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.
