Maybe you picked up The Best of Tim Buckley because the fawning cult has made you curious, or perhaps you're intrigued by the many ways his life eerily mirrors that of his son, Jeff, or perhaps while perusing the B's in your local music store you came across the handsome autumn-gray slipcover packaging with a photograph of an afro'd James Franco and just had to find out what this guy sounded like. However you come to the elder Buckley, don't let The Best of be your introduction. Or, if you do, be prepared to exercise a great deal of patience. If this isn't your first exposure to Buckley, you might consider giving The Best of a pass altogether. This new single-disc compilation of the singer's decade-long career, which was marked by critical praise but little commercial success, is marred by a choppy tracklist and a scribbled portrayal of the singer and his output. You could call it merely Some of the Good of Tim Buckley.
Buckley's first two albums-- Tim Buckley (1966) and Goodbye and Hello (1967)-- are represented by six tracks that showcase his powerful vocals and his and Larry Beckett's literary songwriting (they allegedly drew inspiration from ancient Greek poetry), but these songs in this order don't hold together very well. You'll admire "Aren't You the Girl" and "Song for Janie" for their almost naïve pop economy before realizing that's the first thing he jettisons on his second album, Goodbye and Hello. In fact, you'll likely grow fatigued listening to the run of songs from that release, which have aged poorly, weighted down by the excesses of the era. The cumbersome string arrangement and Buckley's solemn performance on "Morning Glory" sound silly when you realize how earnestly he's emphasizing the word "hobo." "Carnival Song" is a dated 60s folk theatre-piece, and "Goodbye and Hello" is a nine-minute, multipart epic about America written in impenetrable Dylanspeak and reaching ridiculous melodrama well before the halfway point. There have to be better songs from this period, you think.
But if you persevere, you'll be rewarded. As if apologizing for the overindulgences of "Goodbye and Hello", the relatively minimalist "Sing a Song for You (Take 11)" (never released during Buckley's lifetime but compiled on Rhino Handmade's Works in Progress) proves that Buckley worked best in Spartan settings. He's accompanied only by two guitars, one strumming folk acoustic and the other darting jazz electric. You'll immediately note that his singing has become more fluid and free-flowing, less tied to traditional structures and more improvised. This is the beginning of Buckley's most creatively fertile period-- Happy Sad (1969), Blue Afternoon (1969), and Starsailor (1970)-- which forms the bedrock of his legacy. You'll hear him incorporate more styles and sounds into his music, with varying degrees of success. On these later songs, the sprawling arrangements prove advantageous, giving the songs a loose, jazzy spontaneity. You may find the r&b of "I Had a Talk With My Woman" less convincing than the marimba jazz of "Happy Time", but in general his experiments are intriguing, keeping you guessing where he will take the song or how he'll bend his malleable voice.
Then you'll get to the final four songs, culled from his last albums, which are considered by many (even those associated with Buckley) to be transparent attempts at commercial success. You'll perk up at his covers of Tom Waits' "Martha" and Fred Neil's "Dolphins", both from Sefronia (1974), but you'll most likely cringe at the graceless white funk of the final two tracks from Greetings from L.A. (1972) and Look at the Fool (1974).
As "Look at the Fool" draws to a close, you may reflect more fondly on those earliest tracks and perhaps even generously excuse how awkwardly they opened the set. But something will gnaw at you, whispering that you never got a full understanding of Buckley the artist. While considering this matter, you may come to regret not spending the extra couple of bucks for the 2001 comp Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology, which boasts 33 tracks across 2 discs and better showcases Buckley's impressive range as a vocalist and songwriter. Mathematically, it's definitely the better of the two collections, but more importantly, it gives a much better impression of Buckley's career. In particular, that comp's longer tracklist includes tracks from the 1990 concert release Dream Letter: Live in London 1968, as well as his acoustic reading of "Song to the Siren", from "The Monkees" TV show, showing his full vocal range and control. But most of all it's just more revealing, casting Goodbye and Hello not as a pomp-folk snore but as a lively and diverse album that includes songs like "Pleasant Street" and "No Man Can Find the War", which could easily replace any of the songs on The Best of.
Or maybe you should consider splurging on the albums themselves. Even if some of them remain neglectfully out of print, they provide the proper context to hear these songs, where the consistency and quality are to the fault or credit of the artist more than anyone else.
