Saturday, November 27, 2010: Tim Buckley - Buzzin' Fly

I love music.

I love playing music, listening to it, learning about it and, most importantly, sharing it.

It's one of my main motivations for keeping this blog alive, this hackneyed idea borne from a bad feeling. I get to introduce other people to cool music, or help other music lovers reconnect with songs they also love and may have forgotten.

Way back in the day, before Napster and the internet, the lowly cassette tape was the king file sharing format. I lived for each blank TDK 90 minute tape I could fill up and share. And, equally, for each tape that was given to me. I still remember the Tour Tape Tom Bernal gave out when I was a senior in high school.  The opening track was Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon & Garfunkel, and it was the first time I really sat down and had a good listen to that masterpiece. To this day I can't listen to those opening piano chords without seeing Edgewood HS fade into the distance as our bus departed for the annual show choir tour.

And so it goes. The best music is music shared.

When I was living in England I was in a couple of bands, and the guitarist for my first band made a mix CD for me. Somehow, I'm sure its the bright glare of nostalgia effecting me, but mix CD's just aren't as cool as mix cassette tapes. CD's sound better, obviously, because the sound quality on most tapes usually sucked. But they lack that romance of the cassette.

Again, that's probably just me.

The CD I was given had a lot of really good songs, some fair songs, and one fifteen minute song by Godspeed You! Black Emperor that I never really made it all the way through.

But towards then end of the CD was this song, Buzzin Fly by Tim Buckley. And it stopped me dead in my tracks.

I've talked about this before, being so effected by listening to a song for the first time that you literally stop what you are doing and are compelled to just listen.

I had this song on repeat for about three days when I first listened to it. Of course I had heard of Jeff Buckley, but I don't believe I had ever heard of his father, Tim. Which is strange, because I was into that whole singer/songwriter thing, having come to love Jim Croce, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, et al.

But here he was was, that ethereal voice, those soring lyrics, guitar playing that dripped like audible honey into my ears.  All the pieces fit, and fit gloriously.  I still get goosebumps listening to this.

So, here's to music that stops us in our tracks.  Music that compels us to forgo our mundane tasks, put aside the humdrum and stop and listen.   And here's to those who make such music.

Fewer and fewer they become.  How many today can compare to Tim Buckley?

Fewer and fewer they become.