For your Sunday listening pleasure:
I started thinking of this song yesterday after Stacy Widelitz posted a link to the first Blood Sweat & Tears album, “Child is Father to the Man” as his first entry in that “10 most influential albums” thing that seems to be making the rounds lately…
I thought of this song because that album was one of the few (only?) albums that delivered a cover of a Tim Buckley song, “Morning Glory.” I think the only other time Tim Buckley made it into “pop” culture was when the song “Once I Was” played near the end for the Vietnam War film “Coming Home” with Bruce Dern, John Voight and Jane Fonda. I’ll share that clip at the end for this post.
I started thinking about “Morning Glory” because there is something about it’s soothing, plaintive tone that just seems like a necessary antidote to the tone of these tumultuous times (personally and generally).
So this morning as I was driving into work I asked Siri to “Play ‘Morning Glory’ by Tim Buckley.’
I was a little miffed at first when Apple Music pulled up this live version of the song, its algorithms apparently confusing it with the studio recording from Buckley’s breakthrough 1967 album “Goodbye and Hello.” But as I listened to it, I was grateful for the cross reference.
For starters, this live performance demonstrates the pure, brilliant clarity in Tim Buckley’s vocals even more than the studio version. I like the instrumentation too: the elaborate piano, strings and vocal chorus of the studio version on “Goodbye and Hello” is replaced here by Buckley’s Guild 12-string, and the simple bass, vibes and electric guitar that Buckley drew on for what I consider his best record, 1968’s “Happy Sad.”
So there ya go. I gotta get this posted and get to the store…
And here is “Once I Was” from “Coming Home,” released in 1978 – 4 years after Tim Buckley’s untimely demise, from an overdose at the tender age of 28 in 1974 (yes, the same age that his son, Jeff Buckley, died at in 1997).