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Tim Buckley: How a Hippie Hero became a sultry Sex Object...
Chrissie Hynde, NME, 8 June 1974
...and had a simply devastating effect on the glands of a certain Chrissie Hynd [sic].
It’s a Summer night, Anytown USA, 1969. We’re sitting in a loosely-constructed circle under the bridge, passing around a gallon jug of cheap California red wine. The river stinks of detergent and oil, but the smog has lifted and the full moon splashes us with ribald ideas. A few chicks plunge into the greasy water labelled "fire hazard" by the city council as the whistle of an oncoming train is heard from a few miles away.
Someone throws the now-empty jug downstream and it’s a quick scramble up the river bank and over the bridge railing. Stumbling drunk, we simultaneously leap onto the passing train and clutch those iron ladders for dear life, sliding between the moving cars like Jack Kerouac pros, making a flying dismount onto Main Street. Holding a piece of sandstone in her hand, Colleen points to one of the boxcars. Under the large stencilled letters B&O (Baltimore – Ohio) is scribbled a name: Tim Buckley.
Seems like a long time since that waif countenance gazed down at us from its place on the altar-like mantle of a hundred hippie hovels. See, Tim wasn’t just a musician, he was Spokesman for the Love-in generation, an ultimate being that everybody wanted to be and go down on at the same time. Boys...girls...didn’t matter – and his wasn’t an AC/DC appeal, rather one of that gentle wandering minstrel we all fancied ourselves as. Nobody’s ever looked prettier – and that image combined with one of the most sensual, multicoloured voices ever...well, how could any underdog resist?
But times change, as has that idyllic head-shop fantasy for which Buckley played Good Shepherd. Here I am interviewing him – and the Indian Moccasins, sweet expression, and even the windblown locks which once crowned him in curls and became his trademark are now gone. In fact, Tim’s burly and aggressive – an American’s American. The cleft chin and shorn hair provide the very look sought out by the advertising world to sell toothpaste, razor blades, aftershave, sporty cars. I’m even tempted to ask his stud fee, but don’t.
I do ask him whatever happened to the lonely hotel room image? "Well, when you’re working that’s all there is. I was on the road since 1964 to ‘71."
How old were you in ‘64?
"16 or 17."
So you really were an innocent youth, huh?
"Well, when you’re 18, you’re sorta still right outta the choir, aren’t you? And you have to consider the year. Kids now that are 14 are strung out on reds and heroin and pregnant maybe a couple times. I mean really been through it by 16. Before, you didn’t get laid till 17-18 maybe if you were lucky – got the cheerleader drunk at the right time. That was a different period. Whether it’s good or bad I’m really at odds with it. I got an 11-year old boy and a 15-year-old sister, and she’s just about washed up – all the shit she’s done. I don’t know if the body will be there by 23. I’m ready for the ass to fall any minute".
Suggest a question and he develops an entire island of thought with his answer. He’s an acute observer and must have a million miles of imagery down on mental tape.
"You’ve seen the acid casualties of ‘66. Whereas kids 15 years old are now experiencing downhome problems without having to make their own way. Still getting compensation from Pop and Mom but Living The Blues as it were. Bullshit! So now a concert consists of 13-year-olds passing coffee cans of pills around and listening to Deep Purple. And they don’t respond! But I have to stay in tune with the whole thing cause I’m a writer and it’s America."
At this point I’m starting to realize I could talk to this guy for hours before even touching on his musical interests. I’m still feeling dizzy at just meeting the guy whose singing sends me into raptures. I’ve often thought (when listening to, for example, ‘Strange Feeling’ from the Happy Sad album) that if sound could create orgasm, Buckley’d have to have his throat registered as a dangerous weapon. He made so much beautiful music, but sure isn’t the type of person content to live on past laurels; still I can’t help but ask about some of those songs that led me through my teenagehood when the going got rocky... like, he seems to have gotten well away from the idealism of the Goodbye and Hello days.
In fact, that was pretty much a statement of youth as a whole, pertaining to acceptance for something which they hated – which was old, the establishment. Therefore, it took two traditional points – old hating young, young hating old, and not getting each other into their worlds.
"What makes somebody kill for their country? It’s a little easier to understand in an alley, when you’re being attacked, but when you’re paid and fed to become a professional soldier, where’s that at – right? That’s what that was about, so the album wasn’t idealistic. It came out of an idealistic period of time – the acid days and all that. And I think it was probably understood to mean things it didn’t mean. But everything’s like that."
Look at the Buckley of today and muse over the developments which have evolved in his music over the years. 1970 saw him at his most avant-garde with the release of Starsailor, a combination of combinations – beyond category and dazzling innovative content. The mountain boy of his previous efforts went wall-eyed crazed astronaut on Starsailor. It was the type of statement great artists always seem to make just before they freak out, OD or fade into obscurity.
For two years it looked like Buckley had taken the last course, and then, in 1972, he reappeared with Greetings from LA, and if his fans were unhinged by Starsailor, Greetings had them upside down with confusion. At least I sure as hell was, when I saw his L.A. set over a year ago. I trotted dutifully to some bowling alley dive to see him and felt my brains drip outta my ears when the virginal innocent of my dreams got on stage and started belting out "Get on top of me darlin’ woo-maan! Let me see what you learned!"
What brought on this change to overt sexuality?
"Oh well. After Starsailor, I took about a year off and started a book – movie scripts which will be turned into books – and I’m told, ‘Well, you better make another album’. And I said okay and I was just sitting there... I hadn’t touched the guitar in a long time and I thought, well, I have to get up to date. I saw nine black exploitation movies, read four black ‘sock-it-to-me-mama’ books, and read all the rock criticisms. I took a week off, read all the Rolling Stone things, and finally realized that all of the sex idols in rock and roll weren’t saying anything sexy.
"Or had I learned anything sexually from a rock song? Or for that matter pornographic? So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious, and to deal with the problems as they really are, so I guess that’s where the innocence went."
And if go you must, go in style, say I. And of course, Buckley always does. The song he mentions as his personal favourite, ‘Sweet Surrender’, is cruel and poignant, a walk right through the jungle. His present involvement in the ethnomusicology department at UCLA seems to me as just the obvious thing a guy like Buckley would extend himself into. He may be making notation on Balinese music for students, but check out his own music for a real taste of incorporated exotica.
Sefronia, the latest edition to Buckley’s recorded achievements, is more or less a potpourri of his own and other people’s compositions. Unusual for him, since in the past he’s pretty well stuck to his own material, often co-written with poet Larry Beckett. Not that he’s cooling his rockets writing-wise. A few movie scripts later, he’s now working on a novel: "It’s about America."
Oh, so it’s existential?
"Fear and loathing in Tulsa. It doesn’t miss. It says the whole thing. I can’t explain it, it’s not about music or my life – I’ve just been travelling there for the past 10 years."
So he’s obsessed with America?
"Look, the U.S. is one for the connoisseur! There’s so many things going on – you HAVE to stay!"
We talk about the state of the States with pseudo-apathy and lethargic concern. It’s obviously a subject which warrants more time than either of us wishes to dedicate. Tim manages to assure me that the place isn't going to fall, but...
"It’ll get more moronic. The ’70s haven’t been too optimistic, have they? But it’s going to be great for the avant-garde. Warhol’s going nuts! The problem with the avant is that it happens too quickly and by the time it’s happened commercially, it’s all been done. There’s basically an artistic resentment by the establishment ‘cause they don’t get the idea fast enough."
And Buckley seems to hold a bit of artistic resentment himself for the establishment. The fact that he’s apparently chosen to lead a life with some semblance of anonymity, as a working artist opposed to the glam bag of stardom, shows it. He’s certainly had opportunities no end to be a bopper idol.
A 1969 issue of American Datebook stated: "Tim Buckley clearly was about to become a STAR – the hottest 'Folk' singer since Bob Dylan!" That was a year ago and Tim Buckley is still just Tim Buckley – with a quiet army of intensely loyal fans. But Buckley didn’t want the kind of stardom that was offered him then."
In a 1974 issue of English NME., Buckley states: "Well, my life does not depend on Top 40. It’s so anonymous, it always has been, and that’s not where people are. I don’t put it down – there are a lot of great songs – but I just don’t fit there."
So remember next time you turn on the radio you may not hear him – but wander outside your insulated world of rock newspapers, Top Of The Pops, school functions, clothes and all the safety gauges of home, and the music you hear will surely include the songs of Tim Buckley.
*
Postscript: Chrissie Hynde to MOJO in July 1995:
"When I interviewed Tim in 1974, I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t done the right journalistic thing and listened to his whole catalogue: I was still a smitten fan from that summer, going about my merry way. He struck me like a vagabond, a minstrel, quiet and shy. I didn’t know him well enough to say, ‘What’s happening, Tim, how’s it going?’ If anything, I was starstruck. I kept looking at his throat, thinking about his voice, thinking that he was just sitting there but could break into song at any given moment and transport me somewhere. Not that you’d say, ‘Sing us a tune’. You treat them like you’re handling a very valuable violin.
"It was a year before he died. He didn’t seem like a happy-go-lucky kind of person, more of a troubled individual, but knowing his music to be so sensitive and deep, that’s the kind of personality you’d expect. What I tried conjuring up in that NME piece was this: I’m standing there at night, in Kent, Ohio, and a freight train goes by. This girl jumps on, and writes her name on the train, and jumps off again. That was my image of him – that travelling vagabond, the minstrel. 1969 was that Jack Kerouac moment for me."
© Chrissie Hynde, 1974
Someone throws the now-empty jug downstream and it’s a quick scramble up the river bank and over the bridge railing. Stumbling drunk, we simultaneously leap onto the passing train and clutch those iron ladders for dear life, sliding between the moving cars like Jack Kerouac pros, making a flying dismount onto Main Street. Holding a piece of sandstone in her hand, Colleen points to one of the boxcars. Under the large stencilled letters B&O (Baltimore – Ohio) is scribbled a name: Tim Buckley.
Seems like a long time since that waif countenance gazed down at us from its place on the altar-like mantle of a hundred hippie hovels. See, Tim wasn’t just a musician, he was Spokesman for the Love-in generation, an ultimate being that everybody wanted to be and go down on at the same time. Boys...girls...didn’t matter – and his wasn’t an AC/DC appeal, rather one of that gentle wandering minstrel we all fancied ourselves as. Nobody’s ever looked prettier – and that image combined with one of the most sensual, multicoloured voices ever...well, how could any underdog resist?
But times change, as has that idyllic head-shop fantasy for which Buckley played Good Shepherd. Here I am interviewing him – and the Indian Moccasins, sweet expression, and even the windblown locks which once crowned him in curls and became his trademark are now gone. In fact, Tim’s burly and aggressive – an American’s American. The cleft chin and shorn hair provide the very look sought out by the advertising world to sell toothpaste, razor blades, aftershave, sporty cars. I’m even tempted to ask his stud fee, but don’t.
I do ask him whatever happened to the lonely hotel room image? "Well, when you’re working that’s all there is. I was on the road since 1964 to ‘71."
How old were you in ‘64?
"16 or 17."
So you really were an innocent youth, huh?
"Well, when you’re 18, you’re sorta still right outta the choir, aren’t you? And you have to consider the year. Kids now that are 14 are strung out on reds and heroin and pregnant maybe a couple times. I mean really been through it by 16. Before, you didn’t get laid till 17-18 maybe if you were lucky – got the cheerleader drunk at the right time. That was a different period. Whether it’s good or bad I’m really at odds with it. I got an 11-year old boy and a 15-year-old sister, and she’s just about washed up – all the shit she’s done. I don’t know if the body will be there by 23. I’m ready for the ass to fall any minute".
Suggest a question and he develops an entire island of thought with his answer. He’s an acute observer and must have a million miles of imagery down on mental tape.
"You’ve seen the acid casualties of ‘66. Whereas kids 15 years old are now experiencing downhome problems without having to make their own way. Still getting compensation from Pop and Mom but Living The Blues as it were. Bullshit! So now a concert consists of 13-year-olds passing coffee cans of pills around and listening to Deep Purple. And they don’t respond! But I have to stay in tune with the whole thing cause I’m a writer and it’s America."
At this point I’m starting to realize I could talk to this guy for hours before even touching on his musical interests. I’m still feeling dizzy at just meeting the guy whose singing sends me into raptures. I’ve often thought (when listening to, for example, ‘Strange Feeling’ from the Happy Sad album) that if sound could create orgasm, Buckley’d have to have his throat registered as a dangerous weapon. He made so much beautiful music, but sure isn’t the type of person content to live on past laurels; still I can’t help but ask about some of those songs that led me through my teenagehood when the going got rocky... like, he seems to have gotten well away from the idealism of the Goodbye and Hello days.
In fact, that was pretty much a statement of youth as a whole, pertaining to acceptance for something which they hated – which was old, the establishment. Therefore, it took two traditional points – old hating young, young hating old, and not getting each other into their worlds.
"What makes somebody kill for their country? It’s a little easier to understand in an alley, when you’re being attacked, but when you’re paid and fed to become a professional soldier, where’s that at – right? That’s what that was about, so the album wasn’t idealistic. It came out of an idealistic period of time – the acid days and all that. And I think it was probably understood to mean things it didn’t mean. But everything’s like that."
Look at the Buckley of today and muse over the developments which have evolved in his music over the years. 1970 saw him at his most avant-garde with the release of Starsailor, a combination of combinations – beyond category and dazzling innovative content. The mountain boy of his previous efforts went wall-eyed crazed astronaut on Starsailor. It was the type of statement great artists always seem to make just before they freak out, OD or fade into obscurity.
For two years it looked like Buckley had taken the last course, and then, in 1972, he reappeared with Greetings from LA, and if his fans were unhinged by Starsailor, Greetings had them upside down with confusion. At least I sure as hell was, when I saw his L.A. set over a year ago. I trotted dutifully to some bowling alley dive to see him and felt my brains drip outta my ears when the virginal innocent of my dreams got on stage and started belting out "Get on top of me darlin’ woo-maan! Let me see what you learned!"
What brought on this change to overt sexuality?
"Oh well. After Starsailor, I took about a year off and started a book – movie scripts which will be turned into books – and I’m told, ‘Well, you better make another album’. And I said okay and I was just sitting there... I hadn’t touched the guitar in a long time and I thought, well, I have to get up to date. I saw nine black exploitation movies, read four black ‘sock-it-to-me-mama’ books, and read all the rock criticisms. I took a week off, read all the Rolling Stone things, and finally realized that all of the sex idols in rock and roll weren’t saying anything sexy.
"Or had I learned anything sexually from a rock song? Or for that matter pornographic? So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious, and to deal with the problems as they really are, so I guess that’s where the innocence went."
And if go you must, go in style, say I. And of course, Buckley always does. The song he mentions as his personal favourite, ‘Sweet Surrender’, is cruel and poignant, a walk right through the jungle. His present involvement in the ethnomusicology department at UCLA seems to me as just the obvious thing a guy like Buckley would extend himself into. He may be making notation on Balinese music for students, but check out his own music for a real taste of incorporated exotica.
Sefronia, the latest edition to Buckley’s recorded achievements, is more or less a potpourri of his own and other people’s compositions. Unusual for him, since in the past he’s pretty well stuck to his own material, often co-written with poet Larry Beckett. Not that he’s cooling his rockets writing-wise. A few movie scripts later, he’s now working on a novel: "It’s about America."
Oh, so it’s existential?
"Fear and loathing in Tulsa. It doesn’t miss. It says the whole thing. I can’t explain it, it’s not about music or my life – I’ve just been travelling there for the past 10 years."
So he’s obsessed with America?
"Look, the U.S. is one for the connoisseur! There’s so many things going on – you HAVE to stay!"
We talk about the state of the States with pseudo-apathy and lethargic concern. It’s obviously a subject which warrants more time than either of us wishes to dedicate. Tim manages to assure me that the place isn't going to fall, but...
"It’ll get more moronic. The ’70s haven’t been too optimistic, have they? But it’s going to be great for the avant-garde. Warhol’s going nuts! The problem with the avant is that it happens too quickly and by the time it’s happened commercially, it’s all been done. There’s basically an artistic resentment by the establishment ‘cause they don’t get the idea fast enough."
And Buckley seems to hold a bit of artistic resentment himself for the establishment. The fact that he’s apparently chosen to lead a life with some semblance of anonymity, as a working artist opposed to the glam bag of stardom, shows it. He’s certainly had opportunities no end to be a bopper idol.
A 1969 issue of American Datebook stated: "Tim Buckley clearly was about to become a STAR – the hottest 'Folk' singer since Bob Dylan!" That was a year ago and Tim Buckley is still just Tim Buckley – with a quiet army of intensely loyal fans. But Buckley didn’t want the kind of stardom that was offered him then."
In a 1974 issue of English NME., Buckley states: "Well, my life does not depend on Top 40. It’s so anonymous, it always has been, and that’s not where people are. I don’t put it down – there are a lot of great songs – but I just don’t fit there."
So remember next time you turn on the radio you may not hear him – but wander outside your insulated world of rock newspapers, Top Of The Pops, school functions, clothes and all the safety gauges of home, and the music you hear will surely include the songs of Tim Buckley.
*
Postscript: Chrissie Hynde to MOJO in July 1995:
"When I interviewed Tim in 1974, I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t done the right journalistic thing and listened to his whole catalogue: I was still a smitten fan from that summer, going about my merry way. He struck me like a vagabond, a minstrel, quiet and shy. I didn’t know him well enough to say, ‘What’s happening, Tim, how’s it going?’ If anything, I was starstruck. I kept looking at his throat, thinking about his voice, thinking that he was just sitting there but could break into song at any given moment and transport me somewhere. Not that you’d say, ‘Sing us a tune’. You treat them like you’re handling a very valuable violin.
"It was a year before he died. He didn’t seem like a happy-go-lucky kind of person, more of a troubled individual, but knowing his music to be so sensitive and deep, that’s the kind of personality you’d expect. What I tried conjuring up in that NME piece was this: I’m standing there at night, in Kent, Ohio, and a freight train goes by. This girl jumps on, and writes her name on the train, and jumps off again. That was my image of him – that travelling vagabond, the minstrel. 1969 was that Jack Kerouac moment for me."
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