Tim Buckley

Born in Washington D.C., Buckley spent his early childhood in the small upstate New York town of Amsterdam before moving with his family to the Los Angeles suburb of Bell Gardens, CA. Buckley became interested in the folk music revival in his early teens, picking up both the banjo and the guitar. Attending high school in Anaheim, Buckley befriended drummer Larry Beckett and bassist Jim Fielder, with whom he formed two bands, the rock and roll cover band The Bohemians and the more experimental folk trio The Harlequin 3; the latter name was dropped after The Bohemians began incorporating Buckley/Beckett originals into their sets. Also during high school, Buckley met a fellow student named Mary Guibert, who quickly became his girlfriend. The pair married on October 25, 1965, shortly after Guibert had a pregnancy scare. The teenage couple's marriage lasted barely a year; they divorced before their son Jeffrey Scott Buckley was born, and Tim rarely saw his child for the rest of his life. In early 1966, manager Herb Cohen was introduced to The Bohemians after his clients The Mothers of Invention shared a club date with the fledgling trio. Cohen signed Buckley as a solo artist, although Beckett continued in his part-time role as Buckley's lyricist and Fielder played bass on Buckley's first two albums. Signed to Elektra Records alongside Love and The Doors as part of the esteemed folk label's move into Los Angeles' underground rock scene, Buckley released his self-titled debut in October 1966; it featured guitarist Lee Underwood, whom Buckley had met during a residency at a New York nightclub and who would go on to become his key creative foil. Buckley's second album, Goodbye and Hello (1967) featured a more expansive sound, with greater use of keyboards and percussion; the album's two standouts, the confessional "I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain" and the title track, both stretched well over five minutes, pointing the way toward the much more experimental trend of Buckley's next several albums. The following year, Buckley appeared at the very end of the final episode of "The Monkees" (NBC 1966-68): sitting alone with a 12-string guitar in front of a smashed car, he introduced a brand new ballad, the haunting "Song To The Siren." The song was co-written with Beckett, whose collaboration with Buckley was about to be interrupted by the lyricist being drafted into the U.S. Army. Buckley's third album, Happy Sad (1969), was his first to be entirely self-penned, and it solidified his growing experimental reputation. Consisting of only six lengthy songs over nearly 45 minutes, the jazz-influenced album featured acoustic bass and congas instead of a typical rock rhythm section and featured David Friedman's marimba and vibraphone as primary musical elements. Buckley recorded his next two albums near-simultaneously while in the midst of changing labels: Blue Afternoon (1969), his first release for Straight Records, the Warner Brothers-distributed imprint co-owned by manager Cohen and Frank Zappa, was a partial return to the folk-rock feel of Goodbye and Hello, but Lorca (1970), his final release for Elektra, was his most avant-garde release so far. Inspired by the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, its five lengthy songs found Buckley experimenting both with song structure and vocal performance, his mellow folk-rock croon replaced by sometimes-startling explorations of his entire vocal range. These experiments continued on Starsailor (1970), an only slightly more accessible record featuring the return of Beckett as lyricist and the addition of free-jazz brothers Buzz Gardner on trumpet and flugelhorn and Bunk Gardner on flute and saxophone. Including a radically re-arranged "Song to the Siren" and the title track, on which Buckley dispenses with words entirely for a vocal performance heavily indebted to avant-garde modern classical singer Cathy Berberian, Starsailor eventually ranked alongside Goodbye and Hello and Happy Sad as a fan favorite in his catalog. But at the time, critical and commercial response to Buckley's shift away from his folk-rock roots were decidedly cooler: each of his albums following his commercial high point Happy Sad sold worse than the one before, and Buckley's increasing drug problem was starting to affect the quality of his live performances. Shortly after the release of Starsailor, Buckley abruptly changed musical directions once more, forming a horn-driven, R&B-based band, keeping only Underwood from his previous endeavors. Buckley described his new music as "sex funk," with unimaginative suggestive lyrics far removed from the poetic sensibility that made his name. Greetings From L.A. (1972), Sefronia (1973) and Look At The Fool (1974) were, if anything, even bigger commercial and critical failures than Buckley's experimental albums, and are often ignored in reissue campaigns of Buckley's discography. After several years as an alcoholic and addict, Buckley went off hard drugs in early 1975. Celebrating the end of a well-received comeback tour, Buckley's newfound restraint ended when he took heroin at a friend's home. No longer having the tolerance to the drug that he had previously built up, Buckley overdosed and died on June 29, 1975. Over the next several decades, Buckley remained a cult hero. In 1984, British dream pop collective This Mortal Coil took a haunting, minimalist version of "Song to the Siren" to the top of the U.K. indie charts. Later, British alternative rockers Starsailor named themselves after Buckley's album. In 1991, a Hal Willner-produced tribute concert called Greetings From Tim Buckley doubled as the professional debut of 24-year-old Jeff Buckley, who performed four of his father's songs. In 2013, this incident was dramatized in the feature film "Greetings From Tim Buckley," with Penn Badgley as Jeff Buckley and Ben Rosenfield appearing in flashbacks as Tim Buckley.