Tim Buckley

小简介
Tim Buckley，又一个早逝的天才，1975年6月29日死于过量吸毒，享年二十八岁，死因 “过度用药”。英年早逝的Buckley，音乐创作以民谣为主要风格，尽管他是美国歌手，但给人的感觉确有相当的英国气质。早期的他已经充分的展现出吉他上的造诣，搭配上音域宽广的歌声，即使任何一张他的专辑从没打进过排行榜前一百名，但对后世的影响却极深。
他的儿子，Jeff Buckley，也是著名美国摇滚歌手。1997年5月29日因车祸溺死于孟菲斯城附近的密西西比河中，年仅30岁.父子两代，多才，命薄，令人感叹生命的脆弱。
《Goodbye and Hello》，Tim Buckley最被推崇也是最成功、影响最深远的专辑。专辑封面上的他，脸带着微笑，注意那被子弹穿射过的眼睛，隐含着当时反战风潮的反讽。专辑中产生了许多名曲，像是Hallucinations、Once I Was、Goodbye and Hello、Morning Glory。其中Hallucinations被选为美国最重要五十首迷幻单曲之一，细听着这首歌，Buckley吉他的演奏手法，大量的勾弦与空间感的营造，伴奏乐手congas鼓的搭配，对我来说，每次听都有着不同的感受，尤其是带上耳机细听，那空洞的层次与延绵不绝的吉他声响，当时的Buckley，透过迷幻药物的使用，将他眼中所看到的事物与景象，换化为这首歌，消逝的烛火，追寻的美好情境突然消失。
《Happy Sad》是Tim Buckley的第叁张专辑，其中作品大都是篇幅较长的叙事民谣，有的竟长达十多分钟，Buckley的演唱低调感性，宛如来自中世纪的游吟诗人在荒野上边走边唱。Buckley出色的民谣专辑还有1970年的《Lorca》。
《Blue Afternoon》与《Starsailor》，在这两张专辑中，呈现的是Tim Buckley当时最疯狂的乐曲表现。《Starsailor》这张专辑试验色彩浓厚，带有鲜明的“太空要摆”情趣。在专辑中Buckley将民谣的甜美和谐与自由爵士的即兴元素结合在一起，创造出一种崭新的声音，给人感觉像海妖在某个荒凉空荡的外太空星球上歌唱，妖异诡秘。在乐队的编制上，Buckley加重了管乐的成分，长笛与小号的自由吹奏是专辑始终徘徊在一种难以固定的状态之中。
后期的Tim Buckley因为药物的过度使用，导致呈现疯狂的状态，在后期的专辑中， Buckley皆尝试要将影响他的爵士蓝调根源加入到乐曲之中，往往显得冗长而且结构变的精密，加上唱片公司给予的创作压力与商业考量，失去了原本早期的美感，有人甚至会有难以感受之感，觉得Buckley的变化差距之大，与早期优美的歌曲相比，Buckley好似变了一个人。
One of the great rock vocalists of the 1960s, Tim Buckley drew from folk, psychedelic rock, and progressive jazz to create a considerable body of adventurous work in his brief lifetime. His multi-octave range was capable of not just astonishing power, but great emotional expressiveness, swooping from sorrowful tenderness to anguished wailing. His restless quest for new territory worked against him commercially: By the time his fans had hooked into his latest album, he was onto something else entirely, both live and in the studio. In this sense he recalled artists such as Miles Davis and David Bowie, who were so eager to look forward and change that they confused and even angered listeners who wanted more stylistic consistency. However, his eclecticism has also ensured a durable fascination with his work that has engendered a growing posthumous cult for his music, often with listeners who were too young (or not around) to appreciate his music while he was active.
Buckley emerged from the same 60s Orange County, CA, folk scene that spawned Jackson Browne and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley and a couple of musicians Buckley was playing with to the Mothers manager, Herbie Cohen. Although Cohen may have first been interested in Buckley as a songwriter, he realized after hearing some demos that Buckley was also a diamond in the rough as a singer. Cohen became Buckleys manager, and helped the singer get a deal with Elektra.
Before Buckley had reached his 20th birthday, hed released his debut album. The slightly fey but enormously promising effort highlighted his soaring melodies and romantic, opaque lyrics. Baroque psychedelia was the order of the day for many Elektra releases of the time, and Buckleys early folk-rock albums were embellished with important contributions from musicians Lee Underwood (guitar), Van Dyke Parks (keyboards), Jim Fielder (bass), and Jerry Yester. Larry Beckett was also an overlooked contributor to Buckleys first two albums, co-writing many of the songs.
The fragile, melancholic, orchestrated beauty of the material had an innocent quality that was dampened only slightly on the second LP, Goodbye and Hello (1967). Buckleys songs and arrangements became more ambitious and psychedelic, particularly on the lengthy title track. This was also his only album to reach the Top 200, where it only peaked at number 171; Buckley was always an artist who found his primary constituency among the underground, even for his most accessible efforts. His third album, Happy Sad, found him going in a decidedly jazzier direction in both his vocalizing and his instrumentation, introducing congas and vibes. Though it seemed a retreat from commercial considerations at the time, Happy Sad actually concluded the triumvirate of recordings that are judged to be his most accessible.
The truth was, by the late 60s Buckley was hardly interested in folk-rock at all. He was more intrigued by jazz; not only soothing modern jazz (as heard on the posthumous release of acoustic 1968 live material, Dream Letter), but also its most avant-garde strains. His songs became much more oblique in structure, and skeletal in lyrics, especially when the partnership with Larry Beckett was ruptured after the latters induction into the Army. Some of his songs abandoned lyrics almost entirely, treating his voice itself as an instrument, wordlessly contorting, screaming, and moaning, sometimes quite cacophonously. In this context, Lorca was viewed by most fans and critics not just as a shocking departure, but a downright bummer. No longer was Buckley a romantic, melodic poet; he was an experimental artiste who sometimes seemed bent on punishing both himself and his listeners with his wordless shrieks and jarringly dissonant music.
Almost as if to prove that he was still capable of gentle, uplifting jazzy pop-folk, Buckley issued Blue Afternoon around the same time. Bizarrely, Blue Afternoon and Lorca were issued almost simultaneously, on different labels. While an admirable demonstration of his versatility, it was commercial near-suicide, each album canceling the impact of the other, as well as confusing his remaining fans. Buckley found his best middle ground between accessibility and jazzy improvisation on 1970s Starsailor, which is probably the best showcase of his sheer vocal abilities, although many prefer the more cogent material of his earliest albums.
By this point, though, Buckleys approach was so uncommercial that it was jeopardizing his commercial survival. And not just on record; he was equally uncompromising as a live act, as the posthumously issued Live at the Troubadour 1969 demonstrates, with its stretched-to-the-limit jams and searing improv vocals. For a time, he was said to have earned his living as a taxi driver and chauffeur; he also flirted with films for a while. When he returned to the studio, it was as a much more commercial singer/songwriter (some have suggested that various management and label pressures were behind this shift).
As much of a schism as Buckleys experimental jazz period created among fans and critics, his final recordings have proved even more divisive, even among big Buckley fans. Some view these efforts, which mix funk, sex-driven lyrical concerns, and laid-back L.A. session musicians, as proof of his mastery of the blue-eyed soul idiom. Others find them a sad waste of talent, or relics of a prodigy who was burning out rather than conquering new realms. Neophytes should be aware of the difference of critical opinion regarding this era, but on the whole his final three albums are his least impressive. Those who feel otherwise usually cite the earliest of those LPs, Greetings from L.A. (1972), as his best work from his final phase.
Buckleys life came to a sudden end in the middle of 1975, when he died of a heroin overdose just after completing a tour. Those close to him insist that he had been clean for some time and lament the loss of an artist who, despite some recent failures, still had much to offer. Buckleys stock began to rise among the rock underground after the Cocteau Twins covered his Song for the Siren in the 1980s. The posthumous releases of two late-60s live sets (Dream Letter and Live at the Troubadour 1969) in the early 90s also boosted his profile, as well as unveiling some interesting previously unreleased compositions. His son Jeff Buckley went on to mount a musical career as well before his own tragic death in 1997.