Tim Buckley: My Fleeting House

It's the late Jeff Buckley who gets most of the family praise these days (one pundit went so far as to label him "the Jimi Hendrix of his generation," which might be a bit of a stretch), but as good as he was, Jeff's impassioned style and soaring vocals were inherited from his father, Tim—even though the two met only once before the latter succumbed to a heroin overdose in 1975. My Fleeting House profiles an artist who, though just 28 when he died, had a remarkably prolific career (nine albums in eight years), marked by a willful inability to follow a predictable commercial path and a concomitant lack of material success. The 14 performances in this collection, most of them complete and previously unreleased (and varying in technical quality), range from 1967 ("Song to the Siren," from The Monkees TV show, of all places) to 1974 (an outstanding version of Fred Neil's "The Dolphins" from the Brit program The Old Grey Whistle Test). The songs here also chart Tim's evolution from a fairly straight folkie with a 12-string guitar and a voice like an Irish tenor to a genuine iconoclast whose jazzy, experimental approach bore little resemblance to anything else that was happening at the time ("I Woke Up" and "Come Here Woman," from the Starsailor album, are rife with improvisational flourishes by Buckley's five-piece band). Some viewers will prefer more "normal" tunes like "Sing a Song for You" and "Happy Time" (both taken from a 1968 spot on Dutch TV), while others will thrill to the relative weirdness of "Venice Beach" and "Who Do You Love" (not the Bo Diddley classic); either way, My Fleeting House offers a portrait of a genuine original. Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, DVD extras include comments by Buckley's songwriting partner, longtime guitarist, and biographer Larry Beckett. Recommended. Aud: P. (S. Graham)