It must have come as quite a shock. I’m talking about the moment fans of super-sensitive singer-songwriter and cult artist Tim Buckley—a folky introvert with jazz/avant garde leanings—rushed to the record store to buy 1972’s Greetings from L.A., only to discover that it wasn’t the next Starsailor. It was a full-blown funk and R&B SEX record, complete with whips and chains and some Buckley imposter (it had to be!) singing “Get on top of me woman!” and “Well like a bitch dog in heat we had those bed springs a squeakin’ all night long.”
Cue up gasps of shock from every sensitive soul in America! James Taylor and Carole King would never have gone the raunch route! THIS was obscenity, perversion, trash! What happened to the gentle and ethereal soul who gave us “Song to the Siren,” with its immortal line “I’m as troubled as the oyster”?
Well, it seems Buckley was tired of being Mr. Cosmic Ethereal. The Sexual Revolution was in, and fey and introspective bullshit like “Phantasmagoria in Two” was out. Fuck navel-gazing—Tim Buckley wanted to fuck!
Buckley’s shocking metamorphosis positively gobsmacked Chrissie Hynde (then freelancing for New Musical Express): “I trotted dutifully,” she wrote, “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-man! Let me see what you learned!”
Buckley the soul man was ahead of his time—trendsetter David Bowie wouldn’t go the plastic soul route until 1975’s Young Americans. Buckley was also very out of sync with the times. Come 1972, Young Americans wanted a calmative after the non-stop series of calamities that closed the sixties and put paid to the hippie dream. It wanted Joni Mitchell, CS&N, the peaceful, easy Eagles, and America—John Denver, the Carpenters, and Three Dog Night, even!
And here came Buckley, perhaps the tenderest sprout of them all, with the anything but nerve-soothing soundtrack to a honky blaxploitation film.
Buckley’s transformation was just as shocking as David Bowie’s metamorphosis from long-haired hippie in a dress to Ziggy Stardust. Both albums were released in the Summer of ‘72. The difference is there’s a whole lot more “Wham bam, thank you ma’am!” in Greetings from L.A. than there is in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And Buckley’s new persona didn’t require a radical wardrobe change. However, I would have loved to have seen him decked out in James Brown garb.
Opener “Move with Me” tells a wonderful story—Buckley makes his way to the “meat rack tavern,” sees “ a big ol’ healthy girl” drinking all by her lonesome and concludes, “What a waste of sin.” Turns out she’s married, but Buckley doesn’t care—that is, until her hulk of a husband discovers them in bed, grabs Buckley by the throat, and tosses him down the stairs, breaking every bone in his body.
But all of that is secondary to the music, which is all piano, a big horn section, female backing vocalists going “Woo!” and one helluva sax solo, over which a hyper-kinetic Buckley twists his voice in knots and takes his vocal cords to places they weren’t designed to go. He sings:
“Move with me move with me move with me darlin’
Aw don’t be shy
I’m gonna mess witcha, mess witcha, mess witcha,
Mess witcha, mess witcha mind.”
And that’s nothing compared to his truly over-the-top vocal performance in “Get on Top.” He sings like he just got struck by lightning, like his hair’s on fire, and he’s ad-libbing like crazy over one super-funky beat, with the band motorvatin’ like they have an appointment somewhere and are running ten minutes late. Meanwhile Buckley’s girl has him speaking in tongues, and I’ve never heard anything like it.
And that’s the bottom line. You have to hear Buckley to believe Buckley. It’s impossible to do the man justice with words. He packs so much into a song—high notes, low notes, Cliff Notes, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground…
The sexual prude-repellent “Make It Right” opens with some fooling around and Spanish-flavored acoustic guitar, then the strings come in, sounding very Blaxploitation-flick chic. At the same time, Buckley sings about wanting to be the “sweet little victim of love” of “some street corner girl” willing to “beat me, whip me, spank me.” Oh glorious perversion! He beats Lou Reed at his own game! THIS is masochism in its pure state! Lou sounds more literary than lewd with his “shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather.”
And not only does Buckley get down to the nitty-gritty, but he also goes completely berserk at the end, screaming like Wicked Wilson Pickett, raising his voice to a deranged falsetto and keeping it there, and making like a natural-born stutterer on the word “mama.” It totally rehabilitates S&M!.
The jumpin’ and jivin’ “Devil’s Eyes” features Buckley at his most unhinged. Over some funky guitar and Kevin Kelly—who serves up one crazy fingers solo—Buckley goes into this wonderful shtick about cunnilingus and toe-licking and doing (what sounds to me) “the monkey rub.”
And all the while he’s making nonsense noises galore, and at one point he holds onto a note for maybe an hour. Then he rolls his r’s for another hour. A naive soul might think the song’s about cooking (“Lord said she got a recipe/Oh and she don’t need no fancy sauce”) but you would never have caught Julia Child whipping up this particular dish on the Magnavox in your living room.
“Nighthawkin’” is a guitar-fueled rocker that has Buckley driving a late-night taxi (just like Harry Chapin!). But instead of picking up an old flame, Buckley picks up a Vietnam War vet with PTSD coming out of his eyeballs. Who puts a knife to Buckley’s throat. Then you get:
“He said “You ever been over to the war boy”
I said “Man I was a combat paratrooper daddy”
Well then he slump back cool and he pocket that steel”
Then you get:
“Man that last block that cat was singing
Man he was sittin’ in the backseat singing to me this song
I got my VAR boy
I got my M1 on my hip right
You better listen Mr. President
Oh boy don’t you mess up with my war, boy
I wanna do I wanna do
Lord I wanna do the Blood Boogaloo
I’m just a Redneck son of a gun
I wanna kill me a gook before dawn.”
[Editor’s note: For the record, Buckley was never a vet. As he sings later, “Ah that paratroop bluff always cools the red-eyed geezers down.”]
Only two of the songs fail to completely draw me in, probably because Buckley doesn’t run roughshod over them. The slow “Sweet Surrender” opens like a song off Exile on Main Street, then you get washes of strings while Buckley goes full-tilt soul crooner, alternating between gutbucket deep vocals and a warbling falsetto.
He’s no Barry White or Marvin Gaye, but I love the way he sings, “Now you’re going to have to go out and get yourself a reputation.” And the way his vocals do some rapid wardrobe changes towards the end, delivering up some 100 different ways to sing the title. Not his best, but every soul man needs a ballad, right?
“Hong Kong Bar” is a mid-tempo and very bluesy affair, and you don’t get many of the vocal pyrotechnics that characterize the rest of the album. But he makes for a pretty good bluesman, both with his 12-string guitar and his vocals. “Hong Kong Bar” is both too long in minutes and too short on excitement—the album’s only disappointment.
I’ve looked in vain for Buckley’s reasons for turning into a sex-obsessed soul man, but he pulls it off and then some. He boogies like a white man, no doubt about it. But he sounds like he’s having Barry White-sized fun, and it’s contagious. You can whip the Tim Buckley of Greetings from L.A. You can even spank him. But there’s no beating him.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
