Happy Birthday to Timothy Charles Buckley III, born on February 14, 1947. "I Can't See You" is the first song off his first album from 1966. From this album sleeve, he may look like just some random folksinger. The latest in a never-ending line of folkies at the time. But from the first crashing notes it becomes evident that no, this isn't your average 1960s folkie. Yes, it's semi-electric folk, but there's also jazz, punk, & avant-garde elements here, in a tenor singing (his high school friend) Larry Beckett's beautiful poetic lyrics. And as he did for the rest of his life, Tim Buckley broke the rules. Leading off this, his very first Elektra Records release with not the most commercial radio-friendly tune of the collection, but the least.
I first heard Buckley at 13 years old, early in 1968, when my local Dallas "underground rock" station KNUS, the first of it's kind in Big D on the FM side of the dial that played at least one album cut from almost every new LP release of the time, & practically none of the Top 40, that dominated AM radio back then. It was where I first heard The Velvet Underground, The Jeff Beck Group, The Red Crayola, Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, Condello, The Ill Wind, & on & on. I'd save up my lunch money allowance all week, & on the weekend head over to Preston Record Center & pick out an album by the coverart & what I'd heard on KNUS radio. One week they were playing Tim Buckley's long epic, "Goodbye & Hello", the title song from his more psychedelic second album. So that was what I picked out to purchase with my hard-hoarded cash & was first introduced to the varied music of Tim. For some reason I never went back to this first album until much later in the 1970s. Maybe it was that folksinger cover. After the obviously drug-induced cover photos of "Happy Sad" & the likes, that first album coverart never struck my fancy until I later realized just how brilliant & different Tim Buckley was. But once I finally did investigate further, Wow!
But on to my own musical career. When I was finally putting together my last & possibly final musical project in 2017, my damaged hearing required a lower volume, different approach that started out as just a trio with my pals Eric Hisaw & Dan Hoekstra on guitars, & turned into a combo simply called The T. Tex Edwards Group, when we later added JJ Barrera on bass & Shawn Peters on drums. It had started out as a songwriting project with Hisaw. After years of mainly playing covers of semi-obscure 60s Brit & off-kilter C&W nuggets, I wanted to see if I could still write some meaningful songs like I had years ago with Mike Haskins in The Nervebreakers & Click Mort in The Loafin' Hyenas. I had started writing things down during a month-long rehab torture at Austin Recovery, & upon my release, contacted Eric about possibly getting together & putting some music to my scribblings. We cranked out a few songs & added a Tim Harden tune, a Bob Dylan song, along with some reworkings of some of my earlier Nervebreakers & Loafin' Hyenas originals. Plus this song from Tim Buckley, that I absolutely fell in love with upon my first listening all those years ago. When we later recorded our batch of originals, this song, (along with Gary Stewart's "Single Again"), were the only two cover songs that we recorded at those sessions. Hopefully sometime soon, those recordings will see the light of day...
No comments:
Post a Comment