I already posted a stellar live acoustic version of this song on Dave’s Strange World. Here’s the awesome original from the 1967 album “Goodbye and Hello.” That unearthly emotional voice, which sounds like he’s seen something unspeakably horrific, always puts a chill up my spine.
Man, I love Tim Buckley. He’s often lumped in with other folk artists of the era, but I think that’s entirely wrong. While he strummed a guitar and often sang lovely and sad ballads, Buckley could turn on a dime and be the scariest, most intense motherf–ker in the room. That voice, when it rises and cracks and wails, comes from a private hell that I don’t want to ever go near. Incredibly powerful stuff.
Talk about intense. From the posthumously released live album “Dream Letter: Live in London 1968,” Tim Buckley could go from a whisper to a scream at the drop of a pin. A great acoustic performance of an already great song that segues into a Supremes song at the end. Most of the people from my generation are more familiar with Tim’s son Jeff, who like his father, died tragically at a young age.
FYI – Buckley was director Hal Ashby’s first choice to play Woody Guthrie in “Bound for Glory,” until Buckley died of a heroin overdose in 1975. David Carradine did a fine job, but I always wonder what Buckley would have done in the role. Ashby paid tribute to Buckley by using Buckley’s “Once I Was” during Bruce Dern’s suicide scene in “Coming Home.”
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