Troubled Troubadour / Remembering the late Tim Buckley in Lee Underwood's new biography, "Blue Melody"

At the end of his short life, Tim Buckley seemed both the embodiment and the classic casualty of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. With all the evidence and passion he can muster, author Lee Underwood does all he can to belie that simultaneously raunchy and depressing image in his new hybrid biography/memoir, "Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered" (Backbeat Books, SF).

When Buckley died from an alcohol-enhanced overdose of heroin in 1975 at age 28, he had recorded nine studio albums in nine years. By Underwood's accounting, the singer had passed through five Picasso-like artistic periods, the last defined by the lascivious "funk-rock pop" of the 1972 album Greetings From L.A. But in Blue Melody, Underwood puts forth a powerful argument for remembering Buckley by the radical innovations of his earlier Lorca/Starsailor period and, above all, for the "the fire of his creativity" and the "courageous commitment to this art" that drove him to such daring experimentation.

Underwood is well positioned to make the case. He played guitar on seven Buckley albums and toured hard and often with the troubled troubadour for seven years. He considered Buckley not only his close musical compatriot but also his best friend. And after Buckley's death, Underwood developed as a respected music journalist, writing for Rolling Stone, Billboard, the Los Angeles Times and Down Beat, for which he was West Coast editor from 1975 to 1981.

Underwood's firsthand experience with Buckley's music and his writing chops as a music critic and poet make "Blue Melody" a rarity among pop-music biographies -- one driven by love for both the music and its maker.

To be sure, "Blue Melody" abounds with sex (on the road and at home in Southern California's beach communities) -- and drugs (mostly pot, booze and barbiturates -- Seconals, or "reds," not heroin, were Buckley's intoxicants of choice). And Underwood devotes many pages and passages to a major source of Buckley's inner turmoil, the knotted and anguished relationship Buckley had with his frustrated father. In the book's "Coda," he also briefly explores how, in another form, Tim passed down the conflicted psyche, and the will to create, to his own doomed son, Jeff.

But over and over, Underwood brings us back to the music. "It was not neurosis that ultimately drove him," he writes of Buckley, "but selfless service to music as a living force of nature. He did not create to destroy himself, as some people maintain. He created to serve music and fulfill his talent."

For readers who want stories about Tim Buckley's anxieties and quirky behavior, "Blue Melody" won't disappoint. Underwood was there. Although he qualifies many of his recollections with some variation on "as I recall," he provides plenty of colorful anecdotes, punctuating his intelligent prose with almost musical stream-of-consciousness impressions ("bell-bottom pants, cutoff blue jeans, tennis shoes, sandals, beards, long hair, beads, eagle feathers, circus-clown makeup, tank tops, no shirts at all") and one-word sentences ("Frightened. Appalled. Amazed.").

But readers should also be forewarned that this is not just an insider's view; it's an insider's memoir. Underwood includes hefty amounts of material about what he calls "my own corrosive sense of alienation." He describes the "deep sense of inadequacy, sometimes outright fear when confronted with anything new" that plagued him early on. He chronicles his personal battles with alcohol. And he occasionally merges his history with Buckley's in sentimental reminiscences that border on mawkish: "For two years, yes, in every season, yes, our hearts swayed with music and the tides and rhythms and moods of Venice by the sea .... Scattered among so many faceless strangers who passed without sound, there were dozens of acquaintances and friends who touched our lives. I treasure them all."

Underwood's confessional tone about his own frailties during that period, combined with his seemingly bottomless reservoir of admiration for Buckley, make "Blue Melody" a study in hero worship. After describing an acid trip during which Buckley "glowed in a green aura, which phased into purple haze," Underwood observes, "Although he was very young, he seemed to know and understand so much about big things, little things -- about nearly everything that mattered -- music, love, suffering, pain, pleasure, anguish, yearning ...."

Clearly, Underwood's identity was inextricably bound to Buckley's for a significant length of time. Reading "Blue Melody" entails a certain amount of heavy sledding through psychological commentary on "divided souls," "the little lost ones" and fathers and mothers who, although not to blame, "brutally bash our courage, undercut our confidence, reduce us to inner ruin." Underwood also offers analysis of individuals, such as lyricist Larry Beckett, who "appeared to feel extremely uncomfortable in the presence of emotional pain, perhaps because that kind of pain reduces the human intellect to impotence."

Ultimately for Underwood, Buckley's heroism derives from his integrity as an artist. As he "began fusing influences together and developing new concepts," progressively moving through and away from the folk, psychedelic folk rock and folk jazz of his first three albums (Tim Buckley,Goodbye and Hello and Happy Sad), incorporating avant-garde classical and improvisatory ideas and instrumentation, Buckley turned off a large segment of his audience, undercut his commercial viability and engendered resistance if not downright hostility within the music industry.

"On this lonely journey," Underwood writes, "Tim Buckley showed the courage and strength of a Van Gogh, an Antonin Artaud, a Muhammad Ali, a Miles Davis. I am not comparing accomplishments. I am saying that, like them, he kept on keepin' on, no matter what the odds or the popular climate of the day. When he had to walk in dark isolation because of his choices, he went ahead and walked in dark isolation, sometimes for years on end, as in the Lorca/Starsailor period. And he didn't let fear or alienation stop him. He kept creating until the end of his life."

Thus Buckley becomes a radiant if fragile beacon for the culture at large. "At every level, these dedicated creators lead us upward, toward psychological wholeness and spiritual realization," Underwood writes. "They themselves do not always attain what they envision, but they light the way toward the gate, and that light forever shines.... Even the smallest candle vanquishes darkness."

Drawing mostly on material he gathered for his seminal 1977 Down Beat profile, archival interview material and his own memory, Underwood provides fascinating documentation of Buckley's musical growth, pointing out his own role in bringing the singer provocative and perhaps pivotal "gifts" of new music, musicians and literature. A voracious sponge for information, Buckley added to his pantheon of influences such jazz musicians as Davis, Coltrane, Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre and Rahsaan Roland Kirk; composers Messaien, Xenakis, Berio and Cage; singer Cathy Berberian; and authors Blake, Rilke and Lorca.

At his innovative apex, with 1970's Starsailor, Buckley was challenging audiences (as well as agents, club owners and record-company executives) to hear, as he did, the beauty in "new song forms, harmonic dissonance, radical new vocal techniques, odd-time rhythmic signatures and a new array of instruments" and to follow him into a "new psychological and aesthetic worldspace grounded primarily in avant-garde jazz and twentieth-century classical music." Most didn't.

So, in addition to depicting Buckley's strengths as artist/hero, Underwood expends much energy countering the detractors who dismissed and demeaned Buckley's experiments and the "recalcitrant listeners" who "shut their ears, pouted, complained and criticized" because "Tim was no longer mirroring their inveterate tastes and values." He shows no mercy for musicians he once admired, but who struck him at the time as failing to grow: Tom Rush, he writes, had become "only a smooth-talking cardboard frontman putting on a charming act that was as superficial and retrogressive as it was dead at the center," and Gordon Lightfoot became "a zombie" who was giving listeners "product that had no more vital presence in it than a tombstone with faded names."

Of course, many accused Buckley himself of selling out when he recorded Greetings from L.A.,Sefronia and Look at the Fool. Underwood argues that the singer's alleged compromises were signs that he was "moving up the ladder of maturation, taking responsibility for his family as well as his music ..." and recognizing "the interdependent nature of art and commerce."

"With Greetings and subsequent albums," Underwood continues, "he devised an integrated way in which he could make music, play the game, earn a living, reach people and keep growing."

Buckley died before he could move into yet another creative direction, and his musical legacy remains ambiguous. David Browne, author of "Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley" (Harper Collins), told Buckley Internet archivist Jack Brolly that Buckley's "impact -- on contemporary solo acts and bands like Elliott Smith, Badly Drawn Boy, This Mortal Coil, Duncan Sheik and on and on -- is inestimable."

But Mark Brend, author of "American Troubadours: Groundbreaking Singer-Songwriters of the '60s" (Backbeat Books), argues that while "other trail-blazers from the period," such as the Velvet Underground and the Byrds, left musical echoes in bands today, Buckley's "direct influence is strangely absent from contemporary music."

It would certainly be a different story had the cometlike career of Buckley's son -- whom Underwood cites in recent e-mail correspondence as "the only one I know of who had voice, talent, intelligence and wisdom enough to chose Tim as his primary musical mentor" -- not been prematurely snuffed out when Jeff drowned in the Mississippi River at age 30 in 1997.

Still, for Underwood, whose philosophical musings and excavations beneath appearances may test readers accustomed to more superficial treatments, Buckley's legacy is clear: "Perhaps above all, Tim showed us how to explore ourselves and the world around us in terms of the beautiful."