Lee Underwood played lead guitar for Tim Buckley throughout most of Tim's career, touring with him and playing on seven of the nine studio albums Tim recorded. In the years following, Lee has been a musician, music journalist, poet and photographer. He is also the author of Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered which is not only a detailed biographical exploration of Tim Buckley's life and music but also an insightful look into, and fond recollection of, the era in which it all happened.

Lee talks to Naldertown about Tim Buckley, his music and how it's perceived, music and the industry today and of his own current work.


Naldertown: An aspect that I think makes Tim's music so compelling are the many stylistic changes he went through. What new directions do you think his music may have progressed to had he been able to continue?

Lee: It's impossible to speculate with any degree of certitude, but I think Tim would have reinvented himself in several ways, each time expanding his musical scope. As you know, he wanted to continue writing music for his and Larry Beckett's 'Outcast of the Islands,' based on Conrad's novel. He also wanted to bring together musicians from all five of his conceptual phases and record old (and new) material for a live album. As the years rolled on, I think he would have continued writing his own music, merging all previous concepts, and creating a wide span of new songs and song stylings. As well, he almost surely would have devoted at least one album to great pop and jazz standards both past and present. I don't know, of course, but I suspect he might find modern electro-trance-music to be an exciting, workable context. I can see him laying down a sexy electronic groove and singing over the top perhaps like Track 8 on Underworld's CD One Hundred Days Off. He was only a kid when he died (age 28). Who knows what he might have accomplished had he lived?


Naldertown: It seems obvious that artistic freedom was important to Tim, he was clearly true to himself in the music he created, and willing to risk commercial rejection. Do you know what he would have thought and what do you think, of popular music and the music industry today?

Lee: Our evaluations of musical styles and levels change as we ourselves change. If we don't evolve psychologically, we fall into nostalgia, loving and clinging to the music we loved as teenagers and young adults while more or less rejecting new music written by new generations. Tim, however, kept stretching and growing while alive, and may well have continued exploring new and different musical dimensions both as a listener and songwriter had he lived. I feel sure he would have remained true to himself, going his own way and creating his own contexts (rather like Miles Davis did), no matter which new fads appeared and disappeared. He may not have cared for rap-oriented styles, but there is always room for a multi-dimensional intelligence, a great voice, a beautiful soul, a 12-string guitar, and a brilliant creative imagination.


Naldertown: Is a lack of willingness from some of the larger record companies to take risks on more experimental music stifling creativity?

Lee: The recording industry is a business. They will always sign artists who they think will return a profit. As well, commercially successful musicians are not necessarily "sell outs." To the contrary, they naturally reflect the mass-mind. That is their gift. If a musician's individuality proves itself eccentric, difficult, or aesthetically threatening (as Tim's did during his Lorca/Starsailor phase), the Billboard Top 40 crowd will reject it. The majority of listeners want mirrors, not portals into new domains. Record companies survive by finding and supporting musicians who give mainstream listeners what they want (egoic validation). When a musician's temperament matches the consumers' temperament, the result is commercial success (as Tim enjoyed with Goodbye and Hello and Happy Sad). Musicians cannot be "commercial" just because they would like to be any more than they can be conceptual innovators just because they want to. They have to be themselves and follow whichever direction their talent takes them.

So, no, I don't think mainstream businesspeople "stifle creativity." Outsiders just have to find other outlets, that's all, and it is not impossible to do that. If the music is good, whatever its style, outsider labels exist that are willing to support it. They want to serve music, rather than just exploit it. It's the artist's job to seek them out, make the connection, do the legwork. Today, the Internet is a great place for launching new directions.


Naldertown: Do you think that people have now become more, or less accepting of experimental, challenging and innovative music, than they were at the time of Tim's music first being released?

Lee: Listeners of any age usually stick with whatever they already like. They enjoy conceptual repetition. Baby boomers who love the Beatles are just like Fifties people who love Elvis and Forties people who love Frank Sinatra. They push the same button over and over again. Conversely, if the music is not familiar in comfortable, pleasurable ways, they tend to condemn it instead of liberating their own ears. It's an old problem for the artist, because a serious artist wants to grow, but that problem comes with the territory, right? At the same time, I think listeners who rejected certain kinds of avant-garde music thirty years ago might be more receptive to that same music today, because music-on-the-whole has introduced so many new sounds and stylistic variations. Through CDs, television and movies, the modern ear has become familiar with psycho-sonic colors and creative perspectives that were simply impossible for the conventional mind to digest twenty-five or thirty years ago. In other words, I don't think contemporary listeners would find Lorca and Starsailor unduly difficult. I think they would enjoy them to no end, because there is so much substance, depth, and innovative imagination in them, and because the modern ear has caught up to where Tim was then.


Naldertown: Starsailor seems to be the album that Tim himself was most proud of. Do you think that as a result of Starsailor's not being a commercial success and receiving such a mixed response from audiences and critics alike, Tim felt let down and to a degree, lost faith in people's ability to embrace and understand new and challenging forms of music and self expression? Do you think this had any effect on the final albums?

Lee: I explore this subject quite a bit in my book, Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered (Backbeat, 2002). It's a complex, intense, and fascinating subject.

In a nutshell, Tim loved his audience so much that he tested himself to the limits of his creative brilliance to give them something new, exciting, nourishing, and conceptually thrilling. When Lorca and especially Starsailor proved to be too much for them, they rejected him and his music, and he did indeed feel dismayed, profoundly so.

However, he did not "sell out," as some of his so-called friends accused him of doing. He continued developing the avant-garde concept and performing that music for more than two years after the release of Starsailor, until he felt he had explored the dimension fully and completely. At that point, he needed a new musical direction. He also needed to earn a living. For both musical and commercial reasons, he reinvented himself for the fifth (and last) time, exploring the domain of funk-rock, merging all of his previous concepts into a fresh approach, which for him was new. Ballads, heart-touching melodies, familiar harmonies, sexual get-down dance rhythms, and his incredible "vocal gymnastics" all found a home in the new domain.


Naldertown: It is such a shame that Starsailor, an album that Tim himself regarded so highly, is so hard to get hold of. Are you aware of any plans for a re-issue of this album?

Lee: No. People might want to write to Rhino Records and encourage them to acquire the rights and reissue it. Blue Afternoon, with many of Tim's all-time best songs on it, is also out of print, and many listeners would like to see that one reissued too.


Naldertown: Are there any particular artists or bands around today that you would consider to be particularly influenced by Tim's music?

Lee: I'm not connected very much with the pop domain these days. There are others more qualified than I to venture an opinion.


Naldertown: Could you single out your most memorable moment of recording or touring with Tim?

Lee: There were many, but let me offer two: When 50,000 fans at an outdoor concert in Atlantic City stormed the barriers so they could stand at the foot of the stage and cheer Tim on; and when we took the stage at Carnegie Hall and played for a house full of New Yorkers who loved us.

Excerpts from Blue Melody describing these and other events can be found on timbuckley.com


Naldertown: As far as your own work is concerned, are you touring or recording at the moment? Any more books on the horizon?

Lee: I just recorded a CD of original improvised solo piano music that I am quite proud of (a Limited Edition, 100 copies). It's spacious and intensely inner in a beautiful way. I call it Phantom Light. Interested listeners can get in touch with me by e-mail at undrwd@Sti.net I am deeply involved in writing a lengthy novel entitled Diamondfire: The American Odyssey of a Universal Mystic. There's a good deal of written material (and photographs) on my site, including previously unpublished material on Tim, several short stories, some of my poetry, and a number of letters to various people talking about a host of interesting subjects. It's at http://www.leeunderwood.net


Naldertown: Are you aware of what other significant figures from your years touring and recording with Tim are doing musically now? Any collaborations?

Lee: No to both.


Naldertown: You mention in Blue Melody that when touring, the British audiences in London were less than receptive, why do you think this was?

Lee: Tim was an extremely emotional guy with a powerful personality, which nonplussed and occasionally offended the more stuffy members of that highly repressed society. Also, Tim was Irish, and conditioned by his father and previous generations to dislike the notoriously impeccable British facade.

But only some British listeners were less than receptive. Others loved Tim. In fact, I would say the majority of positive responses to Tim's music and to Blue Melody have come from Brits who appreciate rebellion, innovation, sexuality, and a good sense of humor — qualities Tim had in abundance. Brits with imagination, aesthetic adventurousness, emotional courage, and innovative intelligence had no problem with Tim and his music. They were some of his greatest fans at the time, and remain so. I get more letters from excited British listeners and readers than from any other country in the world.


Naldertown: Which new artists/bands do you find interesting at the moment?

Lee: I've come to the point where I see nearly all of music, especially popular music, as being an intoxicating drug. That's terrific. I spent a lot of time there, and have no problem with it. Every kind and style of music is sacred. Every level shines with its own bright light. Most of the new bands focus on themes I have already explored and celebrated. There must be many new young artists worth listening to, because music is unending and infinitely creative, but I don't necessarily know them. Each new generation sings about love, loss, and hope in its own way. I tip my hat to them.

Today, however, I'm less interested in emotional turmoil, angst, confusion, sexual obsession, and narcotic oblivion than I used to be. I'm more interested in clarity, inner spaciousness, and higher-consciousness, which are not mainstream values. I listen to Bach (Glenn Gould); spacemusic (Henry Wolff, David Parsons, Peter Michael Hamel, Stephen Micus, Steve Roach, et. al); rhythmically charged electronic trance music (Lost Tribe, Gus Gus, Hybrid, Underworld, et.al.); but especially natural music: waterfalls, streamsongs, wind in the pines.


Naldertown: For those who are not familiar with Tim Buckley's music, what would you recommend as an essential album to begin with?

Lee: I would suggest they check out Goodbye and Hello, an accessible, well-performed album; Happy Sad, an intimate, jazz-influenced atmosphere with vibraphonist David Friedman; and Dream Letter: Live in London 1968. If I had to pick only one of those, I would say Dream Letter. It's a double-CD, folk-oriented, with good songs, well-performed, live in concert, and a good place to start. I wrote the liner notes, so there is a lot of good information about Tim in the booklet.


Naldertown would like to give a big thanks to Lee Underwood for his time and thought. For more Information on Lee Underwood's work, past and present, visit http://www.leeunderwood.net

Album Discography:
Studio album reviews:

Tim Buckley- Elektra Records, October 1966
Goodbye and Hello- Elektra Records, September 1967
Happy Sad- Elektra Records, March 1967
Blue Afternoon- Straight record, January 1970
Lorca- Elektra Records, February 1970
Starsailor- Straight Records, November 1970
Greetings from L.A- Straight records, October 1972
Sefronia- Warner/Discreet, May 1973
Look at the Fool- Warner/Discreet,1974
The above dates are the original releases, all of the above except Blue Afternoon and Starsailor are available on C.D in the U.K.

Posthumous releases:
There have been several posthumous releases, of which the following are the most readily available in the U.K:
Dream Letter: Live in London 1968-Demon, 1990
The Peel Sessions: Tim Buckley 1968-Strange Fruit, 1990
Live at the Troubadour 1969-sBizarre/Straight Records, 1994
Honeyman-Manifesto Records, 1995
Morning Glory-The Tim Buckley Anthology-Elektra/Rhino 2001

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Thanks to Jo Abolins for giving me permission to publish this interview on my site.