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Timothy Charles Buckley III (February 14, 1947 – June 29, 1975) was an experimental vocalist and performer who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, and avant-garde rock in a short career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Buckley often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent principally showcased on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. His first marriage was to Mary Guibert, with whom he had a child, musician and singer Jeff Buckley, who died in 1997. They divorced in 1968 and Buckley later married Judy Henske in 1970.

Biography

Early life and career

Born in Washington DC, Buckley lived for 10 years in New York before moving to southern California. During his childhood, he was a fan of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Nat King Cole, and Miles Davis, although country music was his foremost passion. He left school at 18 with twenty songs written with Larry Beckett under his belt — many of which later featured on his debut album. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley to Herb Cohen, and he quickly got him signed to Elektra record company. He also met guitarist Lee Underwood around this time, who became a big part of nearly all of Buckley's artistic endeavors.

Buckley released his debut album Tim Buckley on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. Jack Nitzsche and Van Dyke Parks were involved with some performing/arranging aspects of the album.

1960s impact

The late sixties were a progressive time in music, with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band embodying the movement. Experimental psychedelic music was being produced, and the sounds of the time seeped into Tim's second album, Goodbye and Hello, an album reflecting the influences of producers Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky. The influence boded well for the success of his second release, which was his first album to penetrate the top 200 music charts, peaking at #171. Five of the songs on the album were written solely by Buckley, and the other five were Buckley/Beckett collaborations.

Buckley appeared solo to sing one song ("Song To The Siren") at the end of The Monkees TV show episode "The Frodis Caper" in March 1968.

Departure of Beckett

After Beckett left for the Army, Buckley was free to develop his own individual style, without the literary restraints of before. Uneducated both vocally and instrumentally in the finer aspects of melody and lyric structure, the quality of the tracks he produced demonstrate the natural talent he possessed.

He described the jazz/blues-rock that he was associated with at the time as "White thievery and an emotional sham." With this opinion strongly set, he rebelled against what was commercial, and persevered on a course of development that alienated many of his fans. Drawing inspiration from jazz greats such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, and vocalist Leon Thomas, his subsequent independently-recorded music was vastly different from previous recordings.

All That Jazz

In 1968, Buckley recorded the jazzy Happy Sad, which was released the following year, and alienated a large portion of his prior audience. Dissatisfied with playing the same old material continuously, and disenchanted with the music business that he felt was restraining him from producing new material, he began to weave in new songs into his performances, featuring an increasingly minimalist sound from his heavily orchestrated first two albums, and introducing a vibraphone player into his band. However, this attempted rejuvenation was a failure; becoming largely based on improvisation, his performances were less accessible to the audiences who saw him as a folk-rock poster boy. However, despite the relative criticisms that his performances were to receive, Happy Sad became Tim's highest charting album ever, peaking at #81.

Artiste

During 1969, Buckley began to write and record material for three different albums: Lorca, Blue Afternoon, and Starsailor. Inspired after hearing the singing of avant-garde musician Cathy Berberian, he decided to integrate the ideas of composers such as Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis in an avant-garde rock genre. He started to fully utilize his voice's impressive range. According to guitarist Lee Underwood, Buckley knew that Lorca had little to no chance in the commercial market, and due to his old friend Herb Cohen starting up a new label venture with Frank Zappa, Straight Records, he wanted to provide an album of older material that was a step back from his current direction, but one that would have a better shot at making a dent in the public's minds. Selecting eight songs that had yet to be recorded, these tracks evolved into the sessions for the forgotten classic Blue Afternoon, an album that was quite similar to Happy Sad in style. [1] Underwood himself contradicts this with a 1977 article he wrote for Down Beat Magazine chronicling Buckley's career - he states that Buckley's heart was not into the Blue Afternoon performances and that the album was a perfunctory response to please his business people. [2]

Neither album sold well, with the near-simultaneous release of each seemingly "cancelling out" the other. Lorca was viewed as a failure by many fans who, shocked by its completely different style, found the vocal gymnastics too abstract and far removed from his previous folk-rock rooted albums; while Blue Afternoon was seen by some as uninteresting and tepid - one critic went as far as to say that the album "[wasn't] even good sulking music." Blue Afternoon was the last Tim Buckley album to hit the Billboard charts, reaching #192. After the lack of success for both records, Buckley began to focus more on what he felt to be his true masterpiece, Starsailor.

Starsailor

Vocally and instrumentally haunting, the album was unlike much else at the time; Buckley chose words for their phonetic sounds instead of meaning, and admitted to using other languages if an English word didn't suffice. At times his voice sounds disturbed and depressed. Different from his first three albums, this personal album shared the same response as Lorca. Impervious to Buckley's avant-garde style, few of his fan base were aroused, with the majority disliking it. It included the more accessible "Song to the Siren", later recorded by 1980s British indie rock group, This Mortal Coil.

After the failure of Starsailor, Buckley's live performances degraded to insincere chores and he eventually ended up unsellable. Unable to produce his own music and almost completely broke, he turned to alcohol and drug binges. He also looked to become an actor, with the unreleased low-budget group therapy drama Why? from 1971 being the only film completed (it was actually shot on the new technology of videotape), after several abortive meetings with Hollywood producers.

"Bye Bye Baby"

Two years later, with his finances depleting and craving for recognition ripe, he released three albums which combined rock with a soul/funk direction - Greetings from L.A., Sefronia and Look at the Fool. These albums failed to become a commercial success. Fundamentally Tim was unhappy with the systematic and shallow R&B structure of the lyrics and music, despite being a fan of the genre. His distaste with bowing to commercial pressures from his manager Herb Cohen's DiscReet Records soon left him without a recording contract.

Death

On June 28, 1975 after returning from the last show of a tour in Dallas he snorted heroin at a friend's house. Having diligently controlled his habit while on the road, his tolerance was lowered, and the combination of a small amount of drugs mixed with the amount of alcohol he had consumed throughout the day to celebrate the tour's end was too much. His friend took him home thinking he was merely drunk. Tim was put to bed by his friends, who told his wife, Judy, that he'd also used some barbiturates. As she watched TV in bed beside him, Buckley turned blue. Attempts by friends and paramedics to revive him were unsuccessful. Reportedly, Buckley's last words were "Bye Bye Baby," delivered in a way reminiscent of the line in Ray Charles' "Driftin' Blues." Buckley was just 28 years of age.

Discography

External links

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