Dream Brother. The Lives & Music of Jeff & Tim Buckley by David Browne

Author:David Browne [Browne, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Divulgación, Biografía, Música
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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By early 1970, Larry Beckett had had an eventful eighteen months, albeit in the worst ways. After being drafted, he had been assigned to a fort near Monterey in Northern California and another in Missouri. Desperate to get out before he was shipped to Vietnam, Beckett went AWOL and, upon being caught, was sentenced to the stockades. Beckett did his best to act strange—which his friends say wasn't terribly difficult for the lost-in-his-thoughts Beckett to do—and after a stay in a stay in a state mental hospital, he was eventually discharged as unsuitable for combat. Manda Bradlyn, who had become Beckett's lover during the later Venice days, was now living in Portland, Oregon, and Beckett, still sporting his army crew cut, relocated there to live with her. (In terms of his own military obligation, Tim was more fortunate; according to Cohen, he and other Cohen clients like Captain Beefheart and members of the Mothers of Invention were deemed 4-F. “Would you want them in your army?” Cohen cracks.)

Back in Portland, Beckett played the first side of Lorca and was so disheartened he couldn't bring himself to flip the LP over. Still, he couldn't resist when Tim called and said he wanted to write a new batch of songs with his old friend. Tim flew up to Portland, and the two bore down on a lyric idea Tim said was inspired by a dream. Out came “I Woke Up,” the first song Tim and Beckett had written together in two years. Although Beckett wasn't completely happy with the lyric, Tim was inspired by its unorthodox imagery and rhyme scheme (the line “Oh, I see your woman in the raw/Ride a mare of stone and howl” is a lesbian image, according to Beckett). It seemed a fine match for the music he was writing, although Beckett had no idea what that music was.

The duo collaborated on several more songs. “Monterey” began as a Beckett poem recalling the time Bradlyn left him while he was locked away. Ever since his days in French club at Loara High, Tim had always wanted to sing a song in that language, so Beckett came up with “Moulin Rouge,” a jaunty reverie half in French and half in English. Again, Beckett had no idea what the accompanying melodies would be; all he heard were mentions of atonality and various time signatures.

Those elements were the least of it. As Tim told a reporter several years later, “We decided that, now that we're good at this, we'll present a new way of writing a song.” By this time, Underwood's role in the band had been quietly usurped by John Balkin. The bass player had turned Tim on to avant-classical composers like Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki, and as he so often did, Tim sucked up the sonic input like an audio vacuum cleaner. For Tim's new project, Balkin assumed an even larger role than he had on Lorca. He recruited Buzz Gardner and his saxophone-playing brother John “Bunk” Gardner (all three had a side project, the Menage a Trio, devoted to experimental music).

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