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A Tim Buckley story, by Judy Norbury

The partnership with my boyfriend was going through changes. It was in the days of free love and we both agreed to an open relationship if something or someone came along but never doubted that we would spend our lives together. An opportunity to be part of a craft shop in Vancouver presented itself and we took it. It was really only a pretend shop, not a serious financial venture. It was a storage place for a candle and card maker we knew and a place for us to stay in the city. We called it ‘The Sow's Ear’. There was a very large, behind the storefront space, with a toilet and sink with cold water. The ceilings were high with a large central vaulted skylight divided into four panes, a giant cross.

We (being several friends and I) built a sleeping loft and set up a hot plate kitchen. I had been living in relative isolation for three years away from the media and the music and the life of the city. It was exciting to be part of Vancouver life again. My partner and I would take turns minding the store and minding the country house and dog. Two weeks for me in the city and him in the country and then we'd switch. We spent the winter travelling back and forth. The occasional customer would come to browse our limited selection of arts and crafts, but mostly we would listen to music, smoke dope, cook and eat. We also had to search out places to take baths, as there was no hot water at the shop.

After being away from recorded music, radio and records, for three years, I was listening to all the new music I had missed. I had all my old records from when I'd lived in Vancouver but all the new music, plus what I'd missed in the past three years, was what was played on our record player. Among my old LPs were two by Tim Buckley. Tim Buckley, a folk/jazz/rock singer from California with an amazing voice, had been a great favourite of mine since 1967. His album, Hello Goodbye, got played during acid trips and whenever I was feeling down, Happy Sad lifted my spirits. I had been to a concert he gave at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre before moving to Oyster Bay and enjoyed it greatly. But that winter in the city he was passed over for all the new music I'd not yet heard.

One day in March I was alone in the Sow's Ear, a little high on pot as was often the case in those days, and I thought, "I wonder what Tim Buckley sounds like after all these years?" I put Hello Goodbye on the turntable and lay on the floor to gaze at the skylight and listen to the record. An amazing thing began to happen as the music played. I was propelled into another time and space. I felt I was in a whirling universe travelling back through lifetimes and forward through lifetimes. Stars and galaxies were the highway I rode on. I felt my whole life was being sung about and every question I had ever had was answered. Every secret I kept was being exposed. As I watched the skylight and its giant cross I felt this was Jesus singing specifically to me. I was impaled upon the music, its electricity twisting and turning me. When the record was finished I was frightened. What had happened to me? Would it happen again? I put on the other one, Happy Sad, and once again the same overwhelming revelations occurred. Every word he sang felt like it was for only me. He sang of searching for someone he had long known but had lost. I became somebody different after that afternoon.

After recovering that afternoon, I now had to behave as if everything was normal. I couldn't really tell my friends that Tim Buckley was looking for me, that he was Jesus Christ and he was going to save the world and we were going to do it together. I kept most of that kind of thing to myself but I did gradually reveal that I had a "thing" for Tim. Soon after, on the FM radio a new Tim Buckley song, “Sweet Surrender”, was played and I learned that there was a new album in the shops. Greetings From L.A. fueled my fantasy with lust and excitement. I was completely melted by its raw sexuality and beseeching desire. The same messages were there in all his songs. I suddenly heard the story I had created in my mind in all the different music I heard. I never quite thought I was really crazy. It was too significant and real and it gave me a drive and a purpose.
The world as seen through my eyes became something else completely. I never questioned why this was happening or how. I believed in magic, this was magic and magic was real. “Sweet Surrender”, the single from the then unreleased Sefronia spoke so specifically to me and oh boy, did I surrender!

Then came word that Tim would be appearing in a small downtown club in Vancouver called the Egress. I got myself to the club on the first night and sat at a table close to the stage. I was very early and had time to take stock of my surroundings. Walking through the club came a small, pale man with short-cropped hair, dressed in an unassuming maroon corduroy jacket. Tim Buckley. Was this slight and rumpled figure responsible for the amazing world of purpose and vision I now inhabited? I felt no connection, no bond to the flesh and blood human who walked by. I sat impatiently through the opening act. Roy Forbes, then known as Bim.
Then it was time for Tim. From the moment Tim sang his first note I was once again transported into that world I’d been living in secretly, only this time he was really there singing, to me, only to me, those songs that now shaped my world. During intermission a women recognized me from childhood, a neighbour of my cousins. She said, “You know he’s singing to me!” I smiled at her and in my mind said smugly, “No, actually he’s singing to me!” How many of us, I wonder, were affected in the same way by his music?

Of course it was necessary that I speak to him and tell him about this strange thing that was going on. I passed a note for Tim, to, I believe, a band member saying I must speak with him after the show. After the audience had cleared the club he came and sat at my table. I told him my name and he said, “Oh, my wife is named Judy”. I said something like “But I’m your wife”, and other things I can’t recall. He told me I was crazy and needed to see a doctor, but he was quite nice about it. I asked him where he was staying, he told me about his new album, Sephronia and all else fades from memory. Again, none of the special connection that filled me through the music, but I wasn’t about to let that discourage me. He left the club and I hailed a cab to take me to the Blue Boy Hotel where he was staying; a hotel near the Fraser River that had a bit of a sleazy reputation, an occasional suicide, perhaps a murder.

I arrived at the hotel and asked for the number of Tim Buckley’s room and head up on the elevator. He hadn’t yet arrived so I parked myself outside the door to wait. After some time the bellboy I’d seen at the front desk came by. I told him my friend and I had left at the same time but that he must have gone somewhere else first. He said to wait a moment and he let himself into the room and used the telephone. He came back out and said, “You can wait in the room.” I was relieved to see twin beds, it was very late, 2:30 or 3 o’clock and I was tired. I took off my things and was just getting into bed when Tim arrived. He had a look of shock and disbelief on his face and asked how I got in. I explained. To his credit he didn’t tell me to immediately get out. He just said he was going out for a bit and told me not to answer the phone if it rang. I slept.

In the morning when we were both awake I must have told him more of what was going on in my head and I know I tried to get answers from him. I have little recall of exactly how the conversation went. I do remember he was polite and not unkind. The whole thing must have been quite bizarre for him. A wild-haired, wild-eyed, disabled hippy chick materializing through the door of his supposedly private hotel room! I dressed, asked him for cab fare and went back to my friend’s where I was staying, The Sow’s Ear shop was now a thing of the past.

That night I once again went to the Egress for the show where all the same magic occurred and once again, I am somewhat embarrassed to say, I made my way back to the Blue Boy Hotel. This time Tim’s wife, Judy was there and they were checking out of the hotel. We three rode down in the elevator together. She was polite and friendly and again I had to ask for cab fare.

During the three years from my mental explosion until Tim’s death I saw him perform several times in Vancouver and Victoria. Time would pass after seeing him and I would convince myself that I was a bit crazy and attempt to get interested in somebody else and then another recording would come out and all the same connections would happen. Or he would come to town again. I no longer made a fool of myself after his performances. I realized that the way I saw who Tim was, was only through his music and so the only way he would see who I really was, was if I wrote songs. I can thank him for setting me on the road to becoming a songwriter. After gigs he would introduce me to band members as “my friend, Judy”. But the dreams and desires and plans never left me. I was going to sing my songs onstage to Tim Buckley. With Tim Buckley. He was pure, he was holy, he suffered like Jesus. I believed, somehow, he was.

At a performance I would always position myself front and centre. There was no way I would not be noticed. I felt he sang better after he saw I was there. Each time I saw him perform after the first time, he looked happier, better dressed, more of the rock star. There was no way a recording could truly reproduce the experience of seeing and hearing Tim Buckley on stage.

The last time I saw him perform was in Long Beach, California. I was spending my second winter in San Pedro, a suburb of Los Angeles and found out Tim was playing at the Starwood in Long Beach. I went with a couple of guy friends. By this time I was cool and collected. Of course when Tim played in B.C., seeing me in the audience was nothing new. The look of genuine surprise on his face seeing me on his own turf was delightful. I left it at that. No backstage notes, no arranging to stay after the show. I had matured. I was working on my own music, my own story.

One warm June day back in Vancouver my best friend Andrea and I were somewhere near 4th avenue looking to score some pot. We were sitting in the back seat of a long white Cadillac or Lincoln driven by big bearded fellow who may have been called Bear. The radio was playing and a news flash came on saying that Tim Buckley had died in Los Angeles from an apparent heart attack. I was washed by a stunned feeling of disbelief, yet somehow in the confusion of my feelings there came a tremendous feeling of relief, like a huge weight had lifted. In my grief, which was the first time I had truly experienced real loss since leaving my childhood home in India, I felt that that the relief I was experiencing was Tim’s relief at not having to suffer this life any longer. But really it was the relief of my not being burdened by my obsession. I was free.

It later came out that Tim had died from mistakenly overdosing from snorting heroin thinking it was cocaine. That was also incorrect. It seems that it was heroin and alcohol.

For a while I stayed in world I’d created. There was not a lot of difference between connecting to the dead Tim or the living Tim. It was all spirit and fantasy. Only there was no longer the possibility of the musical and physical get-together between us.

During my early 20’s I did a fair amount of experimentation with various drugs. I was never curious about heroin or speed but anything else I would give a try. Tim’s death, and its connection to cocaine (as was mistakenly first reported) may have saved me from a serious drug problem. I had dabbled with coke a couple of times and after Tim’s death I began to hear other stories about death and cocaine.

Soon after his death I got together with the man who would become my husband for fourteen years and the father of my two daughters.

I no longer puzzle over what happened or why. The whole experience was a gift. A gift of magic, a gift of creativity, a gift of understanding those who balance on the brink of what is real and unreal and those who tumble over the edge.

Judy Norbury,
January 2004

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