Fear and Loathing in Tulsa

The more Tim traveled, and the more he matured, the more he became cognizant of America's many extraordinary qualities. Like his blue collar father, a World War II veteran, he felt enormous pride in America, even to the point of chauvinism. And like the explorer he was, Tim saw during his travels a multiplicity of factors that continue to make America the complex and potentially great country it is. If and when we learn how to live up to our professed ideals, our greatness will be based not on pious platitudes and technological power, but on intelligence, nobility of spirit, and universal compassion. The seeds for such greatness are here, and Tim saw them.

He often talked to me about America, perhaps especially in 1974 and 1975. The older he got, the more he spoke of his love of the country, his dislike of established political systems, his reverence for individuality, his resentment of myopic critics. He embraced a sort of independent blue collar pioneer spirit, predating John Rambo, but in some respects very much attuned with that Sylvester Stallone folk hero. As Tim became progressively more preoccupied with America as an abstract ideal, he would almost surely have come to love and champion Stallone's Vietnam warrior hero, who, very much like Tim, was at once a courageous individualist and a dedicated nationalist. (Tim died in 1975, seven years before Rambo's initial appearance, in First Blood, 1982).

I did not always agree with Tim on this point, because I think flags divide peoples and nations. They only create power-tripping conflicts and bloody disasters in the name of beautiful words like "freedom," "honor," and "homeland." But Tim's motives were not limited to politics. He was an artist doing everything he could to understand the context in which he created and performed his music. As a musician and writer, he needed to be attuned with essences. "America" was not just a political abstraction to him. It was the country he was born and lived in, and it was alive, beautiful, and great.

A few chapters of Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered are sprinkled with some of the observations Tim shared with interviewers, but he wanted to take it further. He told Steve Lake in 1974 that he hoped to write a book about his impressions of America. He told Chrissie Hynde he wanted to write a novel entitled Fear and Loathing in Tulsa (a title spoofing Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Near the end of his life he was reading one of the great American novels, You Can't Go Home Again, by one of America's best and brightest writers, Thomas Wolfe. He told Bill Henderson he was thinking of writing a screenplay based on Wolfe's book.

When Henderson asked, "Do you think of yourself as an American?" Buckley responded, "Stone American. That doesn't mean I can't appreciate anything else. I think Europeans have that impression [that we can't appreciate other countries] — but all they get is the tourists."

Although Tim never got around to writing Fear and Loathing in Tulsa, he made numerous comments about America along the way. I assembled a few of his remarks below, nearly all of which are not included in Blue Melody.

1969—

To Anne Marie Micklo—

"Well, New York is really strange. I don't know. . .you come here and, like, the first thing that happens is you're criticized. . .It's not paranoia, 'cause I'm not a paranoid person. It's just ways of thinking that are incongruous with New York itself. The people here don't know what the history of New York is at all. . .They aren't from New York, so they don't know what it means to live here. . .You're playing to people who don't even know who Miles Davis is, or Charlie Mingus. . .

"You've got a lot of people in America not knowing what the fuck's going on. You have people driving to riots just to see what a riot looks like. . .

To Paul Eberle—

"From the heart. That's the biggest kind of music there is. Like, we were in Phoenix a couple of days ago, in a theatre in the round, and we heard everybody clapping. For some odd reason it happened like that, at the end of the thing, with just me and Lee, and it made the best drum I ever heard in my life. Seeger did it a lot, having people clap, but I guess now it's kind of cheeky to do something like that. But it works, man: to see people sitting there in Carnegie Hall once, playing with Seeger, and god, when he did those songs! There was so much age in that room. It's so beautiful. It's just got to be taken back to the human thing. Heart-to-heart. Vaudeville will never die. It keeps showing up in so many beautiful forms."

1971—

To New Star Horizon—

"I went through the whole spectrum, gone thru the meat grinder — get a lot of money, lose the money, on the road constantly, the whole thing. Now they don't dig us in the big cities 'cause we're doing weird music. . .

"Music schools in America teach you little tricks of the trade so you can make a living. It's like a trade school. They tell you, 'If you play it like this, the way Bach did, you can go to any concert hall in the U.S. and they'll love ya. This has been tried and true — A-1! Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland will just drool.' That's the way it is. That's what school do.

"But if you've got any mind of your own, you can get around it. You pick out just what you need. You've got to learn your technique. I mean, you gotta know how to read and write and stuff like that. You can't get away from it. But while they're teaching you how to read and write and do composition, they're trying to change you to their way of thinking, rather than let you go your merry way."