the earth, and our fame is lost, our names forgotten, our powers are wasting from us like mined earth, while we lie here at evening and the river flows... and dark time is feeding like a vulture on our entrails, and we know that we are lost, and cannot stir..."

Personally, I find it very hard to read those lines, but it really shows you just how easy a time the listeners have: all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the music, whereas he had to live his life with this dark sense of disappointment hanging over him. And yet, like David Ackles, he made every attempt to bear his troubles stoically. According to Underwood, during this time, "he was nice to his loyal, well-meaning musicians; he was nice to his producers; he was nice to his managerial and record company people (until he had contracts with neither); he was nice to the press. He was nice to everybody who counted."

And the closing lines just encapsulate so beautifully the contribution that Tim made to music:

"He gave in fire and fury and perverse humor the totality of his life's experience, which was vast far beyond his mere 28 years." [...] "He had a beauty of spirit, a beauty of song and a beauty of personage that re-etched the face of the lives of all who knew him, and of all who ever truly heard him sing. He burned with a very special flame, one of a kind."

Amen.

+100 Great Post Mcq

[jonnyone]

What an album, a mixture of heavy rock, prog rock, pop, classical, trance, space rock and the kitchen sink and what a recording as well, this will test out your HiFi for sure the dynamics in this are scary at times you begin to think the drums are going to come through the speakers. What a blast.......

[cybot]

What an album, a mixture of heavy rock, prog rock, pop, classical, trance, space rock and the kitchen sink and what a recording as well, this will test out your HiFi for sure the dynamics in this are scary at times you begin to think the drums are going to come through the speakers. What a blast.......

Sounds good John. Will have to check them out.....if I can drag myself away from the left field stuff :) Glad you were impressed with Paul's fantastic piece on the great and sadly missed Tim Buckley. BTW the Live in London '68 is phenomenal. If you haven't already got it you should make it your business to get a copy....

[jonnyone]

Sounds good John. Will have to check them out.....if I can drag myself away from the left field stuff :) Glad you were impressed with Paul's fantastic piece on the great and sadly missed Tim Buckley. BTW the Live in London '68 is phenomenal. If you haven't already got it you should make it your business to get a copy....

Dermot I have that Dream Letter Live In London it has that amazing version of Dolphins on it
Muse are well worth a look/listen they sound like a mixture of Rush and Queen. I saw them live in Wembley about 5 years ago and it was one of the best shows I was ever at. I thought the place was going to take off, completely over the top performance i.e. proper rock n' roll.
Hows the leg?

[mcq]

Sounds good John. Will have to check them out.....if I can drag myself away from the left field stuff :) Glad you were impressed with Paul's fantastic piece on the great and sadly missed Tim Buckley. BTW the Live in London '68 is phenomenal. If you haven't already got it you should make it your business to get a copy....

Dermot I have that Dream Letter Live In London it has that amazing version of Dolphins on it
Muse are well worth a look/listen they sound like a mixture of Rush and Queen. I saw them live in Wembley about 5 years ago and it was one of the best shows I was ever at. I thought the place was going to take off, completely over the top performance i.e. proper rock n' roll.
Hows the leg?

The Dream Letter recording has a remarkably timeless feel to it. It's extraordinary that it stayed in the vaults until 1990. (It seems amazing to think that somebody from his record company would have heard it and passed on its release.) When you listen to songs like Who Do You Love, Pleasant Street/You Keep Me Hanging On, Wayfaring Stranger/You Got Me Running and Once I Was (to take four examples that come to mind), time just stops still and you are rooted to the spot. I remember buying the double vinyl set in Freebird on the back of a rave review in Record Collector (I think) which was written in the breathless evangelising tone of the newly converted. Beautifully sparse instrumentation too which highlights the intimate immediacy of the performances. Not a hint of self-consciousness shrouds the vocal performances, this is passionate intensity on an truly epic scale that remains natural and pure and untarnished by artifice.

Do look out as well for the Live At The Troubadour 1969 recording, which points the way towards Lorca just like Dream Letter points the way towards Happy/Sad. Great drumming from Art Tripp (whose day job was with the Mothers of Invention).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5cNqiHE-do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XxR7oxneTM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEy8_YGlfSE

[cybot]

Sounds good John. Will have to check them out.....if I can drag myself away from the left field stuff :) Glad you were impressed with Paul's fantastic piece on the great and sadly missed Tim Buckley. BTW the Live in London '68 is phenomenal. If you haven't already got it you should make it your business to get a copy....

Dermot I have that Dream Letter Live In London it has that amazing version of Dolphins on it
Muse are well worth a look/listen they sound like a mixture of Rush and Queen. I saw them live in Wembley about 5 years ago and it was one of the best shows I was ever at. I thought the place was going to take off, completely over the top performance i.e. proper rock n' roll.
Hows the leg?

Rush and Queen....aw, don't start me on the memory trip!

Pm sent.....

[jonnyone]

Will have to check them out.....if I can drag myself away from the left field stuff

Dermot Here's some leftfield in every sense of the word. Its as relevent today as it was almost forty years ago.

Funerals of the Citizen King........indeed

Down beneath the spectacle of free
No one ever let you see
The Citizen King
Ruling the fantastic architecture of all the burning cities
Where we buy and sell
La la la la la la la la la la la la
That the Snark was a Boojum all can tell
But a rose is a rose is a rose
Said the Mama of Dada as long ago as 1919