Sunday, April 20, 2008

Tim Buckley: Dolphins



Complete with an introduction by Whispering Bob Harris, this Sunday's video comes from the Old Grey Whistle Test and May 1974. Which means that it was recorded just over a year before Buckley's death.

He is described as follows by Richie Unterberger:
One of the great rock vocalists of the 1960s, Tim Buckley drew from folk, psychedelic rock, and progressive jazz to create a considerable body of adventurous work in his brief lifetime. His multi-octave range was capable of not just astonishing power, but great emotional expressiveness, swooping from sorrowful tenderness to anguished wailing. His restless quest for new territory worked against him commercially.
Buckley killed himself with a binge on drink and drugs aged only 28. He now enjoys an enormous and wholly justified reputation. You can read lots about him on this site.

By a tragic coincidence Tim Buckley's son Jeff - whom he hardly knew - also became a singer and drowned in a swimming accident aged 30. Jeff Buckley also had a remarkable voice: he was once described as sounding "like a choirboy singing from the rafters of a whorehouse". Try So Real.

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