An experimental vocalist and performer who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul and avant-garde rock in a short career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buckley often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent principally showcased on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca and Starsailor.
Buckley was born and raised in New York before his family moved to Anaheim in southern California when he was 10 years of age. During his childhood, he was a fan of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Nat King Cole and Miles Davis, although country music was his foremost passion and he always wanted to sing.
He left high school at 18 with 20 songs written with best friend Larry Beckett under his belt - many of which later featured on his debut album - and was recruited as a guitarist by a country and western band called Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders. However, by then his growing interest in jazz and other musical forms meant that his heart was not in it and he left the band.
With another school friend, Jim Fielder, on bass, and Beckett on drums, they formed two bands, the Bohemians and the more acoustic Harlequin 3, mixing in poetry and sung improvisation.
Buckley soon got noticed and Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley to Herb Cohen, who quickly sent a demo to Jac Holzman and got him signed to Elektra. Around this time, he also met guitarist Lee Underwood, who became an important element in nearly all of Buckley's artistic endeavours.
Buckley released his debut album, Tim Buckley, on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. Jack Nitzsche and Van Dyke Parks were involved with some performing/arranging aspects of the album.
Buckley's second album, Goodbye and Hello, released in 1967, reflected the influence of experimental psychedelic music as well as the influences of producers Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky.
By this time, his marriage to Mary Guibert, with whom he had a child (musician and singer Jeff Buckley, also known for his three-and-a-half octave voice, who died in 1997), was falling apart (they divorced in 1968).
When Beckett left for the Army, Buckley was free to develop his own individual style. He was becoming dissatisfied with playing the same old material continuously and was disenchanted with the music business that he felt was restraining him from producing new material. He began to weave new songs into his performances, featuring an increasingly minimalist sound from his heavily orchestrated first two albums. Uneducated both vocally and instrumentally in the finer aspects of melody and lyric structure, the quality of the tracks he produced demonstrate the natural talent he possessed.
He retreated to his home base in Venice Beach with Underwood and they immersed themselves in the music of the jazz greats such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Roland Kirk. Rehearsals became more like jam sessions. The day before playing the Fillmore East, Buckley asked vibraphonist David Friedman to rehearse for the show. Seven hours without sheet music later, a new sound was born. His subsequent independently-recorded music was vastly different from previous recordings and can be characterised as jazzy blues-rock.
In 1968, Buckley recorded Happy Sad, which was released the following year. However, his performances were less accessible to the audiences who saw him as a folk-rock artist and alienated many of his fans. Even so, Happy Sad became Buckley's highest charting album.
Buckley's music continued to evolve. Dream Letter, recorded in 1968 at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, was already more diffuse than Happy Sad, lacking the pulse of Carter C.C. Collins's congas. The budget couldn't afford him or bassist John Miller, so Danny Thompson was drafted in to play an intuitively supportive - and barely rehearsed - role.
During 1969, Buckley began to write and record material for three different albums: Lorca, Blue Afternoon and Starsailor. Bass player John Balkin, who ran a free improvisation group with Buzz and Bunk Gardner of the Mothers, had introduced Buckley to avant-garde opera singer Cathy Berberian's interpretations of songs by Luciano Berio, inspiring the ever-restless Buckley to new heights. He decided to integrate the ideas of composers such as Berio and Iannis Xenakis in an avant-garde rock genre and started to fully utilise his voice's impressive range.
According to Underwood, Buckley knew that Lorca had little to no chance in the commercial market. As his old friend Herb Cohen was starting up a new label venture with Frank Zappa, Straight Records, he decided to provide an album of older material that was a step back from his current direction, but one that would have a better chance of public acceptance (although it has also been suggested that this was to placate his business people). Selecting 8 songs that had yet to be recorded, these tracks evolved into the sessions for the forgotten classic album Blue Afternoon, which was quite similar to Happy Sad in style. Neither album sold well, with the near-simultaneous release of each seemingly cancelling out the other. Many fans were shocked by Lorca's very different style and found the vocal gymnastics too abstract and far removed from his previous folk-rock rooted albums, while Blue Afternoon was seen by some as uninteresting.
After the lack of success of both records, Buckley began to focus more on what he felt to be his true masterpiece, Starsailor, released in 1970. Vocally and instrumentally haunting, the album was unlike much else at the time. Buckley chose words for their phonetic sounds rather than their meaning and admitted to using other languages if an English word did not suffice. This very personal album shared the same response as Lorca. Impervious to Buckley's avant-garde style, many of his fans disliked it.
By this time, he had remarried and bought a house in up-market Laguna beach, but after the failure of Starsailor Buckley sank into a deep depression. His live performances degraded to insincere chores and he eventually ended up unsellable. Unable to produce his own music and almost completely broke, he turned to alcohol and drug binges. He also looked to become an actor, with the unreleased low-budget group therapy drama Why? (with O.J. Simpson) from 1971 being the only film completed.
Two years later, with his finances almost depleted and craving for recognition, he released three albums which combined rock with a soul/funk direction - Greetings from L.A., Sefronia and Look at the Fool. These albums failed to become a commercial success. Fundamentally, Buckley was unhappy with the systematic and shallow R&B structure of the lyrics and music, despite being a fan of the genre. His distaste with bowing to commercial pressures from Frank Zappa's DiscReet Records soon left him without a recording contract.
On 28th June 1975, after returning from the last show of a tour in Dallas, he snorted heroin at a friend's house. Having diligently controlled his habit while on the road, his tolerance was lowered, and the combination of a small amount of drugs mixed with the amount of alcohol he had consumed throughout the day to celebrate the tour's end was too much. His friend took him home thinking he was merely drunk. Tim was put to bed by his friends, who told his wife, Judy, that he had also used some barbiturates. As she watched TV in bed beside him, Buckley turned blue. Attempts by friends and paramedics to revive him were unsuccessful. Reportedly, Buckley's last words were "Bye Bye Baby". He was just 28 years old.