The Tim Buckley Story

by John Stark Bellamy II

Forty years on, I can’t recall precisely whether it was the summer of 1967 or 1968, although the compulsive gravity of nostalgia inclines me to believe it was the former, the storied and drug-fogged “Summer of Love.” But I do remember what happened and how. It was one of my rare life encounters with a bona fide celebrity, and it’s only justice to admit that it probably brought of the worst in both of us.

It was a sultry Saturday night in August, suffocated with humidity and the stale anger of teenaged boredom. Two nights before, I, my brother Christopher and a few friends had hied ourselves down to University Circle to see Tim Buckley perform at “La Cave,” then Cleveland’s sole performing venue for what we smugly termed “progressive” or “underground” pop music. Anxious to be seated close to the stage, we stood in a line on the stairs for two hours before the doors opened. We needn’t have--for it happened that we were the only ones who show up for the night’s performance. The La Cave manager, Stanley Kain, a hard-headed entrepreneur, promptly cancelled the performance and declined, as was his wont, to furnish any refunds. But he generously allowed us to stay as Buckley and his two-man band performed a brief rehearsal, the highlight of which was a languorously slow and hitherto unrecorded version of the Supremes’ hit, You Keep Me Hangin’ On. It made us feel special to be his select audience but the music ended all too quickly, and we quickly found ourselves back on the street with a tantalizingly brief memory and no remaining funds for any of Tim’s subsequent performances.

We thought no more about it until late Saturday evening. Midnight, as usual that summer, found us high on reefers and desultorily wandering the streets of Cleveland Heights, specifically the grassy median strip of Euclid Heights Boulevard. There, unexpectedly, we met two musician friends, Walt Mendelssohn and David Budin, also at loose ends and seeking excitement. More interesting still was their companion, Tim Buckley, who had just finished performing at La Cave and now found himself tagging along with Walt and David, who had been jamming with him.

It was immediately obvious that Buckley was stoned out of his mind. He spoke little and haltingly—but the few words he uttered focused exclusively on two subjects: he wanted to get higher and he wanted to go swimming.

His first ambition was no problem. Retiring to our nearby back yard, we led him behind the garage into my father’s rose garden, stoked up a corncob pipe with marijuana and set to work in earnest.

We must have been back there a good half hour, huffing, puffing and holding it in to achieve maximum effect. And-oh yes--concentrating mightily on trying to BE COOL, because, after all, we were smoking grass with Tim Buckley. TIM BUCKLEY!!! ELEKTRA RECORDS RECORDING ARTIST TIM BUCKLEY! “The quintessence of nouvelle” Tim Buckley (as the album notes of his maiden release so fatuously gushed), “a study in fragile contrasts” with “sensitivity apparent in the very fineness of his features.” THAT Tim Buckley!—who at the moment was happily huffing and puffing along the likes of us suburban hippie poseurs!

My memory is that we scarcely said hardly a word, as we were petrified with fear that TIM BUCKLEY! would think us the doltish, uphip and uncool suburban teens that we were, alas, in fact. Eventually wearying of the pipe and, I suspect, our puerile company, Buckley reverted to his swimming quest. That, too, was hardly a problem but definitely involved more risk. As it happened, we had for some time that summer indulged in the nocturnal and illicit habit of sneaking into the outdoor pool at an apartment complex just two blocks away. Although fully illuminated at night, the pool area displayed no apparent security and we had slipped into a routine of going skinny dipping there when bored and high in the wee hours of the morning. So off we ventured, perhaps a half dozen of us, tripping and giggling through the sleeping streets of Cleveland Heights. Scaling the wooden wall around the pool perimeter, we shucked our clothing and plunged headlong and naked into the pool.

All might have gone well but for Tim Buckley. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was just his normal animal spirits finding release in the cooling medium. Or maybe it was his unspoken irritation with his nocturnal company. But the moment he hit the water he started squealing with delight, emitting sharp, small animal-like cries not unlike those found in his more improvisational vocal work. Inevitably, his quintessence of nouvelle squeals and, possibly, the not inconsiderable din of six or so adolescent boys splashing lustily aside him in the pool alerted an apartment security man, who suddenly appeared poolside, armed with a flashlight and demanding that we explain our presence there. Well . . . we might have been reckless, we may have been uncool and we were certainly at a loss for a snappy comeback. But we sure knew how to run from the police, which we forthwith did, grabbing our clothing and hauling ass, buck-naked and screaming over the wall. As we fled the scene, Buckley, David and Walt scurried in one direction and the rest of us in another. I can’t remember whether we halted to reclothe ourselves but I’m pretty sure we didn’t stop running until we arrived back at the rose garden.

And that was that. Although I continued to follow his music, I never saw Tim Buckley again, and I can recall thinking about him only twice in the years which followed our somewhat mortifying brush with celebrity. The first occasion was when he died in late June of 1975, seemingly just another celebrity casualty of the drug culture that had improbably united us behind my parents’ garage. (Fellow rock scholars may recall that Buckley succumbed to the effects of a massive dose of heroin.) The second was when his son Jeff drowned while swimming in 1997. I had never paid any attention to Jeff’s music, but I remember thinking how oddly ironic it was that my thoughts of the father and son should be linked by the notion of imprudent swimming. As I said to someone at the time, “I guess those Buckley boys just can’t keep away from the water.”

I still listen to Tim Buckley’s records, mostly, I suppose, just to remind me of a time when I was young and naïve enough to believe that getting wasted with a celebrity was as good as it got. Another irony, now that I come to think of it, is that Tim Buckley, who seemed a mature Rock God to me in my father’s garden, was but a year older than I at the time we met. Resquiat in pace.

Read the upcoming installment of Cleveland Confidential next week in CoolCleveland.com.

Read earlier episodes of Cleveland Confidential by John Stark Bellamy II here.

--***--

Former Clevelander John Stark Bellamy II is most notorious for his books chronicling Cleveland murders and disasters, such titles as They Died Crawling, The Maniac in the Bushes and Women Behaving Badly. Countryman Press has also published an anthology of his Vermont murder tales, Vintage Vermont Villainies. This CoolCleveland.com exclusive is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progess, Wasted on the Young.

This fall Gray & Co. will publish a compilation of his disaster stories, including narratives of the Cleveland Clinic gas tragedy, the East Ohio Gas Co. explosion, the 1916 waterworks tunnel blast and a dozen more defining Cleveland castrophes.

Although he keeps a fond and constant eye on all things Cleveland cool and otherwise, John now lives with his wife Laura and their dog Clio in the most soothing part of Vermont, where he continues to recuperate from the excitements and follies of his excessively prolonged youth.