Inspired,yet again by you know who :-) Listened to this last night after a wonderful day for
the underdog (Francesca's stunning and heart warming victory in the French open -surely this
is the real drama of Sport! - and closer,to home Louth's equally stunning performance against
Kildare!).The song cycle from Strange Feeling through to the ethereal and fantastically atmospheric
and languid Love From Room 101 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast highway) to another favourite
of mine Sing a Song For You is the stuff of dreams! Spoiled only by a totally unnecessary Gypsy
Woman,a 12 minute exercise in indulgence which should never have made the cut! Anyway I found this
little article stuck inside the Lp and I'd like to share it with you lot and typed out too!:
You don't have to wield 12 volumes of Sigmund Freud to express how the dead hand of one generation falls on the next.In Scotland, all it takes is one rusty little shiv of a phrase.It says that no matter what you do in life and no matter how rich and feted,you're going to be no better than where you came from.
Whenever some local son makes it to the papers or comes home with a big car or trophy wife, they shake their heads and say:"Him?I kent his father..."
As the son of a well-kent father myself, you'll understand that I was viscerally unshaken and sworn never to use such a drably oedipal slight.Biology And heredity,down! You are what you make yourself.Things change, though, and is patient for revenge.Suddenly,one morning,it turns out they were right after all.It's your father in the shaving mirror.They knew him and they know you as well.Even so,I had vowed never to utter those words.
You'll forgive the confessional digression,but the second Mrs. Morton was a lady called Sally Smirnof.I loved her dearly and she brought me out of myself.She was with me one night at the Forum in North London,tucked in an inside pocket.The young guy on stage was already the darling of the music press and there was,as they say,a lot of love in the house that night.The voice was big and theatrical.The songs teetered on the verge of overripe.I was getting that way myself through the set,with Sally's fulsome encouragement,I took it on myself to tell my neighbour, "I saw his father,you know.He was amazing."
Jeff Buckley's bizarre death in the early summer of 1997,by drowning in the Mississippi,propelled him to instant legend.It also looked as though the Waters of Cronos had claimed him. 22 years earlier his birth father had died younger still,having mistaken heroin for coke. (An easy kind of mistake.I used to mix up vodka and a refreshing glass of water)The irony didn't go unnoticed.Since everyone knew that Tim Buckley had played no part whatsoever in raising his son,some grim principle of heredity seemed to be at work
We went through the same kind of thing trying to hear echoes of Dewey Redman's eldritch saxophone wail in his boy's work,even though knowing that young Joshua never lay in his cradle listening to the old man practise scales next door.In the same way,there ought to have been no audible connection between the Buckley men and much of the commentary tried to point up the difference between Jeff's fruity,almost operatic style and Tim's skittering,multi-scale improvisations.
Even before I saw him in London and Paris towards the end of his life,I'd always thought of Tim Buckley as primarily a jazz musician,in fact only notionally and accidentally a singer at all.Almost the first image I saw of him was a street photograph of Tim on a snowy sidewalk, hands dug deep into a pea-jacket, pipe cleaner legs twisting against the cold.On the wall behind him,a poster advertising successive gigs by the John Coltrane quartet and an Ornette Coleman group that might,now that I think of it, have featured Dewey Redman.
That kind of lineage didn't square with Tim Buckley who'd come through in the business on the say-so of the Mother's manager Herb Cohen,singing a brand of psychedelic folk.That was the Buckley who made his UK debut in 1968,accompanied by guitarist Lee Underwood,vibist David Friedman and the hastily recruited Danny Thompson on upright bass.That was the gig preserved on Dream Letter:Live in London 1968,still the most elegantly mastered bootleg ever.On it,Buckley is still unmistakably a folkie,but Underwood's subtle chords,Danny's sinuous lines,and his own chiming 12-string,point the music in a very different direction.
Two years later,stuff like 'Buzzin'Fly' and 'Hi Lily Hi Lo',in fact the whole idea of songs with words,had been set aside in favour of a spooky experimentalism.In his lifetime,Buckley didn't dent the charts at all.The second album,Happy Sad, clambered up onto the bottom rungs of the Top 200.Three years later,even devoted fans were scratching their heads at Lorca's bizarre vocalise.The industry saw it as flagrant and ultimately suicidal uncommercialism.Others cited Norman Mailer's portentous ambition to "capture the Prince of Truth in the act of changing a style".Later,others still pointed to the supposed example of Miles Davis,missing the point twice over:Mile's ambitions were hardly commercial anyone with ears could surely hear that he did'nt change half as much as he liked us to think.
Right from the start,Buckley was an improviser.On that extraordinary London set he yodels nervously between songs,running variations that couldn't befitted into a format that was already too constraining for him.When I saw him five years later,the parallel with Coltrane made more sense than ever,except that Tim Buckley physically couldn't take the horn out of his mouth.He'd long since turned himself into an instrument of troubled grace.I saw him twice in a period of days.I think this was the trip when he recorded Fred Neil's Dolphins on a session For the BBC TV's the OGWT.It's still the only Buckley performance most people know.By that time,the voice had lost some of its purity at the top end but was still too young and too undamaged by excess to have acquired much gravel and gravitas at the bottom.He was still doing his most intriguing stuff between the songs,tuning and retuning that amazing voice,fuguing on ideas so fleeting and evanescent that they didn't seem to be part of any identifiable material but moments in an ongoing process of self-discovery.The MC5 apparently base their full on sound on John Coltrane's quartet.I suspect Tim posed posed himself in front of that poster in deliberate homage.Like Trane he was hearing harmonies,and like Ornette he had a profound belief in his own unschooled philosophy.
The Rock business is understandably nervous of improvisers.Even with the impetus generated by 1994's Grace,Jeff Buckley would never have been allowed to free-associate and improvise the way his father did for pretty much the last five years of his career.Even though Jeff's body of work was tragically foreshortened,I remember pretty much all the songs he did that night twenty-something years later. I just don't remember much music between them.That was and is the difference. (BM)
The poster,alluded to in the above article....
