Originally published in Uncut Take 280 [September 2020 issue], we explore a remarkable 12 months where TIM BUCKLEY fearlessly pushed his music in disorientating, fractured directions. Out of this wildly creative period came Starsailor – his masterpiece. Here Buckley’s bandmates celebrate this legendary album and the vaulting ambition of its mercurial creator. “He had a very wide spectrum of containment and complete abandon…”
“For ‘Starsailor’, he was in complete command”
It is September 1970, and Tim Buckley is hunkered down in Whitney Studios, Glendale, California, recording the album that he later came to believe was his masterpiece – Starsailor. The music he and his musicians are making is extraordinary, an unprecedented flux of folk, jazz, rock, improvisation and the classical avant-garde. On this day, though, he’s focused on the album’s title track, a staggering summoning of the elements. Larry Beckett, Buckley’s long-time collaborator and the lyricist for “Starsailor”, is watching in awe.
“I hadn’t been to a Tim session since Goodbye And Hello in June 1967,” he says. “It was markedly different. With Goodbye And Hello he’d wander around in the studio going, ‘I don’t know, what do you think we should do?’… For Starsailor, he was in complete command. It was astonishing.”
Beckett saw Buckley construct the song “Starsailor” from its constituent parts. “He’d say, ‘OK, that’s the master of track three, I’m now going to sing track four.’ And then he would waltz into the studio and do that. He knew exactly where he was going, even though it was what we would call an experiment. To him it was just modern music.”
Buckley was pushing his music beyond the boundaries
Lee Underwood, who’d been playing guitar with Buckley for a number of years already, remembers bass player John Balkin directing Buckley’s performance: “Balkin was a major influence on the amazing vocal tracks he had Tim lay down for ‘Starsailor’. Tim sang different ways, in different registers, laying down some 16 tracks.”
Buckley was pushing his music beyond the boundaries of folk, rock and jazz, while stretching the possibilities of his remarkable voice. “That’s where classical musicians stand in awe of Tim Buckley,” Beckett nods. “That he could actually do this.” Maury Baker, percussionist for the Starsailor sessions, laughs affectionately:“It’s like hearing particle physics!”
Starsailor may now be regarded as Buckley’s masterpiece, but its release in October 1970 put the brakes on a promising, if already unpredictable, career. It confused Buckley’s fans, who’d embraced the romantic folksiness of earlier albums like Goodbye And Hello and had then come along for the ride for 1969’s jazzier Happy Sad. Buckley’s restlessness and curiosity led to three albums released across 12 months that effectively left him in the commercial wilderness – Lorca, Blue Afternoon and Starsailor.
“All he had left was his vision”
“He sacrificed previous audiences, his manager Herb Cohen, his record company,” Underwood says. “All he had left was his vision and his music and a few musicians who believed in him.”
For Tim Buckley, Starsailor was another step in a creative trajectory that began in the Los Angeles folk club scene in 1965 and ’66, when he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Jackson Browne and Steve Noonan (this trio of singer-songwriters became known locally as the “Orange County Three”).
Introduced to manager Herb Cohen by Jimmy Carl Black of the Mothers Of Invention, he eventually landed a contract with Elektra – Jac Holzman had been turned on to Buckley’s music after Cohen sent him an acetate demo. Around this time, he also met Lee Underwood, who became one of Buckley’s closest confidants and most regular collaborators, appearing on seven of his nine albums.
“I see this kid with a lot of curly hair, a guitar player and a conga drum player”
Buckley’s first, self-titled album, a passable take on modern folk music, was brightened by the psychedelic touches of Underwood’s guitar and Jack Nitzsche’s arrangements. Its follow-up, Goodbye And Hello, was much stronger, as Buckley found his métier, surrounding himself with musicians who complemented his vision – Underwood; conga player Carter CC Collins; Jim Fielder on bass.
While touring these early albums, Buckley met John Miller, whose string bass playing and education in jazz had a profound effect on Buckley’s musical development. The 19-year-old Miller would drop in at Ann Arbor’s Canterbury House on Friday nights to see if he could sit in with visiting musicians on their soundcheck. “I see this kid with a lot of curly hair, with a guitar player and a conga drum player,” he continues.
“Being the fearless guy that I was – I don’t know how good I was, but I know I was fearless – I walked up and started playing. I didn’t ask, I just started playing. Tim turned around and smiled, and that’s how I got to know Tim.” After a while, Buckley asked whether Miller would be interested in playing with him. Soon enough, Miller suggested that David Friedman join on vibes. Buckley’s new band was formed.
“Everyone stayed in their lane”
“That was the beginning of Tim wanting to explore, and being very receptive to, a slight jazz sensibility, but still very respectful of where he was, musically,” Miller says.
Recorded during late 1968 at the Elektra Studios in Los Angeles, Happy Sad was the first album to feature this new lineup. “I remember musically that with the vibes, the upright bass, Lee’s electric guitar, Carter, and Timmy’s 12-string guitar, sonically they were the perfect ingredients,” Miller recalls fondly.
“Everyone stayed in their lane and we all were following wherever Tim would go.” The sessions brought new things out of Buckley and his musicians – “perhaps it touched some place very primal with Tim when Friedman and I would start stretching it out a little bit more” – and you can hear, here, the beginnings of the free-thinking, free-flowing arc of music that Buckley pursued over the coming years.
Buckley’s heart was elsewhere
By 1969, Tim Buckley was facing two competing pressures: his own desire to push himself further creatively and the industry’s need for commercial product. Complicating matters further, his deal with Elektra was up and he was preparing to sign to Straight – the label started by manager Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa. The latter were hoping for a more straightforward album to kick off the contract. But Buckley’s heart was elsewhere, diving deeper into the experimental terrain he’d begun to explore on Happy Sad.
In September, he performed played four sets over two days at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. It’s telling that, with Happy Sad not even two months old, Buckley was already previewing the next albums he made – Blue Afternoon and Lorca – while pointedly ignoring Goodbye And Hello, the record that had won him his plaudits in the first place.
“Tim had entered a new stage of his musical development,” Underwood remembers, “more abstract, avant-garde and psycho-sonically adventurous music.”
“Tim’s songwriting on Blue Afternoon is top-flight”
With some songs written during the sessions for Happy Sad, Blue Afternoon is a transitional album, bridging Buckley’s earlier, more conventional work and the new directions in folk-jazz he forged on his next albums. “Happy Time” and “Chase The Blues Away” recall the dream folk of Buckley’s earlier work, while the experimental “Train” looks ahead to the shifting, questing music to come.
Recorded with the Underwood, Collins, Friedman and Miller lineup, Blue Afternoon includes one of Buckley’s most powerful performances – “I Must Have Been Blind”, which was later covered in 1986 by This Mortal Coil on their second album, Filigree & Shadow.
“Tim’s songwriting on Blue Afternoon is top-flight,” says Underwood. “That album is often under-appreciated, perhaps partly because not all of Tim’s fans have had a chance to hear it. But Tim’s singing was as good on this album as it was on his other albums.”
“A peak experience”
Released in November 1969, Blue Afternoon was Miller’s last album with Buckley – although there was another session to record music for the soundtrack to Hall Bartlett’s 1969 film, Changes. “I don’t remember any negative feeling,” the bass player says. “I don’t remember anything other than it being a great musical love-fest. This was just like a peak experience.”
Blue Afternoon was recorded in the same, intense four-week period as Lorca. It must have been strange, then, for Buckley; much as he loved the material on Blue Afternoon, his focus was drawn towards the new approach he was developing for his music, his increasingly wide vision taking in improvisation and the avant-garde.
Lorca’s first side takes in two long, extraordinary songs: the title track, a five-note dirge that dissolves near the end into lagoons of textured drone, and the ballad “Anonymous Proposition”, where Buckley’s voice is increasingly unmoored and devotional. He named the album after the Spanish poet and master of the passionate artistry of ‘duende’, Federico Garcia Lorca; there are certainly echoes of Lorca’s poetic intensity in Buckley’s delivery.
“Producing Lorca was a trial”
He’d also gathered together new musicians for a new band: Underwood and Collins were now joined by bass player John Balkin, who’d played on Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy. The live band was fleshed out by Buzz Gardner, another Zappa acolyte, on trumpet and flugelhorn.
Released in May 1970, Lorca did not sit particularly well with Elektra – for whom this was Buckley’s final album. “Producing Lorca was a trial,” Jac Holzman recalls. “I was not sure at that time whether it should be released at all.” For Underwood, though, the developments in the music made sense. “Tim had evolved from folk and jazz into a new domain based mainly on improvisation and some fresh, new vocal techniques.
He had already begun improvising vocal sounds, especially within extended versions of ‘Gypsy Woman’.” There are moments of unhurried beauty on Lorca, too, like the stoned folk blues of “I Had A Talk With My Woman”. In retrospect, Holzman has no reservations about releasing the album. “From the vantage point of many decades, I’m glad I did, because the album was far better than I remembered and it was an honourable exit for both Tim and Elektra.
One sigh or scream
For Buckley, though, it was time to make his definitive statement, to pull together all the varying threads of music he’d been exploring. With Starsailor, he blew everything apart.
Here was an artist supremely confident in his ability to make genres melt together in one sigh or scream, able to come up with all kinds of lateral connections – what would happen if modern composers like Stockhausen or Ligeti met folk singers like Tim Hardin or Fred Neil? – and then make them real through ferocious creativity and force of will.
A man of changes, he confronted profound shifts in his musical sensibility just as his personal life was changing, too: in April 1970, he’d married again, to Judy Brejot Sutcliffe, and had adopted her son Taylor.
“He was into every kind of music you could imagine”
The music kept Buckley moving forward. He’d recently been turned on to avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian, after being introduced to her music by Lee Underwood – “I’ve found a friend,” Buckley claimed upon hearing her work with composer Luciano Berio.
Beckett also played his part: “I discovered things like ‘Nirvana Symphony’ by Toshiro Mayuzumi. One day I said, ‘Tim, you should hear this, he’s turned the sound of a bell into a choir, with Buddhist chants going on in the background.’ He said, ‘If you have anything like that in your record collection, you’ve got to play it for me now!’
“He was into every kind of music you could imagine. For him to discover experimental classical music and then excel at it was no surprise to me.”
“He could do a lot of things with his voice”
Buckley had started preparing the material for Starsailor in late 1969, and his new band had already begun to breathe the songs into life while on tour. There was also a new member of the band, Bunk Gardner – Buzz’s brother, and another Zappa connection – joining in on flutes, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet.
Bunk had played with Buzz and Balkin in their free-improvising trio Menage A Trois, and was already well versed in free-form music. When he first saw Buckley, he was fixated on his singing – “one thing for me [that] stood out was Tim’s range. He could do a lot of things with his voice” – but he soon learned that Buckley was after the very essence of the musicians he played with. “Tim actually gave us free rein to express ourselves musically. I could see that Tim was going in a more progressive direction.”
In the studio, the music flowed from the players, their near-telepathic understanding of one another, honed by time on the road, allowing the music to travel far and wide.
“Tim worked hard on every aspect”
But while Starsailor might sound off-the-cuff at times – there are moments of improvisatory splendour on the album, where it sounds as though the musicians are responding as one, in real time, to Buckley’s cues – it was also a deeply considered, rigorously planned album, as Underwood explains. “Tim spent a lot of time writing the lyrics, and even more time working with the odd time signatures and unusual melodic and harmonic factors as well.
Improvisation is involved on Tim’s part and the other musicians’ parts as well, but a lot of conscious artistry was involved on Tim’s part before he and the musicians ever got into the studio. This was not a slap-dash ‘shot in the dark’ effort. Tim worked hard on every aspect of it.”
“Song To The Siren” was almost three years old by the time it appeared on Starsailor. It made its first public appearance on the final episode of The Monkees television series, in 1968 – typical of Buckley to use a high-profile promotional appearance to debut his latest song, as yet unavailable on any album. “No thought of merchandising whatsoever,” laughs Beckett. “Let’s do the edgiest, strangest thing we have. That was beautiful.”
“He always believed the worst”
The version of “Song To The Siren” that appeared on Starsailor, though, had changed a little since its premiere, given Buckley’s embarrassment over the first line of the final verse, “I’m as puzzled as the oyster”.
“He was sensitive about criticism of that line,” Beckett sighs. “He always believed the worst.” So he changed “oyster” to “newborn child” and then botched the second line, too. “Though it’s a very strong song, he ruined the last verse,” Beckett told me. “I’m standing right there as he’s recording the song, but his performance was so outstanding that I thought, ‘I’m just gonna let it ride.’ Let’s just let that be the take, because I don’t think he can sing it any better.”
For other songs, like the ravenous “Come Here My Woman”, which floats in on waves of scarred noise before Buckley lets out an unearthly howl, or the bravura free-jazz soundscape of “The Healing Festival”, Buckley’s group are somehow both taut and loose, able to turn on a dime.
“He was pushing me and I was pushing him”
“We all knew the tunes and I took all my cues mainly from Tim and Lee Underwood,” Baker recalls. “Everything I did was based on the intensity and floaty, airy, atmospheric music that he did. He didn’t want me to play real straight times. He said, ‘Never play two and four for me’, which is great.” On “Monterey”, Baker and Buckley played alone together, Buckley’s spiralling guitar riff the centrifugal force for wild vocal extemporisations, and Baker’s multi-limbed, volcanic percussion. “I was playing full-out with him,” Baker smiles. “He was pushing me, and I was pushing him.”
“I really had high hopes after that session,” Gardner adds. “It looked like Tim was starting to be recognised as somebody to check out, because he was so different and was really radically going in another direction. But I know that it felt very comfortable because we had been playing together a while before we made Starsailor. It was just so good in the studio, that feeling of even though you’re recording, let’s go for it, no holds barred – anything that you can come up with, as far as being fairly wild and experimental in your approach, the better!”
The music that the Starsailor Band made after the album’s release was even more out there
Released in October 1970, reception to Starsailor from many quarters, however, was frosty. While the jazz magazine Downbeat gave the album five stars, many reviewers were puzzled, and subsequent live shows fared little better, critics complaining of “self-indulgence” on Buckley’s part.
The music that the Starsailor Band made after the album’s release was even more out there – the few bootlegs that exist are incredible in their intensity, Buckley pushing the music, and that tremendous voice, as far as it could go, trying to convince fans to take to his new sound.
“Tim spent three years trying to get audiences to accept and enjoy his new music,” remembers Underwood. “That is more time and effort than he spent on any other of the five conceptual zones he worked in along the way.”
A torrent of pure energy
On stage, Buckley was a torrent of pure energy, crackling with improvisatory fury. There were reflective moments – the set for the Boboquivari TV show, which you can find on YouTube, is relatively gentle – but Buckley wanted to take everything further and further. “Every time we played it was different,” Baker remembers.
“You didn’t really know how intense he was going to be, and even when he wasn’t that intense – which was very rare, by the way – he still was so lyrical. Then he’d get really raunchy. He had a very wide spectrum of containment and complete abandon. There were moments where he was very serene. Very beautiful and sweet, and then all of a sudden fiery and in your face!”
The shape of the Starsailor Band changed over the next few years. The final lineup was Buckley, Baker, Glenn Ferris on trombone, and Emmett Chapman on his self-designed “Chapman Stick”, a guitar-like fretboard tapping instrument. “This band was definitely from Mars,” Ferris laughs. “For the record label, you could not give this music away.”
“It will be with me until I breathe my last breath”
A session for the band was booked but subsequently cancelled. “Tim loved this band and he wanted to record it,” Ferris continues, a note of melancholy creeping into his voice. “But a week before the session, he called and said, ‘Man, I am really sorry, but we can’t do the recording. With my relationship with Herb Cohen, they don’t want it.’ He apologised, and I guess that was the end of that band, too.” So Buckley was off again, taking another turn to the soul, jazz and funk of 1973’s Greetings From LA.
Buckley’s most fearsomely exploratory phase was over. But the musicians he worked with during this period still marvel over what they achieved. “Tim was really one of the most exciting artists, musically, for me,” Baker concludes. “Starsailor incorporated all of the genres of music, or most of them, that I’d grown up with. It was just a great combination of so many different things. It will be with me until I breathe my last breath.”