The doorbell rang. Judy Buckley was expecting her husband, returning that day from yet another tour. It was Tim, all right, but he wasn't alone. He also didn't seem conscious. He was supported on either side by a man and a woman. Judy didn't know the woman; the man was the Buckleys' friend Richard Keeling--"Cool Richard."

"What's wrong with Timmy?" Judy asked. "He did some stuff," Keeling replied, adding that it wasn't enough to hurt himself. They brought Buckley up to his bedroom. Keeling thought Buckley was up to his old tricks, once again pretending to be more messed up than he was.

A few hours later, Keeling's phone rang. It was Judy Buckley, hysterical. This time Tim wasn't faking. Keeling returned to the Buckleys and called a paramedic. It didn't help. The evening of June 29, 1975, 28-year-old Tim Buckley came home to stay.

His death ended a decade-long career marked by fits and starts, brilliant bursts of creativity followed by seeming sabbaticals, and serpentine turns in musical direction. Buckley might have been more popular if he'd stuck with one style. But the word "commercial" did not loom large in his vocabulary.

"He had no head for business whatsoever," says his vibes player David Friedman. "He was a true, spontaneous, creative artist--and way ahead of his time, musically."

"He really didn't care about the money part of it," his mother Elaine Buckley says. "He just loved to play music and he loved to sing."

A lot of people love to sing; that's why showers were invented. But Buckley's voice was a phenomenon of nature. With no formal training he was a model of diction and phrasing. His warm tenor curled around listeners like mellow pipe smoke. Its throbbing resonance bored into the heart with surgical precision. His upper register segued seamlessly into a falsetto for acrobatic flights of fancy. "He used to laugh and say what he was aiming for was to get the range of Yma Sumac," his friend Daniella Sapriel says.

The technical equipment was a blessing. The uses to which the Los Angeles-based Buckley put it were more self-willed. If he had been born into another generation, he could have been one of the great saloon singers. Friedman remembers Buckley's "fantastic" version of "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." Bassist John Balkin recalls that Buckley would "go around singing 'Is That All There Is?' It got to him."

As a baby-boomer, though, Buckley treated the cabaret songs strictly as a sideline. He had too many melodies of his own, tunes that gave form to the inchoate feelings of his audience as well as himself. "What made him such an intense experience," Sapriel says, "is that the music transcended the personal and touched things that all of us longed to express but can't, or feel we can't. That's a lot to ask somebody to carry."

For most people, that was the only Tim Buckley they knew. His friends and associates saw another side. Being with Buckley, John King says, was "like hanging out with Eddie Haskell." He couldn't walk past a pool table in a bar without knocking the balls around; or past a fire alarm in a hotel hallway--in the wee hours of the morning--without setting it off. One of his favorite films was A Clockwork Orange.

Keeling remembers one not atypical evening of club-crawling with Buckley. They ended up at a relatively conservative Santa Monica bar featuring a singing pianist on a raised platform. "As always, Timmy wanted to take over the crowd. So he began by heckling the guy. Then he pretended to be so drunk that he fell down; Timmy staggered up and 'passed out,' as if he had fallen asleep on that runway.

"The singer said something like, 'Maybe you'd like to finish this song for me?' Which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Up jumps Timmy, crystal clear, sings this song like the guy could never have sung it, knew all the words, other verses--just kicks the guy's ass musically. That was Timmy, in a nutshell. Then we closed the bar and took the guy out to breakfast at a Denny's nearby. He used to do things like that all the time."

One thing he wasn't was a pop star in the accepted definition of either word. His albums weren't big sellers, even in the relatively scaled-down record business of the late '60s: At the height of his fame he barely cracked Billboard's Top 100. Singles? Forget about it.

But Tim Buckley's importance can't be measured in chart placings or dollar amounts. He lived his life almost in defiance of such standards. If he paid the price for his rebelliousness, he also left an enduring legacy.

Between 1966 and 1975 Buckley released nine albums that could have been recorded by no one else. Buckley put his vocal virtuosity in the service of an artistic vision that showed little consistency beyond a restless searching, an impatience with the present. The sadness in his voice reinforced the heroic futility of his music. His was the sound of defenselessness.

Buckley impressed those who knew him as one of the most remarkable people they'd met. "Certain people in your life," guitarist/"Stick" inventor Emmett Chapman says of Buckley, "you carry them around with you. He's a person like that."

Buckley outlived his friend Jim Morrison by nine months. But while the media keep resurrecting the Lizard King, the equally photogenic Buckley has proven harder to exploit. Score a Pyrrhic victory for Buckley's spiky artistic integrity. (Buckley referred to Morrison, three years his senior, as "the baby" and walked out of a Doors concert in disgust with Jimbo's concept of drunkenness as entertainment.)

In early 1965 Buckley was finishing high school by day and working odd jobs at night. His family had just bought a house in Anaheim, crossing over the Los Angeles County line from Bell Gardens. He was already deeply involved in music. When he was 13, in 1960, Buckley caught the folk-music bug. He took banjo lessons and started playing in a folk group with Dan Gordon and a couple of other school friends. "I would love to say our roots were Hank Williams," Gordon says, "but it's just not true. It's all Kingston Trio."

As the '60s unrolled Buckley fell under the sway of the Beatles, but his eclectic taste didn't stop at the pop border. In Anaheim he met fellow student and bassist Jim Fielder and, through Fielder, Larry Beckett. The three used to meet at Beckett's house and listen to Dave Brubeck and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Having switched to guitar, Buckley was an archetypal '60s folkie. Beckett suggested that they write songs together. Their first efforts, Beckett says, "were extremely conventional simple rock 'n' roll. But right away we both became really experimental."

When Gordon returned from a year in Israel he was amused to find Buckley had reinvented himself for his new high-school crowd. "Bell Gardens enjoyed a reputation of being a tough cowboy/Okie town," Gordon says. "So Tim had made up a lot of shit about playing in country-western bars; he never did. But they bought it. Everybody winked, 'Sure, why not?' Because musically he was really exciting."

With Beckett and Fielder, Buckley formed two bands. The Bohemians concentrated on Top 40 rock 'n' roll. The acoustic Harlequins 3 played folk clubs, alternating music with Kahlil Gibran recitations and monologues swiped from Ken Nordine Word Jazz albums.

At the Anaheim studio where he gave guitar lessons Fielder met a drum teacher who also played in the Mothers of Invention: Jimmy Carl Black. Black invited Fielder, Buckley and Beckett to see the Mothers, and introduced them to the band's manager, Herb Cohen.

Cohen's client list has always shown impeccable taste. Besides Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Cohen's handled Lenny Bruce, Fred Neil, Captain Beefheart, Linda Ronstadt and Tom Waits, among others. Fielder recalls Cohen's initial interest in Buckley was as a songwriter. After hearing a couple of demo tapes he arranged for Buckley to play an afternoon audition for him at the Trip. "It was unbelievable," Cohen says. "This voice, so unlike what anybody else was doing at the time. And he knew how to sing!"

Buckley had just graduated high school. That summer he performed regularly at a coffeehouse co-founded by Gordon. "That's really where he began to blossom," Gordon says. "We had packed audiences every Friday and Saturday night."

He was growing up fast, and not just professionally. His senior year in high school he shared a couple of classes with Mary Guibert, a self-described goody two-shoes.

"Every time I'd walk past his chair he'd bleat like a lamb! One time I confronted him; I was in my cheerleader's outfit and I'd had enough of this insolence. He just gave me a look and said something about my true womanhood and I should be something set apart and not follow along with the crowd. I guess that's all I needed!" Guibert laughs heartily. "Something in me said yes to this young man. He was a very powerful person."

By the end of the school year they ran away, a few days on the lam from parents. By November 1965 Buckley was a college student, an aspiring professional singer--*and* a husband.

Guibert, a year younger than Buckley, was still in high school. Beckett remembers "riding around in a car with them and him saying, 'I just want you to do the laundry and clean house'; and she's saying, 'You don't want a wife, you want a maid!' We were all unbelievably immature."

Buckley dropped out of college in his first year. He saw it as a waste of time as his career began taking off. He was playing Orange County coffeehouses--also a breeding ground for Jackson Browne, Jennifer Warnes and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band--and Monday-night hootenannies at Los Angeles' famed Troubadour. The most exciting development was his signing to Elektra Records.

Jac Holzman was a college student himself when he founded Elektra in 1950. Fifteen years later the label was an established independent specializing in folk music--and just getting its feet wet with the new electric-powered music coming out of Los Angeles.

"I received an audition disc from Herb Cohen of Tim Buckley," Holzman says. "I took one listen and called Herb and said I wanted to sign the artist. I loved the writing, I loved the approach, and I loved the fact that he had both folk roots and rock 'n' roll aspirations." This was exactly what Cohen anticipated. Buckley's music "was an odd category," the manager admits. "That's why I went to Elektra."

Cohen arranged for Buckley to play the small Night Owl in New York's Greenwich Village in the summer of '66. Buckley rode out there in a VW bug driven by Jane Goldstein, whom he'd met at the Troubadour. Although still married, Buckley was living alone in a dingy Hollywood apartment; Guibert was living with Herb Cohen and his wife. The relationship clearly had more downs than ups. During a rare instance of the latter, Guibert had become pregnant.

The Night Owl gigs marked the beginning of Buckley's association with guitarist Lee Underwood. Both had played at one of the Troubadour's "hoot nights." Underwood remembers a jubilant Beckett coming up to Buckley backstage to inform him of the Elektra contract: "I was really envious because I had hoped to get a contract myself with Elektra."

Underwood's initial impression of Buckley was of a remarkable voice singing "little high-school love songs" to wimpy effect. He changed his mind upon closer inspection in New York : "Not only did he have a voice and know how to use it, but he wrote extraordinary melodies. And that gentle, loving, wispy quality was extraordinarily powerful in its impact." With Underwood on lead guitar and Fielder on bass, Leadbelly fan Buckley played acoustic 12-string guitar.

That summer he also recorded his debut album. Tim Buckley included many of the "high-school love songs" that had underwhelmed Underwood. Jac Holzman and Paul Rothchild received co-producer credit, but Beckett praises Elektra for giving Buckley so much creative control. "If Tim said, 'Hey, I want a cello to play one note through the entire "Song of the Magician,"' the arranger would scratch his head, but that's what they did."

Beckett and Buckley believed that good fences made good collaborators. Beckett was strictly the lyricist, crafting finished poems that he then brought to Buckley for musical glazing. Buckley was more intuitive. "He would get up in the middle of the night," Guibert recalls, "swing his legs over the side of the bed, pick up his guitar--which was always there-and suddenly this complete song would come out." Such was the genesis of "It Happens Every Time," on the first album.

One late addition to the album's line-up was the Buckley-penned "Song for Jainie," dedicated to Goldstein (as she was then spelling her first name). While Buckley and Goldstein were together in New York, Guibert--now six months pregnant--was back to living with her parents. "The idea was that he'd go on tour," Guibert says, "and when he came into LA we would look for a little place; he would be there for the baby being born." Buckley was sending her "weird, guilt-ridden letters: 'I wish I could be happy about the baby but I can't keep doing this to you'--cryptic things I didn't know how to interpret. I was deep in denial."

About a month before Jeffrey Scott Buckley was born, Tim and Mary met at a Los Angeles coffee shop and agreed to a divorce. Guibert now can laugh about her selflessness in setting Buckley free: "I didn't have an ounce of recrimination in me for him."

Buckley's first album appeared almost simultaneously with his son. No one involved with it--including Buckley himself, according to his sister Kathleen--seems to have like it much. But its faults are those of youthful naiveté, not underreaching. "He was breaking in his shoes," Holzman says. "The first album had an air of stridency about it. He wasn't comfortable in his own musical skin." But "we never signed an artist for one record," Holzman adds.

"What do you say about first novels?" Beckett asks himself. "'It really has potential.'" What he does admire about Tim Buckley is the 19-year-old singer's "beautiful tenor voice. Almost always after that he shaded the timbre of his voice, reaching for lower tones. Here he sang the way he'd been driving everybody insane in all these concerts we'd been doing for a year and a half: his unbelievably beautiful pure Irish voice."

Buckley and Beckett threw themselves into preparations for a second album. "We had a zillion songs," Beckett says, but "we were continuing to create at a hectic pace." The producer would be Jerry Yester, then married to another Cohen client, singer Judy Henske; "Herb wanted to keep it in the family," Yester explains.

Goodbye and Hello was a quantum leap beyond Buckley's debut. "The times were so intense," Beckett says. "We waited all summer in '66 for Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde to come out, and played the grooves until they went through the other side. We were trying to be part of it, trying to do the most tasteful or powerful work we could. I don't think we had any idea it would be terribly popular."

Recorded fairly rapidly during the febrile summer of 1967, Goodbye and Hello sounds as if all concerned were inspired by Sgt. Pepper to create their own overarching statement on pop culture. Buckley's voice ties together the disparate tempi, meters and arrangements: He alternates between a menacingly subtle lower register and melismatic wailing in his near-falsetto, where sound becomes meaning. "It's almost like they had a vision for that album," Fielder marvels; "that was such a work of art."

In retrospect Goodbye and Hello strikes some listeners as unbearably ambitious (if you like it) or pretentious (if you don't). Beckett looks with a jaundiced eye at his contributions; as on the first album, he co-wrote half the songs. Most of his lyrics were inspired by a romantic break-up; he further immortalized his paramour by using her name in an acrostic poem printed on the album cover.

As usual, Buckley added his music after Beckett's lyrics were finished. His own songs, Jane Pullman (formerly Goldstein) feels, tended to be about himself. Goodbye and Hello's "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain" includes an unmistakable reference to Guibert as "the Flying Pisces" who "tells me of my child." His sardonically titled "Pleasant Street" features a relentless downward harmonic maelstrom; the lyrics to the disturbing, three-quarter time "Carnival Song" "express that tragic sense that he had.

"There was something very sad about him," Pullman continues, "and I believe a large part of his sadness was because of his father. From what Tim said, his father would be physically abusive and call him names and put him down a whole lot."

Blaine Buckley says her husband--one in a line of Timothy Charles Buckleys that his son furthered--was a "wonderful man, wonderful father" until an early-'60s fall off a ladder triggered increasingly psychotic behavior. From then on, "everything went to hell"; the Buckleys separated in 1966.

The album's showpiece is its title track, a generational call to (pacifist) arms. Beckett says, "I thought I would like to try counterpoint, like those crazy songs of the '40s where two people would be singing two different sets of lyrics and the melodies are in counterpoint with each other." Beckett wrote out the dual choruses for "Goodbye and Hello" side by side, as they appear in the album's printed lyrics. Buckley sang it monodically, though, interweaving lines from the two sets of lyrics--"not what I had in mind at all," Beckett comments, "but I liked the way it works."

Yester fleshed out the song with a kaleidoscopic arrangement in the manner of a Renaissance choral sequence. His overdubs, on this and other songs, further distinguished Goodbye and Hello from the simply produced first album.

"The first time I heard it, I just was knocked out," Holzman says. "As we got deeper into the summer of love of 1967, and Vietnam was happening, the combined effect of his words, his music, his passion, his persona struck a particular resonance. To some extent he was the bright side of people's tortured souls, and maybe of his own tortured soul. He could express anguish in a way that was not negative."

Goodbye and Hello was a succes d'estime, helped by a burgeoning rock press. Even the album cover focused Buckley's image. Tim Buckley depicted a reticent teenager hiding behind a houndstooth sportcoat (on which the letters "LSD," barely visible, are disguised as wrinkles--ah, the '60s). The new record glowed with a frontal head shot of the artist as herald of a new dawn: grinning confidently, his hair a backlit explosion of curls, saucily sporting a soda bottlecap as monocle. Buckley later told his sister that Liza Minnelli asked him how much Pepsi paid him for the plug.

Despite his formidable music, Buckley's mother-me good looks were attracting a teenybop following as well as the most earnest progressive-rock hippies. At this time, Underwood says, "I began to realize that here is a guy that I would like to give my whole self to. He was hungry for information--on books, on music, on life in general. That became my way of life: to serve him, and serve the music, in the highest sense of the word."

"Lee really wanted to be Tim's guru," Yester says, "and at the same time he idolized him." But Buckley's personality seemed to affect people that way. Co-producing his first album, Paul Rothchild found him shy, even "amorphous": "He wasn't very strong. His strength was in his music. There obviously was inner turmoil of some magnitude. But he didn't reveal very much." For Jane Pullman, Buckley was "very upbeat and very energetic. He wanted to please people, but not all the time. Tim had his feet on a cloud. He was very ethereal and highly romantic."

Manda Beckett met Buckley through her school friend Goldstein, but she was gone on him before that; his singing struck her as "pure art without any restraint at all." She found him to be "extremely gentle and tender for a boy. He was very vulnerable and emotional. It made him terribly attractive to everybody of both sexes. People just sort of swooned around him because he was so sweet. I think that frightened him. He was difficult to deal with because he was scared of his power over people. He almost seemed to try to reject his audiences for loving him so much. He wasn't mature enough to accept that much attention."

Danny Fields had just joined Elektra's publicity department when Goodbye and Hello was released. Fields was drawn to Elektra because the label had his two favorite artists: the Doors and Tim Buckley. "He was very playful, very modest, smart, very charming, very elfin in a way," Fields says. "When I compare him to Morrison, that monster to work with, Timmy was just a pleasure." Fields found Buckley to be "a little bit goofy looking": "He wasn't a great beauty but he photographed like one. To me, that's a star."

Goodbye and Hello remains the best-selling of Buckley's four Elektra albums, but disappeared from Billboard's LP chart after a scant five weeks--and a peak placing of #171. Since his first album hadn't charted at all, his star was still in the ascendant.

At an Ann Arbor club soundcheck Buckley met upright bassist John Miller, who was only too happy to accept the singer's invitation to sit in--or stand up, in this case--with Underwood and percussionist Carter C.C. Collins. Several months later Buckley offered Miller a spot in the group.

By the spring of 1968 Underwood's drinking had become uncontrollable--"I just couldn't handle it," the guitarist admits--and Buckley had to let him go. His replacement wasn't another guitarist but New York-based vibraphonist David Friedman, a friend of Miller. "Tim called me," Friedman says, "and said he'd like to get together and rehearse for a Fillmore East concert the next day! We rehearsed for seven hours; I had to learn about 16 tunes with no [written] music. That night we went into the Fillmore East and played. It was great."

Friedman, a Juilliard student, brought out the implicitly jazzy direction of Buckley's music. With just vibes, string bass, congas and Buckley's mammoth acoustic 12-string, his group was becoming, as Friedman puts it, "the Modern Jazz Quartet of Folk!" For Buckley, his still-new album was already history. Live, he was playing loosely constructed music that wouldn't be in record stores for a year, even two.

The new songs were written by Buckley alone. "He decided to write everything on his own," Beckett says. "My feeling was--and this is just my stupid opinion--that he was afraid that the success of Goodbye and Hello was due to my lyrics. See where he's coming from? He respects me and tends to believe the worst about himself."

Underwood remembers telling Buckley, during the Goodbye and Hello sessions, that he should write more of his own lyrics. "His lyrics were so much more natural and flowing than these intellectually stilted, European-oriented works of Larry Beckett. Tim was intimidated by Larry's literary way of doing things."

The new songs were more improvisational, commonly centering on one chord while Buckley took vocal flight. As released on Happy Sad, the third album, they marked another striking change in direction.

Once again, Yester produced. (He shares credit with his then-partner Zal Yanovsky, but the latter admits having nothing to do with the record.) Unlike the preceding album, Yester contributed little; Buckley's band, with Underwood reinstated, was now a self-contained unit. Yester's memories of the week of sessions aren't so pleasant:

"His band was saying, 'Now we gotta get this in one take. If you don't get it in one take, that's it. The performance is gone!' I said, 'Let's keep it open, okay?' I love the spirit of jazz, but it's possible that the second take is better sometimes."

Yester feels Buckley was under the influence of his backing musicians. "It was as if someone said, 'You know, that stuff you do is really uncool, man.' And he said, 'Okay,' and dropped it. It was like he felt embarrassed about himself." It didn't help Yester's relationship with the band that he was also producing Pat Boone at the time. (The Boone album included such musicians as Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Clarence White.) "They were like, 'Oh man, what are you doing with Pat Boone's producer?!' I just said, who are these guys? They're good, but this kind of shit is a pain in the ass."

For all the tension, the result is a remarkably seamless dreamscape. Happy Sad consists of six Buckley compositions, ranging from the floating "Strange Feelin'," which Underwood has written was indebted to Miles Davis' 1959 "All Blues"; to the melting changes of "Buzzin' Fly"; through "Gypsy Woman," a live tour de force; and alighting with the tender "Sing a Song for You."

"I never heard anyone play electric guitar the way Lee did," Miller states. "It fit in such a weird way with what Tim was doing." Add pointillistic vibes and bass, and Happy Sad is chamber music from a Magritte painting. Buckley's voice simmers over it all, guiding the listener through this aural impressionism. It is a fully realized work. Buckley was 21 years old.

In the best tradition of accidental art, one of the album's most hypnotic effects--the pounding surf on "Love from Room 109 at the Islander (on Pacific Coast Highway)"--was unintended. "Bruce Botnick, the engineer, had forgotten to put the Dolbys back into the record mode," Yester says. "It was the old-fashioned Dolbys; you had to operate them mechanically. It was a great take. We said, okay, let's listen to it. Bruce looked over at the Dolbys and went, 'Oops! Oh God,'" he mumbled, "'we've got a problem here.'

"Bruce played it with the Dolbys off and it was real hissy. Buckley liked it. I said, 'Well, there's a problem with the take, Tim. The Dolbys weren't in record mode, so there's a lot of this noise.' And Tim," Yester laughs, "had a shrieking fit. His voice went up about four octaves. I could understand it; he loved the performance. He went outside and was comforted by his cronies for a little while. Then he came back in and said, 'Is there anything we can do with it?' I said, 'I'll tell you what: I think it's a great take. You're talking about out on [Pacific Coast Highway] anyway. Let's put some surf in the background; it's the same frequency range as the hiss. Chances are it'll cover it right up.'"

Yester's hunch worked. A couple of microphones were strung up outside Buckley's house--now in Malibu, indeed on Pacific Coast Highway--to "record an hour of incredibly good surf environment. We just laid it in there and it covers up the Dolby problem."

Manda Beckett must have been surprised the first time she heard "Love from Room 109": Buckley took some of his lyrics from letters exchanged between the two. "I think it was written to a lot of people, me being one of them," she says. "That was the thing: He would just start playing, and in a couple of hours he would be singing a song. Sometimes it would take weeks; you would hear little pieces, and then a few weeks later there would be more pieces added. Sometimes they would come out just like that."

Pullman feels the wistful "Buzzin' Fly" is about Guibert, while "Strange Feelin'" and the despairing "Sing a Song for You" are about her: "It was right at that time that we were splitting up." She didn't revel in the role of "old lady." She had accompanied him on tours--at Buckley's insistence, and to budget-minded Cohen's consternation--but life on the road was not for her: "It was his movie." So she stayed home while he toured and they grew apart. During one of Buckley's absences a lonely Pullman started seeing someone else. After Buckley returned from the tour Pullman moved out.

Not that he was a model of domestic faithfulness. For his age and occupation, Buckley would have to have been lobbying for saint-hood to resist the temptations in his path. There's little evidence that he did. "He had girlfriends everywhere," Manda Beckett says. "People were so attracted to him that he would just fall helplessly into these various relationships. He wasn't really using people. He just didn't have any control."

In New York he had met Hope Ruff, a friend of Danny Fields who wrote out lead sheets for less skilled musicians. "I went over some of his stuff with him but it really intimidated him," Ruff says. "He always thought that I would be better at everything than him. And he really couldn't deal with it."

They became friends, however, and then--after his break-up with Pullman, or so Buckley told Ruff--more than friends. "I was always very wary of getting involved with him," Ruff says. "First, he was living with somebody else. Second, I knew he needed a woman who was subservient, which I certainly wasn't. And he messed around with everybody. It was really stupid of me in a lot of ways, but there's one in everybody's life, and he was definitely it."

Happy Sad appeared in April 1969, the year of Buckley's peak popularity. Goodbye and Hello may have accumulated the most sales of any of his albums, but Happy Sad made the biggest immediate impact, lingering in the pop charts for three months. Elektra's ads quoted the artist: "I play heart music." As for his lyrics: "If people want poems they should read Dylan Thomas."

Buckley's paradoxical appeal continued unabated. Happy Sad is striking, even challenging music--"I guess it's pretty demanding," Buckley admitted--but he kept his young female following. In March he headlined Philharmonic Hall in New York's Lincoln Center. Among various love objects rendered to the stage, a woman presented him with a red carnation. Buckley picked it up, chewed the petals and spat them out.

"I can see where I'm headed," Buckley stated in an interview a few weeks after that concert, "and it will probably get farther and farther from what people expect of me." Happy Sad marked a fortuitous confluence of art and merchandising. But Buckley's implacable muse was about to lead him away from mainstream success.

Pullman says Elektra had complained about the length and/or wordiness of some of Goodbye and Hello's songs. Compared to Happy Sad, though, Goodbye and Hello was bubblegum--albeit countercultural bubblegum. "Elektra was very good to him, and very flexible; but they applied pressure, just like any record company, to write songs that are going to be accepted by DJs. He really resented that. He was using music as a form of self-expression, and that was the most important thing."

"They kept asking him to make rock records," Manda Beckett says, "and he really wasn't interested in that anymore."

Buckley was firmly on his own, and not just figuratively. In late 1968 Larry Beckett was drafted; he spent a harrowing year in Army mental wards, boot camp and AWOL before getting the "unsuitable" discharge he so richly deserved. Although he and Buckley had stopped writing together, his absence deeply affected the singer. Buckley's anti-war "The Earth Is Broken" addresses "my brother" who's "been taken away." Recorded in concert during a second visit to England in October 1968, it finally appeared on Dream Letter, released in 1990. Beckett had never heard it before.

Other Buckley cronies disappeared. Miller was developing a New York-based freelance career; he and Buckley parted amicably. Not so vibist Friedman: "I was starting to make suggestions," he says, "about musical directions. I think Tim felt a little bit threatened by that. Next thing I knew he was playing in Boston without vibes."

Before leaving Buckley, both Miller and Friedman contributed to his next album. Blue Afternoon was Buckley's first self-production. Friedman doesn't dislike it, but calls it a "rush job" that lacked the "group feeling" of Happy Sad.

The second half of 1969 was a productive period for Buckley. No sooner had he finished Blue Afternoon than he launched into another album, Lorca, named after the Spanish poet. Since Happy Sad Buckley had been moving away from standard song structure; Lorca exploded with musical daring. The shortest track is almost six minutes long. The title cut is in an unsettling 5/4 meter. "Anonymous Proposition" dispenses with rhythm entirely, spotlighting Buckley's tightly recorded voice as he draws out the syllables of a winding romantic declamation (beginning "Love me/As if someday you'd hate me").

Buckley's friend Daniella Sapriel went over to his house to hear Lorca the day Buckley received the advance tapes. "He was really excited," she says. "It was a big step for him. He really liked it and he really felt he had pushed through something from the last album to Lorca. It was great, but it was also clear that this wasn't what the public was going to find if they were looking for a three-minute hit single for radio!"

"He was really making music for himself at that point," Holzman says. "Which is fine, except to find enough people to listen to it."

Lorca was Buckley's last album for Elektra. It appeared in February 1970--one month after Blue Afternoon's release on manager Cohen's Straight label. Such a dual release could only hurt both records, which were hardly Top 40 fodder to begin with. The comparatively easier-sounding Blue Afternoon peaked at #192. Lorca never had a chance, and was remaindered with almost indecent haste.

Like a good soldier, Buckley toured college venues to promote these new albums. He faced increasingly bewildered audiences. "People expected of Tim whatever his last album was," Dan Gordon says, "and Tim didn't take requests! He was there to play what he was into at that time, not where he was six months ago. The audience should have been flattered. He expected better of them." When a well-meaning Philadelphia fan yelled out "How about 'Buzzin' Fly?" Buckley's immediate riposte was "How about horseshit?"

One day Buckley phoned Beckett, suggesting they start writing again. "He was thinking of a project that came out to be Starsailor," Beckett says. For their new collaboration, "I Woke Up," they broke precedent by working on the lyrics together--"testing each other line by line," Beckett says. "I think he was happy enough with that that he said, 'Okay, let's just let it rip. What else have you got?'"

Beckett had "Monterey," "about being in the Army and separated from my lover." He also suggested Buckley finally record "Song to the Siren," which they had written in late 1967--and which Buckley had performed on the Monkees' TV show. (Buckley was friends with Monkee Mickey Dolenz.) Although the solo spot on "The Monkees" is breathtaking, Buckley had dropped the song from his repertoire. The reason? Some ribbing from Judy Henske.

"Buckley always took everything she said to heart," Beckett explains. "One day she was teasing us about the lyrics to 'Song to the Siren,' specifically the line, 'I am puzzled as the oyster.' Buckley didn't defend himself and I just laughed. And after that he stopped singing the song altogether. I noticed and I said, 'What's the deal, Tim? It's one of my best songs.' He said, 'Well, wow, everything she said about that line--I just can't do it!' Once again, taking a small amount of criticism so profoundly to heart that he can't even perform a song! As the years went by it became clear to us independently that this was our favorite collaboration. So in 1970 he agreed to put it on an album only if we rewrote the 'oyster' line."

Straight/Warner Bros. released Starsailor in November 1970. That same month the New York Times printed a Buckley essay on Beethoven as part of the bicentennial honoring the composer's birth. The essay says more about Buckley than Beethoven. Buckley wonders "if music is really relevant to people or if it just supports a fashionable movement...I think of our culture like I think of bacteria. Rock 'n' roll keeps the traffic moving to an adolescent pulse."

When Buckley entered his Starsailor phase, Cohen says he told his client "that this is not what the record companies are going to want; this will not be endearing to your audience. Maybe other musicians, maybe some people will understand it, but it's the wrong stuff for the wrong people at the wrong time. There would be problems with audiences, with club owners, with record companies. He said, 'That's what I want to do.'"

"Warner Bros. hated it," bassist John Balkin says of Starsailor. Emmett Chapman--who considers it Buckley's best album--says the singer received no tour support. The band broke up for lack of work, but Buckley organized a new group with drummer Maury Baker, Chapman and trombonist Glen Ferris. They rehearsed a few times a week, Chapman says, played clubs "maybe once a month," and "couldn't get an agreement to record."

Buckley was now booking his own gigs in small clubs, but he was in high spirits. "The music was extremely creative," Chapman says, "and he had an extreme amount of energy, and fluency within his energy. He would get up on his tip-toes and almost float in the air while he was singing." Also helping his state of mind was his domestic situation: Buckley was again a married man.

One of the best Buckley performances Dan Gordon ever saw--and he saw many--"was in a little roadhouse somewhere south of LA. He matched Emmett note-for-note with his voice. His artistry as an improvisational musician was boundless. I think he got 200 bucks for the gig. He just wanted to play the music in front of an audience."

"Tim was at his best when a small audience came to hear him," Underwood says. "The honesty he brought to improvisational music was one of his great strengths. What's the point of distancing oneself? Self-preservation? But there's a greater aspiration: creating honest music. And that takes great courage."

His profile was no longer national. Buckley was proud of Downbeat's five-star vindication of Starsailor, but he had little else to show for it. Scared about an ebbing musical career, he started writing film scripts with Gordon. The first was a barely fictional black comedy about a struggling musician--to be played by Buckley--and his friend, a (literal) vulture--to be played by an animated cartoon. The script included a scene of Buckley blowing up a theater full of fans calling for old songs; the finale had the vulture carrying Buckley away from earthly care while the singer belted out "My Way." (How did Sid Vicious know...?). Buckley called it "a million-dollar comedy which nobody will finance."

"Tim didn't care about money or fame," Daniella Sapriel says. "He could just about put everything he owned into a duffel bag. But it must have been very difficult for him not to have that reception by the public anymore." On a more mundane level, Buckley now had two sons to support; his wife Judy had an eight-year-old from a former marriage.

"We couldn't make it happen on any kind of well-organized plan," Chapman says. "He would tell me of arguments he would have with the record people, and how frustrating it was, and with Herb Cohen as well. He had a strange kind of pride. Even though he wasn't a very large person, he would insist on carrying heavy things. He didn't complain a lot and he had a certain heroic quality about him. He had a whole different set of values."

At some point, though, he caved in. He was prevented from recording the music he was playing live. He lost his house at Laguna Beach and moved back to Santa Monica. "There are two aspects in the music business," Balkin says. "One is being a musician, the other is being an artist. A musician works for a living. And that's what he needed to do."

"They said, 'You have to play rock 'n' roll," Kathleen Buckley says. "So he said, 'Okay, man, I'll play rock 'n' roll. But fuck you! I'll make you wish I didn't!'"

Two years after Starsailor, Greetings from LA came out. From the opening line of "Move with Me"'s sex scenario ("I went down to the meat rack tavern") through the concluding "Make It Right"--with its "beat me whip me spank me" chorus--Greetings from LA has just one thing on its mind. The churning music matches the lyrics' over-the-top sleaze. Beckett calls the album "violently erotic," Kathleen Buckley "total camp"; either way, it was shockingly X-rated for 1972.

"He loved the fact that Greetings from LA pleased Judy Buckley," Underwood says. For all Buckley's supposed capitulation, Greetings is a damn good album. But it still didn't put him back on the charts. "It occurred to me," Buckley said, "that all of the rock 'n' roll sex symbols, like Jagger, Jim Morrison, had never actually said anything sexy. So"--he paused--"I decided to do it."

Beckett was initially appalled by Greetings. Then he appreciated it for what it was: a smoking set of songs. Then he got depressed again. "I thought, 'They fucking got him! He'd always said he was gonna deliver bread if they tried to take his art away. We were dedicated to total creative control and freedom and experimentation. Here they were putting pressure on him, and instead of saying, 'Hey! I don't need you people,' he knuckles under."

There were no more two-year waits between albums. Sefronia came out exactly a year after Greetings from LA. The label was now DiscReet, Cohen's new venture in partnership with Zappa. One dubious first was that five of Sefronia's 11 selections came from neither Buckley nor Beckett. The press bio accompanying Sefronia's release included quotes that sound strikingly ambivalent. "I don't think they'll ever happen again," Buckley says of the folk-boom years. "The comradeship is just not there anymore, and it affects the music." Several months later he commented, "A lot of people prefer the older-type songs, and I'm happy to do them, as long as I can continue to experiment simultaneously." The difference now was that the public didn't get to hear his "experiments."

The Tim Buckley audiences did see and hear was ferocious, grafting powerful and usually expansive vocals atop an equally excessive rock band. In July 1974 he had the thankless task of kicking off a mammoth outdoors British concert for the Allman Brothers, Doobie Brothers and three other acts. He turned in a searing performance whose intensity rarely let up. A week later he was back at New York City's Central Park summer concert series--where he had once headlined--as an opening act. Compounding the irony, Jim Fielder had rejoined Buckley and the headliner was Fielder's previous employer Blood, Sweat and Tears. Buckley played a good hour and a quarter, to the delight of his fans--who were very much in the minority.

Fielder hadn't worked with Buckley for seven years, but he saw little change in his friend. "If anything, he was happier. He was with Judy...he'd settled down a bit." Fielder also cut a few tracks for Buckley's 1974 album Look at the Fool.

Buckley was back in charge of writing. The lyrics, though, are casual to the point of parody. "Wanda Lu" is a blatant "Louie Louie" retread; even one of the Beckett-Buckley collaborations, "Freeway Blues," sounds like an Elton John spoof. "That was a ridiculous album," Kathleen Buckley says. "It just seem that the more down he became, the more desperate" Buckley got.

"The Tim who felt so incredibly exhilarated by Starsailor," Sapriel says, "was not the same Tim who was singing 'Wanda Lu, woo-woo-woo.'"

"I don't think his heart was in it," Elaine Buckley says of her son's '70s recordings. "A few times he told me he wasn't satisfied with the music that he was doing."

"When the artist finally comes through all this mess, you hear a pure voice," Buckley said in April 1975. "We're in the habit of emulating those pure voices when they're dead."

Three months later Buckley was dead. The Los Angeles County coroner's office determined that Buckley was the victim of "acute heroin-morphine and ethanol [ie, liquor] intoxication." Overdose. Richard Keeling was charged with murder under California law for having allegedly furnished the drugs that caused the death. The drug charge was subsequently dropped and Keeling pleaded guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He served 120 days.

The death shocked Buckley's friends, family and associates, but the autopsy puzzled them; heroin had never played a big part in his diet. The coroner declared that Buckley was no addict. On the contrary, "he was just trying to be incredibly healthy," Judy Buckley says. "Unfortunately I didn't go and pick him up at the airport and he stopped someplace on the way home."

"When he died, all of a sudden Timmy's a saint and I was a black force," Keeling says. "That wasn't our relationship." Keeling and Buckley had been friends since the turn of the decade, when they lived down the street from each other. Keeling was a graduate student in ethnomusicology at UCLA and a self-confessed "wild young man" who liked "the dark side of things." He was not only "extremely handsome, extremely sexy," Underwood's former lover Jennifer Stace recalls, but also "intelligent. And Tim loved people that knew more than he did...I think he kinda loved Richard."

"We were very close," Keeling says. "We would kiss like a man and a woman, and neither of us are homosexuals. All these people were treating him like a little prince and I never would do that. I think that's one of the reasons we could be friends."

Keeling was dealing drugs, but he says he never sold to Buckley. "To me, it was an adventure. I wanted to have my own stuff, and frankly," he laughs, "I couldn't afford to do that as a graduate student without having some kind of business."

On Buckley's last afternoon he invited himself over to Keeling's. When he showed up, Keeling was there with Jackie McGuire. The latter testified Buckley "appeared to be intoxicated"; she also saw him take a drink shortly before he snorted a brown powder through a dollar bill. Keeling told McGuire the heroin had been returned to him because it was wet. He is also adamant that he "put down a line nobody could die on! If somebody had to pay 10 or 15 bucks for it they would have balked." Buckley's cleaned-up system--besides the alcohol--may have contributed to his inability to handle the drug.

Judy Buckley says she is still paying off Tim's debts. History hasn't been too kind to him--so far. Lillian Roxon wrote a glowing tribute to Buckley for her groundbreaking Rock Encyclopedia in 1969. When the book was revised in 1978 (after Roxon's own premature death) Buckley's entire entry was eliminated. His albums disappeared from stores.

The 1990 release of the Dream Letter concert recording proved that Buckley stands outside the slippery stream of musical fashion. But acclaim is still an uphill battle; in the hype-heavy record business a dead artist is usually a dead artist. Buckley himself was uncomfortable with fame, and created in spite of it. His insistence on being true to himself insured the permanence of his most striking recordings. And even when he caved in, he couldn't sell out enough to extinguish his distinctive spark--or, for that matter, to be popular.

"Creativity means moving forward into new realms," Lee Underwood says; "exploring your psyche, your heart, your guts, your soul, and coming up with something new. That was Tim's great mission. 'What's next?' It's a terrifying question. When you've just shot your whole wad on Goodbye and Hello, where do you go after that? Or after Happy Sad? 'What next?' was the motivating question of Tim Buckley's personality and his artistic aspiration. He had the courage to face that question. Above and beyond everything else, he was a creator."

Musician Magazine Letters : "Goodbye & Bravo"

"Bravo, bravo and bravo for Scott Isler's article on "The Life and Death of Tim Buckley" (July 91). I was 11 when I bought Goodbye and Hello in 1967, and have been in awe ever since. I was able to attend the April tribute at St. Anne's Cathedral, where Buckley's son performed some of his father's songs. Now if we could just persuade Elektra to re-release the first LP and Lorca on CD."

- John Odato
New York, NY

"Those who truly listened to Tim's voice encountered an unmatchable magical experience; those who spent time with Tim encountered a character as unconventional and exciting as his music.

My mother (Tim's mother) and I thank Scott Isler for refraining from using the usual threadbare musician-live-fast-die-young-drug-death-rebel theme that so many writers thrive upon. Tim may have died in debt, but I believe he left a rather wealthy legacy- 10 albums (including Dream Letter), some interesting Tim Buckley adventure stories and most importantly a very talented son, Jeffrey Scott (who has a phenomenal voice and is a salacious guitarist as well), all of which deserve further investigation."

- Kathleen Buckley
Panorama City, CA

"Musician magazine first turned me on to such diverse sounds as Midnight Oil, Chet Baker and now the article that has been worth the eight or nine years of yearly dues: Tim Buckley! Scott Isler's article is the perfect monument to his memory."

- David Hawker
Ripley, NY

"I played drums with Tim Buckley for over four years until he was murdered. We spent the money from our last tour on his funeral services where his "old friends" mourned loudly even though they had rejected him years earlier for "selling out". Your revisionist article aspires to rock history but does a disservice to Tim and the dedicated players who worked with him during his last years: his most focused, drug-free, lucid, creative and commercially promising era. Tim had become a pro, and left behind the resentful, elitist alcoholics and drug addicts who no longer mattered. I don't resent the inaccuracies, just that Tim's gone and his so-called "friends" remain."