Tim Buckley – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 395

Love is a Martyrdom (1965) by Stephanie Godwin. See Joscelyn Godwin’s Flickr pages for more.

• David Shire’s synthesizer score for Apocalypse Now was the first music recorded for the film but was abandoned when Shire was fired due to other commitments. 39 years later, his score has been released by La-La Land Records.

• Moon Safari by “French band” Air was released in the UK on January 16th, 1998. Jeremy Allen looks back at an album that was more successful here than elsewhere.

• On the occasion of the US publication of Iain Sinclair’s The Last London, Geoff Nicholson presents an A to Z of the author and his works.

This is the story of how two artists fell in love with each other, with Kelmscott Manor, and with William Morris, the poet, craftsman, and socialist who had made it his home. As Kelmscott’s first tenants afer the Morris family, Edward and Stephani Scott-Snell rented the historic Oxfordshire house throughout the Second World War. There they created an aesthetic and erotic paradise based on a fantasy land called ‘Thessyros’, and produced a body of figurative painting unique for its time. Much of this was done under the influence of a legally-obtained drug they called ‘Starlight’, making many of their paintings early examples of psychedelic art.

The Starlight Years is a book by Joscelyn Godwin about his artist-parents and their strange relationship

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 634 by Minor Science, Secret Thirteen Mix 243 by Moa Pillar, and XLR8R Podcast 524 by Burnt Friedman.

• At The Smart Set: Marian Calabro pays a visit to the Brussels apartment where René and Georgette Magritte lived from 1930 to 1954.

• Hormone Lemonade, a new album by Cavern Of Anti-Matter, will be released in March. The Quietus has a preview.

• At the Internet Archive: QZAP, the Queer Zine Archive Project; 551 downloadable publications from 1974 to 2015.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Briefly recounting Tim Buckley‘s short, inconvenient stylistic trajectory.

• Musician and bookseller Richard Bishop recommends a handful of rare occult volumes.

• At Kickstarter: Arsgang, a short psychological horror film by Harry Edmundson-Cornell.

• “A Sloppy Machine, Like Me”: Michael Grasso on the history of video synthesizers.

• At Flashbak: 27 Snapshots of Manchester in the 1960s.

• At Strange Flowers: 18 books for 2018.

• Love Is Strange (1956) by Mickey & Sylvia | Love Is Peace (1970) by Amon Düül | Love Is The Drug (1980) by Grace Jones

Weekend links 374

Le Chasseur by Lupe Vasconcelos who was profiled this week at Unquiet Things, and whose work may also be seen at the Ars Necronomica art show in Providence, RI, until the end of the month.

• “After a morning’s writing, Stevenson would entertain himself with music, particularly the flageolet, which he played so badly ‘people fled from the sound’.” Peter Moore reviewing Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa by Joseph Farrell.

• Jon Hassell’s 1981 album, Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two, will be reissued next month.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 228 by Arma Agharta, FACT Mix 614 by Do Make Say Think.

Yet, entertaining as all this is, in a macabre key, the dead are hard to think about—and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity—though Laqueur’s gallows humour about scientific successes in the calcination of corpses can be a bit strong—but because the dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, if they’re forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible. The disappeared are the unquietest ghosts. Simone Weil writes that the Iliad is a poem that shows how “force…turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” But Laqueur is surely right to inquire why that thing, the “disenchanted corpse…bereft, vulnerable, abject”, is a very different kind of thing from the cushion I am sitting on or even my iPad (which keeps giving signs of a mind of its own). I have always liked Mme du Deffand’s comment, when asked if she believed in ghosts. A philosopher and a free thinker, she even so replied: “Non, mais j’en ai peur.” (“No, but I am frightened of them.”)

Marina Warner reviewing The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur

• New Worlds magazine at the Internet Archive. Not a complete run but it’s a start.

• Brigit Katz on breakthroughs in the scientific search to replicate psilocybin.

• The relaunched (and slightly renamed) Manchester Digital Music Archive.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Robert Altman Day (restored/expanded).

• RM Rhodes presents the art of Philippe Druillet.

• Fragile Self

• Dream Lover (1964) by The Paris Sisters | Dream Street (1966) by Henry Mancini | Dream Letter (1969) by Tim Buckley

Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Five

Haight Street hippies, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 1967. From the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.

Continuing the psychedelic mega-mix based on Jon Savage’s list of “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” (see this post). The fifth of the six mixes is the second visit to the USA, and features songs from the years 1967 to 1968 arranged in chronological order. As before, the selections from the Savage 100 are in bold, and I’ve added notes about my additions or amendments.

Savage’s selections for the USA can be more arguable than those in the UK list. As I noted earlier, UK singles are easily identifiable for being effects-heavy studio creations. The US scene evolved out of the dance halls of San Francisco, the same halls that also fuelled the demand for all the trend-setting psychedelic poster art. Some of the bands could be just as adventurous in the studio but the sound at this point is more a transcription of the live performance. In other songs the “psychedelic” quality is a result of context, as with Otis Redding who played at the Monterey Pop Festival, and is singing here about the San Francisco Bay, but isn’t really a psychedelic artist.

US Psychedelia, Part Two by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Radio ad — The Trip
The Glass Family — House Of Glass (The first song on the group’s only album.)
Kaleidoscope (US) — Egyptian Candy (The multi-generic multi-instrumentalists recorded a number of Middle Eastern-style pieces. This is one of the more obscure ones.)
Park Avenue Playground — The Trip (The wildest trip song of them all.)
The Red Crayola — Hurricane Fighter Plane (One of the few actual songs in the psychedelic soup of the group’s first album. This version is from a compilation.)
Jefferson Airplane — White Rabbit
Tim Buckley — Hallucinations
The Chocolate Watchband — In The Past (The Savage 100 has Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In). This replacement is by the “fake” Watchband assembled by producer Ed Cobb to fill out a side of the group’s second album. Real or fake, I always liked the song.)
Big Brother and the Holding Company — Piece Of My Heart (The Savage 100 has Ball And Chain.)
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band — Smell of Incense (A great song by a group who never sound as experimental as their name implies.)
The Third Bardo — Five Years Ahead Of My Time
Painted Faces — Anxious Colour
The Beau Brummels — Magic Hollow
Buffalo Springfield — Broken Arrow
The Strawberry Alarm Clock — Incense And Peppermints
Love — The Red Telephone
The Byrds — Change Is Now
Otis Redding — (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay
The Balloon Farm — A Question Of Temperature
Sly & The Family Stone — Dance To The Music
Quicksilver Messenger Service — Pride Of Man
The Monkees — Porpoise Song (The Monkees at their most tripped-out. A song by Goffin & King that plays over shots of Micky Dolenz swimming with solarised mermaids during the opening of their feature film, Head.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Four
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Three
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Two
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One
• What Is A Happening?
• My White Bicycle
• Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Weekend links 197

Posters by Jay Shaw for Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England which receives a US release this month.

• Alvin Baltrop’s Gay New York: “the clandestine activities taking place under New York piers between 1975 and 1986”. AnOther samples some of the work on display at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Meanwhile, BUTT has some shots from Texas Porno Road Trip, a photo series by Mike McLeod. Related: HBO will show you anything but a male erection, says Justin Moyer.

• “[Robert] Desnos quickly proved himself to be one of the most gifted in these experiments – eventually known as ‘the period of sleeping fits’. He was capable of writing, speaking, drawing and composing entire fantastical narratives.” Eugene Thacker on the Surrealist séances of the 1920s.

• “It’s history, not a viral feed,” says Sarah Werner. A complaint about the way the ongoing decontextualisation of images is both pernicious and potentially lucrative.

His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on JG Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill.

Peter Schjeldahl reviews Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles.

• “Dance music was born in LGBT communities, but has this been forgotten?” Luis-Manuel Garcia on an alternate history of sexuality in club culture.

• Avant-Grade Hallucinogens: the Poetics of Psychedelic Perception in Moving Image Art by Stuart Heaney.

• No Condition Is Permanent: weekly radio shows from Count Reeshard at LuxuriaMusic and iTunes.

• The Golem: where fact and fiction collide. David Barnett on 100 years of Gustav Meyrink’s novel.

• Don’t Let Harlan Ellison Hear This: Nick Mamatas on a great writer.

• Mix of the week: the Ela Orleans Mix at A Sound Awareness.

• Amon Düül II playing live on French TV, 1971 & 1973.

• A soundmap of London canals and minor rivers.

• The Peculiar Underworld of Rare-Book Thieves.

• At Pinterest: William Burroughs and Phalluses.

• Architecture of Doom

• Hallucinations (1967) by Tim Buckley | Phallus Dei (1969) by Amon Düül II | Hallucinations (In Memory of Reinaldo Arenas) (1994) by Paul Schütze

Tim Buckley on DVD

Not before time. Thanks to Jay for the tip.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
TIM BUCKLEY
My Fleeting House
Documentary featuring rare performance and interview footage spanning his entire career

My Fleeting House is first-ever DVD collection of performances of Tim Buckley. This essential DVD features rare live performances from various television shows and interview footage spanning his entire career.

The DVD has eleven full-length songs, and three partial performances. This DVD also features insightful interviews with Larry Beckett (co-writer of many songs with Buckley), Lee Underwood (Buckley’s guitarist) and David Browne (author of Dream Brother: The Lives of Jeff and Tim Buckley).

The footage spans his entire career, from 1967 to 1974, and includes unreleased video of interaction with Buckley on The Steve Allen Show (1969) and on WITF’s The Show (1970). The footage is taken from various television programs from 1967 to 1974 right up to the time of his death in 1975. All but two of the musical clips are unreleased. As an additional oddity, the clip of Buckley being interviewed on The Steve Allen Show includes Jayne Meadows complimenting Buckley on his hair.

Despite having produced nine studio albums, three live albums, and many “best of” compilations—My Fleeting House is the first-ever authorized collection of Buckley’s visual performances. Several segments on this new collection have not been seen for over thirty years. MVD Visual has secured the best possible, first-generation video sources for the compilation, including footage from American, British, and Dutch television, and also a forgotten feature film. This DVD has the full approval of the Estate of Tim Buckley.

Buckley was 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. He often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent most exploited on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. He was the father of musician and singer Jeff Buckley, also known for his three-and-a-half octave voice, who died in 1997. Buckley released his debut album Tim Buckley on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. He went on to release Goodbye and Hello (1967), Happy Sad (1969), Blue Afternoon (1969), Lorca (1970), Starsailor (1970), Greetings from L.A. (1972), Sefronia (1973), and Look at the Fool (1974).

Born in Washington DC, Tim Buckley lived for 10 years in New York before moving to southern California. 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. He left school at 18 with twenty songs written with Larry Beckett under his belt—many of which later featured on his debut album. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley to Herb Cohen, and he quickly got him signed to Elektra record company. He also met guitarist Lee Underwood around this time, who became a big part of nearly all of Buckley’s artistic endeavors.

On June 28, 1975 after returning from the last show of a tour in Dallas, Buckley 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’d been consuming all day to celebrate the tour’s end was too much. His friend took him home thinking he was merely drunk. He was put to bed by his friends, who told his wife that he’d 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,” delivered in a way reminiscent of the line in Ray Charles’ Driftin’ Blues. Buckley was just 28 years of age.

Arranged in chronological order, My Fleeting House traces the evolution of Buckley’s music, voice, songwriting, and backup bands.

DVD extras:
A 12-page booklet of unreleased Buckley photos
An album-by-album review by Underwood, Beckett, and Browne
Beckett (also a poet) reciting ‘Song to the Siren’

Tracklist:
Inside Pop—’No Man Can Find the War’
Late Night Line Up—’Happy Time’
Late Night Line Up—’Morning Glory’
Old Grey Whistle Test—’The Dolphins’
The Monkees Show—’Song to the Siren’
Greenwich Village—’Who Do You Love’
Dutch TV—’Happy Time’
Dutch TV—’Sing a Song for You’
Music Video Live—’Sally Go Round the Roses’
Boboquivari—’Blue Melody’
Boboquivari—’Venice Beach (Music Boats by the Bay)’
The Show—’I Woke Up’
The Show—’Come Here Woman’
The Christian Licorice Store—’Pleasant Street’

• Official Website: http://www.timbuckleydvd.com/
• Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHCccGEUMr0

Selection #: DR-4566
UPC: 022891456698
Street Date: 5/15/2007
List Price: $19.95
Running Time: 105 minutes